Shadowfall Equinox VIII

"Oceans of Storm Clouds"

[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.]

Last volume I noted that Shadowfall Equinox was catching up to Salsatic Vibrato in terms of number of volumes.  And, with this latest one, they’re officially tied.  Realistically, I think SfE may hit a volume IX before SVb does.  We shall see.

As I said last time, the primary reason is that Equinox is what I use for background music when I work, and this volume is no exception to that.  And, as usual when getting to these large numbers of volumes, the challenge is to bring something fresh to the mix without abandoning the dependable artists that have been with us on every volume.  Let’s see how we did.

In the category of repeating artists, there’s one who has been on every volume, and two who have been on every volume but one, and they’re all three here.  The inimitable Jeff Greinke is certainly back, with an album we haven’t heard from yet on this mix: Winter Light.¹  “Mountain in the Clouds” is the same drifting, ethereal ambient that we’ve come to expect from Greinke, but this album has more of a brittle, crisp feeling, as the seasonal reference in its title implies.  Still, I feel this particular track works in a more autumnal setting, which is what this mix is all about.  As for pianist Kevin Keller,² “Stillness” is a melancholy, cello-heavy piece that’s pretty perfect for the mix.  And, finally, darkwave masters Black Tape for a Blue Girl³ also provide a cello-heavy piece, “Fitful.” This is a particularly ambient track for Rosenthal, with the occasional crescendo of what might be brass (or just synth), and the gentle, almost unnoticeable, wordless vocals of an uncredited female singer.

Other returning artists include Ruben Garcia (seen on volumes IV, V, and VII) and Ludovico Einaudi (seen on volume VI), whom I paired back to back so that Einaudi’s spare piano on “In Principio” could highlight Garcia’s departure from that style with some fuller, synthy work on “Five Dreams from Yesterday” (which really sounds more like Greinke than Garcia’s normal output); Dead Can Dance and Loreena McKennitt (who I paird on volume V), here again with a touch of worldmusic: on V, I used McKennitt followed by DCD as an opener, whereas here I’ve followed DCD’s somber “Agape” with McKennitt’s beautiful “Tango to Evora” as our closer; and, last but not least, cellist Jami Sieber (seen on volume IV).

Cello, in fact, is a pretty common instrument for this mix: we’ve heard not only from Sieber before, but also cellist David Darling and groups like Amber Asylum and Angels of Venice who feature full-time cellists.  Plus various guest cellists: Martin McGarrick on This Mortal Coil tracks, Audrey Riley on Hope Blister tracks, and Mera Roberts on several Black Tape for a Blue Girl songs.  Here, I’ve put together a solid block of cello music as our centerpiece: 5 songs in a row, and I kick it off with Eugene Friesen.  He’s a recent find for me, which explains why we haven’t seen him here yet, but he’s been around since the 80s, and I think he may become a regular here.  For his debut on this mix, I’ve chose the title track from his 2005 album In the Shade of Angels, a very spare, not-quite-melancholy, ultimately gorgeous instrumental to kick off the block.  From there we go into the melancholy track from the Kevin Keller Ensemble (including Clarice Jensen on cello), and then to Colm McGuinness, who we’ve mostly seen in this series as a purveyor of gaming music: his “Welcome to Wildemount” is the explosive opener of Eldritch Ætherium II, and he has one more track there as well as one on the following volume.  But he’s also an excellent cellist (as well as playing many other instruments) and “Koala” is a sweeping yet still tenebrous track that is perfect for the midpoint of this block.  Then we hit Sieber, who is surely my favorite cellist of all time, with “The Burning Dawn” from 2013’s Timeless.  It’s an anticipatory track, though it’s not clear exactly what the listener is waiting for.  But it carries us sedately to the block closer, BTfaBG’s “Fitful.” Frequent contributor Mera Roberts plays the cello here, and the light, wordless vocals may well be Roberts herself, who provides vocals as well as cello for her other two projects.⁴  She’s very talented, and lifts this BTfaBG track to a level of sublime I don’t think it could otherwise achieve.

And, speaking of blocks of tracks, I close out the mix with a fun triad of worldmusic, starting with Thievery Corporation’s “Indra.” The DC-based Corporation is normally too upbeat for this mix: we normally see them in places like Smokelit Flashback (volumes III and V), Paradoxically Sized World (volumes I and IV), and Apparently World.  Still, we also heard from them on Zephyrous Aquamarine and even once on Numeric Driftwood (volume IV), so we know they can do mellow when the mood calls for it.  And “Indra,” while it maintains a decently strong hip-hop beat, really brings the dreamy trip-hop with some Middle Eastern flair.  Then to “Agape,” continuing the Middle Eastern theme with what is probably an oud and a qanun, layered with more of Lisa Gerrard’s powerful vocals, singing in a language which might be Earthly or might be just Gerrard’s glossolalia.  And we close with McKennitt’s “Tango to Evora,” which starts out with a simple flamenco-style guitar and then layers on violin, harp, and finally McKennitt’s angelic wordless vocals.  A gentle, soothing track which makes for an amazing closer.

Once again, we’re quite short on lyrics to draw a volume title from, so I used the now-typical method in such situations (that is, I plucked words from various song titles and glued them together).  I actually really like this particular one.

Shadowfall Equinox VIII
[ Oceans of Storm Clouds ]

“For the West Coast Dark Ambient Bedroom Warriors” by the Mountain Goats, off Goths
“Oceans of Change” by Stray Theories, off Oceans, Volume 1 [EP]⁵
“Tanaris” by Tracy W. Bush, off World of Warcraft Soundtrack [Videogame Soundtrack]
“Aquarium” by Casino Versus Japan, off Whole Numbers Play the Basics
“Stay with Me” by Clint Mansell, off The Fountain [Soundtrack]
“In Principio” by Ludovico Einaudi, off Nightbook
“Five Dreams from Yesterday” by Ruben Garcia, off Lakeland
“Riders on the Storm” by Yonderboi [Single]
“In the Shade of Angels” by Eugene Friesen, off In the Shade of Angels
“Stillness” by Kevin Keller, off In Absentia
“Koala” by Colm R. McGuinness [Single]
“The Burning Dawn” by Jami Sieber, off Timeless
“Fitful” by Black Tape for a Blue Girl, off Remnants of a Deeper Purity
“Mountain in the Clouds” by Jeff Greinke, off Winter Light
“Seelenlos” by Scabeater, off Necrology
“Indra” by Thievery Corporation, off The Mirror Conspiracy
“Agape” by Dead Can Dance, off Anastasis
“Tango to Evora” by Loreena McKennitt, off The Visit

Total:  18 tracks,  80:11

Clint Mansell’s beautiful if haunting score for The Fountain makes its first appearance here; “Stay with Me” is a slow, synthy track that seems to have ghostly tones in its background.  The World of Warcraft soundtrack also makes its first appearance outsdide Eldritch Ætherium, where I used two of Jason Hayes’ tracks on volume III.  This is a Tracy W. Bush composition, “Tanaris,” which also has a very haunted quality, as well as sounding somewhat oceanic.  I thought it might be a bit too much to put those two back to back, so I broke them up with an interesting track I found while looking for different versions of Saint-Saëns’ “Aquarium.”⁶  This track of the same name by Casino Versus Japan (the musical moniker of Wisconsin electronica artist Erik Paul Kowalski) has nothing to do with the piece from Le Carnaval des Animaux, but it’s a great, underwatery ambient/downtempo piece that I’m glad to have stumbled onto by accident.

