Archive for December, 2019

Best Of The Biscuit – Missing Persons

Friday, December 27th, 2019

I overindulged after finishing my last day of work before a two-and-a-half week vacation and now I’m nursing a hangover and dealing with the regret of consuming a heroic amount of whiskey while watching the Masters of the Universe movie with Dolph Lundgren.

I never said I was a role model.

Best Of The Biscuit – Missing Persons

Missing Persons are not good hangover music.

This is the second part of the August 7th, 1983 Best Of The Biscuit radio show. The first part, which was a Thomas Dolby concert, can be found here.

I’m not a Missing Persons enthusiast, so I can’t speak to what die-hard fans would want to find on a Missing Persons’ concert from 1983. Speaking as someone who probably owned their first album at some point (just seems like something I should have bought), I can say that I’m very happy with this short, six song set. We get “Words,” “Destination Unknown,” and the immortal “Walking In LA.” In addition to those all-time classics, the group also performs the bangers “Mental Hopscotch” and “I Like Boys,” which I had never heard before and wish I had so I could’ve put it on a slutty playlist back when I was single (somewhere between Lady Gaga’s “Do What You Want With My Body” and an electro-punk cover of “Boys Boys Boys”). Also here is “Windows,” another lesser-known (to me anyways) piece that’s very good.

I’m once again including the commercials, which are sadly still mostly Army bullshit, with an ad for Honda at the very end. At the end of this side there’s a bit more though. You get some production credits for the show, followed by two 30 second promos for the program. One of them features commentary by an announcer, while the other is just the musical clips playing. I assume the latter is there so local radio stations could put their own DJs on the ad if they so desired.

Happy new year! And stay safe this New Year’s. Don’t drink an entire bottle of whiskey and sure as hell don’t watch Masters of the Universe.

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Best Of The Biscuit – Thomas Dolby

Thursday, December 19th, 2019

Best Of The Biscuit – Thomas Dolby
Right after I bought and wrote about a radio-only LP live show compilation called Live Tracks, I just happened to stumble upon another one at an entirely different record store. While the previous radio show I bought seemingly a derivative of the King Biscuit Flower Hour, this one is the real deal, a “best of” episode that originally the aired the week of August 7th, 1983. Split into two parts, the majority of the episode is dedicated to a Thomas Dolby concert, while the later bit showcases a few songs from a Missing Persons show. Since there’s so much content here, I’m splitting this into two posts, with the Thomas Dolby up first.

This is not a complete show unfortunately. If Discogs is any indication, King Biscuit broadcasted a more complete (if not entirely complete) version of this very same concert on May 3rd of the same year, just a few months before this “best of” version. That’s some quick repackaging! They might have even repackaged it once more for another program in the following year, or that could just be another Dolby show, hard to say.

Nearly everything Dolby performs here is from his 1983 debut album, or from assorted singles (that would eventually make their way into various permutations of said debut album – it’s been re-issued a lot). The sole exception is “New Toy,” which is a song that Dolby wrote for Lene Lovich for her debut EP. Lene Lovich actually joins Dolby on stage for this one. I have no idea how rare live performances with both of them are for this one, maybe they toured together and played it all the time, or this was a one-off special appearance. Regardless, it’s cool.

Just like the last radio show I shared, this too has commercials. Unfortunately, this time around they aren’t horribly inappropriate beer commercials that feature racist stereotypes and encourage underage drinking. Instead, they’re just commercials for the US Army (boo!). I remember these commercials though, so while I won’t say that it was cool to hear them again (again, boo military-industrial complex!) it did trigger a nostalgia dopamine response. Haven’t heard that “be all that you can be” jingle in ages. It’s also hilarious to me that the army sponsored a radio show with the aggressively anti-imperialist “One Of Our Submarines Is Missing.”

Also, how many die-hard synthpop fans from the early 80s were down with the thought of joining the armed forces? I feel that the military’s advertising budget could’ve been better spent on radio shows featuring AC/DC or Ted Nugent.

