Friday, April 18, 2014

deathtokoalas
obligatory "influential on song of the day" post.

this is a sort of a landmark of electronic music that all the kids should know about and that was a big influence on me around the turn of the century.

well, the story is that my dad bought a record player some time in mid 99. my step-mother thought it looked ghetto (she didn't want people to think we were that far behind the times) and wouldn't let him set it up in the living room. he wasn't happy about that for a long time, but the record player ended up in my bedroom (along with his drum kit, i might add). she was half-right: he never used the kit or the record player and was never going to, he was just being silly. but i did...

thankfully, he knew what he was doing regarding which records to pick up. oldfield. floyd. jarre. tangerine dream. heavy string and analog synth driven stuff where the harmonic distortion really justifies the older technology.

so, i went on a 70s synth kick that summer.

(relevant track: missed connection, book it!, all symphonies)


Since1987
wtf?!?!?!?!?!?

deathtokoalas
i'm not entirely sure exactly why you're so surprised.

daniel payne
Well it is one of those universal tracks i remember Dj-ing one night on the Decks playing oxygene IV  at 45 instead 33 But worked on the dance floor 

But strangely worked on the dancefloor Btw it was accident that it got played at the wrong speed 

nick ashmore
are you for real mate (Dj-ing) lol where and what have you really done that was yours. do you produced

deathtokoalas
indeed. we should all stop dancing to our favourite songs at bars because it threatens nick's perception of his penis size.

it's really the bar owner you need to blame, you know. could he not have found a nice bluegrass ensemble, so we could all marvel at their musicality while not getting smashed and singing along to bon jovi?

nick ashmore
that's fair i did not read what daniel said right in the first place. I thought he was saying the song was crap. and i bet a koala would kick you arse lol :)

geoff hill
Ohh so true

brianboru62
You should listen to Tangerine Dreams Halcyon more often in one ear and lip up fatty by Bad Manners in the other ear a trip in a trip

ubiquitous saturnine pics to lure one into a false sense of 'being there' stuck in the Jarre

lorne mcneil
well said/ it was a land mark in synthistsers /faze varience ,and imagination :)

Warris
im a bit jealous, i would love to have a record player so i could buy vinyl my favorite artists make :)

Luis Alberto Deveaux
Ferry good:-)

Scott Mantooth
one of the many amazing albums i have of this artist...was thought to be really weird in high school (decades ago) since i loved classical and music like this...of course Vangelis, Tomita, and Kitaro were also fairly included in that select group 

deathtokoalas
i find the more explicitly "new age" stuff tends to kind of drift off into a sort of aimless ambience, whereas the prog stuff (like elp) tends to get aimless in the opposite direction. what i like about the stuff i cited (tangerine dream is an exception, as their discography is spotty) is that it hit a good middle ground in integrating the synth aesthetics into more developed writing styles. you get those awesome synth sounds and developed musical structure, rather than one or the other. put another way, i think i can't really get into stuff like vangelis for the same reason that i can't really get into rossini.

i know a lot of it was not well received at the time by "serious music critics" who largely interpreted it as pop music masquerading as classical music, but i think they really missed the point. what is currently called the classical (or neo-classical) music of this period is really pretty boring because it tries to stop the development of music about the year 1850. i mean, maybe the stuff is a little harder to play. but it exists in a vacuum. it's not trying to create a 20th century artform, so much as it's rejecting the industrial revolution.

i think that future generations will reject the critics of the period, and conclude that the actual "classical music" of the mid-to-late 20th century was being created by a motley collection of jazz fusion, minimalist, post-punk, experimental, industrial, electronic and progressive rock musicians. this is the serious music of the era. the neo-classical stuff is not.