shades of an audio daydream

The Unforgettable Fire

2010-08-05T12:59:00.000-07:00

I was ever so taken by this song this morning while walking to work. Because first of all so many of these songs in my archive or dare i say arsenal are only to be listened to during certain weather conditions. And of course every time a cloudy and slightly chilly day rolls on in, I get a little bit of a tingle in my ears and heart that begs for a song about wanting and longing. Yes, there's a breeze too.... Alright cue THAT SONG!

This morning was indeed one of those moments and as soon as U2's "Unforgettable Fire" popped into the shuffle, well shit, I was transported into that album cover's photo and the wind was whipping through my hair and I was singing away! Oh yes I was so in this moment I didn't even care that I sounded like the foghorn that was off in the distance somewhere. Where is the cliff and the torrents of bitter waves crashing against the rocks and that person is off in the distance that I was trying to sing these words to was out there, not hearing me but yes I knew you were there and I was still telling you all this and for my heart was full with saying it but then you missed it anyways.... So there stood the moment and yet in all the happiness of honesty I was still left sad knowing that truthfully only I knew and you would always be left wondering... Until perhaps one day. Yes one day you may just come to know the truth.

Where was that gray knoll in the northern hills that was waiting for that moment... Okay it was Bono doing it all and I had nothing to do with it for I was wandering on ** street heading to the train station and there was nothing around me but some scaffolding at a Kickboxing gym.

This was not Ireland. This was not a northern UK town. This wasn't even next to an overflowing puddle. And no, urine on the side of a curb doesn't count either! But for the moment I was in a scarf and a tweed overcoat and I was in this moment and somewhere random flags stood in a field whipping in the wind and some random person I had never met before was out there standing for some reason, or just because the canvas looks better in my head this way and without a random person well it would just be a Pink Floyd cover...

Maybe somewhere you can rent a solarizing kit to apply to the isolated bubble you live in so everything can look the way it does in your head when you step out of this world and into the one in your daydreaming head....or just the one's that have been created in this head because of music videos made in the early 80s and the accompanying cover art that sparked your curiosity in so many of these bands always. If I were such kind of a scientist, for sure I'd be institutionalized by now...

"...don't push me too far tonite...."

WE KILL TIME FOR A LIVING from L thru Z

2010-07-06T13:56:00.000-07:00

The List continued....(as boredom continues to inspire me abound!)
[will work on this tomorrow....]

WE KILL TIME FOR A LIVING from A thru K

2010-06-29T15:24:00.000-07:00

A List of Songs from work collection that all have similar titles but different artists...because....

THE WORD ACROSS
Across My Shoulder / The Primitives
Across the Ocean / Resistance
Across the Water / Breathless

THE WORD ALL
All About You
All Day Long
All Glory
All Hands
All My Eye and Betty Martin
All of a Tremble
All That Ever Mattered
All the Faceless People

Angel
Angela
The Angle

THE PREFIX CON-
Confirmation
Consider
Conspiracy
Constant in Opal

WEEPY WEEPY
Cry a Little
Cry in Vain
Crying Dance
Crying Red
The Crypt

DARK!!! DARK!!!!
Dark Angel
Dark Days
Dark Nights
Dark Park Creeping
Darkest Blue

DESIRE
by Perfect and The Sound

BECAUSE IF YOU DID-
Don't Believe Everything You Hear / The Ocean Blue
(DOn't Go Back) to ROckville- R.E.M
DOn't Look Back / THe CHurch
Don't Mess With Bill / Coïtus Int
Don't Talk To Me / The Passions
Don't Stop the Dance / Bryan Ferry

IN YOUR HEAD
THe Dream Police
Dreamabout
Dreaming Again
Dreaming Backwards

IN A LAND OF ABSOLUTES!
Every Dog Has Its Day
Every Road LEads Home
Everyone Everywhere
Everyone THinks He Looks Daft
Everything
Everything is Falling Apart
Everything SHining Bright
Everything that Flies (Is not a Bird)

FOR YOU
Blitz and Electronic

PRESENT!
Here Comes the Floor [Demo Version]
Here Comes The Rain Again
Here It Comes
Here TOday
Here's My House

YOU SELFISH BASTAARD! (ready? its a whoppah!)
I Can't Control Myself
I Can't Escape Myself
i don't know what i want
I Don't Think It Matters
I Don't Want To Be Friends With You
I Got You Babe (nooo, not THAT one)
I Hear You Follow
I Love You
I Love You Mr. Disposable Razors
I Only Think Of You
I Radiate
I Want
I Want to Scream
I Want You
I Will
I Won't Kneel
I'd Rather Be With You
I'll Be Your Saint
I'm Coming Home
I'm Hit
I'm in Love with a German Film Star
I'm Uprooted From It
I've Sung One Too Many Songs For a Crowd That Didnt Want to Hear

OH THE INDECISION OF IT ALL!
If I Can't Have What I Want (I Don't Want Anything)
if you can't find love
If You Cross
If You Need Someone
If You've GOt Love

THE OPPOSITE OF OUT
In a Better World
In Disbelief
In Jutland
In Love, Cancer?
In Purgatory
In Sickness and in Health
In the Afternoon
In the Marshes
In the Meantime
In Transit
In Your Head

FOR THE LOVE OF A PRONOUN
it does nothing for me
It Doesn't Change
It Don't Show
It Won't Be Long (live)
POSSESSIVELY SPEAKING, OF COURSE! ---->
It's A Fine Day
It's A Violent World
It's Alright
It's Alright Now Ma
It's Kinda Funny
It's No Reason
It's Okay
It's Only Obvious
It's Springtime, Baby
It's Up To You

JUST JUST JUST
Just for Tonight
Just for Thought
Just for You
Just the Surface
Just Yet

______________________________________

I Listen to Some Strange Shit...

2010-06-25T13:29:00.001-07:00

Rare that it is that I find myself here and compelled to write but, alas, I am here, compelled and at the current moment writing, well typing, as who in their mind and physical capacities actually uses ink (save for a tattoo artist?!) SO yes, I am here writing in the moment because sometimes you find yourself there in the moment and you really have that itch that needs scratching and I am here scratching, rubbing and trying to apply the ointment that resolves the urgent moment....while still enjoying that slightly annoying tingle.

The tingle comes from a week long exploit back into blogs and obscurity conquests...and some good favorites that I have long since owned and found myself, uh, compelled, again, to listen to. Currently, the tingles and their very long fingers have grabbed me from a little country in Europe called Sweden, who, as we know, holds host to many an arty and at time eccentric folk...it's not just France, yes, Sweden too has some crazy messed up in the head art freaks!

I am sitting here and listening to Elegi's self titled release. I am about half way through it and have still no idea what I think of it. It's manic and definitely rock n roll, but hovering with those odd moments of no wave/punk rock. Admittedly, I had no idea why I was downloading it either, oh yes I do, the cover looked cool and right for a genre that I generally find myself lured to. It was black. It had an obscured image. Bad 80s script. Oh, and it was female fronted! Surely it must have some appeal.... Hmmm, Im not sure if it has the appeal for me, but I can see how in a post punk mindset in a no wave sound generated through modern equipment to primitive ears this could constitute as a FUCKING RAD RECORDING! However, I wasn't looking for rad, I was looking for AMAZING!

Currently I am listening to a song about Anorexia Nervosa, aptly called "Anorexia nervosa" which while my Swedish is a bit slow these days (as opposed to the earlier days when I was a world famous Swedish novelist) I'll figure is about the eating habit, or maybe a metaphor...I'll have to wait on that! I have found more anxiousness than nervousness in listening to this entire album thus far and all I can truly say is that I am waiting for that hidden gem of a track that makes this worthwhile for the time it is currently removing from my life. What is up with the rock opera piano? I can't stand this Rocky Horror like stuff....this could go into such a better direction, and yet it just goes shlocky!

I know there are some truly amazing bands out of Sweden...Mittageissen, Modern Art, even a little project called Svart...But this is truly starting to be an earful of fudge with the worst aftertaste. Squealing guitars and that raucus piano and moaning female vocals....Well I have found myself itching and scratching and I think it's time to grab that music bottle of Calydryl and change this up, yes even though I only have but a pale 6 minutes left on the album on the last track, I don't know if I can handle it.

SHould I? In comes the dismal sax, in a dark ambiance, perhaps this is the track that since its named after the band is the MOMENT IM WAITING FOR. But I sit and type and am worried....Im waiting for some silly zeal to wind over the piano...although the mood seems to linger and clutch to this moment that is unfolding. Oh weep for me sad and lonely street merchant in the big city lost under the haze of the acidic and liquored blown lights while stumbling home to the apartment that contains the seventh eviction notice and find the only thing left is your Lou Reed photo taken from a magazine in a black frame next to the take out leftover in an aluminum tin....the water doesn't work and neither does your lightbulb but you stumble onto your mattress to lay down and count the hours of subconscious delerium that was this evening and all the while still trying to figure out how to get rent or who you could lust up the next day so you would have a place to stay for a little while, certainly there could be someone on those streets that was in need of a lay and if you could provide it with some artsy chat, he'd return the favor with some cleaner sheets within paid walls and perhaps a coffee in a paper cup, for you...just for you.

Close your eyes dollface....it gets better eventually.....in 50 more seconds we will have finally closed this album and moved on to the Italian band Edith Nylon which is exactly what I wanted to listen to in the first place. 10 -9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1-pulsate and away.

coming back into age

2008-09-04T15:45:00.000-07:00

im coming back, but only a bit different....
(Stay tuned)

FUSION (edit to post)

2008-03-12T13:07:00.000-07:00

b l o g . g o i n g . b y e - b y e.
{BUT FIRST I AM GOING TO LEAVE WITH ONE LAST ENTRY,
THAT I JUST STUMBLED ACROSS.
SO AFTER I UPLOAD THEM I WILL POST THEM AND THAT WILL
ROUND OUT THIS BLOG TO ITS
100 POSTS! THEN I'M DONE HERE!}

I am going to link in a newer blog, but there will be no more entries from this point on...

Its absurd to have several blogs, so Im just going to condense them into one.

CO-HESION IS THE NAME OF THE GAME!

I just dont have enough to really blog on this site...I have some interesting vinyl here and there but no method to rip it so what i can contribute by mp3 is really not that interesting.

I haven't been moved to really do much of this....

I have been more interested in other things...But will link to those sites that are doing a FINE FINE job....

more info to come!
:)

2008-01-22T09:59:00.000-08:00

Ultravox. XTC. U2. Simple Minds. These are names of bands that I immediately think of at the reference of this man, Steve Lillywhite. I see it immediately on the flip side of the "Boy" sleeve, and when I think of those catchy early XTC songs and check the production credit. Oh! Of course! Steve Lillywhite is someone I think of when I think of the better new wave and no wave acts of the 80s UK scene.

Basically, when I think Island Records, this is the guy that is almost as synonymous with that label as U2 and Ultravox are. Another thing I start to wonder, does U2 just go from "THE" producer to "THE" producer? What production whores! haa haa. Focusing back to Mr Lillywhite, I think of a certain treble pan sound in the atmospherics of the production qualities. Which is something that I have a lack of preference for, being a bass gal, but he makes treble work for the aesthetic of a rough and live no super over produced sound. There is a raw and refreshing spin to the way those records were produced, that at this point makes them sound dated because of it, but at the time if I was a band of that era I would want a certain level of wide eyed quality to it, which I think he is brilliant at.

Now I dont know too much about the specifics of production, where the drops and gains of + and - in the 60k and such are concerned, but I can be explained these things by those who are production proficient. What I do know and can hear is quality and why things are done the way they are. I think you have to have a good understanding of the music that is being put in front of you and who the band is, in order to be a good producer. One half of what makes a good producer is production qualities that bring the full portrait of an artist to light. I don't think hip hop producers should produce punk, its anti-climactic and just put WRONG!

That said, I look at the list of artists and albums Lillywhite produced, and it all makes sense: Siouxsie and The Banshees-The Scream, Simple Minds-Sparkle in the Rain, Psychedelic Furs-s/t, and Talk Talk Talk, Big Country- The Crossing, Wondertown and Marshall Crenshaw-Field Day just to name the few. There is an overriding similarity that these albums all have and they are some of the ones that are the standouts when people talk albums, The Banshees "Scream" for one!

Thank you Steve!

For more info on Steve Lillywhite GO HERE.
For Steve Lillywhite on producing albums, READ THIS.

2008-01-08T11:25:00.000-08:00

Oh the crossovers continue, as Mark Ellis, aka Flood, is another producer that has produced for bands that Steve Lillywhite, Martin Hannett, John Fryer and Daniel Miller have. The first being that initial notable release by post Joy Division, New Order on their album Movement, which although is credited to M. Hannett, Flood also contributed to. Flood to me, is pretty much the electronic producer of the larger bands to get popular in the later 80s, and give them that slicked over huge sound. The most notable effort being Depeche Mode's Violator album.

However he pretty much was also responsible for a whole bunch of post punk and indie acts as well, such as Gary Numan, PJ Harvey, The Charlatans, Soft Cell, Psychic TV, Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds, The Smashing Pumpkins, and Pop Will Eat Itself. One of the secondary largest credits he has is Nine Inch Nails' huge album breakthrough, The Downward Spiral.

My notice of Flood came when I got Violator, being a huge DM fan for years, and noting more-so the name Daniel Miller (Mr Mute), and then noting this new and strange name. Then I noticed it upon my Curve album and others. I think of Flood as the guy who makes things sound really studio produced without an inch of flaw, and by that I feel his production skills are really pristine. I think this is great for some bands, while at other times, there is a lack of a certain resonance of warmth because the clarity is that great, making the album feel cold and impersonal. However, I think with some bands, this works! I think for what he does though, he does it well. He has worked with Martin Hannett, and Steve Lillywhite collectively with New Order (M.H.) and U2(S.L.)

It is clear to see that pretty much my musical tastes rotate around these 5 men, with each of them producing albums that are near and dear to me. I will be thankful for that huge sound that happened between Music for The Masses and Violator.

Thanks!

For More Info on Flood, go here.
For an interview with Flood from March 29th 2006, read this.

2008-01-07T12:58:00.001-08:00

THANK YOUR 4ADBANDS FOR USING THIS MAN! For had it not been for him a great many of the
legacy bands would not have had certain elements that they had that made them as wonderful as we revered. Just to name a few, Cocteau Twins, Clan of Xymox, This Mortal Coil, Xmal Deustchland, Lush, Colin Newman, Wolfgang Press, M/A/R/R/S, Minimal Compact, and Colourbox. Also not to to mention non-4ad artists, like Wire, Fad Gadget, Moev, Nine Inch Nails, Yazoo, Chapterhouse, and Depeche Mode, but we'll get to more on that DM thing when we hit Mr Daniel Miller and Flood(obviously.) But its no surprise that these awesome producers, have overlapped.

I feel that sometimes there is something lost in the reverence to these bands I adore by not giving the credit due to the production/engineers behind these albums. I am hugely grateful to this man, oh Mr Fryer, for those This Mortal Coil albums and his studio production work with thos early Cocteau Twins albums giving them the ever so slightly hollow and looming quality that I adored so much. If only there was a better budget for better recording equipment that allowed these albums to have had better clarity, however, there is nothing that deters me from listening and escaping all the same from the original recordings. (Treasure is the only one that I feel the need to listen to remastered, but Mr Fryer had no part in that album, therefore, he's still THE MAN!)

I have to say a huge deserved thanks to the man behind Clan of Xymox' albums as well, because this was really moreso when I became aware of who he was moreso, and was like, "his name seems to appear on a bunch of things I own." Those first two studio albums by CoX, are beyond amazing, and anything on Medusa is pure gold, which I also will give Mr Pieter Nooten and Ronny Moorings credit for too. It's simply one of the best albums out there.

Thanks!

For more general info on John Fryer, please Go Here.
For More info on these bands and others recorded, visit this site.

Suddenly

2007-12-14T16:09:00.000-08:00

The moment is still. The moment is tense.
It is both sad and frightening.
There is a heart of joy and a heart on the verge of breaking.
Tears that stream from the face of one whom is so amazed by the other.
While inside the feelings don't feel allowable because they have been oppressed.

Dark room.
Afternoon falls to dusk falls to night.
There is nothing to provide but the sterile application of the wall switch.
This only sends an emotionless cold glow to the room.
You feel isolated and empty while you both stand in the room.
Later left with too many thoughts in your head.
You lay again brewing with hypothetical over hypothetical over mental anguish served hot to your stomach and mind.

The tears come again.
The glare of your light annoying you but all you can manage is a faint sigh.
You absorb your eyes and thoughts to the divots of the texture on your ceiling.
The molding is painted a color you find utterly miserable, fake wood tone.
A timeline of "supposed's" and "perhaps then's" form with future memories.

There is unrest beside some sides and
Certainly searching for a meaning
Clouds as they've floating past in the present
As much more thoughts part in the present days

Oh, keep calling... me,
Oh, keep calling... my name
Oh, keep calling... my name
Oh, keep calling

You wait in your mind further for that day when the joy will return
Your heart only lightly dusted with gray and can be cleansed without pain

Again the room.
Again the two of you.
Again a heart.
Again emotions that have a tendency to conflict.

There is a resolve.
It will allow this to never be your view upon this room again.
They will breathe out without a sigh of helplessness.
Presence will be more than the hypothetical.
The hypothetical will cease to be.

All will be real.
As things that are meant to resolve become resolved and cleansed.
Eyes dreaming to never see another moment like this.
The future is of things to come and not filled with thoughts of "perhaps..."

