Music Discovery Story #2: Found Cassettes

[This is the second post in a sub-series of my music mix series.  It’s basically a story about some music discovery event in my life, so it’s a combo of music info and personal history info.  You can find a list of all the music stories in the mix series list.

Like all my series, it is not necessarily contiguous—that is, I don’t guarantee that the next post in the series will be next week.  Just that I will eventually finish it, someday.  Unless I get hit by a bus.]

You may recall that music story #1 started like so:

Once upon a time, sound was recorded on wax cylinders, and you had to crank the phonograph yourself.  That didn’t last too long, though, and we invented vinyl.

Well, after vinyl, we invented a bunch of other formats, primarily trying to get more and mor portable.  (Please note that, just like last time, I’m deliberately not looking any of this up, so don’t expect 100% factual accuracy.)  We had reel-to-reel tape recorders, which honestly weren’t any more portable than record players, so I dunno where that came from.  And then we had 8-track tapes, which were portable enough to put into your cars, so that was a win.  It was a plastic rectangle, roughly the size of a large smartphone (or a small tablet), and it had 4 “channels” that you could switch between (it was called an “8”-track because each channel had two tracks, so you’d get stereo sound).  It was a wide tape on a continuous loop, and once it got to the “end” the head would just drop down to the next lower channel, or pop back up to the top if it had finished channel 4.  But there was also a button where you could switch the channel manually.  There was no rewind, since it was one big tape loop, and, while I’m sure some 8-track players had fast-forward capabilities, most of the time you just listened to whatever happened to be on that spot on the tape at the time.

The next evolution was cassettes, which were smaller (and therefore more portable), but they only had two “channels,” and, instead of the tape head moving, you physically had to take the cassette out and flip it over to hear the other channel.  So the music on one channel went from the beginning of the tape to the end, and the music on the other channel went from the end to the beginning.  This made rewinding necessary, so fast-forwarding was more common (if you’re making the player do the one, may as well have it do both), and it also meant that you could correspond the tape more closely to the original (vinyl) album: each format had two “sides,” so the entirety of side A of the ablum would go on the first channel of the cassette, and side B on the reverse.  This meant there would be blank space at the end of either one side or the other (the tape was made as long as the longer side), which was wasted tape, but it was still better than the old 8-tracks, which would often switch channels right in the middle of a song (typically with an audible “thunk” sound).  So overall it was better.

My father had reel-to-reel tapes, and he had 8-tracks, but, by the time I started buying my own music, it was cassettes all the way, baby.  I owned a metric shit-ton of cassettes at one point, even after CDs came out: I was daunted by the expense of trying to replace a huge cassette collection.¹  So I had many, many years of cassettes, from high school all the way to my second stint in college.  And what I want to tell you about today is the two times that I actually found cassettes and adopted them into my collection.

The first story is very simple.  I was walking back to my grandmother’s house from somewhere, and I found a copy of Ice Cream Castle on the sidewalk in a very battered case.  Though the plastic case was essentially destroyed, and the paper insert was pretty torn up, the cassette itself was in surprisingly good shape, and I counted myself lucky to have found it.  I only recognized one of the songs (undoubtedly “Jungle Love”), but I knew that the Time were a band associated with Prince, and had a role in the movie Purple Rain (which I hadn’t seen, admittedly).  Honestly, the music reminded me a lot of Prince, whose 1999 I had owned for many years and nearly worn out.  A lot of it was very silly, but it was good, and it was exactly the sort of thing that I enjoyed enough to play since I’d gotten it for free, but not nearly enough to have ever paid for the full album out of my own pocket, so I considered it a great find.²

The second story is more complex.  I went to college in two stints: my first two years were spent at two different colleges in two different states, then I dropped out for a few years, and then went back to school at a third college.  At the first school, I lived in the dorms; by the time of the third, I was paying for it myself and considered living in the dorm an unjustifiable expense.  Even then, though, I had a lot of friends who did live in the dorms, so I spent a lot of time hanging out with them (and even lived on my best friend’s dorm room floor for a brief period between houses, much to his roommate’s annoyance).  And the dorms in these two colleges all had elevators.³  As a freshman, my own dorm was 3 stories, so we mostly just used the stairs.  But there were other dorms where elevators were necessary, and all of the dorms at the last college had them, and so we spent a bunch of time on them, so we invented dumb things to do on them to keep ourselves amused.  The absolute dumbest of these was “bumper people,” a “game” in which one person would randomly shout “bumper people!” and everyone else would just put their hands down by their sides and start bouncing off the walls—and each other, of course—like we were balls in a small, jumbled pinball machine.  Woe betide anyone who’d never heard of this when it spontaneously erupted; initiation into the society of bumper people was disorienting, to say the least.

But it’s the other thing we often did in the elevators that is relevant to this story.  Someone long ago had figured this out and apparently passed it on throughout the years, so that we all learned to do it eventually ... at both schools, even.⁴  It was simple, really: you could put your fingers in the crack of the eleveator doors and just push them open.  It required a bit of strength, but it was surprisingly easy, especially if you could manage to get the proper leverage.  And the best bit was, you could even do this while the elevator was in motion, and, if you did that, the elevator would stop.  Completely.  Between floors.  And stay that way until you allowed the doors to close again.

Now, I’m not entirely sure why this fascinated us so much.  Perhaps just because the inside of the elevator shaft is a thing that the vast majority of us never get to actually see in real life.  We see it in the movies, sometimes, but who can say how accurate that is?  Well, anyone who attended either of these two universities⁵ in the 80s and 90s can say, and, as one such person, I’ll tell you that the primary difference between actual elevator shafts and what you see in the movies is that the cinematic versions are very clean.  In real life, elevator shafts are filthy, disgusting things, full of rust and grease and all the gunk and debris that slovenly college kids accidentally (or purposefully) drop into the crack between the elevator car and the outside doors.  In fact, part of the fun of stopping the elevator by opening the doors (this only opened the inside doors, of course) was to see what you could find in the empty spaces.  The outer doors weren’t solid, so there was plenty of room inside them for papers or whatever to get trapped by the curled metal edges.  And of course there was a set of outer doors for each floor, so there were a bunch of them to explore.  If you opened the doors all the way, you could actually see into the parts of the elevator shaft beyond the edges of the doors, and they too had little recesses and cubbies where detritus would fetch up.  I shudder to think how many times we stuck our entire arms between the car and the shaft, reaching for something that looked interesting.  Sure, the elevator was fully stopped at the time, but there was no way for us to be sure that that would hold.  We were young and stupid, of course, and convinced of our own immortality, so I don’t believe it ever even occurred to any of us that something might go wrong and the elevator might start up suddenly and, if that were to happen at such a time, someone was absolutely going to lose an arm.  Certainly it never occurred to me.

So we often stopped the elevator just to look and see what “treasures” we could find.  I have to put “treasures” in quotes, of course, because it was always trash.  There was never anything actually cool or useful that we found in the elevator shafts of the dorms at either of these schools.  Except, one time ...

During my freshman year, I got a job at a local sub shop.  Which delivered, so I spent probably just as much time running deliveries to places as I did making sandwiches.  The really interesting thing about this local (non-chain) sub shop was that it had a huge ice cream maker, a giant metal monster of a machine that you fed ice cream mix and whatever bits of flavoring you could imagine into, and you ended up with ... whatever ice cream.  I used to make ice cream too: I would feed entire packages of Oreos into the hole, or cut up pieces of strawberry cheesecake, or actual pistachios.  And of course we delivered that too.  In fact, sometimes people would call up and order nothing but ice cream, although you had to order a decent amount of it to hit the minimum order.  But people in the dorms would just get together with their neighbors and order a round of ice cream for the whole floor in the same way that they might all go in on a pizza.  So I spent a lot of time taking people bags of freshly made ice cream, and a lot of that time was spent in elevators.

