i got to say, love shack is the most played-out of played-out tunes. but i couldn’t help but fall in love with it all over again when i got distracted with some pitch-shifting while putting together my bro’s playlist. simple pleasures, folks, simple pleasures. here’s what i’m talking about:

its not quite a screw, but you know. i’ve always had a sneaking suspicion love shack was meant to be sung by an all male choir, and this is a step closer. for some reason i can’t get this guy out of my head when i listen to it, brian, hank kingsley’s assistant:

wonder why that is.

MP3: B-52s – Love Shack Screw

but here’s a real screw, and a real heavy-hitter. this is bona fide, knock-it-out-of-the-park amazing type shit! god bless dutty artz for posting this earlier in the year. i’ll admit to having a serious soft spot for alicia keys, but this takes this song to a whole other planet. this is the kind of song that can keep me going when things get tough, know what i mean? this is something i can get behind. i feel better every single damned time i listen to this. i’m posting it here because you can no longer get it from dutty artz.

MP3: Alicia Keys – No One (Mike Watts screw)

screwing is about slowing songs down, but i can’t bear to hear any more of love shack than absolutely necessary so, yeah, original tempo. in fact, recently i’m all about shortening songs. like, for example, did you know that “horses” by daryl braithwaite is waaay more palatable when condensed down to 1 minute and 9 seconds?

MP3: Daryl Braithwaite – Horses (Time Poor edit)

MP3: Hall & Oates – Maneater (Time Poor edit)

this all reminds me of the time i condensed my 60 minute JJJ mix up set down to 7 minutes. imagine if itunes or winamp or whatever just had a button you could press that says “condense music” and it just compacted what you were listening to into a fraction of its running time. we’d get so much more done.

and lastly, i found this great 7 minute megamix of “i wanna dance with somebody.” in fact, on a p2p network that shall remain nameless, i found no less than TEN remixes of this track, all neatly packaged together by some dude. its 70 minutes of i wanna dance with somebody. most of it sounds way to queer eye soundtrack for my liking – this is the pick of the bunch. no trickery here, just seriously intense 80s pop remixing. the best bit is about 5 minutes in, where it just becomes this intense drum machine workout and some dude yelling at me over and over “dance, dance, d-d-d-dance”

MP3: Whitney Houston – I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Hot Tracks mix)

i’m seriously RIAA-baiting with this post. methinks i’m about to trigger a wide variety of alerts on RIAA automated blog piracy detection bot programs. note to tim’s ISP: prepare to receive correspondence! shit i’ve even said RIAA a couple of times in this paragraph so no doubt they’ll be checking me out.

simple pleasures.

i listened to the moody blues a lot when i was a kid because of my dad. i think actually that we were both exposed to the moody blues at the same time in our childhoods – he, an impressionable kid when “nights in white satin” was on the airwaves the first time, me about the same age when he started to bring home the remastered CDs in the late 80s.

lets start with the obvious, in case you’re drawing blanks on the moody blues completely. after a flop debut album, the moody blues recruited a symphony orchestra to make a rock version of dvorak’s new world symphony (their label’s idea). the dvorak connection was lost, they ended up making orchestral psychedelic pop songs, and the album “days of future passed” spawned the mega-hit “nights in white satin.” here’s a promo clip for the original 1967 single edit, shot at least partially in paris. i get chills.

Video: The Moody Blues – Nights in White Satin (1967)

they scaled back the orchestral overtones for the following album “in search of the lost chord” and instead upped the hippie factor. yes, its a concept album about trying to find the ‘lost chord’ – i don’t want to ruin the ending but, they do find it, and it turns out to be ‘om.’ despite this vomit-inducing revelation there’s much pop greatness on this record. here they are on the bbc show colour me pop, miming the opening track on the record “ride my see-saw.” its introduced here, as on the record, with a poem.

