That's How the World is Made

Self-explanatory.

1. That's How the World is Made - BJ Ward
2. Rainy Day - Susan Christie
3. Lost in a Lost World - The Moody Blues
4. My Death - Scott Walker
5. It's a Rainy Day, Sunshine Girl - Faust
6. A Famous Myth - The Groop
7. Man is Not a Bird - Broadcast
8. Where Do I Go - The Free Design
9. To Put Up With You - The Sunshine Company
10. Walk On By - The 18th Century Corporation
11. I'll See You There - The Poppy Family
12. I Just Wasn't Made For These Times - Peggy Lipton
13. It Might As Well Be Dumbo - The High Llamas
14. Sad is the Way that I Feel - Mark Eric
15. Five O'Clock in the Morning - Wendy & Bonnie
16. The Sign (Pt. III) - David Axelrod
17. I Start Counting - Basil Kirchin
18. Old Man Willow - Elephant's Memory
19. Spleen - The Sound of Feeling
20. On Your Own Again - Scott Walker

Ripples

Two mixes in two days?!  What, am I spending all of my free time laying in bed with synthesizers and my external drive with all of my music on it?  Yes, yes I am.

This one is a bit more coherent than the last.

Wistful melancholy; Oncoming rush of Autumnal emotion; Endings and beginnings

Library music of the 70s and 80s.

1 Birth of the Universe (A Baker/R Morgan/P Jackson)
2. Wind Surf Ballad (Dominique Guiot)
3. End of a Summerlove (Milan Pilar Group)
4. Eternity (A Hawkshaw)
5. Round (Yan Tregger & Pierre Devevey)
6. A New World (Brian Bennett)
7. Girl on a Bike (Brian Dee)
8. Rainy Road
9. Tomorrow's Dream (Geoff Bastow)
10. Tuned Waves (John Fiddy & Norman Chandler)
11. Station Farewell (Vic Flick)
12. Starlight (Francis Monkman)
13. Fathoms (Frank McDonald & Terry Devine-King)
14. Melancholy Moog (John Fiddy & Norman Chandler)
15. Lisbeth (Oscar Rocchi)
16. Ripples (Julian Nott)
17. Dusk (Jacky Giordano)
18. Bucolic (William Gum-Boot & Lawrence Wiffin)
19. Mistral (Astral Sounds)
20. Surrealism (Andrew Jackman)

It looks like I may have a new source for the downloading of the mix, but it's uploading extremely slow.  So, maybe a link eventually?  If you really must have a download, there are a number of ways to just rip the mix - but hopefully I can provide one for possible future peoples who may read this one day--certainly no one now is reading this!

How do you take an already transcendent piece of music and make it even more beautiful? Here's how.

God bless YouTube - of course someone would have uploaded chunks of MTV's show Amp, which I would watch in the middle of the night when I was 13; some of it is a bit dodgy now I suppose, but nostalgia. Also, that Ken Ishii song and video hold up.



One thing I always quite loved about the show was the way it almost felt stream of consciousness; in my memory, which these clips are proving to be mostly false, they didn't necessarily tell you right off when they were on to a different song.
Besides the Ishii video, the one I remember most was Future Sound of London's "Max," which is still a gorgeous piece of music that completely holds up. (Future Sound of London, in my opinion, are one of the great unsung acts; they get lumped in with "techno" from their first album, which was dance-y, but Lifeforms and Dead Cities are far beyond anything most other electronic acts were doing. They should be mentioned much more often.)

Lord have mercy.





(By the way, this comes from a wonderful show called The Beat, of which you can find several full shows uploaded on YouTube. Well worth checking out - it was a regional show, and have some wonderful performances, in addition to having possibly the greatest set design in the history of everything.)

From Way Out

I'm incredibly late here, but of course Jean-Jacques Perrey died recently. (The day he passed, I was in hospital, and the days immediately following weren't very good, so I blame that somewhat.) Obviously Perrey's influence in music, especially electronic music (and rock and pop groups incorporating electronics into their music), cannot be overstated. I was somehow Facebook friends with the man - just one of those automatic things I suppose - and he was, to the end, extremely vibrant and full of life and clearly loved what he did and what he got to do. A life very well lived. If James Brown is The Godfather of Soul, Jean-Jacques Perrey is The Godfather of Electronic. Some of my favorites - I still quite enjoy the wonderful oddity that is Mr. Ondioline:



I will always return to Perrey-Kingsley's The In Sound From Way Out, it's just utter perfection and madness:



I really love the library music he produced, and he actually did a good few, like Moog Sentations on the Editions Montparnasse 2000 label:



Or an album called Moog Mig Mag Moog, also for Montparnasse, which is delightfully bonkers:



And lastly, one that I don't think gets mentioned enough but that I quite thoroughly enjoy:



To bring a Broadcast connection into this, here's a lovely picture of Trish Keenan having a chat with Perrey:



Rest in pease, Mr Perrey. I know angels generally play harps; I hope an exception is made in this case and you get a Moog.

I Am Going to Set Myself on Fire

Here is an interesting bit of business posted by the wonderful Starving Daughter's Vinyl Impressions blog - the wonderfully named artist/group I Am Going to Set Myself On Fire (which is about how I and probably many other people are feeling right about now), with an album called The Challenge of the Salt, which, I don't know, but this song in particular is quite good:




He's generous enough to offer up the entire album for download - and there's many more where that came from; seriously good stuff on offer there, I highly recommend checking out that blog.  The album is one I'd never remotely heard of, and has an interesting pedigree which I'll leave it to you to click the link above and read it from that blog directly.  The album is a mixture of songs with vocals - which I don't particularly think work all that well, but it's not horrible - and then instrumental versions.  The track above it my favorite of the lot, but it's a nice oddity that's worth checking out - and then check out the other extremely generous offerings of that wonderful blog.  Now excuse me, I am going to set myself on fire.

Soundcloud

In addition to making mixes and collecting music, I am working on a musical project (which is starting to finally come along nicely).  I have a Soundcloud page which has very little on it at the moment, but eventually will continually be updated.  It does have a couple of instrumental pieces that may or may not be used as interstitials - but they are all done via tape (namely, my old Akai reel to reel that I rescued from a thrift store and my Echoplex EP-3).

I also have posted the wonderful song from Fiona Richmond and twenty minutes of choice game show music from the 70s, so there's that too.