For the rest, there’s nothing too unexpected here.  Stray Theories is a cinematic and electronica project by New Zealand artist Micah Templeton-Wolfe; “Oceans of Change” is a gorgeous ambient piece that flows insanely well off of our opener and sets us up for the more cinematic tracks to come.  That opener, of course, is the exquisitely named Mountain Goats’ track “For the West Coast Dark Ambient Bedroom Warriors,” which is, as the Brits would say, exactly what it says on the tin.  John Darnielle’s long-running (since 1994) project is musically eclectic, and was originally a one-man affair, though by the time of 2017’s Goths, he was opening up to more long-term bandmates.  This amazingly spare track is, as its name suggests, the epitome of what this mix is all about, so the second I heard it I knew it had to be a volume opener.  It’s a bit of a departure for the Mountain Goats, but then you can say that about most of their songs, so it starts to become meaningless after a while.

And that just leaves us with a small bridge from Scabeater, a band not only so obscure that neither AllMusic nor Wikipedia know they exist—which, you may recall, are my criteria for “really obscure band”—but even Discogs says “hunh??” when you ask about them.⁷  I found Scabeater on Jamendo, and their Skinny-Puppy-adjacent brand of industrial-flavored goth is certainly not for everyone—hell, a lot of it isn’t even for me—but they hit a winner every once in a while, and the 46 seconds of strings-backed piano simplicity that is “Seelenios” is just sublime.  For the longest time, “Mountain in the Clouds” just butted directly up against “Indra,” and it wasn’t working for me, but I couldn’t figure out what to do about it, until I remembered this perfect little bridge.

And that just leaves us with perhaps the oddest choice, Hungarian producer László Fogarasi Jr., better known as Yonderboi, who here graces us with an instrumental, jazzy-to-the-point-of-being-loungy version of “Riders on the Storm” by the Doors.  I love the original track (it is almost certainly my favorite Doors song), and something about this offbeat cover really caught my ear.  It takes the song in a completely different direction (as all the best covers do) and is somehow faithful to its inspiration while also being a completely new song.  I’ve drug it around through several volumes of this mix, never quite finding the perfect placement for it, until it finally managed to land here.  Its Hammond-organ-style melody flows beautifully off the fading synth of Garcia’s “Five Dreams,” and it serves as the perfect palate cleanser before we leap into the 5-cello block of Friesen / Keller / McGuinness / Sieber / BTfaBG.  I’m glad I finally found it a home.

Next time, we’ll look at some more creativity-inducing gaming music.

⇐ Shadowfall Equinox VII

Shadowfall Equinox IX ⇒

__________

1 Although I used “Orographic” from that album on Mystical Memoriam.

2 Seen on every volume except the first.

3 Seen on every volume except IV.

4 Mera is half of Mercurine, a third-wave goth band that occupies the same space between goth and industrial as Faith and the Muse, and all of Oblivia, a cello-driven dark ambient project reminiscent of Amber Asylum, but with more vocals.  Both are relatively unknown, and both undeservedly so.

5 You guys know how much I hate to link to YouTube, but I can’t find anywhere else to get this song.

6 I used one version on Classical Plasma I and one on Phantasma Chorale I.

7 I may have to invent a new term ... super duper obscure band, perhaps?

Music Story #3: Into the Groove

[This is the third 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.

This is one I originally published on my work’s Slack channel #tunes.  It’s a shorter post than usual, but I thought it worh sharing nonetheless.]

This sub-series has covered music in various formats.  But they’ve all been about music formats that you buy.  Obviously that’s not the only way we hear music—in fact, one might argue that we hear way more music for free than we ever do paying for it.  And that’s primarily because of one thing: radio.  Or it used to be, anyway, before the Internet came along.  I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with radio.  Here’s a thing which happened to me recently that may help illuminate that.

A week ago today, we packed up the whole family and went to the Renn Faire (I wrote about this last week).  My youngest had never been, and the other two hadn’t been in years (and the eldest’s partner had also never been), so there were six of us.  Obviously we weren’t going to fit in my Prius, so into The Mother‘s SUV we hopped.

Now, The Mother’s SUV is old enough not to have a Bluetooth connection for the sound system; it used to have an “aux” plug that we would just plug our phones into, but the jack got wonky, so we either have to do CD’s, or listen to the actual radio like we’re the Flintstones or something.  For this trip, we decided to do the radio.

Now, when I listen to the radio, I have a very low tolerance for songs I don’t like, and zero tolerance for commericals, so it’s a constant bouncing around of stations.  The Mother has programmed all 12 possible FM stations with something, even if one is country and one is classical, so it’s like we really only had 10 stations.  But it’s an eclectic mix: KROQ, K-Earth (our local oldies station), Jack FM (which there’s one of in every market, I gather), MyFM (current pop music), etc.  We were just as likely to hear Led Zeppelin as Lady Gaga (both of which we did hear on the trip, for the record).

[Brief tangent: I don’t typically like pop, so I would never listen to stations like MyFM in my own car.  Still, there’s almost always one song by every megapop star that I really love.  So I hate Ricky Martin, except for “La Vida Loca,” which is awesome.  Can’t stand Whitney Houston, except for “How Will I Know?” which I adore.  Or, for a more contemporary example, I’m fairly unimpressed by Olivia Rodrigo ... except that “Brutal” is absolutely bangin’.  I’ve never really cottoned to Taylor Swift either, and thus far had also never found her one exception.  But I stumbled across “Anti Hero” on the way to Renn Faire and I was like, shit, that’s Taylor Swift??  It’s great.  (I had a similar reaction to “How Will I Know?” ... for months I was convinced it was the Pointer Sisters and that’s why I loved the song so much.  But I digress.  In my digression.)]

Anyways, there was a fair amount of 80s music, as K-Earth—who originally played like fifties music when i first arrived in Cali—now considers 80s music old.  Bastards.  But, nonetheless, we heard some 80s classics on the ride down, like “Our Lips Are Sealed” by the Go-Go’s, “White Wedding” by Billy Idol, and “Into the Groove” by Madonna.