Video: The Moody Blues – Ride My See-Saw (1968)

gosh they are a handsome bunch. in particular, check out the smooth dance moves of the moustachioed ray thomas, the band’s flutist. and justin hayward busts out a mean guitar solo. the moody blues shared around the songwriting duties in a fairly democratic fashion. never mind the fact that its generally the honey-eyed sickly-sweet ballads of justin hayward that pull focus, its the esoteric contributions from the less pop-idol members of the band that make their records intriguing. check this tribute to timothy leary, also from “in search of the lost chord”, which incidentally is my favourite song featuring my own name in the lyrics:

Video: The Moody Blues – Legend of a Mind (1968)

“a question of balance”, the fourth record, opens with an absolute belter. thats what craig huggins would probably refer to it as. i find this track really curious actually, because its possibly the most forthright and commanding pop song that they’d written to this point – its the moody blues equivalent of ball-tearing, frenzied acoustic strumming, intense orchestral flourishes, and justin hayward getting, like, totally in your face about the world, like:

Why do we never get an answer
When were knocking at the door?
With a thousand million questions
About hate and death and war.

Its where we stop and look around us
There is nothing that we need.
In a world of persecution
That is burning in its greed.

fuck yeah! but the song just dies about half way through, basically they cut and paste a syrupy ballad into its middle. its like taking the heart of a puppy and transplanting it into a dragon – the dragon is weakened, and a perfectly good puppy (that if left alone would probably have been very cute and been doted on by many handsome ladies) is left for dead. you’ll know what i’m talking about – feel free to skip the middle bit:

Video: The Moody Blues – Question (1970)

i could really go on forever here, but go forth and enjoy yourself with the moodies, there’s plenty more surprises for you to uncover in the first four or five albums from the moody catalogue. plenty more stuff on youtube. there are drum breaks to be had for those who are that way inclined. also, one of the moody’s was one of the first mellotron reps and pioneered the use of the instrument live and on these records.

but i leave you with a part of their legacy that unfortunately can’t be denied, and its that they just went off in the 80s, not like pat benatar going off or metallica going off, but like milk going off. innumerable lineup changes and an unhealthy obsession with 80s synths and production techniques led the moodies down a dark path i’m afraid. like jethro tull, basically everything they released in the late 70s and through the 80s sounds like it was written by a team of trained monkeys and recorded in a septic tank. there is one exception to this – an album called “long distance voyager” released in 1981 (the year of my birth – coincidence? i think not) thats probably best described as a guilty pleasure. its a rarity though in that its an early 80s album that doesn’t sound like dick.

but look, the descent into 80s pop balladry and 90s dinosaur band mentality is their true history and i’ll share a bit of it now – the rather hideous “i know you’re out there somewhere” from 1988:

Video: The Moody Blues – I Know You’re Out There Somewhere (1988)

moody blues i love you.

made a wormhole this morning. sending a ship down it now :) i don’t know what stephen hawkings was on about. it’s not THAT hard!

a photo posted at the zeal blog provides more clues. for real, this is like some “dark knight” style viral marketing puzzle type shit for you. for example, at 54.3, a cat will be seen. at one point there will either be a long shot or a long shoe. and at 55…. re-unite! i’m not sure exactly what bob is re-uniting in this film clip, but i know i’m not the only one who hopes that it will be korea:

speaking of cats, and space…

i might upload my character sheet later in the week if you are really lucky.

thanks to the people who have left comments on the blog in the last few weeks, particularly those who went the extra mile with some thoughtful responses to my rant on ‘transparent costs of production’ and free music and whatnot. and here i was thinking that the only people who read this blog were complete imbeciles. some of you have brains in your heads. i’d respond to your comments except that i have spent the last weekend watching the 2020 summit, which resulted in an equivalent effect to me having had a complete brain amputation. nah fo serious, i will try and respond to youse bitches with some thoughtfully rendered articulations and shit.

here are 11 things i’m currently loving:
- wax stag! i’m digging sound and safe on wfmu with trent, here is his show featuring the genius of wax stag
- arp – in light easily my favourite album of the year so far
- four tet – don’t think about it too much just enjoy it
- moonbeam “slow heart” and sascha funke “mango” – ditto
- hot chip – one pure thought (supermayer remix)
- kraftwerk – ralf and florian 1973. this is the first kraftwerk album i’ve heard and actually loved rather than just ‘appreciated’ as all of us electronic types are meant to ‘appreciate’ kraftwerk. i love them but this is the first album i’ve heard of theirs thats hit a nerve with me. i tracked it down after seeing it on a list that arp made for dusted magazine – his other recommendations (jards macale, franco battiato, group inerane) are similarly spot on.
- babatunde olatunji drums of passion 1959. so fresh!
- herbie hancock – sextant 1972. so stale! god herbie was a massive dork
- stevie nicks – edge of seventeen

yeah stevie nicks. i really love that a lot of the 70s and 80s film clips uploaded to youtube come from worn and weary VHS tapes that have seen far better days. the scratches and wobbles make for instant nostalgia for those of us who used to tape video hits onto VHS every weekend:

ahh thats only ten things. number eleven: house of cosbys.
ok. more soon!