For now there is rest.
There is thought.
There is energy to be saved...
For the future to live...

LINK : These Waves

Out in The Marketplace

2007-12-04T14:05:00.000-08:00

A room full of trees and industry opens in front of your eyes, and the window that you are stuck behind seems slightly filmy, but clear enough to still see what is in front of you. A slight essence of tunnel vision begins and you dream of that window not being there. You close your eyes and drift off into dreams where you magically float through the window like billions of molecules, and are allowed to reform back to normal on the other side.

There you are amongst industry and all the elements that seem real and are pulsating about. However upon the glance backwards you see all that is provincial and residential glaring out louder than normal for it reminds you of the alternate that exists between the upwardly mobile and the desire to live pleasantly while working feverishly. You desire the two as well so you spin round a few thousand times staring to the sky that while that remains constant on both sides you can swing back and forth between the two worlds.

Oh isn't life great when you can dictate the perceptions of it all?!

A wicked grin draws itself upon your face, and you run to the urban side streets to feel the movement and energy of everything that is around you. Time itself seems like an innocent bystander to life, and motion is fluid and without any hesitation to the rules being broken.

Every motion and emotion is circling about allowing you to run backwards into comfort and forwards into chaos, and all of it perfect and unconfrontational. The glimmer of the anything at every moment, while spinning and spinning whenever you best see fit to stop the worlds from colliding and keeping what needs to be behind, behind and what needs to tunnel further in front, just in reach to be ever so slightly on the border of being out of reach.

Incentive. Curiosity. Prospect. The game of chance....

Just don't forget that you never have to wake up, because the dream is the life and it is the spinning that keeps us all in check. Because the sky and ground are always up above and down below. Unless you are on your head, but event hen the ground is below you as your feet are above...and there is the sky, just being how it always is. Passing over but protecting everywhere.

LINK : {Tokyoidaho}
VOYAGER ONE / MONSTER ZERO

Is It Just The Idea I Like or Is It For Real?

2007-11-29T15:16:00.000-08:00

I pull a moderate sized bedsheet out of a bag and place it on the grass. The weather outside is fair, with a bit of a chill but the sun seems to be somewhere in the lurking of weather's knowledge. Its grey but not a depressing gray, a slight overcast, that white-ish tone. Some close friends are gathered with me and we are of a slightly sarcastic lot, but total lovers of life and all the things that we can grasp out of life's hand. I feel like quoting literature in a completely pompous manner, but instead I smile to myself that Im having these absurd thoughts to make myself seem far more intelligent than I am. My friends would pick up on it and most indefinitely laugh.

Time to pour some tea and share in some other quips and perhaps some cheese or fruit, although Im really up for some junk food...Perhaps a pastry with some gooey sugar icing upon it.

Have I been holding this dialogue all to myself so far. Always me sitting there amongst others with a long narrative going, creating this situation that doesn't entirely exist but could, if it was a slightly different universe. If my thoughts were always actualized, then everything would seem to be in a permanent state of absurd meets decadent meets mondane meets hallucinatory.

However it doesn't change that in realizing Im still sitting there talking to myself in my head, its time to realize that others are about me and I should open my mouth and say something. I know I will open it and not be able to shut it. But it would be rude to not say anything, and its simply not my style.

We all engage in some wonderfully ridiculous dialogue about things in our lives and continue to eat in this somewhat Camus-"come"-Fellini-esque picnic. Smiles are abound and smirks of a clever word and phrase uttered here and there.

Its a nice day. Even if the sun isn't completely out. There is a nice breeze rolling in from the shores a sligh distance away. I am feeling quite relaxed in the admiration I have for those I am in conjunction with and how its a really great thing to be a complete internal blabbering fool and not a single one of my friends seems to mind.

Its also of great comfort because when I export those blubberings to the air, it is always met with a pleased smile for my personality. I am fortunate this day to have those near and dear to me sitting and exchanging words with one another. Even though when I look around me there is but a beige wall, a pillow, some mild plum colored sateen curtains hanging in front of me, and the blinds behind me are of a dour sheer fabric of "blah"....I still feel this world continuing as if you weren't so far away from me.

Its just like when I stared at the beige walls with heavy beige curtains hanging, amongst antiques and photographs of my yesteryears...I still felt them all there, with me...being visible faces...

The faces that change. The people that interchange. Some stay constant. I remain as always....thinking of that which is near and dear to me, even when its out of close reach. The picnic invitations are soon to be.....

Just find me a nice bluff...

LINK : {Would It Be Too Much To Cry?}

INCENTIVES

2007-11-20T13:41:00.000-08:00

I remember in passing, a friend telling me I might like this band called Disco Inferno...and while procrastinating some many years ago on Epitonic, in its earlier version, I came across them. I was trying to discover new music, for I was feeling a bit hopeless to the life I had being doomed to mass adoration of bands I would never see perform, because they were all defunkt! Surely, there has to be folks out there, whom are musically inclined and love the same stuff as me and have made bands that are reminiscent of all the good things that early post punk/indie was about.

To my surprise, while listening to the track on Epitonic, Emigre, I hit that very inspiration and satisfaction. It reminded me of The Chameleons, which I recall at this time I was listening to almost every day. There was something about the nature of this track that was just right on spot. I wasn't so utterly blown away by the other track on the site, but this one, this track indeed I listened to a bunch of times that day and fell more infatuated with it.

As the pattern often goes with dear Lorelle, the extremist nature of the leo kicked in and I couldn't fathom another day not owning the album, In Debt. I popped into every music store int he general Flatiron/Gramercy/Herald Square/West Village/Bleeker area and couldn't find it. I was so pissed off. However, fortune found its way to my grubby hands a few days later while out shopping with a friend in the East Village, and BAM! It was mine. I couldn't wait to take it home and play it and be taken into what I hoped would be the restored land of indie rock.

It did just this. I called the friend who recommended them, whom did not have the album but heard a description of them and thought it seemed on par for me, and just beamed with radiant reviews. I thought this album was greater than anything released in the 15 year space that the bulk of my records created to present day. I still think this album is great. I am listening to it right now.

Simply stated I think that Disco Inferno is a great band, with an albeit, horrible name, but I think there is a sense of humor to it all that I know is deliberate, and I can always appreciate sarcasm. Its completely a worthwhile listen and an enjoyable one...to me this album is the right way that a band can be inspired by the "right" post punk outfits, and make music in the current day...for I do feel that what has spiraled out of control these days, is relative to the decade that launched the influences..."This is what happens when the right things go wrong, very wrong!"

Im not saying that there has been nothing since the post punk decade, for shoegaze was a billsful affair of mine too, but there had to be something else in the 90s that made great indie dark tunes!

LINK : {I TRY TRY TRY}

BABY...

2007-11-15T10:18:00.000-08:00

Baby by The Comsat Angels is one of the best penned songs ever written, and its not that lyrically I think it is beyond the many I have heard, although Mr Bacon writes a mean tune, but musically this song has such a nostalgic place for me. I remember the first time listening to it as it rolled off the lp one evening at night, and thinking, "OH MY GOD THIS IS SOOOOOO GOOD!"

Its the kind of song that you are so excited to have that you want to call everyone up and start repeating that phrase above, "The Comsat Angels track Baby, is soooo good! Oh gosh I have to copy this for you. You have to have it!" You want to dub it on tape and get it to everyone of your friends immediately. You also want your friend who turned you on to them to give you a ribbon for congratulating you on buying it. "Yes now I know why you own this and why you had to
put it on my tape and get me insanely hooked to them. I must own everything now!!!!"

As for Independence Day, its all about the 1:36 marker...that rip down the bass neck is so stomach clutching its a sigh of "FUCK YAH" every time. 1:36 is Independence Day, its all about 1:36.

I just had a hankering for this album and I only have it at home on lp so I cannot listen to it during the day at work, but fortunately LOST-In-TYME had it on their blog so I grabbed it to reminisce, and I had to blog my response, because once again its just that kind of an album. Its so good you have to rant about it.

The post punk era of The Comsat's wasn't familiar to me until about 1999, and while that makes it past the newness of its release, I still felt like I had stumbled upon one of the greatest new things. To me all these records I own that are some 20 to 30 years past their point of issuance, all were new to me and I considered them novelties.

This is a band that has truly carved its way past the others in my collection that I will always go back to when I want to listen to something really good that fits my mood. This album is that "I'm just a bit moody enough to not be taken over and put into a rut but if I feel like going there, this is the only thing I want to hear as I fall into it." Unless of course you truly want to go there, in which case, just go to Postcard, which is well, gut wrenching! If ever there is a desperation of animosity track written, by jove this is it.

There are times that I want to make a movie just to use some songs in it and create the best soundtrack that any movie has ever seen. On the Beach is a total credits song for this movie...can you think about that, you are just at the beginning of a movie experience you sit down and this starts?! Shit, you almost want to fall out of your chair....this film is going to be beyond intense...and as it settles at its end you can see the storyline just starting in some character of a disgruntled nature...ITS SOOO GOOD! I can't help it!

In closing on moments from this album I would be a fool to not comment on Real Story...this is probably my second favorite track on this album. The bass line and the bass drum seem to be in such a perfect harmony with each other that your gut once again feels all kinds of wonderful punches in it that you want to scoop up with a shovel and say, once more "FUCK YAH!" Feels good, feels damn! damn!! DAMN!!! GOOD!

Oh this album, this album is just to good to ever keep hidden as a treasure of your own, it must be shared. I want everyone to own it, I want to share it with everyone...If you can get on a plane and come to Oakland, I will have a celebrate the Comsat's night and we can all sit in my room and listen to their first three albums and just feel too lucky to know about it!

LINK : I THINK I'LL TELL YOU AGAIN

Are you made of stone?

2007-10-30T12:38:00.000-07:00

I am seriously unable to bring myself out of this obsession Ive had for the past 2 days. Every part of me just wants it to be 1990 and to be 16 and be living in the UK and going to Stone Roses shows every day.

Yes I cannot save myself from wishing that I was miles and miles and away and in another time dimension. When you listen to certain songs it just makes you want to be a part of the everything. It's like you feel so utterly left out of something that stirs you so much to just get loaded and jump around to such greatness and be amongst a masses of adoring fans who are 1000% mad for it.

Oh, why is it that it always seems that the fan level of hurrah seems so much better in GB than here? I feel completely wrapped in nostalgia and yet Ive never had the opportunity to see the Roses live, and yet I watch it all and feel like Im there with a best friend and I can recall from memory how super fantastic this was.

I have had moments with friends dancing around to these songs as if soaked in the grace of these concerts, and ven cars late at night blasting these songs and feeling like I was there, as the lights above stream fast passing and you are lost in the lyrics just singing away as if your adolescence is the most precious and outrightly eternal thing in this world.

So for now I sit here at my desk at work bobbing my head side to side and pretending to be in a greater place than I am. COupled with the sense of sadness of knowing that this beautiful moment died for so many when the Roses split...and my last passing memories of all of this was in 95, reading all the issues of NME and Melody Maker making jokes about them playing to support their non existant careers, and how Mr Squire was out and about playing his guitar for food. It was just so sad...

Watching it all just makes me sad and anxious and filled with so many things about the joys of youth and nostalgia and how its all gone. That great tapped sense of lost youth. Sad.

But, shit, enough of that reverie, lets dance!

Les Jouets

2007-10-23T17:06:00.000-07:00

I bet you didnt know that Echo and The Bunnymen had one 7" in french? Its true and its sitting under the guise of a band called Little Nemo, and the song is called Les Jouets.

Heavens to Betsy, if they weren't listening to those first two Echo albums when they recorded this, talk about a Les Pattinson bassline, gosh! But its a great track! But you will be expecting Mr McCulloch's voice through the whole thing!

So, you wanted more Little Nemo demo's and you got 'em! Here is the sought after Froide sessions... I enjoy these even more because they include some pretty poppy dance tracks, and that means a great listen while you work.

Yup, while you work on those happy designs as you learn about behaviors in Dreamweaver CS3, and you stare at the clock and wonder when you will get to leave...you have to get home, so you can exercise.

Oh how you wish your gym played the music you listened to so you wouldnt need headphones all the time... That'll be the next thing of hipster culture, a dj at a gym... I'm sure somewhere this exists...and if not, then who ever does it now, has ripped me off...

Yes, Little Nemo is great! :)

LINK : Bed in Summer, Bed in Summer
[its so darn dancy! the lost track from Japanese Whispers, ha!]

Future Is Now...

2007-10-23T11:35:00.000-07:00

Demos! Demos! Demos!

A follow up to the previous Little Nemo post, this week I'm going to add as much Little Nemo as I have, since I am greatly indebted to the nice and generous sir of Phoenix Hairpins, whom has musically aided me this week!
{thanks a bunch!}

I prefer the demos to the album versions because I really do enjoy the earlier versions of songs. There is something about the raw quality of a song that touches me more than many album versions, save for bands like Cocteau Twins that I prefer to listen to after Mr. Guthrie has flushed it out with all the acoustics and wall of chorus...its simply better that way!

That aside, please enjoy these if you don't have them already!

LINK : {Be Seeing You}

Impressionable Youth

2007-10-18T11:51:00.000-07:00

Is there any reason that children born prior to the start of MTV were taken in by goth culture? For crying out loud look how many videos were all steeped in cathedral like phenomenon. Granted the Bonnie Tyler makes the biggest joke of most of it, but how is it that every director sought for the cathedral...all of these could have in essence been filmed at the same place...

You want a hit? Make the video with a cathedral in it! Oh the joys of the early 80s and MTV!

But what do they all share as well, that perfect crap quality lighting...this is what I want to recapture in video again, I love that blown out detail. Here are the other two greatest videos of that time for lighting.
(dont laugh, you know you love it too! Especially the smacking face and floor drum!)

And to be cool you must dance very angular and make gestures to every lyric. An absolute neccessity....hmmm, anyone else that does this.... hmmmmm.

I tell you Richard and Cy should go head to head!

This concludes my regression down memory lane when I was young five year old engrossed with the introduction of MTV to the world.

You Make Me Smile....

2007-10-16T10:44:00.000-07:00

Youuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu were alwaaaaaaaaaaays the fiiiiiirrrrrrrrrrrrrst personnnnnnnnnnn too stohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhp, to stoohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhp..........

Is it Solid Space or DuetEmmo which truly resonates the elements about why the opening sequence of Dr Who strikes some of us in such a way that the music they later get into sounds the way it does? I think any synth adorer within the coldwave spectrum will have to confess to feeling that there was really something special about the empty, chilling, slightly scary, way that intro left them as children.

I was always trying to find this in songs in my childhood because I liked that feeling that a song could have over me. I wanted to feel like I was permanently stuck in a chilly, gray day somewhere, in the outskirts of Iceland, or just what I perceived that to be. There would be a place with much snow and barons of frozen land and the most gorgeous views upon the chilly world that could be imagined....permanently overcast though.

When you eventually hear that music that brings you there, you feel like everything from your early years of visual confusion and hypothetical delusions has been made reality and you are not so alienated. There are even others out there that share in this music aesthetic, there must be, because it has been created....maybe they have the same image in their minds as you did. How could the music so perfectly fit that landscape you dreamed of? Surely these people have tapped your four year old brain and took your illusions as inspiration.

The most popular track on this album is Or So It Seems and with good reason, its brilliant and its the track that brought me to that childhood fantasy land that put a smile on my face of the largest kind. Yet this entire album is so bleak and chilling, so cold and minimal for an "industrial" album. We can all call it whatever the genre we prefer, but we are familiar with the pursuits and projects that the Wire camp made post Wire, and truly if ever an ensemble of 4 men were to have found each other and formed so many amazing projects afterwards, well I can only think of one other group from that time period to have created so many post "band" projects on their own, and that would be the experimental post punk outfit called Swell Maps.

I could almost wonder if perhaps the two bands could have put their efforts together what would have happened? The piano and natural sounds that Epic Soundtracks was so into and how he adored sounds and environments, well it almost seems, that it would have been a given, considering how much the Wire folk were impressed by the same things. I could see a Jowe Head in this as well.

On the track The Long Sledge.....tell me this couldn't have been some crazy B side to a Swell Maps 7" during the Jane In Occupied Europe era....

Im just in awe....Oh happy MUTE, oh happy DOME. :)

LINK : { In Time In Dreams Or So It Seems }

The Resonating Strings of Autumn

2007-10-05T11:57:00.000-07:00

I love this album. I have to say that You Or Sidney by Rise and Fall of a Decade is definitely a great album and utterly appropriate for the autumn of this land. Its moody, but yet great for the sense of sunshine bliss in a cool moment. The second greatest thing about this album, is that its one of those albums that you can listen from start to finish and not feel apt to skipping tracks, which is always the sign of a solid and great album.

The song that grips me the most about this album, that I feel a cinematic moment for is Hold Me. Sure I can be a cheesy dramatic quasi post ethereal goth, its not too hard to drift every now and then into some fantasy novel motif that runs rampant in the genre, but its really quite a compelling song, when played loud. Otherwise its kind of lackluster, but when you are feeling a bit sentimental and little sad it just makes you long for a hug of confidence so terribly.

The title track, You or Sidney is superfun, and when I eventually get around to DJ'ing again will assuredly be in there, because its such a song full of pep and all the good things that great songs have. Its a great driving song, and those always make for awesome spinning tunes.

I dont want to get caught up in thoughts right now, Im just listening to it and it seems right for the day and they mood Im in. If you are unfamiliar with this album, then I highly suggest grabbing the download and giving it a listen!