Then we had a lovely day at the Renn Faire (although it was was more vendors and way fewer entertaining bits than I’d remembered), and we got in the truck again to head home.  On the way, we heard “We Got the Beat” by the Go-Go’s, which wasn’t too surprising ... but also “White Wedding” again.  Then, a half an hour later, there was “Into the Groove” again.  Weird.  I probably hadn’t listened to any Madonna in a few decades—Madonna is less of a megapop-star-with-one-good-song-exception to me, and more like a used-to-be-a-cool-alternative-singer-then-turned-megapop-star-and-so-I-stopped-liking-them type thing.  Early Madonna is great: “Lucky Star” is awesome, “Borderline” and “Holiday” are pretty good too.  Then you get to “Material Girl,” which is still pretty good, and “Like a Virgin” is okay, and by the time you hit “Papa Don’t Preach” I’m pretty much checked out.  So “Into the Groove” is right on that borderline (pun inteneded, I suppose) between good-to-mediocre Madonna and bleaugh Madonna.  So I’ve probably listened to Madonna at some point in the past couple of decades, but certainly not that particular song.

Friday I had jury duty.  My county’s courthouse is about an hour’s drive for me, and it was The Mother’s truck again (for family-vehicle-related reasons).  By this time it was all 80s Memorial Day weekend or somesuch on K-Earth and KROQ was doing some sort of “top 500” thing, so I was mainy back and forth between those two.  And I heard “Into the Groove” again.  And I was like, what the fuck is going on???

Yesterday we drove my middle child out to another city about an hour away (though in the opposite direction) for homeschool prom.  We took the youngest with us and went out to dinner to kill time so we didn’t have to drive all the way to Glendale and back twice in one night.  On the way back home, guess what came on the radio again?  Yes, that’s right: “Into the Groove.” By Madonna.  Again.  A song from nearly forty years ago (I looked it up: it was released in 1985) that I haven’t heard in around twenty years and now I’ve heard it four times in a week.  On the radio.  Which I rarely listen to any more.  What the fuck is up with the universe?  I was ranting in the car a bit about how unlikely it was that I heard this stupid song 4 times in a week when i hadn’t heard it once in the past 20 years, and my middle child opined that perhaps the universe wanted me to refamiliarize myself with the song.  I was like, I was plenty refamiliarized by play #2: numbers 3 and 4 were just redundant.

So, anyway, that’s my random weird radio story for the day.  Or week.  Or month—hell, probably for the year.  I hope.

Dreamtime II

"Colourless and Dangerous"

[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 series introduction for general 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.]

As I discussed last time, Dreamtime is one of the mixes (the first, actually) that I developed after the pre-modern mixes but before the “modern” mixes.  (I used to call these “mood” mixes, but it wasn’t a very distinguishing term, which is why I now use “transitional” instead.¹)  None of these were every designed with any thought to burning them on CD, which is why part of the challenge of updating them is finding natural volume groups.  Even after adding a few tracks to what is now Dreamtime I, what I had left over from the original Dreamtime playlist wasn’t really sufficient to make a volume II ... in some ways.  It had just about enough length, but it didn’t have any throughline, and it also had that really long track that I mentioned last time, which meant that pretty much as soon as I started adding tracks to make it a bit more coherent, it became too long.  So, I set aside a few tracks for a potential volume III—including the really long one²—and started filling out the rest.  And now here we are.

There’s a few returning artists.  Of course we need to hear from the inimitable A Produce again, and once again he’s our closer.  A Produce tracks are just really great for that, and “The Far Shore” is no exception.  It’s slow, mellow, and dreamlike in the way that reminds you of the sensation of moving in slow motion, which is something that you’ve only ever done in a dream.  And I wouldn’t want to leave out the darkwave twins, Black Tape for a Blue Girl and Falling You.  From the former, we get one of those Sam Rosenthal concoctions which starts out as one song—minimalist, but almost carnival-like (if somewhat creepy)—and then, halfway through, becomes an entirely different song: a folding and intertwining of sinuous background whispers, underpinned by a lonely synth melody.  From the latter, a more classic John Michael Zorko composition which is Jennifer McPeak’s only vocal track on the magnificent Touch,³ though this time Zorko eschews the trip-hop bassline and just does an extended, almost ambient synth noodling, while McPeak abandons words altogether and just provides an almost operatic, swooping vocal track.  At 7 minutes long, it was probably never going to land in any of the usual places I tend to slot Falling You,⁴ but it’s kind of perfect here.  And I wouldn’t want to skip This Mortal Coil, of course, who often provide dreamlike instrumentals thanks to Ivo Watts’ tendency towards synth minimalism.  “The Lacemaker” is a curious little tripartite track that starts out as just that, then becomes a lonely wind behind which you gradually start to pick out a voice on the breeze (speaking our volume title, as it happens), which is then superseded by some adjacent-to-creepy chamber music.  Songs like this (and the BTfaBG track) that sort of don’t know exactly what they want to be are often impossible to slot into typical mixes, but the advantage of having a mix based on feeling like you’re in a dream is that weird transitions actually fit the theme.

And we couldn’t forget Ensemble of the Dreamings, those weird snippets of music I found on the very early Internet that were supposed to go into a dreamlike videogame.  I’ll mine them all eventually; for this volume, here’s two more: “Processional” is about two minutes of vocals that you can’t quite make out with the standard synth backing, while “Angel Knife I” is (naturally) an angelic voice for which you can mostly make out the words, and a slightly more coherent melody, but it’s barely more than a minute before it melts into our other returning soundtrack, Mirrormask.  “Meeting the Sphinx and the Dark Queen” is an anticipatory track which climaxes but then keeps going into a very unsettling groove.  Iain Bellamy turns in another great track that wouldn’t really fit anywhere else.

The only new artist to achieve two tracks on this volume is Al Gromer Khan, a German-born sitarist who spent seven years learning the instrument in India, and only added the “Khan” to his name after being accepted into the Khan-I-Gharana tradition.  “The Anahat Syndrome” is something I first heard on a Hearts of Space program (specifically, “The Perfumed Garden”), and I was inspired to pick up the full album (1984’s now impossible-to-find Divan I Khas).  It’s a lovely, dreamy piece of sitar work that’s been on the Dreamtime playlist forever.  Adding “Oiram Qarz” was a much more recent inspiration; I felt that “I No Longer Remember the Feelings” just needed a better lead-in, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that the fading strains of “Oiram” butted up pretty nicely against “Remember.” “Oiram” is a bit more slow and meandering than “Anahat,” and it works pretty well right after our opener, Angels of Venice’s “Persentio,” especially if you overlap the fade-out and the fade-in just a skosh.  “Persentio” is a fairly typical outing from AoV (who we’ve heard from many times thus far in these mixes⁵), meaning it’s some lovely harp work from Carol Tatum with cello and flute backing from her collaborators du jour, but I always felt this particular piece had a bit more of a feel of the nighttime breeze through the trees.  I think making it the opener of volume II was part of my more recent rejiggering, but honestly it feels so natural at this point that I can’t really remember for sure.

