Day 85: Tangerine Dream – The Dream Mixes (I)

Music is a subject rife with things to know. For instance, your favorite modern band (let’s call them OLED Megaphone) could have grown up listening to (let’s call them) The Quimbowls, who grew up listening to Total Recall On VHS, who were hugely influenced by Krautrock, which was a bunch of people reacting to let’s say one pivotal band. Some butterfly flaps his wings and blows the fuzz off a dandelion, and those wisps falling into the breeze are all the things you don’t know about everything you love, as you grab for one and the displaced air sends them scattering further. I’m finding it a lot like that trying to learn about music. Just when I think I’m starting to learn things, I get this album for the day, do a little research, and find out that Tangerine Dream was probably the very butterfly that kicked up half the bands I love nowadays.

HUGE DISCLAIMER FOR THIS ALBUM, WHICH SHOULD BE EMBLAZONED ON ITS JEWEL CASE OR SLEEVE OR THE INCLUDED .TXT FILE: Warning. This album is highly sensitive to your listening equipment. If you disrespect it by trying to listen to it on budget speakers, it will sound a lot like something you’d hear while on hold to take a Target Customer Glad-isfaction survey. For your own sanity, wear headphones or have weapons-grade speakers handy.

Which is to say I spent about three hours listening to this thing on my speakers (not the aforelinked, but scarcely any better) and was ready to write it off as offensively boring, like some Kitaro outtakes CD. And then I put my headphones on.

While songs like “Rough Embrace” and “Jungle Journey” do sound like what might have been stock audio for a rave scene in a 1990s movie, their sonic palettes sounding extremely dated, or basically antique at this point, Tangerine Dream understands how to make that not matter at all. The group waves fistfuls of glow-sticks, creating sound excursions that show off the group’s extensive experience in doing soundtracks. They know how to make a seven minute song positively chug.

From what else I’ve read I’ve gathered that this album is not quite indicative of Tangerine Dream’s overall style. They seem to be more about sedate ambient soundscapes (and a brief listen to their 5-starred-on-Allmusic Phaedra confirms this) and technical alchemy:

The title track was originally based on an improvisation that happened to be recorded in the studio, and unintentionally exhibits one of the limitations of the analog equipment used at the time. As the equipment warmed up, some of the oscillators began to detune (they were highly temperature-sensitive), which was responsible for some of the changes in the music towards the end of the piece.”

FUCKIN’ COOL. How does that translate into dance music? The brains in the group apparently reside in bodies that like to dance, because this shit would kill at the roller rink, with some lasers popping off the disco ball and the fog machine in full swing. You might think that is some condescending remark intended to relegate this album to venues that are ostensibly merriment-oriented without having the savviest grasp on how to party. It is not. I want to buy a roller rink, install a great sound system in it, place 48 or more fog machines around the perimeter of the rink itself, and have them all discharging in a staggered rotation so that there is never not fog bellowing onto the floor. I want to perhaps ingest drugs while I do this, and probably wear very little in the way of clothes. I want for the roller rink to be inadequately ventilated. If this doesn’t sound enticing to you, keep in mind these tunes would be applicable to any other format of rhythm/dance/undulation-oriented party.

Also, as the previous two hours of my very finite life can attest, this is also great music to blare while watching corgi tetherball over and over again.

Day 83: Delorean – Subiza

I wonder what people will think when they listen back on the chillwave wave of 2010. Will this music sound as disco does to most ears, completely incongruous with any mode of existence that seems reasonable? Who would listen to this? Why? Were the people of 2010 driving around in convertibles with the top down on sunny days all year? Did global warming give us a surfeit of beach days?

Was there a beach blanket boom?

Sometimes sounds just come together, though, and one band does something, another does it better, and then another still combines everything so far, and a genre that hasn’t celebrated its anniversary suddenly seems to have traversed a clear arc to get to you, when you may not have even seen its point A or B.

Here, Delorean achieves just that. Sounding like a mashup DJ “best of 2010” mix tailored to the greatest desert-island party you couldn’t afford the helicopter fare to, Subiza flawlessly conveys a shitload of every positive human feeling I can think of.

catharsis (pluralcatharses)

noun

1. (drama) A release of emotionaltension after an overwhelmingvicarious experience, resulting in the purging or purification of the emotions, as through watching a dramaticproduction (especially a tragedy). Coined in this sense by Aristotle.

These guys have that shit down. Their amalgamation of the best elements of indie rock, house music, and MDMA-fueled revelry absolutely shines with light, serrating its seams, and just about every song has some great release. They have a wide range of techniques and a deft hand with them, because this album never falls into the cycle of some (even good) techno records where every track seems to be an excuse to pitch an insane breakdown. Rather, the songs on Subiza just swell and swell with joy, gibbering giggles from your mouth. “Come Wander” is the soundtrack to a caper if I’ve ever heard one; “Grow” rescues one of the despairing female voices from a Burial track and washes her in honey; the songs abound with almost-excessively multi-tracked handclaps, synths, tribal drums, and Merriweather Post Pavilion-esque party klaxons; “Simple Graces” sends rays of giddy guitar to Heaven where they bounce off of Heaven’s force field and fall back to earth, heating to 350 degrees above absolute chill and pouring on the heads of Molly-munching trust-fund teenagers — kids unsullied by disappointment, whose skins are thick from caress — on their third tour of Ibiza, raining on them like the tears of a mother reunited with the child that was kidnapped from its cradle and kept hostage by Basque terrorists for three years, bringing them — at long, long last, the wait having driven her to the brink of emotional collapse — shuddering into each others arms.

Delorean’s lyrics are pretty terrible, though, but they’re Spanish, and what’s more important is they speak music.