LINK : One Of These Days

Fear In Colour

2007-10-04T13:07:00.000-07:00

When you feel that sensation of moments that you have not experienced but you feel them through the imaginary person you live inside, whom is many miles away and its as if you are seeing things behind their eyes/// Does that make sense...?

Pretend if you will that you have a close friend whom lives in a city and country far away from you, and while you have a familiarity with that place, their experiences there now, are different than what you are acquainted with. Somehow though, one song that plays within your ears makes you feel as if you are them, and you are seeing things through their eyes as if you were them...because emotionally you feel an immense connection to them. Perhaps it is because you have linked certain songs to that person since they sent them to you and because of that, these bands and songs will always resonate THAT person whenever you hear them.

Enter Little Nemo...

City Lights, was the first track I heard by them and it flipped me upside down. This was all during the time that I was being familiarized to the french coldwave catalog and was feeling the start of something great and amazing. A new discography of bands I didnt know, and a world of lyrics that would amaze me, when I understood them, and music that would provide more landscapes to dream in and around.

City Lights was the start of something in me, and from the dear person who sent it to me, I felt as if it connected to their new experiences in a new city. I was wondering about their new life, and this song provided the swirling backdrop for it all. More songs by Little Nemo followed into my ownership and as I kept listening to these songs I kept associating them with that person. It wasn't so much a wonderland that was being created but a friendly familiarity with this band because of a relationship I had had with the person, that I felt like Little Nemo was something from my past and of my new present that felt right and not strange.

When I listen to Marine, from this album, I am brought to that sentimental memory of how it felt when I first looked out the french doors from the bedroom of the hotel when I first arrived in Paris and felt completely elsewhere and absorbing the feelings in the air of a place with such a rich history and such a splendid moment that I was having.

So much of this album are moments of watching things through the supposed eyes of others. There is something about the voice in all these songs, which is do to the slight echo effect on it, but it makes it all very sentimental, and there is a longing and remembrance to so much of the lyrics, especially like Sandcastle where you can all but just picture the person roaming the shores in the haze of the thoughts and aspirations of someone...Fickleness, Tales Of The Wind and Blue Years are other tracks that feel wrapped in the memory of a place in a day left alone to ponder about all of it as if it was s movie in sepia that was looping about behind your eyes while what you were truly looking at was the shoreline just moving slightly about.

The most important thing to be noted about Little Nemo, in stepping out of my sentimental carriage for a moment, is that they were the creators of the Lively Art imprint within the New Rose label, and thankfully for that, so much of the french coldwave/touching pop catalog of artists were able to co-exist as a bountiful hospice of emotions and music that all coincided and raised the bar on this genre. (Not to mention that one off project called Teepee, which is BRILLIANT! to say the least...does anyone have the other track that is paired with Erosion?)

LINK : {Precious Days}

The Frozen Friday Shuffle

2007-09-28T13:39:00.000-07:00

((Start at the first track and on the shuffle setting, hit play and record the next arrangement of songs...Top 25...))

Here Goes -
a-Ha : Living a Boys Adventure Tale
Psychic TV : White Nights
Weimar Gesang : Remaining Years
Kraftwerk : Showroom Dummies
Day After : Desert of Time
The Alarm : Rain in The Summertime
Blacklist : Pure Joy In My Heart (AP cover)
Big Country : 1000 Stars
Byro & D.M.T : The Empty Street
The Servants : Its My Turn
DAT Politics : Rainbow Connection
Railway Children : Consider
Die Unbekannten : Radio War
The Ocean Blue : A Question of Travel
The Sound : Distortion
Ulois : Dune
Fra Lippo Lippi : A Moment Like This
A Blaze Colour : Cold As Ever
The Gentry : Visions of a Landscape
Psychic TV : Black Moon
New Order : Ceremony
New Order : Hurt
Solid Space : SPaceship
Sovjet War: It Became A Problem
The Sundays : Don't Tell Mother

And that's that....Back to not paying attention to order, as I work on designs. Ha!

Because Joey and I can't get enough of them

2007-09-26T16:08:00.000-07:00

FUZZBOX

Its like once you encounter anything Fuzzbox related in the day you can't help yourself to going mad with absolute full absorption of whatever is out there....

And since fuzzy ramblings is not at my PERSONAL "beckoned call" this will have to do. Its amusing enough....

READ MY LIPS

2007-09-25T12:58:00.001-07:00

[I am not posting the above, but the compilation, 1986-1989.]

I wonder how many people ever think to write an opinion of a band and site Austrailia's own Ikon, as a reference, for it seems that stuff like this is always compared to the Psychocandy era of Jesus and Mary Chain if there is a dark psyche fuzz element to it. However this is so much darker sounding than the JMC gang...Yet just when I started thinking about my own silly issues with musical journalism the next track rolls around and I start thinking of other elements of another band...and I start thinking of all those heavy drum machine wonders of the post "Some Girls Wander By Mistake" copies...

Then as if by a recognition of my own thoughts, the fuzz changes and I am sitting here with a very dark electronic album that borders somewhere in my head between the things I like, and the great thing I adore about the sound recording quality of demos.

I love a a lo res quality demo!
The sound of an unperfected static like resonance off the drum machine...reminds me of the Lowlife Black album a bit. But then I start to think about how all of this wording just starts to sound so review-esque and it makes me a bit annoyed because all I am doing is a typical music dork thing and sorting the bands by whom they sound like instead of trying to just plainly listen to the album and not analyze it into its place within the musical card catalog where cross references and similarities exist in this world of compare and contrast.

She Only Smiles begins and I begin to think of the slightly fuzzier elements of Abecedarians, yet another band that shoulda, coulda, woulda been a Factory band, but somehow wasn't....But I can't get Ikon out of my head when listening to this, and I wonder, is it just me?

So I think of something off my mind to say, yeah Savage Garden...Guess who????

I think the assortment of tracks on here are quite good, and if the dark brooding drum machine post punk bass line with a fuzzed guitar is what your after, then this is a keeper! I like it! But it keeps sounding like Ikon to me...why does no one ever mention those Aussies...

Or is it like almost everything today? Well it all sounds like Joy Division...because this doesn't sound like that at all! And why is it that Joy Division IS the definition of Factory, lest we all be reminded they were not the first band on the label. I don't think Durutti COlumn sounds like any Joy DIvision album, but its certainly Factory!

Why is it this album inspires me to think about almost everything but the album itself that Im listening to!?! Hmm, if I decide to write about music then I will listen to this and ponder about other things...Good ambience soundtrack!

LINK : Give me your hard shoulder to lie on

FROZEN FRIDAY

2007-09-21T12:26:00.000-07:00

\* T R A C K L I S T *
Novy Mir / AUTUMNFAIR
Will The Ocean Wait? / BACIAMIBARTALI
Our Dreams Our Innocent / ASYLUM PARTY
Killing Dome / CHROMAGAIN
Reflections / SECESSION
Intermezzo / 48 CAMERAS
Filmen / KITCHEN AND THE PLASTIC SPOONS
Couloir FC4 / NEVA
Hold Out / THE FACTORY
The Condos / IRON CURTAIN
Messages Received / CABARET VOLTAIRE
Ring of Fire / WALL OF VOODOO

In conjunction with typical seasonal ailments that cause some of us, like myself, to get sore throats when the air changes and the temperature takes its first dip, I have noted today as mixed tunes day! So using the sparse amount music I have on my computer I composed a little coldwave sampler for everyone to celebrate autumnal chill, and the joy of Friday. So Ive put a little bass heavy groove in here, some electronic based minimal, and a little quirk just to keep it interesting.

Hope everyone enjoys it, and is well in their respected places. I am sitting here with a humidifier blowing vapors at me while I work...Someone asked me if they could get a manicure and pedicure...I wish, for I could use a little extra cash! Who couldn't?!

ENJOY!
(Please follow the stuffed order in the files 01_, 02_ for loading purposes)

DOWNLOAD

Autumnal Glory

2007-09-17T12:10:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time I woke up into the greatest feeling of seasonal bliss. The smell of burning leaves resonating in the air from the night before, the slight dewyness of a cooler morning than in the previous months, and an unleashed feeling of the most beautifully colored spectacle known as the death of life...or otherwise known as autumn. I refer to the leaves changing color and falling from the trees and lining the front and backyards of suburban homes with a bounty of joy to be raked then jumped into for zeal of childhood spirit, if to only be raked again...oh but so worth it!

The temperature turning to a cooler nature and the sky revealing the many splendours of hues of warm colors swirled and streaked every which way and watching each day close shorter and shorter but yet feeling a sense of life and confirmation that everything was yours for the taking! It also meant that Halloween was near and that meant free candy...oh autumn is a graceful time. It is a seasonal beauty that magnifies the coming of age and maturation, and also rekindles a romance we have with our inner regressions. How can one thing that we cannot truly touch and claim materialistically have such an impact upon us? How does one truly contain the meaning of maturity in one's years, by also enveloping the chards of beauty that were our earlier days and smiling upon the sun that sets and takes us closer to shorter and colder days? Is there one thing that does this?

Well no, but for those much like myself, we have a tendancy to mark these days by our journeys with music, and there are certain genre's and bands that we tend to gravitate towards that serve as an enhancement to our daily muckings about, and make the time past all the better. That which serves to make everything around us heightened and packaged together like the best bite sized chocolate in a divine wrapping that you almost hate to undo, but want the savoring to start immediately.

Its a cherished moment. Indeed it is.

In lieu of the coming days that will mark the start of autumn, and the knowledge that I won't have those feelings and senses heightened, as Oakland is kind of in a perpetual haze of summer and then spring, TRUE autumn will not be mine again this year...well there will be that one week...or two. I rekindle the flame of yesterday and think of the one band that so perfectly fits that which is autumn, and that band which makes me sad in a most poetic way, and so exuberantly gleeful in a most joyously childlike way....

The Wild Swans...

Here it is, the Incandescent collection, shared for you, by me, whom wishes that everything magical is hereby imparted...

Now You're Perfect

On a Cloudy Day

2007-09-12T16:09:00.000-07:00

There is no rain but it feels as if there is something lifeless stirring outside...

Hence, I put forth some dismal pop...But you enjoy it ever so much, don't even try to lie...

Your Music Would Sound Like This...

2007-09-11T15:30:00.000-07:00

Just think about those bands and the sentiments of those songs which make you want to curl around a tune like you would with a blanket on a cold day on a couch with the expectations of the most wonderful thoughts. That song that musically touches upon everything that is right with everything that you love about music, which in essence, once again, reaffirming that your taste in music is exceptional, and that you're not the only one who can confirm this. No, I don't mean obnoxiously, I mean that others out there seem to be exactly what you are into which means the artists you think are grander than grand are universally, to some extent, felt in the same manner.

And Also The Trees. Pale Saints. Cocteau Twins. The Ocean Blue. Ride. They all got together, toured America, touched base in Arizona, and decided to grab a couple of kids who played music and listened to them and said, "Take this melody and sentiment and spread it to others. If you like us so much, then let the others know, that in America there are still people who can play what is always defined as "euro"!"
So the guitarist, whom had to put Echoes on a Shallow Bay on pause while being spoken to said, "this is true. If For Against did it, we can too!"

Start the project known as HALF STRING.

They went into their recording studio adorned with the artwork of Vaughan Oliver and Chris Biggs and some Brassai photographs, and on a rainy day the track Hue was created. It would be their first recorded track and the one that would confirm for all of them that they were onto something. Most importantly, being the slightly righteous lads they were, they never wanted to be an indie sell out band, but merely play the music they wanted to and be the band that could honestly admit that their albums were part of what they were currently listening to. When I stood back after reading that in a magazine, I thought, there is absolutely nothing selfish about that at all. You SHOULD make the music that makes you want to listen to it as if its your favorite band. It makes total sense.

The following week, with instruments in had the guys hit the studio after finishing watching a bunch of old films while hanging out with their female counterparts the night before over a really comfortable meal at their off the hillside diner. Oval, Sun Less Sea and Slow Engine Kill were spawned and well, every following week another great song was recorded and the EP's of Hue, Oval, and Eclipse were completed.

One afternoon one of the members stumbled upon a Lively Art compilation at a record shop and after listening to it, called the other guys and they all agreed, that combined with the immense amount of Sad Lovers and Giants, particularly "Epic Garden Music" that that they had been listening to, that this was the direction they wanted to take their last ep. Some of them had their doubts if others would get the early Midnight Records influence in the songs, "Would they know we had been listening to Snake Corps?" They called up their friends in the Abecedarians and inquired if anyone had ever gotten too wise to the act they were doing.

"Has enyone blatantly called you out for probably being huge fans of Royal Family and The Poor and The Chameleons, and that you have an undying love for Faith by The Cure," but honestly there was no problem.

"We just play and record what we would want to listen to."

With that the recording continued and the final ep of the trilogy was completed. This shimmering beauty of novelty distributed out to the indie masses and warmly received by fans who thought, "gosh this sounds like it has all the influences a band should."

It was in the end, exactly what it was meant to be at the start. And with that, I was grateful to encounter them, and am warmed to share them with anyone whom is so willing as to have a great addition to their collection, if you don't already. Highly advised for those rainy gray afternoons in early spring.

LINK : Maps For Sleep

(and yes, none of this is true, but it certainly does make a good story and is highly probable in an alternate universe)

Mentally Waxing Poetic With Myself

2007-09-07T14:01:00.000-07:00

Memories of being a youngin during those laughable high school years.
It was during my junior year of high school that I really started to loose
myself within the worlds I created through songs. These below, are songs
in particular of bands in particular that I listened to ad nauseum, and
found solace in a world that to me felt perfect.

THE OCEAN BLUE / mercury

[ from the album Cerulean ]

RIVERSIDE / waterfall

[ from the album One ]

MY BLOODY VALENTINE / only shallow

[ from the album Loveless ]

CURVE / horrorhead

[ from the album Doppleganger ]

CRANES / starblood

[ from the album Wings of Joy ]

I dont like this version but as we all know, there
is no video for this.
THE CURE / a strange day

[ from the album Pornography ]

Oh those moments spent roaming about my neighborhood with my walkman
and mixed tapes listening to these songs at night feeling like no one
understood me and how I was so alone. Oh the smile one can bear now
in realizing how trivial we once were...but all in a life's day, right?

This Is The...Forever

2007-09-06T14:42:00.000-07:00

Since 11:23am this morning, until about 2pm, these were my recent 25 songs that shuffled through my mp3 player at work:

1 This Is The Sea The Waterboys
2 Inner Voice Day After
3 Crocodile Tears The Dentists
4 Bo Bo Dolly Feud
5 Messerschmidt Parade Bart & Jan
6 Telegraph OMD
7 Out of The Moving Life of Circles (demo) AATT
8 Un Monde Parfait Les Innocents
9 Cant Make Love Wall of Voodoo
10 Sea Change AATT
11 Too Late For Tears Burning Skies Of Elysium
12 Shakes Tones on Tail
13 Blue Shifted Blacklist
14 Senses The Gentry
15 I Feel Lovely The Wendys
16 Moon Pink Turns Blue
17 Mutti Teflon Fonfara
18 Wild West (peel session) Pink Military
19 Djakarta Trisomie 21
20 NYISC x-1 (hee hee)
21 Michaels Bones Morrissey
22 Pregnant For The Last Time Morrissey
23 Know Who You Are At Every Age Cocteau Twins
24 Hide The Danse Society
25 Now and Forever Wild Swans

(i do have a soft spot for this song)

SOmetimes I wonder why one band will repeat when there are many other bands that dont even get played....did I need to hear 2 Morrissey songs...I probably didn't really didnt need to hear 1...I would have far preferred if one of those Cardigans tracks played instead. So it goes...

I Don't Care....

2007-09-05T17:44:00.000-07:00

A C MARIAS

Can I sing the praises high enough for some of the material this fine woman has released? I can honestly express that my familiarity with her is quite recent, for it has only been a year...I think I missed a bunch of stuff in the years I stopped being so addicted to music and focused on being a girl.

Introduced through her involvement with Dome's "Cruel When Complete" which you can listen to here, (please left and right click or control + to download, im being nice here), I thought her voice was a beautiful moment in that hollow stuck in the corridor way. The way that much of minimal synth has sought to do in production, and the glory that is the resonance of how an un overly produced Harold Budd piano just leaves you radiant. The songs within this album by A C Marias are really magical in their nature and have a special place in me reserved for moments when I feel a bit needing of transience.

I do confess that part of me also wishes that I was her a little, for I enjoy watching women create things that sound so amazing and to know that for although the scene was rather small with women and this genre, those who contributed did it in such a truly splendid way, I'll give a shout to Anne Clark as another, Lisa Gerrard (pre DCD), and let us dare not forget the divine AND unique vocal stylings of Mrs. Colin Newman, Malka S. You can have solo acts and be really provoking, and your name doesn't have to be Nico, whom I confess again, really does bore me...

The point here is that this is a lovely talent and one whom sadly slipped by me most definitely due to the fact I had no exposure to her as I was too young to be on it enough as a music dork at that time, as I was cruising the DM and new wave catalogs for almost forever, and then not really ever diving into what has become a very much appreciated catalog of Colin Newman projects...save for the overly obvious one. Sometimes the gems slip through the cracks, but such as long as someone is nice enough out there to share the treasure, well then you can still consider yourself blessed and cherish the kindness of others appreciation.

Appreciate I do. Believe me! So this is my treasure to impart on all of you today, for a moment of grace and solace, take your beverage of great warmth, stand sit down in front of your freezer with your favorite blanket at your side, and put this on play. Just when you start to feel a chill more noticeable than before, blanket yourself and feel that initial comfort of warmth, and this album will make all the more sense to you! A keeper for your first frost of winter.