Ambient tracks can be dreamlike too, so it shouldn’t be a surprise to see Deborah Martin and J. Arif Verner back (we’ve seen them twice so far, both on Shadowfall Equinox⁶) with “Inter Astrum”—this sprawling, synthy track makes you feel like you’re traveling between the stars indeed.  And that bleeds nicely into “Anahat,” which in turn bleeds nicely into some Twin Peaks music.  Unlike most of the music from that show that I’ve used, though, this is a more guitar-driven track by Lynch himself, off the Fire Walk with Me soundtrack.  “The Pink Room” is a bit menacing, a bit minimalist, and thoroughly Lynchian.

Dreamtime II
[ Colourless and Dangerous ]

“Persentio” by Angels of Venice, off Forever After
“Oiram Qarz” by Al Gromer Khan, off Divan I Khas ⁷
“I No Longer Remember The Feelings” by Black Tape for a Blue Girl, off The First Pain To Linger
“Basketball Dream” by the Presidents of the United States of America, off II
“Processional” by Ensemble of the Dreamings, off Chthon [Videogame Soundtrack]
“... a cry for the broken-hearted” by Falling You, off Touch
“Inter Astrum” by Deborah Martin & J. Arif Verner, off Anno Domini
“The Anahat Syndrome” by Al Gromer Khan, off Divan I Khas ⁸
“The Pink Room” by David Lynch, off Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me [Soundtrack]
“Party of the First Part” by Bauhaus, off Swing the Heartache [Compilation]
“Dreamscape” by Nox Arcana, off Legion of Shadows
“Mesonoxian Visitors” by Midnight Syndicate, off Carnival Arcane
“Circus Waltz” by Sweetback, off Stage 2
“Angel Knife I” by Ensemble of the Dreamings, off Chthon [Videogame Soundtrack]
“Meeting the Sphinx and the Dark Queen” by Iain Ballamy, off Mirrormask [Soundtrack]
“The Lacemaker” by This Mortal Coil, off Blood
“Words of Tranquility” by Koop, off Sons of Koop
“The Far Shore” by A Produce, off Land of a Thousand Trances

Total:  18 tracks,  78:53

One of the tracks which has been on this playlist for the longest is Bauhaus’ trippy little song called “Party of the First Part,” which lets the non-Peter-Murphy contingency of the band⁹ do some classic goth noodling in the background of clips of (of all things) The Devil and Daniel Mouse.  This oddity is, so far as I know, only available on the CD reissue of The Sky’s Gone Out, but it’s well worth tracking down in my opinion.  And it was a great excuse to get the goth legends onto this mix.  (Plus, if I’m honest, I’ve always loved this song—possibly due to remembering watching the cartoon that provides the samples in my youth—and where the hell else was I going to put it?)

But what to put after it?  For a long time, it just fed directly into “Angel Knife I,” which was ... okay, I guess.  But I really felt like it needed more there, so I came up (again, fairly recently) with the weird little trilogy that now follows it: “Dreamscape” by Nox Arcana, “Mesonoxian Visitors” by Midnight Syndicate, and “Circus Waltz” by Sweetback.  Now, the first is a creepy synth vibe, perhaps inspired by some of the soundtracks to the John Carpenter classics of the 80s (particularly Halloween, but also The Fog and Prince of Darkness), but then the second (from Midnight Syndicate’s album Carnival Arcane) really starts to lead into the creepy carnival vibe.  Which is what you’d expect from these two purveyors of what I like to call “gaming music” (meaning it’s often used as mood music for TTRPGs), but then the Sweetback track is a bit of a surprise.  Sweetback is the backing band for Sade,¹⁰ and normally I would describe them as “smooth jazz” and just leave it at that.  And, “Circus Waltz” has a bit of smooth jazz in its DNA to be sure ... but there’s also something more here, an auditory glimpse into a carnival that’s just a little off, and I thought it worked perfectly after “Mesonoxian Visitors,” which sounds like the arrival of said creepy carnival on a Depression-era circus train.

Which only leaves us with two more tracks in the “unexpected” category.  I’ve put a lot of Koop on these mixes—on Salsatic Vibrato,¹¹ on Moonside by Riverlight,¹² and of course on Zephyrous Aquamarine—but “Words of Tranquility” is something different from their normal electrojazz.  It’s the first track I’ve used off their debut album Sons of Koop, which is way more electro than jazz, and it’s ... dark.  I don’t know how else to describe it.  The vocals are credited to “K (23),” which is certainly a bit mysterious; whoever she is, she provides the vocals for four of the ten tracks on that album, which is more than any other singer, and more than there are instrumentals as well.  The words are intelligible, which doesn’t mean they make sense: they include lines like “my desires are made of cold” and “I’m a pilot, I’m above, you’re a chauffeur, down below.” It’s definitely very dreamlike, and definitely couldn’t fit anywhere but here.

Finally, perhaps my favorite track here is the very strange “Basketball Dream,” by the Presidents of the United States of America, the closer of their very simply titled II.  This is some basic guitar noodling backing a spoken word description of a dream involving Magic Johnson, as recited by a young boy.  It’s very weird, in that way that makes you believe it was an actual dream, and you can hear one of the band members feeding the lines to the kid, and sometimes the kid just giggles in delight at the preposterousness of it all.  Just a delightful track that epitomizes the dream state.

Next time, more meditative, autumnal fare for getting work done.

⇐ Dreamtime I

Dreamtime III ⇒

__________

1 In this blog series, anyway.  In my tracklists/ directory, they still live in a subdirectory called moods/.

2 It’s just a second shy of 20 minutes long, if you must know.

3 Jennifer provided all the vocals on Falling You’s debut album Mercy, but became a more infrequent collaboration on later albums.

4 The “usual” places in this case being Smokelit Flashback, where we’ve seen them so far on volumes II – V, and Shadowfall Equinox, where they’ve appeared on I, II, V, and VII.  But Falling You is nothing if not versatile, and I’ve also used them on Tumbledown Flatland I, the previous volume of this mix, and slotted them for several other mixes that we will, presumably, come to in the fullness of time.

5 On every volume of Numeric Driftwood so far, on Shadowfall Equinox VI and Darktime I, and, somewhat atypically, on Fulminant Cadenza I and Penumbral Phosphorescence I.

6 Specifically on volumes VI and VII.

7 This album seems to be impossible to locate these days.  The link is to a YouTube video which contains the full album, which is annoying to parse individual songs out of, but it is what it is.

8 Same album as the previous Gromer Khan track.

9 Occasionally known, eventually, as Love and Rockets.

10 In fact, they were recommended to me by a coworker who was a Sade fan and was surprised to hear me play one of her tracks in one of my mixes one late night in the office.

11 Volumes III and V.

12 Twice on volume I and once on volume II.

80s My Way III

"On a Wavelength Far From Home (1982 Pt 2)"

[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 series introduction for general background; you may also want to check out the mix introduction for more detailed 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.]