Enjoy the show (this one is “properly” numbered by the way) and, for those of you who celebrate Christmas, merry Christmas. I’ll be back next week with the second half of this radio show, hopefully.

Posted in Thomas Dolby | 8 Comments »

Switched On East – Electronic Japanese Tunes

Wednesday, December 11th, 2019

Masahiko Satoh
Switched On East (Complete Album Download)

I have accumulated many (many many) Japanese synthesizer albums from the 1970s over the past few years. Finding out anything about any of these releases in English is often impossible. Many times I have to  enter these items into Discogs myself. Which is a real pain in the ass when the majority of the liner notes are in kanji. Thankfully, this one was already there.

Switched-On East is the earliest example of a Japanese electronic/synthesizer album that I’ve come across. It was released by Denon Records in 1971. To the best of my knowledge, it never received a release in any other country, which makes sense. The album is comprised of nothing but covers of songs by Japanese composers. I’m going to guess that the international market for something like that was pretty slim at the time.

The album was arranged and performed on synthesizer by Masahiko Satoh, who for some reason chose to work under the name M Sato for this release. Satoh is a very prolific composer and jazz pianist in Japan, with dozens of albums to his name ranging from experimental electronic pieces like this, to more traditional jazz recordings. He gets around, I’ve ended up owning six albums that feature him, despite the fact that I’m not really into jazz. He shows up where you least expect him.

He’s the Spanish Inquisition of Japanese jazz pianists.

While Satoh is a brilliant composer and fantastic pianist, I don’t think that he really knew his way around a synthesizer in 1971. Or if he did, he wasn’t fully aware of how to properly take advantage of it in a studio environment. This is a very good record, but, like many similar albums that would be released in the 1970s, his interpretations of these tracks are a little bare bones when compared to the stuff that Wendy Carlos was doing at the same time. Carlos would put forth the effort to really layer her arrangements to make them sound as big and complex as possible. But that took a lot of time (and skill). Early synths were entirely monophonic. Anytime you hear layering or chorus effects, that means that the performer had to go back, record those parts separately, and edit them in later. In the days before digital editing software, that meant a lot of tape. It was probably a real pain in the ass. Carlos should be commended for her patience just as much as her technical ability.

I’m not familiar with most of these tunes outside of this album. I don’t know if Satoh took any major liberties with the source material or if they’re just 100% accurate arrangements that happened to be performed on a synthesizer. Regardless, I enjoy listening to them. They’re sparse, that’s for sure, but that gives many of them an almost ethereal quality. “Sunayama” is downright haunting. Others, like “Yashi No Mi” are bouncy and fun, and their minimal nature give them a video game music vibe, some 10 years before that was even a thing.

This album was never released on CD or digitally (as far as I can tell) and I don’t think that the record was pressed more than once. And from what I can gather, most of the ones that were pressed don’t sound good. Every auction I’ve come across for this record by someone who has actually listened to it seems to echo the same sentiment: “It looks perfect, but sounds a bit scratchy.”

I can certainly attest to that. Despite the fact that my copy looks flawless, and despite the fact that I’ve given it multiple cleanings, parts of it still sound a little scratchy. Since I’m a self-hating perfectionist, I usually don’t share my rips unless they’re near-perfect, but considering the rarity of this record I made an exception.

As I said before, I have a lot of records like this (seriously, it’s a problem). So expect more like them in the future. I hope to get some more complex write-ups done on some of the more interesting ones during my holiday break.

And if you like this, be sure to check out this post from a few months back, where I share something similar by Hideki Matsutake, a synth legend.

 

Posted in Complete Albums, Masahiko Satoh | 7 Comments »

Listen to 1998’s remix of 1999 in 2019

Tuesday, December 3rd, 2019

Some news first. I plan on updating my ridiculously huge guide to Tokyo record stores in the coming month or so, with updated photos and added profiles of various stores that I recently discovered. I plan on making this new guide so big that I’ll probably end up breaking it into two parts; one a “best of” highlight reel, and the other a full-fledged “here’s everything” guide that will be well over 15,000 words. If anyone has any suggestions about what they would like to see in either, let me know.