LINK : {One Of Girls}

A Mellow Progression

2007-09-04T17:46:00.000-07:00

[OFFLINE]

I can feel the fingers pull back in hesitation with thoughts, "What is she doing? She posted Die Unbekkanten last Friday to follow it up with a playlist featuring A-Ha? Is she completely delusional? Does she have no idea about what merits good from bad?"
Well the fact is folks, I infrequently discriminate from the things from my past that I enjoyed, just because my musical quotient these days might be just a tad bit more refined. (TAD being the more than appropriate word, ha!)

I do like that A-Ha song, the synths are very smooth and pleasing and isn't of the annoyance factor that some of the other A-Ha material contains, so I will not shy from the podium in defending why I am posting it. Where this play list stems from, Im not sure, but all these songs make me feel at ease and bring a small dose of sunshine to my day, in a happy memory type way. Plus as I was arranging them, they all seemed to flow really well, and if it is one thing I will make a point in notating, I think I happen to be good at arrangement as it pertains to song flow and editing. Once hailed as the master of the mixed tape, I do hold it as a talent that one either posses or does not...how to go from B Movie to Tools You Can Trust to Baltimora and end with Marine Girls, without making it so eclectic that its beyond cliché pretentious hipster, but honest and well crafted....well Id like to think Ive got the gift.

Am I horrible that like phase 2 of The Damned? Well in all honesty I have shared a pleasant and humorous banter with a friend over this song, and that is why it brings a smile to my face. As well as the Ellysgarden song, and this past weekend was a rather nice time spent while listening to the Half String ep that contains this song, as for the Pulp track, that album has always brought a simple smile of a delicate fancy and adoration to this girls face, and well, I think the early material by Tears For Fears is still good, and that song has some rather good lyrics however down they are. But makes no sense to this mix save for the time relevance to the A Ha and The Damned, but you know how music is for precious ears....sometimes you just want to hear something, and perhaps it makes no sense to the other things you have been listening to, but at that moment, your ears just feel the continuity of love.

After all, isn't it all about the moment, and that's the great thing about so much of it...having amazing moments contained in 3-4 minutes of someone else's talents that make you feel all the more better, or simply all the more, about things. Thank gosh for mixes! Thank gosh for folks who can find pleasure in assortment!

Tomorrow I'll return to the regularly scheduled program of pretentious coldwave, haa haaa.

Don't Tell Me

2007-08-31T12:29:00.000-07:00

DIE UNBEKKANTEN

I first came across this band back in 2001, when an acquaintance of mine via the pleasures of musical dorkdom online sent out a CD of war themed songs on a comp about how we were doomed as of 9/11. THe cover was the Time magazine cover of the impalling Twin Towers of NYC. The comp started with The Zounds track WAR.

In the midst of many bands on this compilation was this very lo fi sounding one with this almost metronome like drum machine beat, that had a very analogue similarity to early Sisters for me. Who are these Unbekannten folks? No one I knew in the musical dork scene of the time knew. I just knew I had this pretty neat song that was so simple but so catchy that I really liked it utterly so.

Add a few years to that, and after sending the song along to another friend, he acquired the ep, and sent back to me these songs ripped from vinyl. Yippee, now I had more; hope it sounds good. I really like the lead track Don't Tell Me. Its but a quick 4 tracker, but its a good little cocktail / appetizer for the satisfaction of the listener...at least I think so.

Considering I am becoming increasingly bitter about this war I am taking the moment to reflect in spirit and in time that which 9/11 spawned and has not rectified. So lets donate here for the ears of others, something that the government hasn't had a hand in destroying....our ability to share amongst those who share a universal enthusiasm to hear music and to be of like minded individuals who feel the same about it.

Surely there can be one element left that officials cannot deny us. Since they are aiming to fuck everything else up....

LINK : {Allegiance For A Future Where Everything's Nice}

And In Contrast

2007-08-29T17:17:00.000-07:00

I can confess, when I was a little girl on Long Island growing up, I thought Stevie Nicks was super cool. Because honestly folks, we didn't start off the bat listening to this uber obscure shit. I can admit my silly adorations of youth...like when I was 8. I thought her outfits in this video were awesome and that was half of why I thought this song was so great. I want those dresses.

Stevie's kinda goth in her own way...we all know it. Come on she was a coke addict, that's 50% of it right there! ha!

Perhaps its the synth and the beat that hooked me as I was listening to Depeche Mode at this age too, so anything programmed sounded neat-o. Don't know, but just feeding a hankering that came out of no where...since I can't have cookies until Friday. I know, woe, is me.

Did the choreographer of this video...was it the same guy who did Michael Jackson's "Beat It?"
BUT PLEASE WATCH THIS!!!! Honestly Stevie Nicks is cracking me up... :)

Simplest Perfection

2007-08-29T16:27:00.000-07:00

[OFFLINE]
Tones on Tail- You The Night and The Music
+
Tones On Tail- Rain

no more. moment. delicate.
. graceful divine .

2 years overdose=Twice

2007-08-28T13:06:00.001-07:00

TWICE A MAN

The partnership known as Twice A Man, ie- post Cosmic Overdose, is a great synthesis, dare I say, that created one of the pivotal synth pop albums of the 80's I would say. If not in actual recognition, but perhaps sound alone that to me truly reflected what the early 80's sounded like to me, when they weren't utter commercial synth pop. The first official release by Twice A Man, Music For Girls is one that reminds me of how interesting this music was to me and how it sounded so cold and strange to me when I was little, but still poppish. I dont think I actually articulated it in that way, but mostly I was/still am, and overly visual person and it would make me think of desolated shopping malls, or giant grey rooms of people dressed in black and white with floors of black and white all moving about with very little sound, while music like this played and pantomime ensued in the event of necessary communication.

Kind of like how bedrooms were adorned with those porcelain or ceramic masks that hung from the wall. Something magical but a bit creepy at the same time. Synths to me, have always given this sound of otherworldlyness to me. Not in the Dead Can Dance effects of the Im in the Sahara, but in that video game digital analog and bleak minimal world. Like being stuck in a life version of an Atari game on a black and white set.

For that essence I would acknowledge the tracks, Breathe the Air, Battle (especially) and Decay (god bless that little repeat in there that everyone has blundered in the "did the record skip?" ergo overdubbing in my head). Then there are the outright 80s reflective electro dance pop hits that are just so obvious to anyone who listens to this lp, Dance and In My Mind. Personally, my favorite song on here is Threat, and while I think the lyrics are totally cliché, the music is the eeriest on this one with the string-like setting on the synth, that it resonates the most with that empty oddity world that I felt and conjured in my head as a young one. Gentlemen, I like the piano element to it, but it does get a bit monotonous in tone to me after a while. I still sware this was used in the soundtrack in "Fast Times At Ridgemont High." I can firmly say that Russian Tractors is not my favorite, that anthemic keyboard in it just makes it cheesy and I don't care if its because its totally dated in sound, I would have found this cheesy in the early 80s also...kind of like Ultravox's "Life's Great Adventure."

Anyways, I suppose its synth day. I hope you enjoy this for your Tuesday!

LINK : {Some...One's...Toy}

Machine Musik

2007-08-28T11:29:00.000-07:00

(is the counter on the top almost too perfect for the recording? am i THAT
much of a dork that i think it makes this cooler? probably.

This is where my head is today...Im scheming and dreaming and feeling fortunate. Electronic lapels? HOLY SHIT! ME WANT! One day, you all will be watching me on Youtube being all, electronic eyelashes? Who'd of thunk?
Each lash, flashes a cymbal crash! NIIIIICE!

An Ode...

2007-08-22T16:44:00.000-07:00

there's a space in what you know

2007-08-21T12:53:00.000-07:00

Every band that one holds near and dear has a similar reason as to why, and for me it's the ebb and flow of how I relate my emotions and essences to a band. Does it cradle and pull at the heart and head strings? If it does enough that I fall victim to encapsulating myself into the songs then, by jove! ITS A KEEPAH!

Enter the Comsat Angels. A band that I knew, but didnt know, until I discovered them and didnt realize I knew them but thought I stumbled upon the greatest thing, without realizing I had always known them from a much longer time, but just not in this format. If that seems boggling, then perhaps if I said I knew the pop hit "Stay Tonite" by CS Angels, but didn't know that song was by the CS Angels, who were in fact the Comsat Angels, and while I knew this somg lyrically inside and out, and the track from "Real Genius". Back when I was like 8 years old. Many years later, at 22, I was given a mixed tape by a dear former friend of mine, I heard the song Total War from these sessions, and thought it was one fo the best things I had heard in a great while.

Who the hell were the Comsat Angels?
I must find everything by them and buy it, PRONTO!
So I made a mad dash to my computer, yes, it was only some 8 years ago this stumble happened, and I am quick to want than rest and wait, so I ordered "Waiting For A Miracle" and waited. I got it, listened and then jumped onto the computer and ordered "Sleep No More." Got it, listened to it and was beyond floored. How could there be so much bass in ones face and so darn perfect in every way. Where was this during my mopey teen years? It was everything that The Cure's "Disintegration" was incapable of delivering, but everything I wanted. I hailed Our Secret as one of the greatest gloom pop songs ever and noted the Comsat's as one of the greatest and most under appreciated bands.

Said friend of mixed tape, burned me off the b sides from the re-masters that came out in 2003, so I would have music for my flight to France, and also burned this initial version of the "Time Considered Sessions" and "Fiction" for me. I was Comsatted and ready to go!

Words alone are all I can use but I still have issues with the fact that no one ever mentions these guys as influential in the post punk era. However, in a regard I am also glad because in some way I treasure them soo that I dont want some piece of shit hipster who's on the bandwagon to be listening to them and not fully digesting how great they are, but saying something clever like, they are among his top bands like Suicide, Gang of 4, The Pop Group, Wire and Pere Ubu. I cannot have this. Yes Im a snob, get over it. (or has the reference list changed again?)

"Yeah Im really into those early demo sessions by Human League. THe Normal too....its amazing electronic stuff, really interesting. But I think it all goes back to Eno, but you know The Velvets and Floyd too, I mean you have to admit...."

Do you want me to strike a poseur?
ha! :)

This assortment of songs is grand. This band is amazing and Kevin Bacon, the profound one who is the "real" musician, is one of the greatest song writers and smooth bass players in rock. Give props! Im not sure in the combo who wins...I think I gravitate towards the Bacon more (haa haa thats funny) but then again, there's the Burgess...Its a Burgess v. Bacon....its a toughy, because they're very different and very similar. Its all in the delivery.

Our Secret still makes me feel dropped on my head and dumbfounded by just about everything in this world. But while it does this it makes me feel so assured at the same time. How!? HOW DO YOU DO THIS!!!!???? I also will notate that the greatest bass line ever dropped in musical history comes at the bridge of Independence Day, and you can't tell it so much in the sessions, but on WFM, its beyond amazing! Like getting kicked in the ass in the best way. If you are out there in hip hop land, take a lesson, that's how you drop it!

LINK : BBC Sessions

~ CRUNCHY STEW ~

2007-08-20T15:50:00.000-07:00

waffle waffle /

IM NOT BOVED...Happy Friday

2007-08-17T11:05:00.000-07:00

It's time for a WELL BAD off with videos mate...

THE SOUP DRAGONS | Hang Ten

4:49pm/pct

ECHO AND THE BUNNYMEN | Back Of Love

(its all about the bridge in this song)
2:56pm/pct

TAXI GIRL | Mannequin

(yes this has nothing to do with the below two,
but it makes me smile)
2:25pm/pct

NEDS ATOMIC DUSTBIN | Happy

12:17pm/pct

HAPPY MONDAYS | 24 Hour Party People

11:08am/pct

a la proxima...

2007-08-16T14:45:00.000-07:00

Last year, this time during the summer I was in a bit of a down mood, as per not being in a work capacity and struggling to conserve any last bit of money I still had. I was spending many evenings awake working on my portfolio and getting no sleep for a few days at a time, only to go to interviews for positions that I never got, even though I seemed to get on famously with the people I interviewed with. Is it me?

I would sit at my desk at home and listen to web casted radio and think, I should do this. But I never bothered. SO instead I spent hours sitting and listening to broadcasts through Radio 365, and getting excited about the set lists....more folks into what I was, and as usual so very far away.

Save for one.

The thing is, I spent everyday watching this video at least three times in my melancholy haze and feeling so in this feeling of, well, this song. The title alone felt like everything that was around me. I was just in a really sad place, with only one single glimmer of optimism and a dangling strand of gold that I was unsure I could reach. I truly felt like I was clutching at fantasies and immersed myself further into music and all of these songs I knew so well, but felt a new rebirth of glum appreciation for them...a new setting to feel sorry about myself and be comforted.

The one thing is that, there is a glimmer of hope within this song, because even though we are not left to be be surprised that crap inevitably will come our way, it still always left me feeling that regardless there was something out there that was a slender chance of hope. AND I HAD CLUNG TO IT!

A year later and so much is resolved and for the better and working towards the best. I'm just waxing poetic....as usual..."you're here to cry, i told you,"...i feel humbled in retrospect.

Internal/External Question/Resolve

2007-08-15T15:48:00.000-07:00

[OFFLINE]
The Beloved The Flame
Lowlife Reflections of I
The Royal Family and The Poor Dominion
Fra Lippo Lippi A Moment
The Names This Is Harmony
X V-Sor The Glance

There is something to be said for a hyper active mind. There is also something to be said for not thinking too much, and just being. Kind of a "if I then" but "now i am able," themed mix here. Order specific. Personal. A moment of reflection as it were, of me, to me, by me.

enjoy.

The Modern Art / Age of Light

2007-08-14T17:48:00.000-07:00

I will preface this by stating I have no idea who this is. I have gone mad trying to google it because of the obvious reason the title will bring you through everything Modern art related...and as for Googling The Modern Art+Age of Light, I came up empty. The only thing I can fathom which I dont think is right, is regarding that post I made about Sundial back when, which said in the info back sheet that originally started as a short project called The Modern Art...loosely, if it this was that, I can vocally almost see it. Other than that, Im at a loss.

Well I am here to bring the acknowledgment of this musical project whomever it might actually be, is really not that important to me, because its not facts I care about, as much as the music itself. This album really impressed me when I heard it. I felt like all of a sudden I understood the aesthetic draw to minimal pop. Which I should start to refer to as, GreyWave or RainyDayLookOutYourWindowAndFeelAsGoodAsASunnyDay music, take your pick. The thing is, the latter is exactly what this album is to me. Which although much of the music I gravitate towards is like that, this is like a minimal approach to a summer beach party for the slightly gloom angled person who still can actually be entertained and laugh now and then. A moment without care...Its the riding bicycle on a sunny day for the slightly poetically bleak. Beach Boys for goths. Haa haa, when you listen to it, you'll understand that...there are the sad tunes, Dreams To Live the jangly tunes Harmony In Red and the all out poppy tunes, Barriers. But there is a vibe of old time fun within...and within the song Beach on The Horizon, you will totally get my musings!

My movements with this album occurred while I was out here in Oakland last summer roaming about with nothing to do during the day and taking many photographs. In fact many albums became the background soundtrack for those days, but this album and four others were amongst the heavy rotation....perhaps I should do a week dedicated to that? Roaming about albums? Hmmm. The Modern Art, Age of Light is a really great album and one that should be a bit more acknowledged somehow. I hope that with this blog entry it will at least pop up now under a google search and maybe someone can enlighten me. Because I am a bit curious.

As for the cover up there, no this is not the actual cover, I just made it based on how I would envision it would be with how I feel about it. I almost dont want to know what the cover looks like. Put it into your portable player and take a bike ride my dears, you never know when you might discover something truly happy and smiley within the catalog of bleak music. :)

LINK : {Everythings Alright Now}

GOD SAVE THE KING!

2007-08-13T12:19:00.000-07:00

Thank you beyond any words could ever scribe...

TONY WILSON / 20 February 1950 – 10 August 2007

2007-08-10T17:29:00.000-07:00

..SHE HOLDS IT IN HER ARMS..

CONGRATULATIONS! You all made it through the tribute week, all 5 of you! WOOHOO!

Anyways my week has been a bit hellish so I'll spare you the poetic verse about this band, if you like em then you like em and if not, to hell with ya! So in closing I hope that you have been inspired to dig them out and listen to the albums and enjoy those things that make me so happy when I listen to them...

What can I say right now? Well Im desperately trying to figure out how I am going to get to Paris Thanksgiving weekend, and I tell you it hurts because I have those days off and I know airfare is cheap then. I have been wanting to go for a while and see them. I really want to go to this, I VERY!!! much want to go....Yes I said Paris...and Yes, I live in Oakland, but it can be done...I just need to get to New York on standby and leave from there...Oh it can be done! Im in therapy, Im supposed to be more spontaneous...

Im a nut.

Please come with me! I would adore it ever so....
:)

Oh yeah....the link of things! hee hee, ENJOY some more demos and singles!

LINK : { 'shrine' }

2007-08-09T14:27:00.000-07:00

..I WALK THE GHOST OF ALABASTER STREET..

And here we are in the third down of preferred albums. And Also The Trees 1992 release Green Is The Sea (what color were her eyes and the dress? hee hee) Obviously I am not doing a full discographical retrospect but only pinpointing those things that I am most fond of as they pertain to me in this retrospect...this 5 business day retrospect.

The thing that I adore most about this album is the overall feeling of an uplifting nature. I will say that I always start this album at track 2 because I am such not the fan of Valentino, the song annoys me. But this album just makes me feel warm and not in an Im cold and feel warm. I can only liken it to eating something really wonderful that makes you feel like your whole body is radiating a very delightfully rich glow that you could bask in if you were so inclined to lay within yourself.