Last time we had arrived in 1982, and, despite enjoying nearly 78 minutes of classic 80s goodness, there was still more to cover.  So let’s finish that up, shall we?

As I noted, 1982 is the beginning of the end of the transitional years.  While there were still some tracks that tried to have it both ways—both straight-ahead rock and this new, “alternative” sound—trends like post-punk, new wave, and, most cruicially synthpop, were here to stay and truly starting to take over the scene.  And, most significantly, a lot of the non-quite-alt from last volume was, unlike volume I, from artists who were truly reinventing themselves.  The members of Asia certainly qualify, but the major success story from last time was Hall & Oates, who were perhaps the most successful at this feat.¹  But there are two other artists who were one thing in the 70s and an entirely different thing in the 80s, with both sides of that changeover still being pretty decent.  I’ve picked one of those to be our closer here:² it’s Golden Earring.  Now, if you’re a typical American, there are exactly two songs by this Dutch band that you’ve ever heard.  The first is “Radar Love,” which is in that 70s proto-hard-rock style epitomized by the Who and Led Zeppelin.  (Weirdly, Golden Earring actually originated in the 60s, where they sounded more like the Beatles or the Zombies.)  But, by the 80s, they were ready to remake themselves again, and so the second of their songs you’ve likely heard is “Twilight Zone,” which sounds nothing like “Radar Love” ... but still amazing: strong rock guitars, but a very complex bassline, overlapping vocals in very different styles, solid, scifi-adjacent synth work.  In 1982, I had a paper route, and I usually rode with headphones on and my Walkman cranking, playing mix tapes I’d made myself.³  “Twilight Zone” was definitely was of the songs on those tapes, as was “She Blinded Me with Science” by Thomas Dolby.  Forget “injections” of synth: this song was almost nothing but synths, and samples, and weird, nonsensical vocals.  Everyone was rushing to put synths in their music, because it was new and hip and different.  Utterly unsurprsing from Dolby, whose stage name after all came from his “always messing around with keyboards and tapes.”⁴  But from reggae/dancehall virtuoso Eddy Grant?  “Electric Avenue” was something special, something most of us had never heard before ... primarily because it almost certainly never been done before.  The synths in this otherwise Caribbean-flavored track made it irresistable to butt up against Dolby’s classic.

There are a few other people here who started in the 70s and reinvented themselves for this exciting new time.  For instance, being (musically speaking, at any rate) a child of the 80s, Genesis was an entirely different band to me than it was for the afficianados of prog-rock.⁵  The transition in Genesis came when its lead singer, Peter Gabriel, left.  Now, Genesis is certainly an important part of my 80s, and “Abacab” and “No Reply at All” were likely on those Walkman paper-route mixes, but we’ll have to wait for 1984 to get a proper entry from them.  But Gabriel, on the other hand ... as part of Genesis, he was known for outrageous costumes set to meandering prog-rock:⁶ sort of like what you might get if you could have David Bowie fronting Emerson, Lake & Palmer.  But somehow, as a solo artist, his music morphed into a sort of alt-pop: strong hooks and interesting synth work made songs like “Sledgehammer” and “Games Without Frontiers” 80s staples, not to mention the all-time most iconic 80s ballad, “In Your Eyes.” But the first Gabriel song I ever heard was “Shock the Monkey,” and that’s the one I’ve included here.  A screed against animal testing, there’s something primal about the song, with its electronic perscussion and dreamy synth washes which play against the power chords.

But the real story of the time were the new bands, and few were bigger or more emblematic of the new style than Duran Duran.  Formed in 1978 and named after a character in Barbarella, Duran Duran scored a hit in their native UK in 1981 with “Girls on Film,” but it was barely heard in the US.  But they burst into 1982 with Rio and “Hungry Like the Wolf,” which played over and over and over on the radio stations of the time.  But somehow it wasn’t annoying: it just got better and better.  Spurred on by a great video on the then-nascent MTV and an appearance on SNL, “Hungry Like the Wolf” was #1 in Canada, #3 in the US, #4 in Finland and New Zealand, and #5 in the UK and Australia.  It sold over a million copies in the US alone; it’s been streamed in the UK over 40 million times; its video won the very first Grammy for best video.  VH1 says it was the third best song of the 80s, and Rolling Stone included it on their list of the 500 greatest songs of all time.  While “Rio” was a better song in many ways, and their material of Seven and the Ragged Tiger (such as “Union of the Snake”⁷) was more interesting, there can be no doubt that “Hungry” was fundamentally important: it shook up the scene, and showed that synthy, poppy alt rock could not only be sonically impressive, but cool and sexy and could make money.  I would love to believe that the explosion in alt rock was more about artistic integrity and exploring new musical fusions and all that, but let’s face it: the fact that Duran Duran became mega superstars (and presumably multimillionaires) certainly didn’t hurt.

And so the music starts to diverge more significantly.  Adam and the Ants had always been a bit out there,⁸ and for his first solo effort the former punk turned new wave actually moved just closer enough to mainstream that it would catch on.  Still, “Goody Two Shoes” was pretty distinct from most of the standard offerings.  And what were we to think of one-hit-wonders Men Without Hats and their “Safety Dance”?  My small town couldn’t get cable yet, so I had no MTV: I was reduced to watching Friday Night Videos on NBC.  And I distinctly remember the first time I saw the video for this song;⁹ the “what the fuck is this??” factor was pretty strong for this one.  This was new wave at its weirdest, and that’s saying something, considering new wave is the genre that gave us Devo.  And as for Wall of Voodoo, who were, according to lead singer Stan Ridgway, “on a wavelength far from home,”¹⁰ there was definitely nothing else like “Mexican Radio.”¹¹

This was also the time when I was regularly raiding my father’s reject box, which is primarily what I used to make those Walkman mix tapes.  That may have been where I found “She Blinded Me with Science” (certainly I can’t imagine why else my dad would have had the single); it was absolutely where I found “Reap the Wild Wind” by Ultravox, fronted by Midge Ure, who had formerly toured brifely with Thin Lizzy,¹² and would go on in future years to co-write the first of those charity supergroup songs, “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” “Reap” was #12 in the UK and #10 in Ireland, but peaked at a paltry #71 here in the US, so most of us yanks have never heard it; despite that, it’s a classic new wave tune that deserves wider recognition.

But the most fateful record I plucked out of the reject box was undoubtedly “The One Thing” by INXS.  It wasn’t their pinnacle—“Don’t Change” was more classic, and that album overall was just a prelude to the superb Listen Like Thieves, which would give us the nearly perfect “What You Need”—but “The One Thing” was the first time I heard the band that would go on to define a huge part of my 80s.  INXS is to me one of the four musical corners of the decade, in fact,¹³ and the first one to truly penetrate my consciousness.  From the plaintive wail of Hutchence’s voice to the even more plaintive wail of Pengilly’s sax, INXS is 80s perfection in some fundamental way that is difficult for me to describe.  It’s not really new age, and it’s certainly not synthpop, but it’s amazing, and different, and I’m not sure we ever heard its like again.