There was one dorm in particular that was taller than all the other dorms.  I can’t remember exactly how big it was, but it was definitely the tallest dorm that I’ve ever been in, though of course not nearly the tallest building.  It was probably somewhere between 7 and 15 floors, and it was mostly upper class students.  I had a delivery one day around exam time to one of the girls’ floors near the top, and I brought them their favorite study aid: Oreo ice cream.  They were very happy to see me, and they paid me, and then I got back in the elevator for the long ride down.  I was all alone in the elevator car, and I must have been bored, because I decided to open the doors to look for cool shit in the crannies of the shaft.  I did so once and found nothing (as expected, really).  Then I closed the doors and went down a little further and opened them again, and I just stared in shock, because there was an actual thing.  A useful, even exciting thing, stuck in the hollow of the outer elevator doors, that was not trash.  It was a cassette by a band I’d never heard of before.  It was, in fact, In a Roman Mood, by Human Sexual Response.

Now, I hope I’ve managed to convey how extremely unlikely it was for me to find this cassette.  This was a Boston band who was barely known outside their native state, but someone had bought the cassette of their sophomore (lesser known) album and brought it to South Carolina, where they somehow managed to drop it into the crack of the elevator, where it fell down the shaft, not all the way to the bottom, but rather getting caught neatly inside one of the outer doors, where it did not break, or even crack, but sat patiently waiting for who knows how long until someone else—me—just happened to ride the elevator and just happened to know the trick of opening the doors while the car was in motion and just happened to pick the exact right spot to do it so that they would see this cassette.  This set of coincidences is so very unlikely, in fact, that for many years I didn’t believe it: I assumed that someone had deliberately placed it there.  Obviously they too knew the trick of opening the doors, and they just stuck the cassette there one day.  But why?  There’s no rational reason I could ever think of for it ...  Somebody stuck it in there for safekeeping, meaning to come back and get it later?  Rubbish.  Somebody left it there hoping it would be found by someone else as a way to pass on the music?  Nonsense: almost any other place in the universe would have been more likely to be discovered than this one.  About the best I could come up with was that someone stole it from someone else that they were very pissed at and “disposed” of the thing in this way.  Except ... again, why in the elevator shaft, when a trash can would have been far simpler and far more effective?  I just couldn’t wrap my brain around it.  While I’m not much inclined to believe that everything happens for a reason, things like this that have happened in my life do make me occasionally ponder whether fate might be an actual thing.

Now, my musical tastes are wide-ranging and eclectic, and I often go back and revisit periods in my musical history.  So, while I had never heard of Human Sexual Response at that time, perhaps I would have stumbled across them later.  They do have something of a reputation in new wave circles.  Of course, the vast majority of that reputation centers around their debut album, and the later single “Butt Fuck,” which caused a stir for obvious reasons.  And, here’s the thing: by this point in my life, I’ve heard the early HSR stuff.  It doesn’t particularly impress me.  Had I heard that stuff first, would I have even bothered to check out their second, less critically acclaimed, album?  And, the thing is, In a Roman Mood contains the excellent, nearly-impossible-to-describe “Land of the Glass Pinecones,” which is the mix starter for Totally Different Head, so that feels like a pretty serious deviation in my personal musical trajectory had I never discovered it.  Not to mention that the research for TDH is what led me to discover the music of HSR’s only female member’s daughter, Glasser, whose music is now slotted to appear in many of mixes (although so far we’ve only seen her pop up on Fulminant Cadenza).  So that original discovery had a small but very significant impact in my musical development, and it’s all thanks to stupid college elevator games.

Next time ... well, actually, I don’t have anything planned for next time in this sub-series.  But so far I’ve covered vinyl and tape, so obviously the next topic must be: digital.

__________

1 Eventually what happened was that about half my cassettes got stolen, and at that point I figured, WTF: may as well start buying the replacements on CD.

2 I never did buy it on CD, but I have a digital copy now.

3 At the second school, I neither lived in nor knew anyone who lived in the dorms, so it doesn’t figure much into the story.

4 I’m pretty sure I didn’t carry the practice from one school to the other; I think I’d remember that.  But I can’t swear to it.

5 At least!  Probably folks at other schools knew this trick as well.

Numeric Driftwood IV

"Hints of Lilac Light"

[This is one post in a series about my music mixes.  The series list has links to all posts in the series and also definitions of many of the terms I use.  You may wish to read the introduction for more background.  You may also want to check out the first volume in this multi-volume mix for more info on its theme.

Like all my series, it is not necessarily contiguous—that is, I don’t guarantee that the next post in the series will be next week.  Just that I will eventually finish it, someday.  Unless I get hit by a bus.]

At this point, Numeric Driftwood plays in my room nearly constantly: I turn it on shortly after dinner, and it plays until after I get out of the shower the next morning.  It soothes me to sleep at night, and greets me in the morning.  Given that I’m hearing it so often, I figured it only made sense to expand it a bit more.  So here’s a fourth volume of relaxing, sleepytime music.

This is a pretty decent volume in terms of returning artists, if I do say so myself.  Of the three artists who appeared on all three of the previous volumes, only two are back:¹ Angels of Venice and Kitaro.  AoV are here with their seventh appearance on this mix, another track off Forever After² called “Wildflowers.” While all AoV is harp-focussed (harpist Carol Tatum is the founder and only constant member, after all), this one is particularly so: the opening harp solo is about a minute-and-a-half long, backed only by subtle birdsong, and even when the other instruments come in, they’re very much in the background.  It’s a very pretty, soothing piece.  For Kitaro, for his fifth appearance here I finally stray from my favorite album of his, India, to the second album of his that I ever bought: Astral Voyage.  Well, technically, I bought them both at the same time, but it very quickly became apparent to me that India was the superior offering.  But Astral Voyage has a few gems, and “By the Seaside” is one.  As you might imagine from a song called “Seaside” on an album called Astral, this song is a strange hybrid of sitting by the ocean and flying through space, but somehow Kitaro makes it work, which is really just a testament to his fifty years’ experience.  Plus it makes a beautifully seamless transition into “Ocean and Tambura,” by second-time returning artist Anugama.  This song is just what it says on the tin: the calming sound of ocean waves, backed by the subtle strains of a tambura, which is a “drone” instrument.³  At over 8 minutes, this track isn’t as long as “Shaku Sunset” from last volume, but it’s pretty long; happily, that’s irrelevant when the point of the music is to help you drift off to sleep anyway.  

For other other returning artists, Enya and Skydance are back: we missed them last volume, but they now return to provide a welcome Celtic injection into the mainly Far Easter festivities thus far.  Both previous Enya tracks were instrumentals off my favorite album of hers, Shepherd Moons, so I thought I expand my scope a bit here as well.  “Watermark” is the title track off her sophomore album; while Watermark isn’t quite as good as Shepherd Moons, it does contain the amazing “Orinoco Flow,” as well as this pretty, slightly-longer-than-bridge-length instrumental, which flows nicely into “Wildflowers.” For Skyedance, I follow the exact same pattern: while Way Out to Hope Street will always be my favorite of theirs, their follow-up Labyrinth contains this beautiful gem “The Other Side of Sorrow,” which focusses more on Alasdair Fraser’s fiddle than Eric Rigler’s pipes.⁴

And everyone else here is fresh.  Kim Robertson is another harpist, and her music is often described as Celtic, though I find her amazing album Wood, Fire & Gold to be a bit more than that.  I can’t now remember how I discovered her, but “Anamchara” is just the most beautiful, soothing piece you can imagine, with harp backed by strings and some soft, wordless vocals.  Canadian Mychael Danna is perhaps best known as the composer for Life of Pi; with his brother Jeff (also a film and television composer), they produced a couple of albums for Hearts of Space records, and you may recall that’s the label of the show that inspired my modern mixes.⁵  To be sure, HoS is where I first heard excerpts from this album, titled A Celtic Tale: The Legend of Deirdre; “Loch Etive” is a peaceful Celtic instrumental that flows very nicely into Skyedance.