A great deal of the theatrics have vanished in this album and perhaps that is why I feel that it moves so much more fluidly and resonates a more calmer feeling than the turbulent versus the smooth. There is a still a stoic nature to much of this album for me that I still feel in touch with a nocturnal environment, but it isn't one of despair, its almost of an embracing nature. Dare that I say, that its the snow time Trees album.

I sit here listening to The Fruit Room and glancing at a photo I have of Central Park covered with snow, it seems so utterly perfect. A meandering dream of white scattering amongst you as if in a snow globe. That type of perfect delight that can only be experienced as you appreciate the smallest of things...although there is no jasmine growing into this landscape...

I will always wonder how these bands are felt by those who don't have the background of the northeast of the US to affiliate it with. I mean, I know the feelings of a one in particular, but for others...I associate landscape so much with the music I listen to, that what is it like if you are a huge AATT fan but live in Arizona? Or if you live in Kansas....or say you live in Tokyo, or Greece...what is it like...Or does stuff like this just aim to empathize with those who live in the UK and areas like it...is that why they always play in Belgium and Paris, because of the similar UK weather...

I mean even reflective in the name of the band, its a nature source of inspiration, from the line of the infamous poem they penned the name from. Okay, perhaps I am once again going too far with this, said she of The tremendous Risk for Mr Ferdico...this song has always made me a bit frantic. And its a good instrumental, but not one I would always notate, but I should, more.

LINK : {Her Crescent Figure Through Green Waters}

just a quick catch up on those blissful aatt instrumentals i adore so very much

2007-08-08T15:37:00.000-07:00

..Protecting Me / Protecting Me / Protecting Me..

DEMOS! DEMOS!! DEMOS!!

Its the middle of the week in my tribute so I felt obliged to post some rare material to check out if you wish...The Trees demo's and sessions from 1980-1982.

Its a rather good collection of recordings, given that they are early and the production level is alright, but when it comes to sessions, does anyone really want studio precision recording? I certainly don't! I would definitely get these because I like the slightly jazzy number on Lady D'Arbanville....makes you want to mosey about just a bit.

LINK : {You Will Be My Fill}

2007-08-07T14:06:00.000-07:00

..OUR EYES ARE SEARCHING, SEARCHING, STILL..

Ah yes, THE album! The Millpond Years is the album that attracts those with a fondness for reverie and waxing poetic on a daily basis. Those whom ooze and soak in nostalgia for pretty much every daily activity, or at least romanticize that they are. Perhaps within their laments of why they can't or how they should but feel indifferent to the place that forces them to be real and not creatively inspired to dream.

Filled with drama and lush theatrics, somehow I can still listen to this album whilst making attempts to be pleasantly put to sleep at night. The landscape rich with shadows of night, and afternoons brimming with moisture and fog thickened streets, and somewhere you look up and notice that everyone about you is dressed in a time far older than where you just were. Perhaps now you find yourself holding a whithered paper and reading about things that dont even make sense, or perhaps you are just sitting on the cobble and feeling really pissed about the social environment you are stuck in. So you dream off into the beautiful abyss and make the world in your toxic mind a better place to live in, enter Shaletown and invisible land that Jeffrey has escaped to, oh charcoal thought ladened Count Jeffrey.

At least perhaps it seems better, or maybe he and i both remove the ash from our eyes and realize nowhere is truly better. Are we all in the myth that things get better?

Clearly this is an album that holds a very sinister and dark ambiance about it, but I did say poetic was part of this, and with that, there must be the counter to this tar stained dream. The beauty lies in the sadness that we, as nostalgic fools, are always inclined towards. From The Silver Frost and L'Unica Strada are perhaps two of the greatest instrumentals ever penned and recorded as part of an album that the instrumental didnt feel forced to prove that "we can do an instrumental" and then tagged on the end. There is something beyond stirring that everytime I listen to these two, specifically, I truly am moved to another emotional place and while I feel a bit sad, there is always something hopeful stirring out upon the reaches of where everything eventually goes towards. In that the shimmering beam that we all hope for while the rest of everything feels like shit, is preserved for optimism.

So is this album truly so dark and miserable, or is it a fragmented journey of the possibilities that are. Is the time of indecision and discovery what is meant by the millpond. Something that is not so pretty but still allows growth of even the slightest?
millpond - a pond formed by damming a stream to provide a head of water to turn a mill wheel
While it prevents and forces a hault it still manages to create and isn't it true that within creation something must exist that blossoms...

Maybe its just me being overly philosophical...However these are my thoughts while I listen to this album and feel really thrilled that I have these moments to reflect and think of those others whom have cherished them as much as I. To those who have scoffed, so be it. Some things aren't for everyone. Thankfully, these things are for me.

LINK : Time Goes Through Their Hands

2007-08-06T12:59:00.000-07:00

..A YOUNG MAN AND HIS BRIDE..

Oh this band, this band that I have mocked for being one of the most lyrically pretencious I know. This band that I have created mocked lyrics around and quoted one line and one line over and over..."Cotton forgotten summer dress..."
But underneathe the amusement I have at times with this band, like all of my favorites that I make jokes with, I simply adore And Also The Trees.

I confess that sometimes the vocals are a bit over the top for me, but the music...I have to say that hands down, no one does what they do. While there are so many bands out there that I love and that have many akin to them, for some reason there are a few that many adore, and yet, not one seems to have gotten the blueprint right or made the attempt at all...I feel honored, because a Simon Huw Jones knock off would probably be unbearable, and honestly, I would probably hate it for trying to be something it isn't.

Musically, there is something so time cherished with all of their albums, and upon the later released and this entry posted, The Klaxon, I feel somehow transient in a time of an I don't really know. I have always thought something spanish of this, and perhaps its the percussion and calypso like moments, especially within the track of Johnny Lexington. I feel the haze of an afternoon fading and the dusk on the brink of making its appearance, but no one has gotten upset. Everything seems to push further into the days events that just makes the enjoyment factor a bit moodier but richer.

Then there is the brilliance of the silhouetting guitars by J. Jones, and as yet another shimmering delight of sparkle dancing in the stark nature that he seems to be the master of. Oh gosh I want other things in this musical world to sound like this, why no one ever sites him as a creative force in this industry/genre is beyond me.

Don't get me wrong, I mean like any Trees album, the melancholy, sombre and underlying bitterness is there, but in tone of the arrangements, its something that has always felt still very warm to me. Its like edging your body up into the pushed creases of your duvet and finding that warm spot and being warmed by the heat stroked sun outside that beams upon you. Then you take that visual and magnify it into a perfect mental moment of engaged activity and well, for me, it is beyond amazing.

The Klaxon was the first album I owned by AATT, and while many tend to site the eponymous release as the best, which is then set against the other school of Trees fans who site The Millpond Years, which I have to state I am a member of the latter, I think this album is perhaps my second favorite.

I feel like spinning through a room of Terracotta and then sinking into a gazeful curiosity from a balcony, with a fine glass of red...yes I said it. You know what follows, yes, and a fine tobacco product.

LINK : [ as he walks far from this town ]

HAPPY 50th POST! / IN SILENCE...

2007-08-03T17:23:00.000-07:00

Some Things Never Change (4:49)
A Small Mercy (3:51)
Barrier (3:31)
Sense Of Doubt (5:35)
The Treasure (5:11)
Slow Away (4:09)
Now And Forever (4:43)
French Painter Dead (3:55)
Out Of The Ruins (3:17)
A Moment Like This (3:31)
In Silence (4:32)
Recession (6:13)
The Inside Veil (4:21)
I Know (4:11)
Quiet (3:32)
Lost (7:29)
In A Little Room (2:59)
An Idea (2:42)

A beautiful assortment of melodies that make you feel completely wonderful and warmed within the core of frozen icicles refusing to melt in your throat while the outdoors remind you that autumn is ending and winter is near. But isn't great to at least have these amazing songs to at least make pretty winter landscapes in your mind to?

A tormenting end of autumn and misery wretched winter of 2004 I spent listening to this album over and over and becoming so coiled within all I wanted to do was feel sad. But I felt sad with quite possibly the best assortment of songs to truly bask in the misery with. And the song titles, how's that for cold comfort- Some Things Never Change, A Small Mercy, Sense of Doubt, In Silence, I Know, In A Little Room, The Inside Veil...gosh if every perfection for feeling isolated and alone to truly feel how alone truly is, this is it!

Im an odd girl, because I am actually very keen on this day and I am very happy at the moment, so to be listening to this without the usual fostered emotions I would have to require my gravitation to it, its interesting. I still think these songs are a stoic image of beauty and stunning stillness. The memory of those moments of those years ago make me cringe, but I reflect only to acknowledge them. They are but images that are slurring and blurring atop the ripples of the water as if but dead leaves being brought off to somewhere else and collect upon another shore. They are precious, but they are also a passing of what was.

Fra Lippo Lippi did everything right in every song down to the cascading piano parts (which is probably the number one reason this is such an adored collection, I love piano) that denote musically, the character of each song. There is nothing wrong with anything here. I can only relate my emotions of one other collection of earlier works that hits me in the same way, and perhaps it is because I acquired the same time, and that is The Wild Swans Renacent collection. The grace and humility of wrong and right of you and i, as one level removed from human kindness has never sounded so beautiful and made feeling horrible more attractive. You can take it for how you wish, but it is impossible to NOT find this compelling.

As for the later stuff, eh, Id rather not get into it...The early years are the treasure...in a manner of speaking!

Out of The Ruins

It Could Kill Me / It Could Be Ecstacy

2007-08-01T16:20:00.000-07:00

The infamous band that Factory had no idea how to market because it was simply all over the place as a sound. Precisely why this collection, entitled Temple of The 13th Tribe is, to me, one of the greatest things ever recorded. Its superbly the best emotional landscape which can parallel the earth itself of the smooth grassy plains, to the variants of depth of the mountains and riverbeds, to the multi textural existences of just about every hill and valley.

Why am I being so earthbound in this description because I really move through this album as if a journey were being embarked upon from one extreme to another, and the song titles kind of reinforce it as well. Simply put its the coldwaver's party album, because its got all the elements: the dance element, the mellow out, the introspective thinker, the im feeling emotional and sharing a moment with someone, the i feel like a stranger at this party, and the i am going to be utterly overbearing.

ROYAL FAMILY AND THE POORThe Temple of the 13th Tribe is:
Fragile. Blatant. Menacing. Reserved. Insecure. Human...this album is really human.

At the very beginning there is something so special about what is to come. The innocence and attempt at triumph in the first song, that leads to utter an almost "why am i bothering to feel all coiled inward?" moment. I have to admit, that Voices is a secret dance de pretencia for me, meaning that I am in that spectacle of spinning, dressed in some huge eastern get up gown in the center of the floor flailing arms and making stern facial gestures, is going on. I secretly want to get up and do it every time I hear it, except that i realize my hair is too short to fully carry it off, because something needs to whip the face of the bitchy goth chick behind me, OF COURSE! ha!

Seriously though, this band really has pushed its way to the front of my collection in the last year, and I further highly advise that you all jaunt over to Annie's Animal and grab the Art 45, because that too is beyond brilliant!

Dark and Light

Erreur, et les mots aux froide la francais

2007-07-27T16:56:00.001-07:00

(and to those of you who can correct me, please do because, we all know my french sucks! Do lyrics for this even exist?)

BUT NEVA MOST CERTAINLY DOES NOT SUCK!
TRÉS BRILLIANT! D'ACCORD?

Truly underrated as the french coldwave catalogue goes. To me this entire collection is flawless, and even the poor recording quality I think works perfectly with it. I do wish at times the fader was more equal but so be it.
I heard this collection and thought to myself some 5 years ago, this is weird, "why are you playing this? I know I wanted to know about dark french music, but is this really it? He sounds funny. Where's the Norma Loy? This stuff sounds funny. His voice sounds like a chipmunk on riddalin, itchin for a meth booster." But perhaps it was the computer speakers that we brought on holiday with us....the treble just out of control. Perhaps it was how Jacquy B's vocals sounded out of the speakers, like I cannot even explain, but something like little children moaning for something their parent wouldn't let them have from the store. I was beyond clueless, and then I took it back to New York with me, and let it sit on my shelf for about a year not wanting to get rid of it, but really unsure of it.
Then for whatever the reason, I took it out to play for a friend to say what weird music they had in france, and I completely fell in love with it. I was going to make a joke about it, but somehow it became so not funny. Next thing I knew it was on non-stop play at work everyday...and I had to share it with the Weird folk because I felt like I had the golden ticket in my hands that no one else in this country had. This was also when I truly thought that there were like 3 people in America who even knew about the french coldwave scene and they all lived in New York, in Brooklyn, and all knew each other. We were very rare. (Until I was proven wrong..."Someone in Texas is selling a Little Nemo album on Ebay?")
There is such a sense of intensity and immediacy to this album, and at times very dark and sadistic in tone..can't say lyrically, cuz as I said, my french sucks. The following collection of Neva I have is so sad. So I sit here and wonder, where is the Neva boxset? Come on Mr Coldwave French Music 10,000 albums guy, release one! Oh you all know who Im referring to...Someone go post the request on his myspace page!
While some of us say that NEva is the french half of Alien Sex Fiend, I would say only visually to some extent, for I can eagerly listen to this material rather than the drudgery that is a great deal of Nick Fiends melodies...although I do have my weaknesses! Admittedly...
Im listening right now and I still love this! Its just great. There is nothing too complex going on, but it all works in its demented tangent like ways. My favorite moment on here is Outrage, for there is this ginding sound that happens throughout like a vault door opening to a new room each time and then how can I not adore the trademark "Clan of Xymox" instrumental element in there. Yes there it is at 1:08. and back at 1:23..and 1:39..then cue in the guitar as if its going to truly progress to something else and it doesn't, it just goes back to more of that one rhythm and melody that I love so much...which is great. It knows that its good so it doesn't try to go ahead into something...and back to the Xymox thing at 2:37 and 2:51...its a melodica, right? at 3:06....and then its over...oh its soo good.

ICI!

And with that folks, I conclude this weeks donations of tunes and moments...I shall return Monday, a year older and a new layout and tunes to follow! Be well, and daydream.

Oh my legs just can't dance anymore...

2007-07-27T11:17:00.001-07:00

And we all thought those Sisters songs were murder in our club days! Oh nay, here's another jem in the dang this song is long and im still dancing days. I have to say hands down, its my favorite New Order song, as far as ones that make me dance around in my chair or that I can't resist the urge to dance to.
I sit here now and Im bobbing my head aggressively and playing keyboard on that wrist support cushion that is supposed to keep my wrists supported while I work. But far better for invisible keyboard.

I have to laugh because Bernard looks so utterly confused by what he should be doing at the start of this. "oh you've got the camera on? uhm, alright, its pointing at me, so im going to look up and uhm, right...you still got it on me? so, why not point that over there? uhm, now what?" and then the camera moves.

And will I ever understand how to get that perfect 80's new wave girl eyeshadow job on me...this is my inspiration for tomorrow eve!

And A Closing Moments From Years Ago

2007-07-26T16:47:00.000-07:00

Can't say how many times this was my new wave misery ballad of melancholia.

We ALL Have Our Moments

2007-07-26T09:42:00.000-07:00

Completely regressive on this one...I remember dancing around my hallways when i was 15 to this...haa haa. I even had some self made gold glitter baton/dancing wand that i used to go to parties with, because I was that silly. Fairy raver.

Claire, You Are...Well...You Just Are...

2007-07-25T16:12:00.000-07:00

so sad that there are so many faux replica's of you, when you were just being you.

A little Mood pour ton Mecredi

2007-07-25T08:54:00.000-07:00

Its rather lifeless out right now. A bit misty and I am tired as all heck. So we're taking it down a notch and just being mellow....but as always...moody. :)

How Come We Never Talk

2007-07-25T08:38:00.000-07:00

What a great album! What a great idea I had to buy it on a whim those years ago because it seemed to be something I would like. There are songs on here that I positively adore...some make me really sad and others make want to frantically run about. They move me, and that's why Breaking The Silence by The Opposition is an awesome album.

Many folks will give the comparison that The Opposition is a side spin to The Chameleons because both are a vibrant rock band with a heavy melancholy side for love lost and personal struggle with a huge sound. But then again, The Crossing by Big Country sounds akin to The Chameleons too, but doesn't hold entirely the same sentiments as those songs...which means, many bands were doing similar things. Instead of the non stop comparisons that we all make by somehow edging out the originators of "that sound" we should all be grateful that we aren't stuck with only one band, one album and one tune to listen to when we feel "that way."

I remember listening to this album a great deal when I got it, and always jumping to She Said because its an amazing song, and I used to "spin it" for that brief moment I dj'd in NYC. Its such a kick ass track. The title track, it kills me. Actually I would say that most of these tracks kill me a bit, because the music is just so in step with the vocalist that as he gets more wound so does the music. Its a really amazing dynamic.

But enough about how I feel, judge for yourself!

Demolished sanctuary!

2007-07-23T14:13:00.000-07:00

Sleek, Disturbed and Sexy always gets the job done, right? 'Tis a strange thing, for I recall the first time listening to this, thinking it was really bland, annoying and dismal in a bland, annoying way. Somehow after putting it away for years and not bothering to listen to it, I have rediscovered that its, still bland, dismal and annoying.

Not at all.