Day 69: Gossip – Standing in the Way of Control

Once upon a time I got paid to dance around like a kid with a snake in his sneaker while I made pizza for drunks who hated me. In that time I cultivated a taste for dance music, finding it to be music that is quite like, well, pizza, where even the most appalling microwaved K-Mart Food Court personal pan pizza (brandless) is still pizza, and deftly scratches a spot for which only that delectable edible platter of forcemeats, post-lactation, and tomato mash has the fingers for — goddamn I am hungry right now — the point being that in the crummiest example of the medium, unless they are some subversive artsy band who seek the dance of the mind and find beats crass and superfluous, it can still get your stupid hips colliding with objects and people.

Was dancing cool in the 90s? Fuck, I don’t think so. I’m gonna have to fall back on my usual “pre-conscious” excuse, reminding one that my only three really vivid memories of pop culture in the 90s are:

• Watching Ronin Warriors while seeing how fast I could wear out the batteries on the TV remote by pressing “mute” as rapidly as my thumb could manage
• Seeing the “Paranoid Android” video for the first time and my face presumably contorting into a grim rictus of fascination and horror
• That fucking baby

So while I can safely assume that people didn’t just stop dancing for a decade until The Rapture hit the scene, the pandemic spread of three-piece drum kits and dirty tube-driven bass amps that found new popularity in recording studios and led to insecure white kids learning how much fun it was to not be such fucking mopes for a goddamn minute. Good decade, guys. Anyway, the whole stripped-down garage rock aesthetic was a perfect place for this dance revival to take place, as it was just White Stripes enough to trick rhythmically-averse people into nodding in time to it. Gossip do little to expand on that formula (singer, drummer, guitarist, and a metronome somewhere ticking incessantly in the drummer’s worst nightmares) but, fortunately, don’t much have to. Beth Ditto has one of those voices that sounds forever out of place, always bigger than whatever band mates are trying not to ballast it. Across these ten hasty tracks, Ditto threatens to run away with the songs time and time again, and almost derails the whole thing as many times over. Her intense vocal stylings (her stirring gospel caterwauling on “Coal to Diamonds“, her slow-boil on “Listen Up!” and many others) thrill, and steal the show time and time again, for better or worse.

The unfortunate thing is that though her voice can carry the songs to new heights, she doesn’t have anything to offer to it. That is to say her lyrics are utterly hollow, a fact that thankfully her voice is acrobatic enough to disguise. No matter what she is or isn’t saying, though, the band absolutely kicks it out. Almost every song is compellingly danceable, though things do tend to lean more toward the rock side of things. The whole package is almost ashamed of its dance tendencies, not fully committed to the dance. Listening to the way they come out of the bridge in the title track (~3:14) and hearing them just unselfconsciously sweep-kicking the dance floor, I found myself wanting much, much more of this, just this perfect syncopated, joint-jerking dance funk, and much less of Ditto and the awkward attempts at headbanging. Who knows — if only she was less talented, if she had more of a reason to use her voice besides the fact that she has it, this imbalance might not exist.

Day 46: Lizzy Mercier Descloux – Press Color

What an odd album. I listened to it all day before I did any research on it, and I was befuddled at its complete lack of congruity — how it opened with the kind of punk-disco rager that LCD Soundsystem filled 3 albums recreating, and then proceeded to forget how to dance and transitioned into a well-rendered Mission Impossible theme song cover. Very strange. The latter half of the album barely sounded like it was even the same band, being filled with toneless noise experiments that seemed to be canvases for drugged-up spoken word performances. I figured it was some sort of Best Of, a compilation of tracks plucked from several different albums. It was so hard to orient myself to the experience of the music, so hard to interpret what kind of anything it was trying to say, that it kept me from really grasping it as a cohesive album.

Turns out that’s because this re-issue had a few quirks: One being that they arbitrarily re-arranged the tracks from the sequencing on the original LP, cutting up a number of track transitions recorded into the songs, and putting “Fire“, a cover they did perhaps jokingly that absolutely tears, at the forefront. The result is that it creates an expectation that the rest of the album can only disappoint, whereas if this had been buried on the back half as on the original one would be pleasantly surprised by it after the quirky new-wave of the rest of the thing. The other is that it includes Lizzy’s original, obscure release, the Rosa Yemen EP, which explains the mess of weird and mostly uninteresting shit at the end.

Yes, I pretty much just ended up wanting the whole disc to be 7 or 8 different renditions of “Fire“. I haven’t listened to LCD Soundsystem in months, but they have sowed the seeds of a thousand euphoric, dance-fueled memories in my stupid sentimental brain. I spent a while earlier just playing the first 15 seconds of “Fire” over and over again. Perhaps this is kind of cheating.

But what a disservice this re-sequencing did to the album’s integrity, holy shit. I haven’t even really heard the rest of the thing, for how fixated I am on the awesome disco-punk of the new opening track. Which is too bad, because it’s an intriguing disc overall. “No Golden Throat” sounds like a rehearsal of a good idea for a jam that turned out to be more entertaining than the actual song they planned on making it. The album gets its groove back with the chase-scene surf-disco “Wawa“, and closes with the straight-faced jazz sendup “Tumour” and the sexy, agitated “Aya Mood”. But some asshole had to go and open the album with a goddamn Hercules & Love Affair track, and render the rest of the album sedate by comparison. Highly unfortunate.

In any case, days like this remind me why this project is at least as rewarding as it is deeply spiritually exhausting: I really doubt I would have ever heard this album otherwise, and I feel like I discovered something important and influential today, even if neither I nor the jerkoff at the record label who shuffled it around quite knew what to make of it.