Most of the other new artists are invading from Shadowfall Equinox, most notably Black Tape for a Blue Girl (while uncharacteristically—and surprisingly, given the name—non-sombre track “With a Million Tears” is their first appearance here, they’ve appeared six times on five of the six SfE volumes) and Kevin Keller (one of the artists showcased in the Hearts of Space program Shadowfall II that directly inspired SfE, Keller’s spare piano track “The Lost Father” is just a touch melancholy, but still pretty relaxing).  Another pianist I’ve drawn from for Shadowfall Equinox⁶ is Ruben Garcia; he’s only appeared on SfE twice,⁷ but his mellow piano track “90 Degrees at 7 A.M.” works very nicely here, especially coming directly off the Keller track.  In fact, I seem to have inadvertently created a whole Shadowfall Equinox block:⁸ after the opening pair of ocean-inspired new age tracks, we go into the wind-and-birdsong backed darkwave of “With a Million Tears,” then to Rapoon,⁹ who is normally sort of ethno-ambient, but “Noord” is actually pretty darkwave itself, and thence to the pianists—the Keller is very spare, the Garcia is as well, if a bit synthy, and then on to Tim Story, with a perfect balance of piano and synth in “Scene and Artifact”¹⁰—and then circling back around to the darkwave with some Love Spirals Downwards and their very ambient “Waiting for the Sunrise,”¹¹ and finally fetching up at Julianna Barwick,¹² whose looped and overlaid wordless vocal tracks make something which is tough to categorize, but probably closest to ambient, and who here gives us “Offing,” an echoey track with some angelic voices, and that drops us right into the Celtic centerpiece of the Dannas, Skyedance, and Enya.  Quite a run!

Numeric Driftwood IV
[ Hints of Lilac Light ]

“By the Seaside” by Kitaro, off Astral Voyage
“Ocean and Tambura” by Anugama, off The Lightness of Being [Compilation]
“With a Million Tears” by Black Tape for a Blue Girl, off Mesmerized by the Sirens
“Noord” by Rapoon, off Cidar
“The Lost Father” by Kevin Keller, off Nocturnes
“90 Degrees at 7 A.M.” by Ruben Garcia, off I Can Feel the Heat Closing In
“Scene and Artifact” by Tim Story, off Threads
“Waiting for the Sunrise” by Love Spirals Downwards, off Idylls [Reissue]
“Offing” by Julianna Barwick, off Nepenthe
“Loch Etive” by Mychael Danna & Jeff Danna, off A Celtic Tale: The Legend of Deirdre
“The Other Side of Sorrow” by Skyedance, off Labyrinth
“Watermark” by Enya, off Watermark
“Wildflowers” by Angels of Venice, off Forever After
“A Gentle Dissolve” by Thievery Corporation, off The Cosmic Game
“Anamchara” by Kim Robertson, off Wood, Fire & Gold
“Stretch Out Your Arms” by Devics, off The Stars at Saint Andrea
“5 More Minutes” by Meaghan Smith, off The Cricket's Orchestra

Total:  17 tracks,  69:28

That only leaves us with the three moderately unexpected tracks.  Thievery Corporation have popped up all over these mixes, from Smokelit Flashback III to Zephyrous Aquamarine I with several stops in between, but you might not expect to hear their Caribbean-flavoured electroworld on a mix of sleepytime music.  And, indeed, “A Gentle Dissolve” almost didn’t make the cut here: it’s got a noticeable electronic beat and even some brass.  But, at the end of the day, the gentle, almost hypnotic synth trills and washes convinced me that it deserved its spot here, close to the closing.

And, speaking of the closing, that brings us to the two closing vocal tracks.  This is a tradition that started with Numeric Driftwood II, and I decided it worked here as well.  For the penultimate song, I chose a Devics track that was less dreampop and more slow and mellow.  (Whether you find it creepy or not probably depends on how closely you listen to the lyrics ...)  Devics of course we’ve seen on Smokelit Flashback,¹³ twice on Darkling Embrace, and once on Dreamscape Perturbation (and that ought to give some idea of where most of their music falls), but also on Shadowfall Equinox III and Porchwell Firetime I.  So “Stretch Out Your Arms” is a bit atypical, but they’re eclectic enough to make it work.

And we wrap up the festivities with normally quite upbeat Meaghan Smith, another artist who’s been all over these mixes: Salsatic Vibrato V, Moonside by Riverlight I and II, Slithy Toves I, and Sirenexiv Cola I.  The closer for her excellent album The Cricket’s Orchestra is “5 More Minutes,” a soft little ballad in which a child begs for a little more time to enjoy the evening.  It’s a beautiful closer, both on her album and on this volume, plus it provides the titles for both as well: “hints of lilac light” is one of the most poetic descriptions of a dusky, twilit sky that I think I’ve ever heard.  A really special closer for this one.

Next time, let’s return to the gaming table.

⇐ Numeric Driftwood III

Numeric Driftwood V ⇒

__________

1 Satori may show up again one day, but I used every track off his excellent For Relaxation, and I just haven’t gotten another of his albums yet.

2 The previous track from this album was “Starshine Lullabye” which appeared way back on volume I.

3 Other drone instruments include the bagpipes and the shawm.  Also the kazoo.

4 Honestly, if Eric is in there somewhere, I can’t really make him out.

5 And, in particular, Shadowfall Equinox.

6 And who also had a track on the aforementioned Shadowfall II.

7 Specifically, on volumes IV and V.

8 Or maybe I did it vertently and then forgot about it.

9 We first saw Rapoon, and discussed a bit about his origins, on Shadowfall Equinox IV.

10 We first met Tim on Shadowfall Equinox II and then saw him again on Shadowfall Equinox IV.

11 We first encountered LSD on Shadowfall Equinox I, but we’ve also seen them on Smokelit Flashback V, Rose-Coloured Brainpan II, and Candy Apple Shimmer.

12 We’ve actually only heard Julianna so far on Incanto Liturgica, though I’ve no doubt she’ll eventually show up on SfE.

13 Volumes IV, V, and VI.

Dreamsea Lucidity I

"But You Dream About Islands and You Go to Them"

[This is one post in a series about my music mixes.  The series list has links to all posts in the series and also definitions of many of the terms I use.  You may wish to read the introduction for more background.

Like all my series, it is not necessarily contiguous—that is, I don’t guarantee that the next post in the series will be next week.  Just that I will eventually finish it, someday.  Unless I get hit by a bus.]

