Archive for October, 2015

Neil Young’s Dance Remixes

Friday, October 30th, 2015

I hope I’m not the only person who finds tonight’s music interesting.

Neil Young
Sample And Hold (Dance Remix)
Sample And Hold (Single Version)
Sample And Hold (LP Version)
Mr. Soul (Dance Remix)
You have no idea how happy I was to find this single.

Quick backstory (which I’ve covered multiple times here). In 1982 Neil Young released Trans. It was a radical departure for him, abandoning the rock style he was known and acclaimed for and replacing it with a strongly electronic/synthpop sound. Not only that, many of the songs found Young experimenting with a vocoder, which distorted his voice to near unrecognizable levels at times (as someone who has never been a fan of Young’s voice, I don’t consider this to be a bad thing).

It’s a brave, crazy and entirely original record (with a few amazing “traditional sounding” Young tracks too), but it was a massive bomb both critically and commercially. It also wound up being the first in a series of intentionally obtuse and experimental albums that led to Young being sued by his label at the time for releasing music that was too uncommerical.

The album was out of print forever. I even shared the entire thing here twice. But now it’s back in print digitally and I highly recommend buying it. The version on digital storefronts is the CD version, which is remixed and significantly altered when compared to the original LP mix.

I don’t know which came first, the CD mix or these single mixes for “Sample And Hold” and “Mr. Soul,” but it’s obvious that one influenced the other. All the changes that are present on these mixes are also present on the CD version. The guitars are muted, the cymbals are removed, and the beat is punched up to the front of the mix. Both just feel substantially more “electronic” in about every way you can imagine. The CD version of “Sample And Hold” is still the best though, largely because it’s a ridiculous eight minutes long.

Seriously, buy Trans. That album is nuts.

 

Posted in Neil Young, remixes | 4 Comments »

Prince’s Purple Sci-Fi Fantasy

Sunday, October 18th, 2015

Ever have one of those nights where you’re sitting in a Japanese fast food curry shop in a suit with a pink tie, contemplating the significance of your life and the things you hold dear when you suddenly discover that the best-selling album of 1989 was Bobby Brown’s Don’t Be Cruel and that fact forces you to doubt everything you ever thought you knew about how you view the world?

No? Just me? Okay then.

Prince
Space (Universal Love Radio Remix)
Space (Universal Love Remix)
Space (Funky Stuff Remix)
Space (Acoustic Remix)
Space (Funky Stuff Dub)
Prince never fills me with doubt. He just fills me with funk. Okay, that came out wrong.

Space was a single off of the Come album, and I would be lying to you if I claimed to know anything about that record outside of what’s on the Wikipedia page. I really need to expand my Prince knowledge. I only own Purple Rain, 1999, a greatest hits and a shitload of singles. I’ve also bought his three most recent albums, two of which (PLECTRUMELCTRUM and HitnRun) are actually really fucking great. I recommend them.

This song is good. We need more intergalactic funk.

Liv Warfield
The Unexpected (Live At Blue Note Tokyo)
Speaking of Prince, Liv Warfield is a Prince protege. You can tell because the cover to her latest album, the amazing The Unexpected, has a purple tinge to it.

Seriously though, Liv is an amazingly powerful singer, and the fact that she’s failed to breakthrough at all is downright criminal. “The Unexpected” is an incredible tune (written by Prince), and this live version taken from the Japanese release of her album really showcases how damn amazing her voice is.

And if this track sounds familiar to you, it’s because Prince recorded his own version for the previously mentioned PLECTRUMELCTRUM album. His version is called “Wow,” which is funny as the chorus of the song is “you can call it the unexpected or you can call it wow.”

I guess she chose to call it unexpected. He chose to call it wow.

Posted in Liv Warfield, Prince | 2 Comments »

I Dream of Swiss/Japanese Synth-Pop Collaborations That Will Never Be

Tuesday, October 13th, 2015

I’m drinking from a tiny bottle of whiskey, which makes me feel even more giant than I already am. One day I’m just going to get wasted and walk around Tokyo whilst vocalizing the Godzilla theme.

Wait, I think that already happened.

Anyway, hey Halloween is coming up! And I actually have some spooky scary songs planned so stay tuned for that. In the meantime, here’s some synth-pop and hip-hop.

Depeche Mode
Suffer Well (Tiga Dub)
According to my relatively in-depth and well-organized cataloging system, I haven’t posted a Depeche Mode track on this site for over two years. That blows my mind. Used to be that this site could’ve been named “That MP3 Blog that Posts Erasure, Depeche Mode and New Order.” Eventually it just got hard to keep that up as A) Depeche Mode finally started releasing their old remixes digitally and B) Look, you seriously have no clue how much Depeche Mode I posted. It was a lot. Seriously.

I still have some honest-to-goodness rare Mode on this hard drive somewhere, maybe someday I’ll get around to posting it. This remix is from a 12″ single. It’s got a good beat.

Sir Mix-A-Lot
One Time’s Got No Case (Bass Mix)
One Time’s Got No Case (Instrumental)
I bought this last year when I was visiting my mom in Oregon. I think 90% of all Sir Mix-A-Lot records currently in circulation can be found in the Pacific Northwest. I like to imagine that Mix-A-Lot himself hawks some off to second-hand shops whenever he’s short on cash. Of course, that’s probably not often right now thanks to the mad “Anaconda” bucks he has to be pulling in.

I really hate that song. But the last time I ranted about that I got called a sexist racist. So let’s move on and discuss Swiss electronic music.

Yello
Live At The Roxy  N.Y. Dec ’83
I’m going to be real and admit that I know absolutely nothing about this. My knowledge of Yello is limited almost entirely to “Oh Yeah,” because even I can’t know everything about every electronic act from the early 80s. I’m sorry. Maybe once I’m done exhuming forgotten Japanese 80s music I’ll move onto Europe. I assume this is some sort of medley, but I really couldn’t tell you. It’s fucking weird though, I can say that much.

I really like it. Shit, does this mean I have to start buying Yello albums?

Hey did anyone ever do a Yellow Magic Orchestra/Yellow mash-up? The could’ve called it Yello Magic Orchestra. This shit writes itself. Someone combine “Behind The Mask” with “Oh Yeah.”

Posted in Depeche Mode, Sir Mix-A-Lot, Yello | 8 Comments »