Actually I would say that the overtones of dismal are still going to be used to describe this, and I think of this as almost a precursor to a great deal of what much of the SST mid 80's catalog sounded like, that droney indie rock. Who knows, perhaps one can look at Dance Chapter and think, I wonder if Sebadoh every owned a 7". I mean on the 4ad label who doesn't know them? Well provided you are a fan of 4ad. :)

I was in the mood for this today, and Im not sure why, because I was enjoying my perusals of other random things, and this just called out to me, "play me. you never play with me." Funny, was that prior to listening to this I was having fun with Sex Gang Children material...perhaps the vocals just, literally, called out to me.

It's my offering for today
ps- i know sebadoh was not part of SST. I was speaking of two separate thoughts...just in case someone tries to nab me on factoids...

My New Idol

2007-07-23T11:21:00.000-07:00

Oh yeah you know it! My friends, its a girl! I never knew this. I thought it was gabi and robert only, but whom do i spy with my little eye? Is it, a woman behind the electronics...for this performance, it seems so.

Well she just became the coolest person I was not aware of. Oh can someone please come and get me? Im feeling creative! I WANT TO HANG THAT MICROPHONE IN MY OWN BATHROOM! I WANT TO RIG UP TEN MICROPHONES TO THE BASE OF AN OLD BATHTUB AND DRUM IN IT WHILE I BATHE, AND RECORD THIS AND THEN LOOP IT BACK WITH DELAY!

Screw the smog, come get me, its a slow day!

:D

Slow Train Wreck

2007-07-23T10:43:00.000-07:00

I adore you both, but this is like watching your very unhip family members trying to be hip...Its beyond laughable and quite sad actually.
I just couldn't contain myself.

And She WIll WIsh Again For That Side

2007-07-20T15:56:00.000-07:00

I was once mesmerized that something that sounded this good, could actually be from the states. I was informed that this was some California band that was friends with a friend. I was utterly shocked because I couldn't understand how this was sitting in Southern California and not out somewhere and accessible for many more people in this country.
Later I learned that the earlier info was completely wrong, and that this was a project that had been joined and formed with former Cocteau Twins's bassis Will Heggie, and with that little CT affiliation everything made sense and I of course started to obsess about the collecting of these albums. WHat can I say, it was the perfect element of the morosity I wanted from New Order and never seemed to get. Here it was, gloom pop personified, and I wanted to live in these songs as if they were storage places for all my emotions that I hadn't identified with every song yet, even though CT was doing its own marvelous things for me.

I remember it so perfectly. The first song I heard was off a tape that my friend and I played on our radio program, entitled Enchantment. Tonguetiedandtwisted began and I was just rattled from head to toe by everything. The vocals. The beat. The bass-line. Oh god that bass-line. The little shimmering chords of the infrequent guitar just lingering like the eyes upon a secret special place. I sat in my crappy chair, listening to this and staring at the table and the player spinning around watching the levels move up and down and thinking how sad it was to be when this stopped because this was the first thing in a while to hit me as amazingly as it did.

All of a sudden I could visualize the fans of this band, and it was a population of people I wanted to be friends with. I wanted to sit in a room with other people and listen to Lowlife and be amongst those people who were as insanely in love with this band and "got it" like I did. So I went on a mission a few more years later to start finding Lowlife fans and converting others who shared similar tastes in music to me, into them. I orchestrated this by hitting every discussion group I could with bands I liked, and asking about Lowlife in the forums...I converted at least 8 around this happy globe. I found about 10 and with that started a forum of my own for this amazing and highly underrated band.
As the months and years went by I culled a nice array of friends to chat with and wax poetic about these albums and songs, inclusive of a few nice moments of Craig's responses back to my waxings. However, my love did not die but the drama within that forum at times became a bit much, and without wanting to spoil the memories of all I had worked on with such enthusiasm, I handed over the forum to the now owner of the official website and said, enjoy!

This album is such a sparkling momento in my history of friendships, loss and memories. Listening to it just puts me in such a place. Sitting in my dorm room and watching the sun setting behind the trees and over the parking lot behind the cafeteria. Autumn dusk and full of the crisp world permeating with the early onsets of a cold chill in the morning. The feeling of being awake and very much in a daydream at the same time. To be reciprocated with the same impact in one's eyes that I feel within about these words and sentiments. Love and loss. Hope and Wonder. Everything from one's sad past with the grace of optimism in ones future.

FROM SIDE TO SIDE

What an absolutely amazing and for the most part, utterly flawless band and discography. There will be more on my moments with them...

Optimism

2007-07-19T17:01:00.000-07:00

as of the now

2007-07-18T15:42:00.000-07:00

It has always been something to hear something unknown and feel really good by what you hear. I was over at Phoenix Hairpins earlier and downloaded a band called The Gentry, since I'm all about hearing stuff I don't know, but from description sounded pretty good.

AND BOY AM I PLEASED TO SAY---IT IS!

Okay so its not like you are going to hear anything that sounds drastically different from what you might have heard in your musical comings and goings, but for what it is, its catchy. It's reminding me of a Seventeen Seconds era Cure, a splash of Sad Lovers and Giants moody pop, a mild tinge of early sombre Bono stylings in the vocals, with that Korova Records feel from the early 80's, and an undeniable punch of cool post punk drum punch machine percussion...even if it is a real drummer...No I don't mean Factory Records, I mean the muted drum version of a slightly softened thumping than gun shot popping.

Oh yeah, this is quite good. This really feels quite like a early/mid 80s release on Midnight Records. Wow, where has this been for my years of obsessing with bands like this?! This track called Fragments of Truth, that Im currently listening to, is really hitting the references from above. Oh its so good, the ambiance of synth filling in the backgrounds while the guitars just kind of fuzz over the swooning vocals and the drum just keeps the beat to move through it all. Oh this is a definite "mopey rainy day with the headset wandering outside below the trees in your neighborhood" tune.

Oh and yes, the Adrian reference on the site is quite apt...

"The more we talk, the less I get involved
The more You talk The less I get involved"

So I am posting because this has my full attention right now and I'm really excited about it. Please go here, read the bit and download this!

Senses...

Le chanson est tres bon! Arrive!

2007-07-17T15:47:00.000-07:00

. Sound of the Toundra . Sound of the Toundra . Sound of the Toundra .

. C L A I R . O B S C U R . C L A I R . O B S C U R . C L A I R . O B S C U R .

l i s t e n

In Alphabetical and Genre Ascending and It All Flows? Fuck, You're Good!

2007-07-16T13:40:00.000-07:00

OFFLINE/Tracks...
deleted...

So what is my hidden talent? Well besides being able to write my name with a pencil between my toes and write my name backwards in script, yes first, middle and last, oh yeah and that trick you do with the cherry stem, hee hee...I have to pat myself on the back when it comes to arrangement, and tricky arrangement. I have been known by some folks in such discriminating circles, as the person who can get you from A to B by ways of C-Z....
I think I have a knack for editing and being able to sort things that all blend by means of a meandering methodology but somehow gets you back to where you started. There have been tapes that contain bands that seem anticlimactic to each other but somehow through the progression of tracks they blend and don't seem to be in a crazy disarray.
I'm not trying to make this post about me, even if I am boasting a wee bit much here, but I do think I am pretty good at editing, and therefor submitted this week is a 10 track assortment of tunes that range in various genres but all move in a nice way that you can groove on them and rock out and then just when you have concluded it starts again as if it was meant to.
I'm reflecting on feeling good today after having a kick-ass weekend and being in better spirits, and cleaning both physically and mentally. So why not get a few fun songs that give one a little oomph?

Fit Like A Target!
(ps- i can't believe this! 1000 Mexicans are on facking myspace...oh where does this insipidness stop?!)

video block friday

2007-07-13T10:41:00.000-07:00

LAST ONE! Hope you enjoyed this eclectic assortment.

5:27pm Minimal Compact Dedicated

4:23pm Material Issue Valerie Loves Me

3:09pm The Lightning Seeds Sense

2:18pm Blur For Tomorrow

(a little switch of pace, hee hee)
1:05pm Ultravox! Hiroshima Mon Amour
12:02pm Resistance Across The Ocean

10:38am Psychedelic Furs Sister Europe

With a Name Like Ice

2007-07-12T15:30:00.000-07:00

Where can I find this audio recording? This rules! It's so much more coldwave/minimal, than PP/// Gosh they should have never released produced albums, because the demo's were always so far better!

Thanks J!

UMLAUTS!!!

2007-07-12T15:24:00.000-07:00

I was listening to this last night and remembering how I listened to this so incessantly when I grabbed all these tracks from a good friend, who had the fortune to unload much of his musical collection to me...Thanks G$!

But this post is really for one person specifically, for without him I wouldn't have known these fine folk in the first place...ironically I have it and he doesn't, so here you go my fine Josephina Theresa Angela Boddacciolini.

The rulers of the wasteland

2007-07-11T15:01:00.000-07:00

It just felt right...or at least sounded right.
Actually the sound is shitty.
So is the state of numerous things today.
A call to humanity is desperately needed!

From The Silver Frost

2007-07-10T15:53:00.000-07:00

Encapsulation.
What is it about time and space that some of us find so fascinating and relish those moments that we relinquish or existences from this time to being utterly absorbed in another?
Our eyes move to places that we are clueless to, and carry heavy glares of romanticized people and places and worlds that seemed to carry a perfection. Or perhaps they carried so little and within that, we find perfection, as our current worlds are so cluttered with massive proportions of highly disposable things.

One plate of bread and a beverage eaten across the table with the most entertaining and comforting of persons you know. A moment spent in dialogue that means more than any party one could compose for any one of numerous forgettable faces. The beauty of the dynamic of interaction in an environment that resonates for years. Like beauty stained across one's sincerest face, of innocence and tainted worlds never seen.

What does it mean to cherish moments in perfect time?
I am unsure but I do know what it feels like and I do know that there are moments when I wish I could hold onto it forever and loose myself into those times and places...at the visual embrace of one's face and glance.

To this I hold sacred, for there is nothing that can be perfect and acquired in any material manner, but the beauty of anything to be cherished is that which we cannot define, but only feel. And to that, I only wish to share and impart to others.

My Elementary Coldwave Assault Come on Baby, Come On!

2007-07-09T12:43:00.001-07:00

I most humbly put my cold heart upon this marble plate and say it was only but some 4-5 years ago that this all became knowledgeable to me...and I never looked back. How could I? It's all so unbelievably great...I only wish I knew about some of this earlier when I was a club goer, because the one fault I have at this point of my musical affinity career, is that I have never danced to any of these. Its infrequent to ever hear this at a dance club here...you only hear this when your friends dj at bars, where everyone only drinks and never dances.
[OFFLINE]
Norma Loy Power of Spirit
Baroque Bordello Today
The Asylum Party The Sabbath
Die Bunker Gewalt
Neva Hallucination
Babel 17 Shades of a Dream
Aroma Di Amore Fe
Mary Goes Round The Night
The Bonapartes Battle of Iena

Ma Fois!

But I won't...let others live in hell

2007-07-06T17:22:00.000-07:00

Well what do I remember of those early years of MTV?
I remember a miasma of videos that made no sense, but looked damned cool. I also remember the starkness of two videos in particular that I thought the songs were great because of it. One was Modern English's "I'll Melt With You" and the other was U2's "Sunday Bloody Sunday". This is before these songs were played to death and became nauseating to hear. Somehow my tolerance for U2 is greater than Modern English.

I still contend that U2's first three releases are flawless and are a most perfect early trinity in this genre of music. Its raw and packed with emotion and just great rock music. Sure you can cover it with whatever you want to feel cool about liking early U2 because you are not a lame-o...call it punk, post punk, alternative, but down to it all, unmistakably true, U2 is at the core a great rock band. And this album is what proves it. While I am a huge fan of Boy, War has refined out the mellow and the pop so that it is infectious in beat when it needs to be, and is really gripping when it needs to be. I think this album laid the groundwork for what became the elemental formula for this band. Even though I lost touch of my fondness for them as the years carried on and by Achtung, I said, okay its enough. Next!

The memories I have listening to this album bring me back to childhood and my innocent reflections upon the outdoors, and truth be told the first interaction I had with songs and snow. I remember going sledding with my mom and while we were coming home, Sunday Bloody Sunday was playing on the radio, and it made me smile because I too was out in the snow only earlier watching the heat escape from my mouth. That and a craving for Chicken McNuggets, but that has nothing to do with U2, so I digress...but quickly I add, I used to love going to McDonalds after a winter storm and getting those and the barbecue sauce and a fry...oh baby!
moving along...

Its a great album. It moves and by the time you get to the end you want to go back in, or maybe just go through a few favorites but you can't help yourself. They are a band that cannot be stopped apparently, but unarguably it can't be said that they have lasted this long for no reason...they're good at what they do, even if style wise they may not be that interesting, they still know the formula! So they keep the old and bring more in each time!

Let the Bells Ring Out

Like A Song recorded live in 1983 (song only)

For the black-suited boys

2007-07-05T14:46:00.000-07:00

You know the sad thing, besides the fact that its founding main member is dead, but when a band really has a great sound, and yet one really popular song, plunges them into mainstream acknowledgment for that one song and dismisses them slightly amongst other bands that get more pronounced credit. If I ever hear a Chameleons fan dismiss Big Country or tell me they dont listen to them, well there is something seriously wrong, because I think they are quite comparable, except Big Country's lyrical content is rather different, but that "sound" is there. The rough big concert get drunk and get rowdy with a fellow fan/friend essence is there. I'll put side by side "1000 Stars" with "Fan and Bellows" and you tell me that the essence is NOT the same, bah!

Why am I expressing all this? Because I am guilty of this dismissal when I was younger. I knew the title track and liked it but thought nothing further of them, save for this one catchy tune. Id see it in stores and say, "oh its that In A Big Country band." Thinking I had stumbled upon yet another thing that probably sounded like later period Heaven 17, and by that I mean a really great song amongst a bulk of crap, I never heard this album, sadly until I was already a Chameleons fan at the age of 22.

Through the fortunes of an older friend downsizing her entire vinyl collection, and me reaping the rewards, I inherited a very nice vinyl sleeve silver embossed version of this album, which kicking myself now, I got rid of for cash. But!!! I do own the cd because I love the album so. I have curiously surprised a friend here and there with thinking that the album they were listening to, was some other obscure post punk band I had stumbled upon. All I would say is keep listening to the album and you'll figure it out...you'll kick yourself you haven't figured out...HOW? Because I always used to start it on track 2, and then let it fall onto the first one at the end..

"HOLY SHIT??!!! THIS IS THEM?"

I love getting that reaction to bands. Because its such a great sign of appreciation that you feel warmed in sharing it. It's similar to when I heard Icehouse, by Icehouse, and was blown away that this amazing song was THAT band.

I think one of the great things about music is when you can emit a response from someone that totally makes you smile. It's the great thing about good music, is that it can really grab someone in such a way that they loose sense about stupid shit and just immerse themselves entirely. Plus being made to feel dumbfounded with yourself every now and then is a good way to keep us all on our feet.

The Crossing is another great rockin-alterna-Pub-Art band and this album I think still holds up...even on repetitive rotations on the car stereo, right? ;)

ENJOY!

Singing Rule Britannia

2007-07-04T13:20:00.000-07:00

HAPPY FOURTH OF JULY!
From all the boys!
:D
Here is my oxy-moronic post...with guitars of course!

The Chameleons are another band that are due a few days of dedicated thought, but honestly this post is really more for the irony itself and to enjoy a band that I think is a great band for a day like today.

Another release that contains adjusted versions of familiar songs with alternate titles. Recorded from 83-85, the Radio One Sessions are a great overview of the earlier years...and the Peel Sessions ain't half bad either. I dedicate this album to you...wherever you are...enjoy it for the day is beautiful and everyone should enjoy it...

I shall be exercising some good ole americana today by making burgers and tater tots at home for some friends. There will be booze and dessert and in advance, I hope this day goes well.

I hope someone takes a picnic today. Perhaps you'll take this with you!

Cheers!

Remembrances

2007-07-03T13:13:00.000-07:00

To the left of the driver, sand, trees and shimmering water that stretched to the shores of Japan, and to the right, yellow golden, grass plotted hills speeding by as the smell of sweet plants and warm air pleasantly whips past your face. In front of you the highway curves to the left and right, bringing you behind homes on the beach-front and obscuring your view. Every few minutes a break out of this and the full view of natures wonder and shorelines and cliff lined highways with the foam and mist engulfing the scenery in front, creating an almost mystical place in a slight vanishing point.

This compendium of singles and the full length by The Lucy Show, blares at most indefinitely a volume too loud, but perfect for absent attention to anything else of a distraction...no really I'm a good driver. And its very interesting, for The Lucy Show has been an opportunity afforded to me, only because record shops exist in Los Angeles. I came to own Undone on tape, by a record shop in Venice, and Extended play was purchased at another record store in West Hollywood. It almost seems fitting that listening to them reminds me of this drive I took some many years ago, by myself, while exploring the coast of SoCal. Further I happen to know a store that has a copy of Undone sitting in its bin for 2$, that Im hoping someone took a chance on and is enjoying it the way I have for these years.

Upon the backside of a business card was written three things that I was told I had to go to certain stores on Long Island and track down...1) Dead Gone Days, by B-Movie, 2)Ha! Ha! Ha! or Systems of Romance by Ultravox!, and 3)Undone, by The Lucy Show. Well I never found any of them at these supposed L.I marks, but they all became these things I had to find and that I became increasingly more obsessed about finding until I did. (Ultravox! the entire Island record catalog was purchased in Boston, B-Movie never happened...)