Like nearly all new(ish)—or newly popular—subgenres, “lofi” means different things to different people.  In point of fact, lofi is neither new, nor limited to only what you can hear on YouTube if you do a search for it.  Wikipedia tells us that it’s just “a music or production quality in which elements usually regarded as imperfections in the context of a recording or performance are present, sometimes as a deliberate choice.” And that’s why you usually hear static or “scratchy record” sounds in lofi music videos.  But, if you think about it, that tells us nothing about the music itself: theoretically, one could just put some imperfections into any song and call it lofi.  So what type of music is what you will inevitably find tons of if you search YouTube for “lofi”?  Well, it’s a form of chill (a.k.a. “downtempo”) that is sometimes called chillwave or chillhop.¹  It’s basically trip-hop crossed with chill, mostly instrumental, and set to anime loops and labeled “music to study by.”

Now, a lot of what you can find on YouTube as “lofi” these days is pretty formulaic: one gets the sense that there’s just a generic lofi factory somewhere, churning these out over and over.  But there are standouts.  I discovered Finland’s Kupla because I kept listening to those 2-hour-long mixes of various lofi songs, and it seemed like every single time I would actually stop and say “oh, I like this one; wonder who that is?” it was them.  I discovered New Jersey’s Autumn Orange because they share with me a love of Critical Role, and they make lofi mixes for CR characters.  In fact, it’s the one he did for Caduceus Clay, Destiny and Dead People Tea that gives us our mix starter, “Islands (You Dream Of).” (And it’s the volume namer, too.)  Once I heard that, I was so intrigued by AO’s weaving in of quotes from the Critical Role crew and recontextualizing them to music, and giving them perhaps a heft I hadn’t originally ascribed to them ... well, I started to wonder if I could put together a mix that was a little bit dreamy, a little bit psychedlic, and maybe just a little bit deep.  Music that’s perhaps not trippy enough for Smokelit Flashback nor poppy enough for Candy Apple Shimmer.  In naming it, I went back to Clive Barker’s notion of the “dream-sea”: a place of dreams that is more real than dreams (a characteristic it shares with Robert Jordan’s Tel’aran’rhiod), which he names Quiddity.  This is music that sails along the dreamsea, but perhaps it also provides some moments of clarity ...

Of course, I don’t like to restrict my mixes too much in terms of musical subgenres and styles, so we’re going to broaden our scope out beyond lofi chillhop ... but let’s start there.  Besides the aforementiond Autumn Orange track, which really is the core that this volume is built around, I of course had to throw in some Kupla.  While almost all lofi these days is set to Miyazaki-style animation, Kupla really does seem to capture the feeling of background music from a Studio Ghibli film.  I love many of their pieces, but “Lavender” is one of my faves.  I had to restrain myself from using multiple tracks of theirs, but I figured I’d save something for future volumes.  So I went to Sweden for a track from Theo Aabel—I guess these Scandinavians are pretty good at this whole chillhop thing.²  Unlike Kupla, I don’t necessarily like everything Aabel does, but “Constellation” is pretty awesome.

From there, I started by branching out into general trip-hop and the more psychedelic forms of dreampop.  Old favorites Naomi³ are of course a good pick: “Heavy Little Lights” is possibly too long, but a real classic of this type of music.  And of course former Enigma producer Jens Gad⁴ can provide a perfect fit in his more upbeat moments, such as “Navajo.” British DJ Jakatta’s track “It Will Be” is a lovely piece of upbeat trip-hop⁵ that manages to make a voice delivering the time over and over interesting.  Finally, Morcheeba is a British trip-hop artist built around the smoky vocals of Skye Edwards; while I don’t dig all their tracks, some of them are just transcendant, and I think “Slow Down” is one of the best.  Here, it signals the winding down of the volume, where everything—from the title itself to the synth noises that sound like lonely winds—does that job perfectly.

To keep going even further afield, we can bring in a little electroworld with Carmen Rizzo;⁶ “Through the Sunlight” is an almost ambient piece that works nicely to bring the mood to a more mellow point after the first third.  We can drift through ambient with tracks from Keven Keller and Amethystium: the former, so far featured only on Shadowfall Equinox,⁷ provides a contemplative piano piece called “Hawi Moon”; the latter, so far only seen on Incanto Liturgica, gives us “Avalon,” which has a more mystical feeling.  And that brings us right to dreampop, where of course we first must sample the masters: the Cocteau Twins, whose “Fluffy Tufts”⁸ is a multi-layered track that provides just the right amount of dreaminess.  The next most logical choice is probably This Mortal Coil: “D.D. and E.” is a short bridge that takes us from the proper trip-hop of Naomi to the much lighter touch of Anugama, but it’s an excellent 48 seconds that just felt perfect for this mix.  And Kendra Smith, who was Hope Sandoval before Mazzy Star,⁹ has a number of psychedelic-adjacent albums, including the one I draw from here, Five Ways of Disappearing.  The real draw is “Drunken Boat,” which is both dreamy and evocative, both lyrically and musically, but her little bridge “Dirigible” serves as the perfect bridge from the trippy Jakatta track to the more buzzy Tashaki Miyaki selection.

And, if you drive through dreampop long enough—especially if you cross back and forth into ambient a few times—you’ll eventually hit Enigma, and that’s the last stop before you’re truly into New Age.  I thought I’d give Enigma the last word on this volume: “The Dream of the Dolphin” is a short track from their sophomore album Cross of Changes, featuring Sandra Cretu’s breathy talksinging saying just a couple of lines, and it’s the perfect closer.  As for New Age, the vast majority of it is going to be way too mellow and downbeat for this mix, but I thought that Anugama’s “Tropical Morning” was an exception to that.  It’s entirely too long, really, but, as 8½ minute songs go, this one is pretty solid for not wearing out its welcome, so I basically made it the volume’s centerpiece.

Dreamsea Lucidity I
[ But You Dream About Islands and You Go to Them ]

“Serial Angels” by Miranda Sex Garden, off Fairytales of Slavery
“Ilomilo” by Billie Eilish, off When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?
“Islands (You Dream Of)” by Autumn Orange, off Destiny and Dead People Tea
“Navajo” by Jens Gad, off Le Spa Sonique
“Constellation” by Theo Aabel, off Endless Memories
“Lavender” by Kupla, off Melody Mountain
“It Will Be” by Jakatta, off Visions
“Interlude: Dirigible” by Kendra Smith, off Five Ways of Disappearing
“Keep Me in Mind” by Tashaki Miyaki, off Tashaki Miyaki [EP]
“Outside” by the Primitives, off Pure
“Through the Sunlight” by Carmen Rizzo, off Ornament of an Imposter
“Heavy Little Lights” by Naomi, off Everyone Loves You
“D.D. and E.” by This Mortal Coil, off Blood
“Tropical Morning” by Anugama, off Jungle of Joy
“Hawi Moon” by Kevin Keller, off Nocturnes
“Almanac” by Widowspeak, off Almanac
“Fluffy Tufts” by Cocteau Twins, off Victorialand
“Drunken Boat” by Kendra Smith, off Five Ways of Disappearing
“Avalon” by Amethystium, off Odonata
“Slow Down” by Morcheeba, off Charango
“Everything Is On” by Asobi Seksu, off Citrus
“The Beautiful” by P.M. Dawn, off Of the Heart, of the Soul and of the Cross: The Utopian Experience
“The Dream of the Dolphin” by Enigma, off The Cross of Changes

Total:  23 tracks,  82:32

With all this chillhop and dreampop and ambient and even New Age, you might think there’s no room for anything a bit harder ... but you’d be wrong.  I’ve often said that Mazzy Star should be its own genre—or at least that we should have a name for what you get when you take shoegaze (arguably derived from dreampop in the first place) and feed it back into dreampop and get something really interesting.  I didn’t pick any actual Mazzy Star here, but I found a couple of artists that I think are Mazzy-Star-adjacent.  First and foremost, the most amazing Tashaki Miyaki, who I discovered via LittleBigPlanet and therefore have featured mostly on Paradoxically Sized World.¹⁰  “Keep Me in Mind” is one of those tracks that seems deceptively like just a pop song with some buzzy guitars, but it really grows into something bigger and more expansive the more you listen to it.  I think TM is probably the best of the Mazzy-Star-adjacent bands, although I know many have a fondness for Beach House.  Honestly, though, my second choice isn’t them: it’s Widowspeak, whose excellent “In the Pines” I used on Smokelit Flashback V.¹¹  For a long time I tried to transition directly from Keller to the Cocteaus, but it just didn’t work.  Finally I remembered that Widowspeak has a brilliant little bridge called “Almanac” that has the perfect dreamlike quality to make the connection.  Finally, Asobi Seksu (which is apparently Japanese for “sportfuck,” which was the band’s original name before they wokred out that no one was ever going to give them airplay with that moniker) is a bit more experimental in this space, which means that I often don’t care for the results.  Still, they have a good one every now and again, and I really thought that their bridge “Everything Is On” made the perfect step-down from Morcheeba to P.M. Dawn.