LUDO FRIEND

hey bob! check this out!

i myself grew up on the c64 version of labyrinth. i could never get very far in it though – this was a pretty recurring theme for me playing commodore 64 games. i was not a good gamer. i tended to give up when things got hard, which is a philosophy that i have tried hard to carry over into my adult life. things would be much easier if david bowie visited me in a freaky dream

one thing i had forgotten was how the melody of the track dropped out whenever you triggered a sound effect – ie by throwing a grenade, or powering up. so cool. i had also forgotten that the game had only, like, three levels. so it only takes 3 minutes to sit and watch reinhard blast the hell out of all the pixelated military sprite dudes..

but a couple of things have happened this week that makes me think i need to get my head back into that.

first up, while preparing to interview luke disasteradio – yes, theres that name again, he pays me in virtual synths every time i mention his name on this blog – i rediscovered my favourite commodore 64 computer game theme, commando. if you ever played c64, you probably played commando. when we played it during luke’s interview, one of the other announcers came in to the studio saying “i’ve played this game… what is it?!” its a song that never leaves you. this game i played a lot when i was a kid, though i could never get past the first few levels. i didn’t realise it at the time, but now i’m positive, that the reason i kept going back to it despite the fact that i was so shithouse at it was obviously just to hear rob hubbard’s amazing theme song over and over and over:

MP3: Rob Hubbard – Commando

what is amazing about this track, and i guess about all computer game music from this era, is how the composers could make such compelling and innovative songs using only the barest of building blocks. they were under such restrictions in terms of the sounds at their disposal – they were literally constructing music out of the tiniest shards of electrical noise. so they squeezed everything they could out of melody and rhythm. recently several groups have rather infamously started transposing the old commodore 64 game themes into orchestral arrangements.. eg the c64 orchestra… but there is actually something about the original distorted proto-digital sound that i find really inviting and comforting. but i guess thats all about memory, as most things tend to be, that really its just the way this song evokes so vividly a piece of my childhood, thats why it gets my rocks off so severely.

the second thing thats happened – and i see this to be some marvellous confluence of mystical energies that led these two things to happen in such temporal proximity – or perhaps it was a coincidence – it actually happened just a couple of hours ago when i got an email from marcus asking me about my EP changes (i hope he doesn’t mind me quoting some of his email here):

Incidentally, have you ever played the video game ‘Secret Of Mana’ or heard the soundtrack? The first time I heard Changes on the radio it immediately reminded me of a song from that game, which is why I like it so much. Listening to the rest of the EP, it sounds like it was very ‘Secret Of Mana’ inspired. Is this the case, or is it a fluke that they have similarities?

this is seriously one of the coolest things i’ve ever heard about my own music! i’ve managed to do a little bit of googling and tracked down some info about secret of mana, which i’ll be honest i haven’t played before. i think it was a super nintendo game – i never hooked into that generation of consoles to be honest. for me it went C64… xbox… neverwinter nights. and not much in between. except for civilisation. railroad tycoon 2- that shit is hot! but i digress. secret of mana:

The game’s soundtrack was composed by Hiroki Kikuta, and is perhaps his most famous work[citation needed]. It is known for its variety of tunes which tend to focus on the use of percussion and woodwind instruments, ranging from a lighthearted dwarves’ polka to a somber, wistful snow melody to a tribal-like dance.

my music sounds like a dwarven polka! if only! though i will admit – “tunes which tend to focus on the use of percussion and woodwind instruments” – this is not so far from the mark given the liberal doses of sampled drums and flutes that litter the track “changes” and also just most of my stuff in general. anyway, thanks so much marcus for making my day!

the secret of mana soundtrack can actually be downloaded in its entirety from this website. i’m just starting to give it a few spins and some of it is great stuff. here are a couple of samples to whet your appetite:

MP3: Hiroki Kikuta – Dancing Animals (Goblin Theme) (from Secret of Mana)

MP3: Hiroki Kikuta – Into the Thick Of It (from Secret of Mana)