For proper Australian new wave, we need to look to Icehouse.  Their excellent Primitive Man was contemporaneous with INXS’ Shabooh Shoobah, but I don’t believe I was aware of them until a few years later, when I started getting serious about filling out my collection.  “Great Southern Land” most likely came to my attention in 1989 when the compilation album of the same name was realeased in the US.  With its individuated synth notes and echoey vocals, it’s a great example of the subgenre.  As is Missing Persons’ “Walking in L.A.”, with Dale Bozzio’s quirky vocals, like Martha Davis (of the Motels¹⁴) cranked up to 11 and twisted slightly out of true.  Of course, “Walking” is a much more jagged version of new wave than “Southern” or “Reap”; for an almost folksy contrast, we go to the Nails, known as one-hit wonders for their “88 Lines About 44 Women,” which, musically isn’t much more than a preprogrammed Casio rhythm track and some harmonized humming, but lyrically was quite adventurous: the “women” in question included Eloise, who “sang songs about whales and cocks,” and Tanya (Turkish), who “liked to fuck while wearing leather biker boots.” And, if you want the Britpop version of new wave, there’s “Love Plus One,” by Haircut One Hundred.  I never really loved this song the way some did, but it was definitely an important milestone for the subgenre, and I have some fond memories of it.

But of course the ultimate new wave classic (for this volume, at any rate¹⁵) is “I Melt with You,” a song so insanely good that it transcends having the stupidest breakdown in musical history (seriously? a humming solo?).  “Melt” is an anthem about making love while the bomb is dropping, and it’s utterly wonderful.  I can’t quite consider Modern English one-hit wonders, even though it’s true that “Melt” was their only top 40 hit in the US (they did much better in their native UK), mainly because I think of a one-hit wonder as having one great song, period.  The rest of the album that that song comes from has to be mediocre at best, at least in my head: a band with even one really great album just doesn’t seem to hit the one-hit mold for me, despite technically fitting the definition.  But After the Snow is brilliant: opener “Someone’s Calling” is a solid offering; “Life in the Gladhouse” is dark and brooding; “Face of Wood” is pretty and melodic; the title track is martial and just slightly off.  But there’s no doubt that “I Melt with You” deserves its spot on just about everyone’s 80s retrospective.  Including mine.

80's My Way III
[ On a Wavelength Far From Home (1982 Pt 2) ]

“The One Thing” by INXS, off Shabooh Shoobah
“Should I Stay or Should I Go” by the Clash, off Combat Rock
“Goody Two Shoes” by Adam Ant, off Friend or Foe
“Hungry Like the Wolf” by Duran Duran, off Rio
“She Blinded Me with Science” by Thomas Dolby [Single]¹⁶
“Electric Avenue” by Eddy Grant [Single]¹⁷
“Shock the Monkey” by Peter Gabriel [Single]
“White Wedding, Part 1” by Billy Idol, off Billy Idol
“Mexican Radio” by Wall of Voodoo [Single]
“Steppin' Out” by Joe Jackson, off Night and Day
“88 Lines about 44 Women” by the Nails [Single]
“Save It for Later” by the English Beat [Single]
“Come On Eileen” by Dexys Midnight Runners [Single]
“The Safety Dance” by Men Without Hats, off Rhythm of Youth
“Reap the Wild Wind” by Ultravox [Single]
“Great Southern Land” by Icehouse, off Primitive Man
“Love Plus One” by Haircut One Hundred [Single]
“I Melt with You” by Modern English, off After the Snow
“Walking in L.A.” by Missing Persons, off Spring Session M
“Twilight Zone [single version]” by Golden Earring [Single]¹⁸

Total:  20 tracks,  82:09

There are two tracks which come close to straight-ahead rock (even more so than “Twilight Zone,” in my opinion): the first is “Shoud I Stay or Should I Go” by the Clash, and the second is the crowning achievement of one William Idol, “White Wedding.” The Clash were theoretically a post-punk band, but, honestly: they were still punk.  Especially for ‘82’s Combat Rock, which include both this classic and “Rock the Casbah.” Mick Jones’ surly lyrics and Joe Strummer’s simple but powerful guitar licks make this a song to rival anything the Sex Pistols or the Ramones came out with.  And what can you say about Billy Idol’s magnum opus?  In many ways, I was more enamored of “Dancing with Myself” at the time, but, man does “White Wedding” really stand up all these years alter.  Also coming out of the British punk scene, Idol and his guitarist Steve Stevens constructed a song that starts with a riff often described as “ominous,” breathy vocals, and background vocalizations, eventually building to that trademark Idol scream at just shy of the 2-minute mark.  Still capable of giving me the shivers decades later.

For further stretching the boundaries of what “alternative” can connote, the English Beat (of course known in Britain as simply “the Beat”) were one of the foremost purveyors of two-tone.  While Madness and the Specials were doing more or less straightforward ska, the Beat were doing songs like “Save It for Later” (which I’ve used here), and the earlier “Mirror in the Bathroom,” which infused some new wave sensibilities into the ska rhythms.  Turning instead to alternative jazz, Joe Jackson has had a tendency to reinvent himself on just about every album.  Whereas Look Sharp! was more poppy, and Jumpin’ Jive was swing and jump blues,¹⁹ his entry for 1982, Night and Day, was in many ways a modern inflection on old jazz standards (AllMusic’s Stephen Thomas Erlewine compares it several times to Cole Porter).  “Steppin’ Out” is cool, breezy, jazzy, and, as the name implies, nocturnal.  There is a bit of new wave flair in it, but it’s a light touch.  I thought it was a nifty song at the time; it was only some years later, when I heard the entire album, that I truly began to appreciate Jackson’s genius.

And that only leaves us with what must surely be the most improbable success of the year, “Come on Eileen” by Dexys Midnight Runners.  Dexys struggled with finding its image and tone for several years before settling on the coveralls that became their trademark style.  Their instrumentation was all over the place: a strong contingent of Celtic/country (banjo, mandolin, accordian, and two or more fiddles) but also a touch of brass (saxophone, flute, and trombone).  The album that spawned “Eileen” credits 11 musicians, not even counting backing vocals.  Speaking as someone who owns the dubiously named Very Best of Dexys Midnight Runners, I can tell you that it contains 19 tracks, and two of them are great—the second being their cover of Van Morrison’s “Jackie Wilson Said”—and 17 of them are absolute shit.  How this eclectic mess managed to stumble into a #1 hit in 8 countries, best selling single of the year in the UK, declared later by VH1 as the third greatest one-hit wonder of all time, and the sixth favorite 1980s #1 hit by ITV poll ... how this band did all that is anyone’s guess.  It’s a complex song, with key changes and tempo changes, rapid-fire lyrics, blazing fast fiddling, brass fills, and piano glissandoes.  It’s both unlike all the other music extant at the time and quintessentially 80s.  Almost everyone who was alive at the time will sing along when it comes on, despite the fact that very few of us know more than a few words.  It’s just that catchy.  That was just the state of music in 1982.