And that brings us to the first of the really unlikely candidates.  P.M. Dawn was a band that I always thought of as merging rap and New Age, which is as unlikely a combination as you’re going to run across, and yet they not only make it work, they consistently make it work.  As I’ve noted with other such weird combinations (such as Dread Zeppelin or the Diablo Swing Orchestra), a lot of times such artists produce the occasional gem, but their output is very inconsistent.  Not so P.M. Dawn though: every song on their debut Of the Heart, Of the Soul and of the Cross: The Utopian Experience is a winner, and I fell in love with the album after receiving it as a Christmas gift from my brother.  I’m surprised it’s taken me this long to work it into a mix, frankly, but then P.M. Dawn is one of those bands that has a unique sound that often doesn’t really fit it with anything other than itself.  But as soon as I started this mix, I knew that they deserved a place here, and I went with “The Beautiful,” which works perfectly as the penultimate song on the volume.

For pure alternapop, though, I didn’t think there was much that would work here.  Still, I thought there might be a Primitives track that might work, and “Outside” proved me right.  It’s slinky (which is why I used them on Slithy Toves), but also shimmery (which is why I used them on Candy Apple Shimmer), and overall fits the mood here perfectly.  I was perhaps stretching a bit further by including a Billie Eilish track, but I think once you hear “Ilomilo” (especially in context) you may understand why I chose this tune, which is both atypical of her music and yet quintessentially Eilish.  Finally, our opener is Miranda Sex Garden, who has been called everything from neoclassical to folk to goth, which only goes to demonstrate how hard they are to pigeonhole.  This is another band I’ve not yet used, primarily because there are only a few tracks of theirs I really like, and also the whole “hard to slot in” factor.  But “Serial Angels” is an excellent example of their dynamic, starting with gentle, almost inaudible notes that have a toy piano feel, which then build, and build some more, and then burst into drums and guitars and wordless vocal screams, and then drop back down to fade into Billie Eilish.  I think it works pretty well.

Next time, let’s drift away again.

__________

1 Apparently there’s some sort of subtle distinction between what counts as chillwave and what counts as chillhop; inasmuch as I understand the difference—which ain’t much inasmuch—I would say that what this mix features is more chillhop than chillwave.

2 And, don’t forget: some of the best trip-hop acts are from there as well, like Ugress and Röyksopp (both from Norway), and Trentemøller (from Denmark).

3 Seen primarily on Smokelit Flashback (volumes I and II), but also a couple of tracks on Cantosphere Eversion I and Bleeding Salvador I, one on Shadowfall Equinox V, and even one each on Rose-Coloured Brainpan I and Wisty Mysteria II.

4 Seen previously only on Shadowfall Equinox (volumes V and VI).

5 For a more downtempo track, see Shadowfall Equinox IV.

6 Seen on Smokelit Flashback IV and Shadowfall Equinox IV, as well as Rose-Coloured Brainpan II and Moonside by Riverlight II.

7 Specifically, volumes II, III, IV, V, and VI.

8 From my all-time favorite album of theirs, Victorialand.  For more on that, see Smokelit Flashback II.

9 By which I mean that she recorded with Dave Roback as Opal, which then morphed into Mazzy Star when she departed.

10 Specifically, volumes III and IV, but also once on Darkling Embrace I.

11 As well as another track on Dreamscape Perturbation I.

Salsatic Vibrato VIII

"Jump Into My Caddy"

[This is one post in a series about my music mixes.  The series list has links to all posts in the series and also definitions of many of the terms I use.  You may wish to read the introduction for more background.  You may also want to check out the first volume in this multi-volume mix for more info on its theme.

Like all my series, it is not necessarily contiguous—that is, I don’t guarantee that the next post in the series will be next week.  Just that I will eventually finish it, someday.  Unless I get hit by a bus.]

Both Smokelit Flashback and Shadowfall Equinox have achieved sixth volumes in this series; in the unpublished category, there is only Paradoxically Sized World.  So far Salsatic Vibrato remains the only published volume VII, and only SfE can realistically challenge that on the unpbulished side.¹  And now here we are at volume eight.  Of course (as I may have mentioned before), the mixes that achieve these rarified heights tend to be the ones I utilize most: Shadowfall Equinox is my primary work soundtrack, and Paradoxically Sized World is a set of music preferences I share with one of my children.  Smokelit Flashback mainly has the advantage of being the very first of the modern mixes, and it had two volumes before there was a volume I of anything else.  (And also whenever I’m feeling non-specifically weird, it’s what I reach for.)  And Salsatic Vibrato?  Well, that’s the mix I want when I’m feeling happy and I want to double-down on that feeling.  If I’m doing any sort of work (whether in my professional life or just work around the house) that doesn’t require any brainpower, SVb is the perfect accompaniment: it’s brassy, and upbeat, and just ... happy-making.

So what can we expect from this outing?  Certainly we can’t have a volume without Big Bad Voodoo Daddy (we certainly havne’t had one so far), and they’ll make their twelfth appearance here.  In the only-missed-one-volume-so-far camp, Squirrel Nut Zippers, Cherry Poppin’ Daddies, and Lou Bega are all here (SNZ for their eleventh appearance, so they’re only a bit behind BBVD).  Other returning artists include the Brian Setzer Orchestra (who have only missed two volumes so far), Joe Jackson (who returned last volume after a long absence), the Swing soundtrack, electro-swing artists Caravan Palace and Caro Emerald, infrequent contributors Madness, Oingo Boingo, and Indigo Swing, recent discoveries Tape Five, Swing Republic, and Electric Swing Circus, one more brass-funk masterpiece from Earth, Wind & Fire, and the Mighty Mighty Bosstones are back after last being seen way back on volume II.  And there’s still room for 6 first-timers.  So I would say this volume leans a bit heavily on established doctrine, but isn’t afraid to branch out into bold new directions at the same time.

