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 64: This Heat – Deceit

At first listen, this album suggests how you might best take it in, opening with “Sleep” lulling you with druidic chants quietly insisting you “Sleep sleep sleep/go to sleep.” From there, This Heat bring on night terrors with the hallucinating-ants-wriggling-out-of-your-pores trip of “Paper Hats“. This track takes the musical antagonism of King Crimson and applies it deftly to creating as moody and unwelcoming a soundscape as possible: guitar arpeggios flutter mechanically, a drum set tries to wrestle the song to the ground, and a synthesizer in the next room malfunctions. Things go nowhere, the track chasing its own tail, until the microphone develops sentience and crawls slowly out of the studio.

“S.P.Q.R.” is the song where the ‘Post-punk’ label that This Heat garner so frequently in my reading begins to crystalize. In this song Joy Division-esque guitars collide with martial drums and disaffected gang vocals, resulting in a quiet thrash that curls up fetally at the foot of an unfathomable aggression, ready at any moment to send limbs flailing about.

This brink of furor, this chin-buried-in-chest tension ends up being the album’s strongest quality. Things continue with “Cenotaph“, which breathes more easily but doesn’t feel any better, and then, in a dream-logic series of free associations, comes the brilliant bonfire dance of “Shrink Wrap” and the studio-effect tinkering of “Radio Prague”. But the earlier nightmare recurs, and “Makeshift Swahili” takes all the unease that’s been percolating in the air in the studio and finally turns it on you, and the effect is disturbing. From there, the sound of the album culminates in its final three tracks, which take all the fear and resentment that preceded and bring them finally to a climax, rewarding any who made it that far without being driven away.

Deceit exemplifies the punk spirit even if you couldn’t possibly imagine them having mohawks or any traditional ‘punk’ signifiers. They channel the worst alienation into a musical package that bucks any normalizing structure, in the process making something that sounds (even now) original and spits in the face of conventionality, while at the same time creating something rather than merely demeaning or destroying. For those who can identify, there is comfort here. The sometimes-antagonistic song structures, the abrasive tonality, are not there to keep you out, they’re there to keep everyone but you out.

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.

Day 43: Paul McCartney – Ram

After yesterday, just about anything would have been a treat. Living in Lou Reed’s aural hell for a day made me crave something less epileptic-seizure-y. This was good enough.

I’ve never listened to any of The Beatles’ solo work, mostly because I wore out enough Beatles tapes during my childhood that the songs are codified in my brain, and besides that I’ve almost gotten sick of them. I still love The Beatles and enjoy listening to them, but the solo stuff is in some separate category in my mind, and doesn’t feel necessary.

Plus, over the years I have associated the worst song of all time with McCartney/Lennon’s solo work, and have thus assumed that, subtracted from the beautiful equation of The Beatles, the members individually were some sort of perverse music rapists who delighted in ruining every happy memory their voices had ever forged.

So this morning, I started this up — noticing the album was credited to Paul & Linda McCartney, which for some reason made my knee jerk even harder — with serious apprehension, expecting something worse than yesterday. After two tracks I was relieved, to say the least. And then track three came on.

“Ram On” is one of the nicest goddamn songs I have ever heard. I feel like I am making this statement regardless of the context of my recent listening. It is wonderful. Almost every second of it is magical. From the studio chatter at the beginning, to the do-over Paul pulls on the ukelele part, the song seems to happen spontaneously. At the same time, it is lavishly decorated — McCartney paints the back of the soundspace with rich ribbons of voice, and the percussion in the song is all handclaps and whisper-quiet drums that quake with bass. It’s a truly fantastic song, and to be honest it’s almost kept me from even hearing the rest of the album. With each listen I just find myself getting impatient, waiting for it to come back around. And that’s after earlier today when I just repeated “Ram On” for about an hour.

What’s most striking to me is that it sets a number of precedents for most of the indie music I’ve loved in the last year. That’s probably a big part of why I like it so much. The backing vocals, with their unmiked-in-the-back-of-the-room sound and their ethereal tremulousness, are a precursor to the vocal arrangements of Grizzly Bear, and the ukelele part that drives the song could have come off of any Pitchfork top 10 album in the last 4 years. And the rest of the album, too. “Uncle Albert / Admiral Halsey” plays at Pet Sounds’ “pocket symphonies” in its languid first half, before taking an absurd detour into a medley of almost-rock styles. “Dear Boy” is a nervy, bitter tune that teems with voices, all applied gorgeously and faultlessly. The use of studio effects on this track, as well as most of the album, is a big stand-out here. “Dear Boy” opens with the lead voice and the piano stuffed and compressed into a jar somewhere in the right channel, while in the left channel a lightly-touched conga drum sets the beat and its echo is allowed to ring out, lonely. When the song eventually grows into all of this space that these two effects created, it makes the whole song seem to have a real definable space. The album abounds with clever craft like this.

Which really gets at what’s interesting about this album, for me. For all the schmaltz — which is there — and the grating songs (“Long Haired Lady”, and “Monkberry Moon Delight”, which appears to be some sort of horrific Tom Waits tribute), there’s a “Dear Boy”, “Ram On”, or “Heart of The Country” that has enough great tricks or just plain lovely shit in it to make the whole thing shine. And though at its worst moments the album can be a bit trite (“Heart of The Country”, “3 Legs”), it just sounds so fucking good that the sometimes questionable content of the songs seems kind of beside the point.

And supposedly Linda McCartney was involved in this? I only noticed a female voice on one track. Oh well.