The thing about these songs, is that they have a very touristic nature to the music that you can visually track them to scenery and advancement, so it is an ideal car drive type of band. But also a great band to listen to in the car and then take out of the car when you get to that one place that for some reason you had to stop the car on the side of the road and just gaze upon that thing that has drawn your attention...a moment of small enigmatic proportions, or perhaps large ones, but you feel transported. I think start the journey with Undone's first track, Ephemera (This is No Heaven), it is one of the greatest songs, and it just kicks up towards the ends when the guitars layer upon themselves.

You are apt to free caught in the moment of total independence and a shit eating grin on your face...and go on, if you feel the need to air guitar upon the steering wheel, you won't be the first!

Take my word for it!

Shoe n Gaze

2007-07-02T13:44:00.000-07:00

Well, we're trying to rock out a bit more with the music this week! So its my tribute to bands with guitars...Prominent guitars I should say.

Reflecter, by Sundial, I do believe is out of print at this point, so I'd grab this if I were you! And what's more, Im not sure if it's the same band, but apparently the precursor to Sundial was the Modern Art, which is far more a synthwave band, and now Im really curious about this fact....because I can almost see it....(note to dorkself- investigate this).

The title track to this album, kicked off a most rockin and one of the best mixed tapes I had ever been made. It was because of this mixed tape that I got into Sun Dial, and a whole mess of stuff that appeared on that tape, not to mention a really awesome friendship that lasted for a dynamic seven years. Sadly, like the tape, the friendship is gone too...
The name of the track? Reflecter...it seems, yet once again folks, poignancy follows me through music into my lifeline. But its such a great track and it really moves and the beginning of it reminds me of the darker post punk material, like somehow it could have been spawned by the cross platformed child of RLYL and Loop. With that said, I should think Loop is a most apt reference to make, as it is within a similar vein to the shoegaze of the heavier moodier dark bands, ie, more comparable to Swervedriver shoegaze than Slowdive...What's with the letter "S"?

Its a really great springtime driving album, through the suburbs of any town. Think of the tree lined streets, the occasional highway that runs along a bunch of strip malls, but the sun is out and its a bit muggy from rain, but really bright. You have a really great friend in the car alongside you, both of you having an "i love this song" moment and rocking out like losers...losers with impeccable musical tastes, of course.

If you ever come to New York, even though I live in California, which still looks odd when I type it, get in a car on a Saturday in May, and take a drive on the Northern State Parkway (westbound) to the Meadowbrook Parkway (southbound) and get off on the Zeckendorf Blvd exit and precede to Hempstead Turnpike, and take that westbound towards the Coliseum and just keep driving till this album runs out. This is THE album with this drive...oh and don't forget the smokey treats...

If you're lucky, I'll drive!

Sweetness and Tinderbox

2007-07-02T09:38:00.000-07:00

Currently listening to Fast Forward Reverse, the lush v. cocteau twins show!
Please support and give a listen!

click on the "here" within the Listen to the most recent show here.
or go directly to the podcast link.
*enjoy*

A KNEES UP!

2007-06-29T16:22:00.000-07:00

My Ode to The Discriminating Pub Attendee...
FUCKIN YAH!
Cheers!!!!

the candle glows

2007-06-28T16:29:00.000-07:00

An afternoon haze on a summer's day
Orange glow of the light beams atop your legs
While laying upon your bed
The warmth
The smell of golden splendour
A memory
A fondness
The face that brings you warmth
The presence that bathes you as much as the sun
An adoring glance
The eyes of reassurance
Comfort
Mutuality in a beautiful dynamic
The exhale of confidence
The inhale of delight
When one look is everything
Your eyes close in theirs
Drifting off...

And while the lyrics of this ep are the complete antithesis to these reflections, the world these songs create around me, does this. Please refrain from listening to the lyrics, unless you truly are feeling miserable and want to push yourself further into that hole...but I would really think twice then about listening to this. I don't want anyone to be sad or miserable.
The lyrics are really disturbing, and I am unsure if I am disturbed because they do the polar opposite to me, but pretent the voice is just another instrument and there is nothing decipherable about it.
I feel beyond in sentiment...and listening to this right now, I am on the verge
of tears, because the above is quite personal, and very close to me right
now...so in this daydream, I looking for tints this time, instead of engulfing myself in shades...
download

Intervals During The Days of Work

2007-06-27T15:33:00.000-07:00

I would like to send a big wave of gratitude to all the copyright breaking bloggers out there, because, thanks to you, I have been downloading some really friggin amazing shit! I owe you a bunch, and will never be able to give back all that I have taken. Nor do I intend to feel bad about taking it all shamelessly...Nor will I apologize for sitting here at work using that 280-320kps downloading connection speed...fucking brilliant!

Albums I dont want to buy, I dont have to!

Albums I didn't know existed, I now know do!
(And I didn't have to risk a hefty Ebay disaster to discover if it's crap!)

I have been exploring so many new and different projects, and enjoying each day moving through these vastly broad in spectrum variants. I get excited when I discover a new blog and must share the link with those few close ones, to either be corresponded in gratitude, or "yes lorelle, i know about this one..." ah well.
But the sharing continues and we all embrace the spirit of our excitement to share what else we found..."can you believe it's on a blog? DAMNIT! Im never going to bed!" and "Im never going to get to the gym! HA!" Most of the time I just get annoyed when someone interrupts me at work with work things when I am trying to get to files...Honestly, I have my priorities.

COME BACK LASER BEAK!!!!! PLEASE!!!!

When I used to blog in my earlier days, where mostly it was an absolute indulgence on my hair, makeup, shoes and shopping...with the occasional dorkout on music, we always had silly list posts. Many would be about "what are you listening to today?" "when you shuffle on your iPod what is the last song?" Well, I don't own, for the most part an iPod (sorry iHave an iPod Shuffle...which iUse when iGo to the gym...), but Im going to reminisce in the old days of livejournal, and do a list here!

Im going to set iTunes on shuffle and go forward 10 and see what those 10 are:
1. Reseau D'Ombres / Perska
2. The Royal Family and The Poor / Art on 45
3. A.R.Kane / Lollita
4. Of a Mesh / Burning Bride
5. Dead / Come To The Place
6. Lush / Kiss Chase
7. Kitchen and The Plastic Spoons / The Poet
8. Quel Domage / Bright Lights
9. Ova Looven / Invisible Triangle (demo)
10. The Distributors / Wireless

Gosh I'm an odd one...I mean a bunch of this is under a similar vein, but if I didn't know me, I'd be like, "What the fuck do you listen to? Who ARE these bands?"

Im bogged down with work so this is all I can spare for a post...That and what I was going to upload for a post I can't due to the fact Cyberduck doesn't want to work on this machine, strange.

Anyone want to share in the list? What's your daily listen/musical excursion. Or play the game and give me your iTunes top 10 on the shuffle :)

*cheers! And remember the greatest thing about being a musical enthusiast is sharing where and how you can...so keep those upload options comin'!

The World Is As Soft As Lace

2007-06-26T12:56:00.000-07:00

The Splendour of Fear / Crumbling The Antiseptic Beauty

There are many albums that upon the first listen hit you as wonderfully as they do.
There are times when the right album listened to by unknown ears, and a heart in just the right place, can create the perfect moment for an album to be embraced and adored eternally by the listener. Thank gosh for all the elements that exist to create these moments, and allow all of us to have those albums that do that for us, we are so grateful.

Upon my journey into wide world of the ever popular post punk genre, I was in such a place that I was unsure about a few things I was embarking upon. In my head I knew I was probably doing something stupid, but thought perhaps it was a great thing at the same time, and my heart was being lured by one who knew how to pull the strings ever so perfectly. Sending forth in their melancholy, the album/compendium that meant so much to them and that they were finding solace in, I was privileged to share in the sentiments.

Felt was not a new band for me, as I owned the compilation on tape that starts with the material from Ignite the Seven Canons, and closes with the 7" of the unreleased singles. But apparently, according to this person of that moment, THESE were the songs that I was in great need of listening to...especially to move through the rainy and grey days of spring in New York.

Alas, after a sense of fond affection to these albums had began, the person left me in a state of despair, or rather, from just left, with no reason, a vanishing grace as it were. Left in a sense of misery and melancholy, with the haze of humidity to greet me every morning in NYC, I found new charm in this album. While I had a beautiful attachment to it as the sympathetic eyes of another feeling my thoughts, now knowing that I could use it as my way of being sad, it was poignant. Fortune became a soundtrack to many points of my day and seemed utterly perfect in the moment...day in and day out.

The person whom was kind enough to burn this for me, is all but a spec in my lifeline, the feelings and sentiments have allowed me to harbor treasures of emotional journies, and to always preserve that moment of foolishness and sadness, but also with a knowledge that I am past those days and can appreciate my earlier ways with a grain of sand, as I reflect on my innocence and nievity. Understanding one's lack of grace or rather appreciating the growth and sense of maturity we all make.

These albums have such stoic places in my heart, to appreciate these titles as a chapter to one's life. The Splendour of Fear happens to be the most appropriate title I could have even dreampt to contrive, for the experience and past moment to this album is almost cliché. Beyond fitting.

I ask you to find a perfect morning within a haze of being alone, take for yourself a wonderful baked item (I prefer a fresh scone), a divine cup of earl gray tea, crack open a window, take a look upon the town/place you live, and breathe it in. Put Crumbling The Antiseptic Beauty onto your player and sit down in the most comfy way and enjoy your morning breakfast still gazing upon it all, and listening to this. Let your thoughts wander ever which way...

As you progress you might want to just lay back in bed while still gazing out your window and dream off into sleepyland. And every once in a while, you might enjoy this napping option alongside a loved one....

Just make sure the weather and moment are right!
[ download @192kbs ]

Haunted in The Hollow

2007-06-25T15:12:00.001-07:00

[O F F L I N E]
Dome Cruel When Complete
Martin Dupont Just Because
Pink Turns Blue Moon
The Lucy Show History Part One
Thule Ssel Gniemanlla

What is it about sound and production that sometimes suckers me more than the composition of the actual song itself? A song could have the worst lyrics ever, but if they are slightly muted and the sound-scape surrounding are really mystical, most likely I'll like it. Fortunately, I don't think that the above thought applies to the selections above, but I'm just saying.

I gravitate towards so many types sounds...the wall of sound with feedback galore and clashing guitars layered and layered, and when mixed down, layered more until i can't hear myself breathe. I am also drawn to things that seem a bit hollow in tones as if they were recorded in empty white rooms with no producer at all, when in fact they have just been deliberately produced to sound like that.

The selections all have a certain bleakness in tone for me that the songs seem ungrounded and not all slicked out in production hyper quality...there is a roughness to them that I like. I can say that the Thule may not seem to rough there is something within in it that I find unresolved...
The Martin Dupont track just seems vacant and roaming to me, even though its very arranged, but I listen to it and feel like I'm spiraling around in something waiting for something but not the something I'm sure about...
Pink Turns Blue, the drums resonate in such a way that it feels the way U2's Sunday Bloody Sunday video looks...somewhere out in the snow and cold. But once again I suppose a stark night time upon the view of a moon could be the same effect...but the nature of this song lingers in a haunting way to me. One of those songs that feels like you have felt, and lyrics aside the anxiousness is so dead on. And the coarse rusty driven like guitars as emotional moments...oh I can't help myself, I really like this song.
History Part One by The Lucy Show well its simply dark and rough around the edges in all the best ways. The bells of doom that ring through this, its so ominous. The nature of the recording has a slight muffling, so its very fitting, which is probably more to do with the nature of the aesthetic that time, versus the lack of proper skilled technicians...I wouldn't want it remastered and "brought into the CD clarity of the day." "Is anybody someone anybody" how can you say these lyrics are not tinged with vacancy and the sense of the blank white room....*mental note, dedicate post to Lucy Show*
You should just enjoy the Thule song, because its from the Flexipop compilations, and its a nice elegant spiralling of kind of the themes I expressed, with qualities that send you here and there a bit. Back and front...Left and Right. Still preserved with a bit of uncertainty and anxiousness.

I love being slightly irked by what I listen to....the prickles upon the back of one's neck.

The Spark That Lit the Flame

2007-06-22T18:34:00.000-07:00

People Are People / Depeche Mode (released as single 1984)
This is the release that took a little suburban girl and changed her forever. When I was little I liked to listen to music, but nothing ever made me insane for music, I was quite young. I remember listening to this song when it came out on my Barbie radio that I got as a Christmas gift from my grandparents and they played this on 77AM which was most famous for the Don Imus and Howard Stern talk show....but because it was a very forward liberal based station, it played a decent array of music now and then for AM radio.
I remember hearing this on the radio and it seemed like the coolest thing with those metal dropping sounds at the beginning, this was definitely not Billy Joel or Carly Simon. The voice was so strange to me, everything was so strange to me, but it was so damn cool. In all its treble splendor playing out on the hand-held Barbie radio....

It was also at this time that the girl I was really good friends with, had an older sister that was really into all this new wave anglo-fronted music, and owned the album. I remember listening to it in the car when her mom would take her to a friends house, and my friend and I would accompany them, as we were too young to stay at home, at the age of 7/8. Her sister was totally cool, and we idolized her, so whatever she thought was cool, so did we.

It was strange to be a seven-year old who was obsessing over Depeche Mode and knew the words to songs that didn't make sense, but sounded, once again, so damn cool. My favorite from this album back then was Pipeline and Told You So...I thought Everything Counts was a bit sad because of the severity of the elements and objects that people were confined too...in retrospect, I think I have always had a sympathetic nature towards oppressive elements in our society, even though I would have by no means referred to it as that...mostly imagery in my head and black and white music videos.

This single pretty much saturated my head and upon owning the album on tape, I began falling further into my anglophile ways, and wanting to be british, sound british and live in all of the videos on MTV that were made in Britain. Little did I know that had it not been for America, most of the New Wave culture and music that I was freaking out over, would have failed to exist. Granted Kraftwerk helped just a little, but the stylized crafter decadence and lack of that I saw, was the hook...and much of that was because of us yanks! And a big gulp of jealousy and idolization by one Malcom MacLaren, but I digress.

This was the single most influential song/album of my life, because it was the one that sparked the flame and wanting to own more of this type of music, which is completely responsible for all the music I listen to today and how I became a music dork/obsessor who when they hear something really neat and different must own it. Perhaps, I should send them a bill for this! haa haa

I thank these 4, for even though I got to them not at the beginning of their career, I got there early enough to ride out a pretty fantastic wave of music, and that of many years to be devoted to this band...not to mention my insane school girl crush that I had for some 20 years for Martin Gore...because it was just great too that my initials wouldn't have to change. DORK!

Because it was the song specifically that hit me so, I am attaching the single, and not the album, but please play in the nostalgia...it isn't so great as all songs of their discography go, but it is reminiscent of time and place, and we can all appreciate that, no? download here

some great reward, indeed!

Tinderbox...

2007-06-21T14:30:00.000-07:00

If I am able to do justice to this post I still will have failed

The Cocteau Twins have remained one of the most influential bands of all time in my life, or what has been the past 13 years. I never knew on the onset of my collecting days that this band had a dazzling catalogue of songs and visuals that would pretty much dictate everything from what I listened to, to the career that I embarked upon. I had seen the video for Bluebeard and I was blown away by the vocals. Her voice was like nothing else I had ever heard. Sure there were similar styles out there, but Liz's voice was absolute perfection and the music just swooned and swirled about her and the video was all shiny and like some ethereal carnival and it was something I had to own.

download @192 courtesy megaupload
After listening to this album I found that I really liked the start, and the end, but the middle fell flat to me, and such I was unsure of this band, were they solid, or was it another gimick...

I had no one else that knew them so my high school senior year ended with only that one album and I opted to go no further...until my sophomore year of college.

I had met a girl the year prior, whom was emphatically in love with them, and at the time, being huge into Rave culture thought it was fluff..."where are the beats?"
She told me I was stupid and simply didn't understand that I was listening to greatness and that one day I would learn.

And boy did I!

She left, and this other girl gave me Heaven or Las Vegas to listen to, because I was seeking paper writing music...and she said, Cocteau Twins are one of my favorite bands, if you need any of the albums to listen to, just stop by. I listened to every single one of them...except for the one she didn't own, Head Over Heels.

and this...

was how it allllll started....

during the winter of 1995/96....

I'm not even going to touch how listening to The Moon and The Melodies has changed me, that needs a post all to itself, if not a week of posts...

download @192 courtesy megaupload
I went on vacation to Wisconsin and purchased Head Over Heels, because I had to know what this sounded like as it was the only one that remained a mystery to me. I fell in love with it. Listening to it as the cold air whipped past the windows in Madison, and feeling ever so more warmed by the dramatic and insular air of the sound. It became my favorite album of that time...

Honestly this album is my favorite. M+M is my favorite, but I won't get into the syntax....Head Over Heels is a time and place in life for me, and it's the only album that hits me with such nostalgia that I love it from start to finish and never get sick of it...I never get sick of any of them.

Save for Four-Calendar Cafe...but it was my introduction to them and that is why I am notating it here. The box set of eps is my most cherished heart keepsake by them, with many of them amounting to "my favorite albums" but they alas, are eps.
(another time on that too)

I think the experience is different with everyone, but this band means more to me than some of the people I met during those years...They are almost people in themselves that I feel so close to, that I have shared so much with, that have been there to provide so much for me, and yet, we have never spoken.

There within lies the beauty.