And we’ll kick it off with the opener for BBVD’s all-time best album, Americana Deluxe.  Now, I’ve mined this album extensively: of its 12 tracks, I’ve used four on previous volumes of this mix, and several others are slated for other mixes.²  I haven’t used a track from it recently, though, and I really wanted to return to it.  “Boogie Bumper” isn’t quite a bridge, but it’s a gorgeous, mostly instrumental intro track, and I thought I’d honor that by using it open this volume.  From there we launch directly into “Master and Slave” by CPD off their best album, which is another track I’m surprised it took this long to get around to, and, continuing the trend, I thought I’d go back to the Brian Setzer Orchestra’s best album too: “This Cat’s on a Hot Tin Roof” is the opener for their amazing The Dirty Boogie, which, if you’re into this type of music enough to still be here eight volumes later, I’m sure you already own.  This latter tune is the primary one to stray from strict retro-swing into that 50s-reminiscent, often brass-infused, retro-rock-and-roll that I’ve struggled to find an appropriate label for.  For the remainder of the retro-swing, Indigo Swing is one of the bands in the subgenre that misses more than it hits, but their eponymous track is pretty hoppin’; the Swing soundtrack and Joe Jackson’s Jumpin’ Jive album are (as I’ve noted before) not so much retro-swing as just modern takes on classic swing.  The title track from the Jackson album was originally done by Cab Calloway, who was arguably the best swing artist of all time; “Gotta Get On This Train,” as rendered by singing-voice stand-in (for the film’s lead) Georgie Fame, is one of those tracks that the Swing soundtrack does so well: co-written by co-star (and fantastic singer in her own right) Lisa Stansfield, it’s a song created for the movie that utterly sounds like it was conceived in the 40s at the height of swing’s power, and Fame’s voice³ really sells it.

And all but one of these are right in a row, a powerful retro-swing pentad to open the volume.  From there we branch out, first to the retro-mambo of Lou Bega—“Baby Keep Smiling” is one of his slower numbers, but still sunny (and provides our volume title)—and then the retro-hot-jazz of the Squirrel Nut Zippers, with one of their rollicking instrumentals.  “Lugubrious Whing Whang” serves as a bridge to the volume’s more experimental middle stretch.  But it’s electroswing that dominates the volume’s back half (which is, to be fair, more than half the volume, by length).  Caravan Palace is back with one of their most experimental (and frenetc) compositions, “The Dirty Side of the Street.” The magnificent Caro Emerald is back too, with another track off her best album, Deleted Scenes from the Cutting Room Floor.  “You Don’t Love Me” slows us down just enough to be a great closer without losing the vibe: it’s a bit melancholy, but still manages to be peppy at the same time.

As I’ve noted before, electro-swing is almost entirely a European phenomenon, and we’re covering the continent pretty well here.  Caro Emerald is from the Netherlands; Caravan Palace is from France, as is our newest electroswing discovery: Lyre le temps.  From Strasbourg, they tend a bit more towards the electro end of the spectrum of the spectrum than their Paris-based compatriots, although our CP selection here certainly pairs well with “Hold the Night,” which has that same frenetic, jitterbug-adjacent pace and experimental feel.  We also cover Denmark, with more traditional electroswing artist Swing Republic—“On the Rooftop” is perhaps not quite as awesome as last volume’s “Mama,” but close—and Germany with another tune from Tape Five—again, “Bunga Book” isn’t the equal of their tune from last volume, but it really oozes that 40s swing vibe, primarily via a (presumably deliberate) similarity to Louis Prima’s “I Wanna Be Like You.”⁴  And we mustn’t forget the UK, where the Electric Swing Circus continues to be unfairly underappreciated.  “Valentine” has some shades of “Bella Belle” (their selection from last volume), but adds a certain electronic darkness that makes it slot perfectly between “The Dirty Side of the Street” and our two most experimental tracks of all (which we’ll come to in just a bit).

We’re a bit light on the ska this time, but I thought we’d return to the Mighty Mighty Bosstones (who we haven’t seen since volume II), and of course the original two-tone ska boys: Madness, missing here since volume V.  From the former, “That Bug Bit Me” is another track off Let’s Face It; I favor the two previous selections (which is why we saw them first), but this one is pretty rockin’ too.  Madness’ eponymous track is an early B-side of theirs, which you can find on their excellent compilation album Complete Madness.  It’s silly and fun, as most Madness tracks are, and I thought it was an excellent penultimate track for this volume.  I also thought it was a good time to circle back to the funk classicists with an awe-inspiring horn section: Earth, Wind & Fire.  I’m pretty partial to “Shining Star,”⁵ but “Let’s Groove” is pretty badass too (with some of the best use of voice-processing I’ve heard), and I thought it broke up our two ska tunes kinda perfectly.

Salsatic Vibrato VIII
[ Jump Into My Caddy ]

“The Boogie Bumper” by Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, off Americana Deluxe
“Master and Slave” by Cherry Poppin' Daddies, off Zoot Suit Riot [Compilation]
“The Indigo Swing” by Indigo Swing, off All Aboard!
“Gotta Get On This Train” by Georgie Fame, off Swing [Soundtrack]
“Jumpin' Jive” by Joe Jackson, off Jumpin' Jive
“Baby Keep Smiling” by Lou Bega, off A Little Bit of Mambo
“Lugubrious Whing Whang” by Squirrel Nut Zippers, off The Inevitable
“Same Man I Was Before” by Oingo Boingo, off Dead Man's Party
“Another Day in the Big World” by Eurogliders, off This Island
“Disenchantment [Intro Theme]” by Mark Mothersbaugh [Single]
“Don't Stop That Crazy Rhythm” by Modern Romance, off The Platinum Collection [Compilation]
“The Dirty Side of the Street” by Caravan Palace, off Panic
“Valentine” by the Electric Swing Circus, off The Electric Swing Circus
“Farligt Monster” by Analogik, off Søens Folk
“Bootleg Brass” by Stepcat [Single]
“Bunga Book” by Tape Five, off Swing Patrol
“Hold the Night” by Lyre le temps, off Lady swing
“On the Rooftop” by Swing Republic, off Midnight Calling
“This Cat's on a Hot Tin Roof” by the Brian Setzer Orchestra, off The Dirty Boogie
“That Bug Bit Me” by Mighty Mighty Bosstones, off Let's Face It
“Let's Groove” by Earth, Wind & Fire, off Greatest Hits [Compilation]
“Madness” by Madness, off Complete Madness [Compilation]
“You Don't Love Me” by Caro Emerald, off Deleted Scenes from the Cutting Room Floor

Total:  23 tracks,  79:22

Which leaves us with the less likely candidates.  We’ve heard Oingo Boingo here before,⁶ and they certainly have the horn section to back up their creds for this mix.  Wikipedia wants to call them “ska and punk-influenced new wave,” which ... sure.  Why not.  “Same Man I Was Before” is also from the excellent Dead Man’s Party and is satisfying both musically (with great brass hits and interesting synth sounds) and lyrically (the singer goes from “not the same man I was before” to “not the same boy I was before” and finally to “not the same ghost I was before,” who can “disappear, disappear, disappear whenever it may please me”).  Contrariwise, this is the first appearance anywhere on these mixes for the Eurogliders, an Australian band who caught my ear in my freshman year in college with “Heaven (Must Be There).” That’s more of a ballad, but they can also do upbeat, and on that album (This Island) in particular, they supplement singer Grace Knight’s saxophone work with two trumpeters, who are put to good effect on “Another Day in the Big World.” It’s just so upbeat and happy I thought it would work well here, so here it is.

And thence on to Mark Mothersbaugh, who is both famous for being one of the primary songwriters for Devo, and also for a metric shitload of soundtrack work, mainly for Wes Anderson and cartoons.⁷  He’s written for Rugrats, Pee-wee’s Playhouse, Yo Gabba Gabba! (where he also taught kids how to draw), and, most important for our purposes, Matt Groening’s foray into fantasy, Disenchantment.  The main theme for this show is so infectiously brass-filled and joyous, containing a counterpoint that I’m pretty sure is tuba and accordian, that I just had to download it from YouTube and stick it here as a bridge from our first two 80s tracks to our final one.