Now, Prince.

Prince
1999 (The New Master)
Rosario (1999)
1999 (The Inevitable Mix)
1999 (Keep Steppin’)
1999 (Rosie & Doug E. In A Deep House)
1999 (The New Master Edit)
1999 (Acapella)
The 1999 super deluxe box set is out and I highly recommend it, even though I haven’t been able to dive into everything that it has to offer. It is five CDs (and a DVD) after all. I haven’t touched much of the live content or archival remixes/edits all that much, I’ve been far more interested in the vault tracks, many of which are downright fantastic. The estate really did a good job with this one, populating those bonus discs with a good mix of legit, finished tracks that just didn’t make the cut; polished demos and raw takes that sound damn good; and a smattering of live cuts that show Prince playing around with his material on the fly in a fun and interesting way. Great shit all around. If you have any interest in Prince’s 80s output at all, it’s a must buy. I’m sure that the die-hard Prince bootleg collectors out there will find holes in it, and have their own “unreleased” material that they would prefer, but I’m not in that scene so I can remain happily ignorant of what I missed.

The above remixes were not included in the 1999 box set, although they really had no right to be. They were released in 1998 as an effort to capitalize on the literal 1999. These remixes arrived with a thundering thud when they came out, failing to make any substantial impact on the charts in damn near every country.

That makes sense on a few levels. The most obvious being that the world did not need a new version of “1999” in 1998, or in any year for that matter. “1999” is a near perfect song, no “new master,” remix, or any other attempt to rejigger or rework it for a modern audience would be a success, in my opinion. Remember that when “1999” first came out, there were no 12″ or dance remixes of it. The only alternate versions of the original track are radio edits. Prince knew he didn’t need to fuck with it then, he should’ve known not to fuck with it in 1998.

But I think that’s not the only reason why these mixes bombed. I think a lot of it has to do with the song itself. Think about the song “1999” in 1982, there could not be a song that was more in tune with the zeitgeist of the time, not only musically (synths galore) but musically (Ronnie’s gonna nuke the world). In 1999, there couldn’t not be a song more out of touch with the state of reality than the song “1999.” The Cold war was over, compared to the periods immediately before and following, the world was relatively at peace. America was in the middle of a ridiculous bubble economy. The internet was bringing us together in fun and exciting ways, as opposed to the sad and depressing ways it does now. Everybody loved the president. Apolitical was a thing you could be.

This showed in the music of the era. Look at the top songs of 1999, they’re dumb as rocks. The biggest song of that year was “Believe” by Cher. Sugar Ray was one of the biggest rock bands in the world. The closest thing to a song with a message reaching mainstream popularity was “Jumper” by Third Eye Blind.

Compare that to 1983 (when “1999” actually charted). Sure there’s a multitude of stupid shit there, but the number one song of the year was “Every Breath You Take” (which some read as a statement on nuclear proliferation) and there were other dark songs that managed to be big hits as well, like “Maniac,” “Dirty Laundry, and “Twilight Zone.” Yeah, these aren’t political or “serious” songs, but they have an edge to them. There wasn’t no edge or commentary in the popular music of 1999. That shit was polished to a happy sheen.

Of course, the pop hits of 1999 (and 1983) blow most pop hits of 2019 out of the water, since they actually have things like melodies, hooks, and emotions aside from “I’m sad about stuff.” Yowza what a shitty year for pop music this turned out to be. But that’s a whole other topic and I don’t want to write another 1,000 words that’ll just piss 20 year-olds off (I do that enough already).

Okay I got sidetracked. These mixes aren’t…well…they aren’t bad. Okay, a few of them are bad. Like, downright bad. About half of them aren’t even mixes of “1999.” “Rosario” is just Rosario Dawson rambling on for a minute or so, and a couple of other mixes are just excuses for Rosie and Doug E. Fresh to freestyle. But the main remix is actually pretty good, and the edited version is a good abbreviated version of that. The others are good enough, and are worth a listen just of out curiosity if nothing else.

Posted in Complete Albums, Prince, remixes | 4 Comments »