Hurray for McCarthy

2007-06-20T16:04:00.000-07:00

McCarthy tracks-
A Child Soon In Chains
An MP Speaks
Now Is The Time For an Iron Hand
The Process Of Popular Capitalism
The Vision of Peregrine
The Well-Fed Point of View
[offline]
One of the most addictive pop bands to ever grace my ears. And a most addictive venture to music stores to find these darn albums, eventually I caved and used the infamous Gemm...I couldn't deal with not being able to find it.

In the essence of The Smiths, McCarthy brought the truly dark lyrics to really catchy jangle pop and that is why I thought they were positively brilliant...these lyrics are really amongst the best.

In essence they changed my enthusiasm for this genre and launched me into a head first quest of all things jangly pop, inclusive of searching through the wide vast catalogues, of Aussie bands and Scottish bands, most notably contained in the C86 family. I give them much credit, and all I ask is that when listening to them, you play it loud or else its going to sound like background AM radio...

enjoy!

REFLECTIONS OF I

2007-06-19T11:12:00.000-07:00

T H I S W E E K I'm thinking about the beginnings of my musical obsessions, and those things that changed, or had massive impressions upon me that shaped my tastes and fostered my peaked interest.

This was the first Siouxsie and The Banshees album I owned, when I was engulfing myself further into the darker tones of music. I was an insane Cure fanatic and everything that Robert Smith had a part in I had to own. At the tender age of 15 I was well aware of the Banshees, but had owned nothing by them, as I wasn't really collecting music that heavily yet...most of the reason being I really had nothing to ever play it on. All we owned was a stereo, and a record player that really was unreliable...I had a walkman, but as my father took our tape deck with him when he moved out, it became difficult at times to always find things on cassette, for this was the age of the CD's claim to fame...and things were becoming more accessible at stores on CD...finally I had gotten a cd player at Christmas and with whatever money I received as well, purchased the cd's I had been pining away for...
this being one of them.

It was January of 92 in New York, in the Long Island suburb of Huntington, and around I walked listening to this on the tape I dubbed from the CD on my walkman and listening to this album at loud levels at home, and feeling this haunting chill and unexplainable dark decadence that I had never experienced with anything I owned. I would walk around at the night hours listening to this album and become more and more enchanted with it, thinking this was the album that expressed everything about this time of year at this hour...dark and urgent...

Only years later would I read about the fact that this is one of their least favorites, and its one of the most panned of them, but the most popular. I can't resolve this, for it is the only album that contributes more tracks than any other on the greatest hits cd's, ergo, Twice Upon A Time...

It still remains a great album, no longer a favorite, but while listening to it yesterday it brought back all those feelings of roaming around in the cold night times and staring into the sky and wondering about others whom might possibility relate to me and these moments. And wondering "what seething, unsated, and dervish meant," and "what was belladonna," and "why did I always read Preacher as Pre Acher and think what the heck a Pre Acher was...,"
That and having an obsession with the illustration on the cover and tracing it over and over until i got it right...

If you would like to share this memory and have it now to reflect on, well then...
care of bigupload / 128kps

beneathe the projekt of her 4ad

2007-06-15T15:16:00.000-07:00

for many years i was a devotee of the Projekt label and especially its main entity Black Tape For A Blue Girl...and many years of these album covers and the names that appeared as titles and group names...well I think Projekt has every other label beat for highly pretencious titles...however many furnish some great music--ie: Loveliescrushing, Love Spirals Downwards, Soul Whirling Somehere, Love Is Colder Than Death...Especially LSD, my favorite of all Projekt bands...

It is with an essence of respect that i think of the sepia and color washed images of womens faces, either in goth cleopatra eyegear (ie: many a compilation cover) and these overly indulged long names that I found a knack for the mimicry of title creating...
So here lies some in the moment examples of my homage to the label and its genre

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * ready?

Her Multifoiled Calvalcades of Ethereal Splendour
Some Pale Misfortuned Stoic Grace Does The Beauty Shine
Within the Grey Tales of Dazzling Watercolour
Shimmers Beyond The Troubled Path
Soft Spoken Only Next to Silent Misfortune
Her Breath Upon The Secret Snow (<-- now thats a band name if ever there was!)
Falter Forward Upon My Cold Darling
My Garden of Encrusted Memories Dies Pale
(these would all make great song titles! tell your friends!)
Shared Moments of Memories Gleam
Shards Upon the Daunting Past
The Gray Hours Unto These Places Between Us
Blind Within the Dusk House Lies
From the Pale Walls Her White Hand Fell
(great opening lines for any poem!)
Your Empty Silver Meadow Calls Upon This Pallid Lake
(great for pick up lines too!)
Closets Unlock This Below Mournful Grace
These Shimmering Windows From Whence They Mourn

It's almost to the point that I can't keep myself contained...
So perhaps one day I shall saddle up upon ye keyboard of design things and bring one of these to fruition with trademark cover...

Did they heist a Liz Frasier photo from the Bluebeard years on that one above? haa!

Once again these are quite a gross exaggeration, but fun in the spirit...

Its something I used to do with friends and I would usually win because I seem to be able to keep coming up with more and more of them...is it more pathetic that i won or the methods as to how i won...
?

(you just put your poetic hat with feather on and think of
the most ridiculous things that no romance poet ever did...
or just aspire to the grace of Baudelaire...)

From and Towards

2007-06-12T13:20:00.000-07:00

Colin Newman-Image
Dirty Rosanne-Nebulous Canaan
Pieter Nooten+Michael Brook-Searching
Weimar Gesang-
Mittageisen-Danach
[OFFLINE]
Progression.
Movement.
Stored memories that seem to have changed.
A new glance to a new view.
A familiar presence.
Novelty.

In thinking about one shift to the other and how we move about and start from one end to another in hopes of things being better. A hope for something that will be great. Your old eyes seeing the possibilities of new ways.

The sadness shifts, even though it will never be forgotten. It shouldn't be.
We look ahead as the clouds roll and the breeze comforts.

But Never When It Rains

2007-06-08T16:56:00.000-07:00

Oh Mr I.A....

Time For the Weekend...
is it not...

Out of Mind...

Its Sinead...with a splash of candles and a horse, huh?

2007-06-05T18:22:00.000-07:00

I just found myself in the mood for a Sinead video, and Im not really sure how listening to Weimar Gesang did that, but it did. And then I was reminded about this song which I no longer have, because I sold the album, and I always thought this was the best song on the album and it was one of the best songs that I felt she had between the first two albums.

This is the first time I have seen a video to this, and I have to say that I dont really care for it and I find it actually very dated looking, but I can recall many videos looking like this...The sad thing, is that I think the video to "Nothing Compares 2 U" would have been the perfect video for this song, because its very bare and I think this song is more bare than the other.

Regardless, I think this song is beautiful and it evokes a very stillness, which is poignant for this moment...

A R KANE

2007-06-04T16:15:00.000-07:00

[tracks]
A R Kane-Lollita
A R Kane- So Far Away
M|A|R|R|S- Anitina
[offline]

All things that I revel in musically are in this song, save for the one major factor of a kickin bassline. But I have a huge weakness for really fragile delicate, frozen in the movement of its own composition type songs. One's that seem to be almost of another era in feeling, and by that, they conjure up nothing that feels like that which is around you. Lollita is one of my all time favorite songs, ever! An awesome find for this ep I bought in LA many years back for 3$ in the bargain bin at Vinyl Fetish. From the first time I listened to it, it grabbed my most haunted essence and I was completely mesmerized by it. The dynamic of the dueling entities both fragile and cherished and captivated....pushed to loud and abrasive....then back to fragile....extreme movement in tone that push and pull at each other and balance out so perfectly that you dont even see it as a balance but as a perfect compliment that keeps contradicting. DO you know what I mean? Well I do. Frozen ice. Scorching sun, but its like being hot and lying on a cold duvet...both things against but work with.

A person who roams about and just peers through the spaces left by buildings that sit side by side. Head down and thinking about it. Roaming the streets by yourself. Sitting by yourself by the streetside and watching the people and other histories pass. Watching moments form for others, and having those outside elements reflect your inside yesterdays. You seem so far away but the moments are fragments that are broken because they no longer exist but still mirror within an ebb and flow, gracing the eyes always when they are recalled to the memory.

I hate Colourbox. We all usually know why that phrase exists, do I have to even say why? But, with having a fondness for the A side of this MARRS 12" I never bothered to like it so much to buying it for I figured it wasn't worth it. I had the chance to hear the flip side numerous times but never did. And then I had my ass kicked with it about a few months ago one day in January and I'll never be the same...

This song kicks ass, and as a certain someone said, "I love, love...this song." I have to say that I have to agree...and now I own the said 12", but the one with the shorter version...but i have this long version now two places, so as long as I have it, that's all that matters. I can't say that I can put a visual with it, but it makes me feel damn good whenever I hear it. The fall out when all the guitars do this layering action, holy, it sends me...I blast that part because its gorgeous!
wait for it at the 5:41 and blast it.

The song is just beyond words to me, and such moments of discovering things that hit you in this way make musical discovery worth it every time!

(more to come on that last thought*)

ITN

2007-06-04T11:46:00.000-07:00

the sad thing is the drums are fairly lost, save for the snare...but the bass drops out pretty much...its one of my most fond of ITN's early work, and at that, their early work is the work i prefer the most. i have thoughts roaming around listening to this, and just really liking the drumming, but as always thinking of how much it sounds like a militant spin number by joy division...

i do wish their was not this imagery to this song...its so cliché...but it is fitting to the song...

im basically posting this because i was a bit surprised to find it...so in case i forget about, i know where to find it.

another thought, another band i need to have full recordings of the early stuff...i only have that darned compilation. ah well....

For You

2007-05-30T16:43:00.000-07:00

play at full volume, and while you do that, im off to get the bastaard!

fuckers!

You Were Outside Shivering but I Tossed You a Blanket from My Window

2007-05-29T12:26:00.000-07:00

Seventh Séance- The Incision
And Also The Trees- Out of The Moving Life of Circles
Felt- Fortune
Revolving Paint Dream- In The Afternoon
---(offline)---

I am really not as dreary as the music I really enjoy sounds. There is something very comforting in songs that sound very hollow and/or bleak. Well to me there is. A comforting shiver...

By the time you get to the end of AATT's self titled debut album you already feel satisfied but this is the clincher and remains one of my favorites. Everything about this song makes me want to sit out in the middle of nowhere at nightime under a moon and stare off into space. I used to stare out windows listening to this and thinking about how I was certainly the only one lost in that moment with this song and if I shot a radar out there I would be able to prove it. I just felt significant in my appreciation of how this song moved me...and then it starts to move you through memories of chapters in a book, watching it like a soap opera, but not in that vein.

I am remiss that I do not have Durutti Column's The Missing Boy loaded in this, for that, and Fortune were complimentary songs if ever there were, by 2 different artists, on two different labels, yet at similar times. This song kills me everytime, but Im warped so that is a good thing. Its simply put a great song, one of those songs that can either be the one you listen to while you are miserable, fetile on your bed, crying...or perhaps, like me, you are sitting in your office in New York City in the Flatiron Building, mid June, drinking some Earl Gray Tea, eating a scone, with a warm breeze coming through your wooden window pane at 9 10 in the morning and watching the windows on the other side of 5th avenue wondering how others are starting their day. It just seems like the way to ease into your day...a prelude of hours to roll along...

Sitting in the corner of your room staring at a diagonal to the door and feeling sorry about something...or were you roaming around the park at night listening to a song about the afternoon...but it has nothing to do with the afternoon because its about the moment past...the moment past and now sour. I can't say that I had this song accessible to me during those bad times, but it does seem to say a few things that one could very well cling to when refusing the truth...My fondness for this is simply the layering and the simplicity of the drum machine...just a ticking with an abrasive slap sounding every now and then like a smack a face. Its so cold but its just about the most perfect thing...sorrow, despair, and abstract swirling about you...Revolving Paint Dream, such a brilliant name.

Which brings us to the first song, at the end of this entry...I like it as a precursor to these tracks...The parallel of the beat and the bassline to the others makes it fit nicely. But of course its the synths that sucker me in...those "Im walking along a street and thinking of you and have made my way to the lake we used to walk to, and as I look into the water I am reminded of your face...the last time I saw your face" synths....you know the kind. I think of this as the sad girl at the prom in the 50s if coldwave existed then...it has that feeling...if Peggy Sue was a goth. Not to cheapen it, but the melodramatics of the vocals can be a bit much at times, however the bucket sound of the drums combined with the bass makes you conjure the tears falling of the darling one...

"im in pain, so much pain, why wont they help me..."

I have regressed into sympathy and sorrow, but these songs do not make me feel sad, they are pleasant in their stillness and to me that is how much of this music is...little vignets of treasures in tunes. Music is very cinematic to me and that is why it means what it does because I am heavily visual and dare I say it, emotional...
(if you are interested in these files, please email me)

Meloncholy Swoons

2007-05-25T16:35:00.000-07:00

My first introduction to this song was through the video on the Lonely is An Eyesore compilation, and that is why I am placing it in video format.

The first time I heard it I was eager to hear the lyrics until I realized half way through there were most likely no lyrics. It made me feel slightly dreamy in a restful on the bed on a sunshine day staring out your window way...counting the squares within that one section of the screen you had become fixated on. I remember a friend being very engrossed with this song and going on a very huge thirst for it...to finally be quenched many many years later.

At this point this song is nostalgia for me...its of a time when I was still very wide eyes about the notions of romance and post school years and everything I lived for was collegiate or the complete antithesis. This antithesis was going to clubs as many nights as I could to spend time with a large group of friends that I loved dearly. It was being the me I had always wanted to be when I was younger and in high school craving the union of folks into what i was into...but never having them.

I sit here and listen to it and it makes me think of smoke filterred bedrooms with fans sucking out the smoke as we glare at the television in a low lit bedroom watching this video on an ash stained carpet being completely entranced by the myriad of 4ad videos and always getting to the end of this one and letting out a sigh. So good!

Each time I hear it I am apt to listen to it at least twice.

Sure its not the most obscure track out there, and for Dif Juz this is the one most know, because of the comp. but it has special meaning to me and I am transported everytime I hear it, to another period of my life, at which so much of that seems dead, or at least very suitably stowed away in a chest for only me to reflect upon later on.

A keepsake.

Somewhere

2007-05-23T17:17:00.001-07:00

Dark Day- Laughing Up Your Sleeve
The Modern Art- Diversion
SigloXX- In The Garden
Néva- Valse
Trisomie 21- Il Se Noie
---(offline)---

THE FIRST INSTALLMENT
Elsewhere
Im reminded of those visuals found within the beginnings of shows such as Dr Who, something spiraling going towards something else. It should have been perhaps the far better version of an episode of Buck Rogers....something that visually seduces you into that perfect world of the perplexed...the sounds that make you furrow your brow while staring up into space or an evening sky and feeling mystical but utterly lost and confused in the best way possible.

A sense of alienation from everything else around you...

Perhaps there is no one else around and you are watching everyone else like those early 80 late 70s post psychedelia late night movies where the people have no eyes or people are lost in abandoned warehouses filled with statues and awkward metal objects that look like they are from bomb shelters.

Is that a keyboard player I see in the distance?

Perhaps it is you in this shelter like place of abandoned days...There is sadness and little faith that you can leave and all is existing around you in a slightly purgatorious state...through stained windows of yellow and gray...its your new place of existence. A little world of oddity...

Remnants of yesteryear.

Thoughts of something delicate and lovely but tragically distraught and wanted for the wrong thing...you lie down on the floor and close your eyes from this sullen warehouse place and drift off into a nicer place in daydreams...but your thoughts too dark your visions are of night time in these nicer places...the things around you are cold and stale, but very alive with every sense, so much so you could smell your thoughts...

Oh the sense of being lost in the head of confusion and the spectacle of forced alientation from the reality around you. Neither within the true reality or outside the abnormal...

a continual stroll outside in evening hours that finds you back where you started but still many miles away inside...

[these thoughts are not to always make sense...i simply write as i listen...fragments moreso]

(player omitted 05/29/07)

How Strange When It Seems So Normal

2007-05-21T13:44:00.000-07:00

Good Afternoon.
Here is an attempt at something very precious to me...music. Oh yes, another one of them, for Blogger does not have its overly insane amount of blogs created by musical enthusiasts. I am prepared to offer something different, and even if there are but 4 people who pay me any attention then there is hope that there are 4 people out there who care in the manner in which I do.

I know a great deal about music. I know a bunch of really obscure bands. I can talk my fair share about information, details, side projects, cross reference producers and guitarist relevance, and Im just starting to expand my knowledge into machines, guilty! Are you going to hear this type of dialogue on this blog? NO!

I don't care anymore. I care solely about why I am listening to what I do. Enough banter about information, there are multitudes of sites of music dorks like myself spewing details about these bands, so why jump on a long winded train of others? There are folks out there more knowledgeable than myself so why act as if I am the new all-knowing? Im not. But I do thank those of you who do spread the knowledge, because I do think for those not in the know, it is a great service to share the wealth!!

I am doing this because I have drifted away from creative writing, and once upon a time I used to sit in my bedroom as a young teenager and compose music video scripts of the songs I loved. I would roam around aimlessly with my headset and compose visions and scenes in my head based upon what I was listening to. I loose myself in what I listen to that I feel as if I am walking around in a video, however simple or stoic it is, I am transcended, always. Here I am at 30 still falling into those moments with my headset, and still relishing the visions created by music rather than those of reality.

There is a desire to do this, and the best reason is because I want to, and one should never put off doing something they wish to do. There is but one conscious moment in this life to do, so never deny yourself. So here I am. On the threshold to sharing my pretencious, honest, humble, moments based upon my musical escapes and daydreams...

Perhaps you have felt the same way too?