And that final track is from Modern Romance.  You may recall, when we last saw them (on 80s My Way II), I pointed out that I was originally scouting them for inclusion here.  “Don’t Stop That Crazy Rhythm” was a decently big hit in their native UK (#14 in 1983), but somehow it never made it over here to the US.  Which is just insane to me: it’s an amazing, super-brassy, dancey, salsa-inflected (our only one this time, sadly) tune that defies you to sit still while it plays.  I was just blown away when I discovered it, and wondered how in the hell I’d been missing out on this music for almost four decades.

And from there we hit the most exciting pair of back to back tracks in the whole volume.  We kick it off with Analogik, a Danish ... well, Wikipedia says that “their music mixes elements including jazz, electronica, reggae and Balkan music,” which is another of its infamous descriptions that fairly makes your head spin.  But I suppose it’s not too far off.  I found them because they did a tune for LittleBigPlanet 3 that I wanted to feature in Paradoxically Sized World,⁸ but I found the whole album so interesting that I started looking for where else to put them.  “Farligt Monster” is a weird, trippy little tune that isn’t quite what you’d call “glitch,” but perhaps borrows some elements from that subgenre.

And thus it makes the perfect flow into a proper glitch-hop tune—in fact, it’s easily the best transition on the volume.  There’s a bizarre little appendix on “Farligt Monster” that bleeds beautifully into the abrupt bursting into being that is Stepcat’s “Bootleg Brass.” Now, glitch-hop is distinct from glitch—the latter is just using sonic “mistakes” such as feedback whines, CD skips, hiss from vinyl, distortion from speakers, etc to make something in the general neighborhood of music.  But glitch-hop takes the basic elements of glitch, samples them, chops and recuts them to form a strong beat and more melodic tracks.  One Internet source says that it combines elements of lo-fi and hip-hop with the building blocks of glitch, and that’s a pretty good description.⁹  Now, a lot of glitch-hop doesn’t employ brass—and, I gotta be honest with you, I’m not sure whether several of the tunes on this particular volume, including this one, are employing real, live brass instruments—but I came across this magnum opus of Stepcat’s and I was just blown away.  It’s utterly amazing, and 100% belongs here, even if all the “brass” is just synth-generated or sampled.  It’s gorgeous, and thus perfect as the centerpiece of this volume.

Next time, we’ll check out the intersection of dreamy and trippy.

⇐ Salsatic Vibrato VII

Salsatic Vibrato IX ⇒

__________

1 There is technically a Smokelit Flashback VII, but to describe it as neotonous would be generous.

2 Including one which has already been published: Moonside by Riverlight II.

3 Which you may not think you’ve heard before, but you probably have.

4 Whether it’s sufficiently different from that classic is of course in the eye of beholder; though I felt it deserved inclusion, I certainly wouldn’t put it on the same volume as any version of the classic song from The Jungle Book.

5 Which we featured as the closer on volume V.

6 Specifically, on volume V.  Again.  I’m just now realizing how much repeat traffic we’ve got here from volume V.

7 I’m pretty sure that’s not a redundant statement.  Pretty sure.

8 It’s called “God Russik,” and I haven’t managed to work it into a volume yet.

9 Fun fact: this same source says KOAN Sound (who you might remember from Paradoxically Sized World volumes II, IV, and V) are glitch-hop, at least with their later tunes.  I can sort of see it with “Introvert” and “Dynasty,” but honestly “Lost in Thought” is just too peaceful for that.  But it’s interesting to contemplate nonetheless.

Darktime I

"My Shadow Will Cover"

[This is one post in a series about my music mixes.  The series list has links to all posts in the series and also definitions of many of the terms I use.  You may wish to read the introduction for more background.

Like all my series, it is not necessarily contiguous—that is, I don’t guarantee that the next post in the series will be next week.  Just that I will eventually finish it, someday.  Unless I get hit by a bus.]

Welcome to the second of the “transitional mixes”—what I used to call my “mood mixes”—that’s been updated to come into line with the modern mixes.  The first of these was Dreamtime, which has a decent explanation of what I’m talking about with all these terms, but, if you don’t want to go back and reread that, what it basically says is, these mixes were composed almost entirely of instrumental music to set a particular (fairly broad) mood, and mostly consisted of random stuff I found floating around on the Internet.  This one has been reworked a bit more extensively though: part of the reason for that is that, while the original version still felt like it was two volumes, it wasn’t nearly as long as Dreamtime.  So this version has more modern choices, including a couple of vocal tracks, even.

The “mood” of this mix is (as it says on the tin) darkness.  We’re looking for music that just drips darkness, oozes it out of every pore.  Of course, the best types of music for this are darkwave and dark ambient, and we’ve got plenty of it here.  Falling You leans a bit too far into trip-hop for this mix, but Black Tape for a Blue Girl is fond of long, meandering, dark semi-instrumentals, as are German neoclassical-adjacent darkwavers Love Is Colder Than Death.  “A Good Omen” (from the former) is an echoey, bass-heavy affair with wordless vocalizations that are just a step away from moans, backed by mysterious whispers that almost push it into the realm of the creepy.  Meanwhile “Very Ill” (by the latter) is more of a tribal, percussion-heavy foray into a moonless night; there are vocals here, but they seem to come from far away (and are likely not in English, so even harder for us Yanks and Brits to make out).  Unto Ashes is perhaps a slightly less obvious choice, but “Viper Song” is an interesting little tune which seems to evoke a gothic nursery rhyme, backed by what might be a harpsichord (or then again might just be a more common plucked chordophone such as a lute or even a guitar).

On the dark ambient side, Jeff Greinke (who is the linchpin of the Shadowfall Equinox mix) is always an excellent choice, and we have two of his tracks here.  Kevin Keller doesn’t make an appearance,¹ but I’ve always felt that Chad Kettering was a musical cousin of Keller’s.²  But “Into the Gate” is a bit more “out there” for Kettering, which is why it ended up here rather on a more traditional one of my mixes.  Seeming to consist almost entirely of echoes, and the small discordancies that you might hear when removing a bow from a cello or when accidentally bumping into a marimba, this is a hard tune to place, in general, but I thought it worked pretty well here.  As for Greinke, I chose “River Limba” off Big Weather, which is a weird little creepy tune, and “Crevice,” off Cities in Fog, which is ... well, also a weird little creepy tune.  The first one sounds more like the frenetic scramblings of small animals (or large insects); the second, like pretty much the entire album from which it derives, sounds more like slowly traveling through a vast, underwater space (or, yes, like wandering through the fog).  Primarily “Crevice” is a bridge to get us to Rapoon,³ whose “Estuary” feels like a continuation of “Crevice,” execept ratcheting up the creepy tension to deliciously unbearable level.  Finally, a short bridge from Michael Stearns and Ron Sunsinger, off Sorcerer, adds a ghostly vibe that flows beautifully from “Estuary” to “Into the Gate.”

There’s also a pretty decent dark neoclassical contingent here: from Amber Asylum’s carnivalesque “Black Waltz” to our closer, Jami Sieber’s “Darkening Ground.” The former we’ve heard from primarily on Shadowfall Equinox,⁴ and this doesn’t stray too far from that template.  The latter is an uncharacteristically spooky track from the electro-and-acoustic alternative cellist who I first discovered on Magnatune⁵ and who we’ve heard from many times before on many different mixes.⁶

And the proper goths should get their shot too: I’ve chosen a short bridge from Clan of Xymox, from their 1986 album Medusa,⁷ and the meandering, understated, almost muted part 1 of Bauhaus’ 3-part “The Three Shadows,” off of The Sky’s Gone Out.  Neither of these non-vocal tracks were likely to fit anywhere else in my mix universe, but they work really well here.