Next time, we’ll return to dreamland.

⇐ 80s My Way II

80s My Way IV ⇒

__________

1 One might argue that Heart did it better.  But, as Heart blossomed more into stadium rock than the synth-infused alt-rock that Hall & Oates was so successful at, we won’t feature them on this mix.

2 The other will have to wait for us to reach 1985.

3 Remember, my father was a record collector, so making mix tapes was a skill I learned at a fairly young age.  They weren’t very good mix tapes, of course, but everyone has to start somewhere.

4 According to Wikipedia.

5 As was Fleetwood Mac, I suppose.

6 Here’s a typical example.

7 But not “The Reflex”; that song is just annoying.

8 In fact, I almost threw in “Stand and Deliver” as my choice for Ant.  But in the end I decided to wait for this one.

9 Which was, apparently, some time after it came out, since FNV didn’t start till ‘83.

10 Title drop.

11 Fun fact: I used to have a friend who fantasized about an imaginary 80s song which was a duet between Stan Ridgway and Fred Schneider of the B-52’s.  Try imagining “Mexican Radio” with Schneider interjecting “Mexican radio, baby!” in between lines of the chorus.  It’s fun.

12 And sang for Rich Kids, the band Glen Matlock formed after he left the Sex Pistols.  Ghosts of Princes in Towers is damnably hard to find, but well worth it in my opinion.  Its title track was a little too early to land on this mix, but it was defnitely an early harbinger.

13 We’ll see the other three corners when we get to 1984 and 1986.

14 Who we heard from last volume.

15 I’m going to make a strong case for Icicle Works’ “Whisper to a Scream” being the ultimatest new wave song of all time when we get to 1984.

16 The single is probably sufficient, though The Golden Age of Wireless is not a bad pick-up either.

17 Unlike Toni Basil’s “Mickey,” even the single of this song is not easy to find.  However, Killer on the Rampage is pretty nifty, if you’re willing to put in the extra effort (second best track: “I Don’t Wanna Dance”).  Or, as always, just go to YouTube.

18 Make sure to get the “single version” of this track.  The album version is nearly twice as long, and that’s not to its credit.

19 You may recall hearing a lot of the latter album on Salsatic Vibrato.

Paradoxically Sized World VI

"I Can Dream the Rest Away"

[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.]

My opening line for the the last installment of this mix was this:

Can you believe it’s been just over 3 years since we last saw an installment in my LittleBigPlanet-inspired mix?

And that was, ironically ... almost three years ago.  So I guess we can believe it, eh?  Look for PSW VII sometime in early 2026, I suppose.

This is just one of those mixes that started strong and has slowly petered out.  My middle child, for whom this was always their favorite of my mixes, has moved on to other music, and, honestly, my tastes in mostly wordless electronica run way more towards downtempo: basically, this music, entirely designed to make you feel like you’re in a happy little videogame like its inspiration LittleBigPlanet, is often just way too upbeat for me.

Still, there’s a time and place (and mood) for nearly all types of music, and I still reach for this mix every now and again.  You might think I’d be running out of actual music from LBP to seed the volumes with by this point, but the truth is that there’s 3 main games, plus the two portable versions (PSP and PS Vita), and, the one that I lean most heaviy on this time around, LBP Kart.  Kart gives us a whopping 4 tracks this time out, so let’s start there.

LBP Kart is exactly what you think it is: the LBP version of Mario Kart.  It’s a driving/racing game, so it’s quite different from the cute little platformers that comprise all the other installments in the franchise.  And the music is different as well—could Fishbone’s “Skankin’ to the Beat,” for instance, ever have made it into a “normal” LBP game?  Doesn’t seem that likely.  Actually, even “Fresh” by Devo is (unusually for them) a bit frenetic and punky.  Driving games require a whole ’nother vibe when it comes to music: you want fast-paced music that inspires speed and those daring feats of roadwork that are best left to videogames because you’d die in a fiery crash if you tried them in real life.  Crashes in driving games are more funny than scary, so that frenzied beat that you find in the punky reggae of Fishbone or the punky synthpop of Devo is perfect.  You know what else has that crazy energy?  Dubstep.  In this case, “Odessa Dubstep,” by Liverpool house/D&B group Apollo 440.  All 3 of these tracks have a beat which is driving (pun only half intended) and intense; the game itself uses instrumental versions, but I’ve gone with the original vocal version in all cases (as I typically do in this mix).  All these factors combine to mean that this is perhaps the most head bangin’, almost danceable, volume of this mix so far.  Its character diverges sharply from previous installments, at the same time that it’s still noticeably upbeat videogame-inspired electronica.

One of the consequences of that is it’s given me a chance to include a few tracks that I had had slotted for this mix but just never seemed to work on any of the other volumes.  Probably the best example of that is Finland’s Nightwish, whose metal tune “Whoever Brings the Night” was used in LBP2.  As boss battle music, it was okay for it to be a bit more intense than the other tracks in that game, but it meant that it really stood out in my other volumes (which, you know, don’t really have boss battles embedded in them).  Now, Nightwish is often described as “symphonic metal”—and I think that pretty well describes “Whoever Brings the Night,” with its operatic-adjacent choral background vocals, barely noticeable woodwinds, and interesting orchestral percussion.  Add back in Anette Olzon’s excellent vocals and it becomes a heavy metal anthem which still fits right in with the rest of the mix, amazingly.

Another track which fit nicely here was “Toccata” by Canadian electronica artist OVERWERK (the stage name for Edmond Huszar).  OVERWERK was introduced to me by another coworker, who is more into the EDM and techno side of electronica.  A lot of OVERWERK’s stuff isn’t my bag, but this take on Bach’s famous Toccata and Fugue in D Minor is pretty awesome.  As is “Best Fish Tacos in Ensenada,” another track from LBP Kart, this time by British DJ Freeland.  It’s a hard driving EDM tune that makes a nice lead-in to “Odessa Dubstep.” Finally, Chicago’s Tortoise is usually described as “post-rock,” but to me it mostly sounds like a 2000’s update of prog rock—“Prepare Your Coffin” (used in LBP PSV), for instance, sounds like it’d be right at home alongside early Yes, or perhaps Emerson Lake & Palmer.  Hard to fit that vibe into other volumes, but it seemed perfectly comfortable here.

