My first encounter with lis­ten­ing to Mary Anne Hobbs was in 2000 when she had James Lavelle (of Mo’Wax and Unkle) and Pablo (of Psy­cho­nauts) on the show to mix it up. Specif­i­cally I had read that they had played an acetate of the then-unheard “Giv­ing Up The Ghost” track that DJ Shadow had made for Michael Mann’s The Insider. Never used, it even­tu­ally appeared on the follow-up to Endtro­duc­ing, The Pri­vate Press. This was the time of post–Endtro­duc­ing Shadow obses­sion for me and many oth­ers. How was I to hear this slice of new music?

The inter­net hadn’t really got up to speed on record­ing and archiv­ing radio shows, tools for cut­ting slices out of a record­ing weren’t exactly com­mon­place. But tape trad­ing was big. Even­tu­ally this arrived:

This tape intro­duced me to the amaz­ing music that MAH was uncov­er­ing and push­ing on to the air­waves in the UK. A dis­ci­ple of her oft-cited men­tor, John Peel, she has been a tire­less fan and pro­moter of emerg­ing music for the past 14 years. A sem­i­nal moment for her and for music was the 2006 show­case “Dub­step Warz,” which laid her love of dub­step bare and exposed this excit­ing new evo­lu­tion in dance music to the pub­lic. If you read Dub­step­fo­rum, you’ll see that many long­time posters cite this show as a life-changing moment for them. Aside from releas­ing three amaz­ing com­pi­la­tions for Planet Mu (War­rior Dubz, Evan­ge­line, and Wild Angels), she is a con­stant pres­ence all over the world as a DJ, includ­ing her annual curated stage at Sonar, all the while giv­ing air­time to ground-breaking music each week.

How­ever, late last week, she let every­one know that she had cho­sen to resign from BBC and pur­sue men­tor­ing and teach­ing radio stu­dents at the Uni­ver­sity of Sheffield’s Union of Stu­dents. While I wish her all the luck and best wishes in her new endeav­our, it’s a sad day for radio. Wednes­day nights will never be the same, and stay­ing on top of what’s hap­pen­ing in this wide world of music just became slightly harder with­out her show open­ing the doors.

Here’s some links to just a few great moments in Mary Anne Hobbs BBC 1 Breezeblock/Experimental (you may want to hunt around for higher qual­ity ver­sions of some shows if you like):

Dub­step Warz — Jan­u­ary 9th, 2006

Gen­er­a­tion Bass — August 20, 2008

West Coast Rocks — Feb­ru­ary 11, 2009

Build­ing The Beat — Jan­u­ary 14, 2010

This spring, stranded in LA dur­ing the Ice­landic vol­cano cri­sis, she made the most of it, and put together two fan­tas­tic shows show­cas­ing the music scene of the city:

Vol­cano Refugee Party — April 28, 2010

City of Angels Spe­cial May 5, 2010

Mary Anne Hobbs TV — Videos from LA, Sonar, Build­ing The Beat, and her amaz­ing tour travels.

Mary Anne Hobbs: New York Nat­ural — URB pro­duced this video shortly before her announce­ment, a tour of NYC, with many dis­cus­sions of the cur­rent state of music.

Defin­i­tive, exhaust­ing, and inspi­ra­tional inter­view with MAH from Joe Muggs: Part One | Part Two

In clos­ing, make sure to tune in for the final month of shows at BBC 1 Exper­i­men­tal. Her last show, which I hope will be an intense and emo­tional extrav­a­ganza airs Wednes­day night, Sep­tem­ber 8th, 2010, 9:00–11:00pm EST (2:00–4:00am GMT, Thurs­day morning).

#SaluteMaryAn­neHobbs