That primarily leaves the “cinematic” music.  In terms of television soundtracks, I of course couldn’t resist throwing in a Twin Peaks tune—“Night Life in Twin Peaks” is a slow, building tune that doesn’t really build to anything, which only adds to its creepiness—and perhaps the ultimate Darktime pick: the theme from the original Dark Shadows.  I’ve only used this soundtrack once before,⁸ primarily because it has a very strong 60s-TV vibe that makes it sound out-of-place on many mixes.  But I think this one works well here.  As for videogame soundtracks, I thought Jesper Kyd’s “Meditation of the Assassin,” from the original Assassin’s Creed, slotted perfectly between “Very Ill” and “Crevice”: it’s got that tribal percussion like the former, but also the echoey, lost-in-the-fog feel of the latter.  In the not-really-a-soundtrack category, Dead Man’s Bones, the self-titled debut (and only) album from Ryan Gosling and his equally-ghost-obsessed pal Zach Shields, has been described as the soundtrack to a movie that was never made.  A lot of the album doesn’t work in my opinion, and many tracks that do work don’t fit anywhere traditional.  But, as we’re seeing, Darktime (and its cousins) are home to the oddballs, and I always dug its “Intro,” with the spoken-word poem backed by spooky sound effects.  It’s super-short, but it’s less of a bridge and more the centerpiece of the volume.  Plus it’s one of only two tracks here with any words at all, so I took advantage of that to extract our volume title.

And of course we mustn’t forget my two favorite bands for providing soundtracks to D&D and other tabletop roleplaying games:⁹ Midnight Syndicate and Nox Arcana.  From the former, “Diversions in the Dark” is practically a soundtrack for Halloween attractions, and, being off the aptly titled Carnival Arcane, flows beautifully into “Black Waltz.” From the latter, “Ghost in the Mirror” is another of NA’s music-box-reminiscent spooky tracks, this one off Legion of Shadows (which is one of my favorite Nox Arcana outings; it’s less tightly-themed, so I think it offers a more varied experience).  And it carries the listener perfectly along from Dead Man’s Bones’ “Intro” to the weird maze that is Love Is Colder Than Death’s “Very Ill.”

Darktime I
[ My Shadow Will Cover ]

“Night Spirits” by Angels of Venice, off Music for Harp, Flute and Cello
“A Good Omen” by Black Tape for a Blue Girl, off The First Pain To Linger
“Persian Teardrop” by Massive Attack [Single]
“Theme II” by Clan of Xymox, off Medusa
“River Limba” by Jeff Greinke, off Big Weather
“Dark Shadows Theme/Collinwood” by Robert Cobert, off Dark Shadows, Volume 1 [Soundtrack]
“Diversions in the Dark” by Midnight Syndicate, off Carnival Arcane
“Black Waltz” by Amber Asylum, off Frozen in Amber
“The Three Shadows, Part I” by Bauhaus, off The Sky's Gone Out
“Night Life in Twin Peaks” by Angelo Badalamenti, off Twin Peaks [Soundtrack]
“Intro” by Dead Man's Bones, off Dead Man's Bones
“Ghost in the Mirror” by Nox Arcana, off Legion of Shadows
“Very Ill” by Love Is Colder Than Death, off Teignmouth
“Meditation of the Assassin” by Jesper Kyd, off Assassin's Creed [Game Soundtrack]
“Crevice” by Jeff Greinke, off Cities in Fog
“Estuary” by Rapoon, off Cidar
“Between Parallel Lines” by Michael Stearns and Ron Sunsinger, off Sorcerer
“Into the Gate” by Chad Kettering, off Into the Infinite
“Viper Song” by Unto Ashes, off Moon Oppose Moon
“The Darkening Ground” by Jami Sieber, off Lush Mechanique

Total:  20 tracks,  72:32

On the “possibly unexpected” side of the mix, Angels of Venice are typically new age (which is why we’ve seen them primarily on Numeric Driftwood¹⁰), unless you count that one album Angels founder Carol Tatum did with the lead singer of Seraphim Shock.¹¹  But, surprisingly, it’s not that more gothy Carol Tatum collaboration I’m drawing from here: it is in fact “Night Spirits,” the centerpiece of their debut album Music for Harp, Flute and Cello, which is, I’m fairly certain, the only track to include any noises not generated by a harp, flute, or cello.  The opening to “Night Spirits” is all distant, moaning wind, and faint, ghostly voices, and the occasional muted chime.  It settles into a more typical neoclassical AoV vibe after that, but that opening was just too perfect for it not to be the opener here as well.

And, weirdly, I first discovered Angels of Venice by poking around early Internet music-sharing sites.  And that’s also where I found perhaps the most unlikely choice here: a remix/mashup of “Teardrop” by Massive Attack with what I think is Lisa Gerrard’s vocals from “Yulunga (Spirit Dance)” by Dead Can Dance.  We heard the latter on Shadowfall Equinox V; you’ll probably recognize the intro of the former as the theme music for House.  I have zero clue where this incredible mashup originates; I’ve only ever seen it credited as “Persian Teardrop” by Massive Attack, but I suspect that MA had nothing to do with it.  Although of course all the places on the Internet where I originally discovered it are long gone, it seems to have lived on in YouTube form, which is what I’ve linked to above.¹²  Now, why Elizabeth Fraser (of the Cocteau Twins: that’s whose voice MA employs in “Teardrop”) and Lisa Gerrard (of Dead Can Dance) have never sung together in real life I can’t say for sure (although a 2012 article reports Gerrard saying that Fraser’s approach was too similar to her own), but it does seem like a missed opportunity: both 4AD artists, both pioneers of dreampop, both contributors to This Mortal Coil (albeit never on the same song).  So I completely understand why some enterprising ‘netizen created this.  And I think it’s come out beautifully: Fraser’s atypically intelligible vocals, backed by Gerrard’s vaguely Middle-Easter glossolalia, all set to the techno thump of Massive Attack ... it’s just gorgeous, and I’m glad to have had a chance to showcase it here.

Next time, we’ll hit our first volume eight.

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1 This volume.  Next volume ... who knows?

2 We first saw Ketting on Shadowfall Equinox II, appropriately enough.

3 Who we also met on Shadowfall Equinox, though this time on volume IV.  Honestly, just expect artists from SfE showing up here to be a recurring thing.

4 Specifically volumes I and II, but also on Phantasma Chorale II and even on Eldritch Ætherium I.

5 For more details of what Magnatune is and how I discovered it, see the discussion in Rose-Coloured Brainpan.

6 If you want the complete run-down: Shadowfall Equinox IV, Numeric Driftwood II, Rose-Coloured Brainpan II, Smooth as Whispercats I, and Dreamtime I.

7 Their last album before becoming simply “Xymox,” though the “Clan” would return in 1997.

8 That would be Phantasma Chorale II again.

9 For an expansion on what I mean here, see Phantasma Chorale I.

10 Volumes I, II, and III, in fact, although also on Shadowfall Equinox VI.

11 Sometimes you’ll see that album credited to Angels of Venice, though it is usually (and more properly, in my opinion) credited to Carol Tatum.  Certainly that’s how I’ve credited the songs I’ve used from it in my mixes, specifically on Penumbral Phosphorescence I and Fulminant Cadenza I.

12 Although that version has nearly a minute of inexplicable dead air tacked on at the end.  But it’s close enough to get the general drift.