There’s also a fair amount of music from other LBP bands that we’ve seen on this mix before.  You may remember Ochre from their track “Sosacharo,” which was the opener for volume V; well, I actually discovered them after hearing their song used in LBP2, “Infotain Me,” which I planted right in the opening third this time ‘round.  I followed that up with Ratatat, a band who I now can’t remember how I discovered, but it surely must have somehow been related to LBP, because their music is so perfect for this mix.  We heard “Flynn” last volume; this volume’s track is “Dura,” which starts out with a sort of synth harpsichord riff, then explodes into happy electronic tones.  Likewise, we’ve seen Plaid twice before on this mix,¹ but the first time I ever heard them was LBP2’s use of “New Family,” a mellow yet still upbeat piece of electronica that I felt worked nicely into our closing third.  Röyksopp I also discovered via LBP;² “In Space” is a very mellow, almost spacey, track which leads us nicely into our closer.  Ugress is appearing here for the fourth time; after discovering the Norweigian wonder via his track for the PSV,³ I’ve sort of fallen in love with him.  “Apocalypse Please Wait Buffering” is exactly the sort of non-bridge bridge track that he’s so good at: with a slow build for a nearly a minute, it then bursts into a percussion-heavy thrash-adjacent groove that’s the perfect lead-in to Nightwish.

As for other artists who don’t derive specifically from LBP but that we’ve seen on this mix before, probably the most obvious is Bonobo.  I honestly can’t believe this brilliant British DJ and purveryor of amazing downtempo has never been featured in an LBP game: so much of his music seems perfectly suited for it that I’ve already used him twice so far,⁴ and here he takes the honor of closer.  “Nothing Owed” is a sax-driven, meditative but not sad, mellow track, puncutated by an acoustic guitar riff which is just a perfect way to close out this volume.  And the only other band to appear on this mix 3 or more times (including this one) without ever appearing in an actual LBP game is Combustible Edison, the lounge-exotica-electronica band who we’ve heard multiple times on other mixes⁵ as well as twice before here.⁶  “Solid State” (like much of CE’s output) sounds like it’s from a 50s sci-fi show.  It makes a nice transition from the center stretch of more intense songs into the gentler closing third.

For artists just appearing for the second time, you may recall my speaking of Monster Rally before; I discovered them via my old cable company’s “Zen” music channel, and had had “Panther” down for this mix forever before I finally managed to work it in last volume.⁷  This volume’s pick is a short but happy little bridge called “Paradise”: it makes a nice lead-in to the Ochre/Ratatat pairing.  And finally Smokey Bandits have appeared all over these mixes⁸ before they finally showed up last volume.  I squeezed “Revolucion Valiente” in between Apollo 440 and Fishbone because its strong, brassy, spaghetti Western feel could take it.

Paradoxically Sized World VI
[ I Can Dream the Rest Away ]

“Carefree” by Kevin MacLeod, off Calming
“Egg Nog” by Luna [Single]⁹
“Neopolitan Dreams” by Lisa Mitchell, off Wonder

PSV

“Paradise” by Monster Rally, off Return to Paradise
“Infotain Me” by Ochre, off Lemodie

2

“Dura” by Ratatat, off LP3
“Fresh” by DEVO [Single]

Kart

“Toccata” by OVERWERK [Single]
“Apocalypse Please Wait Buffering” by Ugress, off Reminiscience
“Whoever Brings the Night” by Nightwish [Single]

2

“Main Title” by Xcyril, off StarGate Odyssea
“Best Fish Tacos in Ensenda” by Freeland [Single]

Kart

“Odessa Dubstep” by Apollo 440 [Single]

Kart

“Revolucion Valiente” by Smokey Bandits, off Debut
“Skankin' to the Beat” by Fishbone [Single]

Kart

“Solid State” by Combustible Edison, off Schizophonic!
“New Family” by Plaid, off Double Figure

2

“Prepare Your Coffin” by Tortoise [Single]

PSV

“In Space” by Röyksopp, off Melody A.M.
“Nothing Owed” by Bonobo, off Dial 'M' for Monkey

Total:  20 tracks,  77:23

I wouldn’t want to imply that there’s anything too surprising here, but I will note that hearing Australian Idol contestant Lisa Mitchell show up in an LBP game was surprising to me; I mean, generally speaking, her music is more suited to, say, Sirenexiv Cola.¹⁰  But “Neopolitan Dreams” is a jaunty 3 minutes that, once stripped of vocals, you could imagine popping up behind Sackboy’s adventures (which it did, in the PSP version).  The use of a celesta (or similar toy-piano-adjacent instrument) just gives it that extra layer that makes it fit in so well here.  (Plus it handily provides our volume title.)

And I decided that the Mitchell tune should be the culmination of a very happy opening triad, sort of the bridge to past volumes.  I absolutely had to start with “Carefree” by Kevn MacLeod; because of MacLeod’s habit of releasing his music royalty-free, it gets used in an amazingly large number of YouTube videos, and “Carefree” is so close in sound to Lullatone’s iconic “Race Against the Sunset” (which was used in LBP3 and was the opener for volume IV), “Carefree” is used in a metric shit-ton of fan videos about LBP, because creators know they won’t get demonetized for using LBP’s actual (copyrighted) music.  So it’s an obvious choice for opener here.  That flows nicely into “Egg Nog,” by Luna, also known as “what the founder of Galaxie 500 got up to in the 90s.” “Egg Nog” is theoretically a Christmas tune, but it’s not overtly seasonal (aside from starting with the shaking of some sleigh bells), and is probably not particularly typical of Luna’s output.  But it’s a happy little tune that slots beautifully between “Carefree” and “Neapolitan Dreams.”

And that just leaves us with Xcyril, a French composer who does the occasional soundtrack and otherwise releases neoclassical works that feel like they ought to be soundtracks to something.  So far we’ve only heard from him on Phantasma Chorale, but his “Main Title” for what appears to be a Stargate fan-film series is short, sweet, and very videogame-y.  I’m not entirely sure why I thought it would fit between the Finnish goth-metal and the British EDM, but I actually think it works.

Next time, let’s dip our toes back into that pool that is the 80s.

⇐ Paradoxically Sized World V

Paradoxically Sized World VII ⇒

__________

1 Once on volume II and once last volume.

2 “Vision One,” their track from last volume, was used in LBP2.

3 “Ghost Von Frost,” which we heard on volume IV.

4 Once on volume I and once on volume II.

5 So far: Salsatic Vibrato V, Phantasma Chorale I (twice), Phantasma Chorale II, and Snaptone Glimmerbeam I.

6 Specifically, volumes III and IV.

7 Besides “Panther,” Monster Rally has also showed up so far on Gramophonic Skullduggery I and Apparently World I.

8 Specifically, Salsatic Vibrato VI, Shadowfall Equinox II and IV, Gramophonic Skullduggery I, and Snaptone Glimmerbeam I.

9 As usual, I hate to link only to YouTube, but there doesn’t seem to be anywhere else to get this track.

10 In point of fact, “Clean White Love” does appear there.