Bleachers – Terrible Thrills Vol. 3 #2 & #3 (High Quality Vinyl Rips)

May 30th, 2019

Terrible Thrills Vol. 3 #2
I Miss The Last Days of Disco
Don’t Take The Money (Demo)
All My Heroes/Hate That You Slow Me Down (with Muna)

Terrible Thrills Vol. 3 #3
Everybody Lost Somebody (with Julien Baker)
Good Morning After a Breakup/Vietnam Documentary

Better late than never.

After receiving a copy of Terrible Thrills Vol. 2 #2 that looked like it was used as a sharpening tool by Freddy Kruger, I got my replacement copy in the mail yesterday, alongside a copy of the third volume in the series. Thanks to Jack for personally responding and helping me get a replacement!

Neither copy look like they were sanding with a brillo pad this time around, so here you go.

Quick note regarding the audio quality though; even with pristine copies of these singles, they were pretty difficult for me to rip. These have a lot of quiet spots, odd intentional distortion effects, and sudden (also intentional) popping and clicking sounds. All of those things make removing things like (unintentional) pops, crackles and other surface noise very difficult.

I have a program called ClickRepair that I’ve been using for probably over a decade. It’s usually very good at scrubbing out any unwanted rice krispie-esque distractions from a record, but these proved difficult even for that powerhouse. Each time I tried to run it through that program, no matter what settings I chose, it would pick up the intentional distortion effects as clicks. The end result sounded like digitally scrambled garbage.

Thankfully, I have another program that also does this task called MAGIX. I mostly use that for EQ adjustments and surface rumble removal (it’s absolutely impeccable at that and makes it worth the price alone). I usually don’t use the click removal features on that because it alternates between too strong and not strong enough, but I was able to tweak it to knock out most of the more obnoxious crackles on each record. Some tiny imperfections remain, but vinyl is an imperfect format (as this entire ordeal clearly demonstrates) so they’re the kind of thing you just have to live with.

Most of the tracks sounds fine, but there are a few minor pops in the beginning of “Everybody Lost Somebody” that I just wasn’t able to scrub out. Sorry about that. However, other distortions in the recording, including some odd vocal clipping that come near the end of the song, are part of the recording so they’re not on me.

I do realize that 90% of the people who listen to these tracks won’t even notice these things, but I also realize the 10% who do will be the ones to leave comments, so I felt the need to elaborate.

Audio and shipping issues aside, these tracks are great. Julien Baker’s cover of “Everybody Lost Somebody” is fantastic. Like Mitski’s take on “Let’s Get Married” it strips the song down letting the lyrics speak for themselves more. I never noticed the lyrics “I think pain is sitting alone in the corner” before, great line. Muna’s “All My Heroes” feels like an amalgamation of modern-day autotuned pop and vintage 80s pop, also fantastic.

Of the “new” Bleachers tracks, which remix/rework album cuts, my favorite is “I Miss The Last Days of Disco,” which is a rejiggering on “I Miss Those Days” with added “disco” beats and vocal effects. It reminds me Antonoff’s other group Fun and “Some Nights.” Very anthemic.

Again, Jack has said that these tracks can be freely shared and copies, so please do with these as you wish and come back after part four comes out, as I’ll be sure to share them too. Just remember that it takes a bit longer for me to post them as I live in Japan and international shipping can be a real asshole. And if you’re looking for part one in the series, I got them here.

I also put all of these up on my YouTube channel so be sure to check that out too!

Posted in B-sides, Bleachers, remixes | 6 Comments »

YMO and Moog Inanity

May 28th, 2019

Yellow Magic Orchestra, Sandii & The Suntsetz and Sheena & The Rockets
Tighten Up/Idol Era/Baby Maybe
Haven’t found a YMO rarity in a while. I literally thought I bought all of them. According to Discogs, I currently have 80 releases that feature YMO as an artist, and I think that’s a conservative estimate thank to some Japanese-only releases that I have yet to add to that website.

Currently, YMO is celebrating their 40th anniversary with a re-issue campaign. While that would usually be a call for celebration, the YMO re-releases so far have been a complete travesty. Instead of focusing on collecting rarities, live material or unreleased material, they’re instead repackaging the albums as they were, just in overpriced “prestige audiophile” formats. Many of these releases cost upwards of $100, despite the fact that they lack anything in the way of bonus tracks. You’re buying a nice box and (allegedly) a nice-sounding record with some posters and other extraneous goods thrown in. Complete rip-off for sure. You know how inessential a YMO release has to be for me not to buy it? That’s really saying something.

I found this oddball remix/medley (which I doubt will ever see inclusion on any YMO re-issue) on the 1980 Alfa Special Disco Sampler, one of a series of records that Alfa Records sent to record stores in the late 70s to early 80s.

Of that bunch, this one is special because it’s the only one that features a unique mix, this medley of YMO and their two sister acts, Sandii & The Sunsetz and Sheena & The Rockets. If you don’t know anything about them, I suggest you read the “associated acts” section of my multi-part guide to YMO, where I cover both of these acts and many more!

 

Gil Trythall
Folsom Prison Blues
Harper Valley PTA
Yakety Moog
A Johnny Cash song sung through a vocoder is the kind of things that you didn’t know you wanted until you hear it.

These three tracks are from Country Moog, AKA Switched-On Nashville, which first came out in 1972. It’s one of the many, many (many many many) “Switched-On” knock-off records to be rushed to the market after the success of Wendy Carlos’ Switched-On Bach. It’s not the first “Switched-On” album I’ve featured here, and it will no doubt be the last, as I buy these things the instant any of them cross my path.

Of the Switched-On knock-offs in my possession, this is certainly…one of them. I was going to say that it’s unique, thanks to its blending of country pop and moog electronics, but I don’t even think that’s the case. I’m fairly certain that I own another country-themed moog record somewhere. If not, I’m sure such records exist. Hell, this isn’t even the only country-themed moog record by Gil Trythall, he followed it up with Nashville Gold a year later. That record has a cover of “Wichita Lineman” that I’m sure is just dope as fuck.

I don’t know much about ol’ Gil, other than the fact that he’s prolific enough to have his own Wikipedia page and is still kicking it at 88 years old. Go Gil! Hope you’re still plugging away with oddball covers of obscure country tracks when you’re not apparently working as a well-regarded avant-garde electronic music composer and educator.

Posted in Gil Trythall, Yellow Magic Orchestra | No Comments »

This post is brought to you by flying gnomes

May 19th, 2019

Four posts in a row of marital that one might deem commercial, I’ve earned myself a prog freakout.

 

Gong
Flying Teapot – Live ’72
Blues For Findlay – Live ’72

Continental Circus is a strange album, and not the way that most other Gong albums are strange. It’s strange because it’s really hard to track down. The album is a soundtrack to a forgotten film of the same name. It was first released in 1971. It wasn’t re-issued on CD until 1994, and that re-issue was only available officially in France. Ditto for the album’s 2010 vinyl re-issue, another France exclusive.

And, of course, if countless knock-off Kraftwerk and Neu! bootlegs have taught me anything, if a label refuses to release an album by a cult act, then the fans will end up doing it for them. Lots of bootleg releases of Continental Circus are out there. Discogs lists at least three different versions. Like a lot of other bootleg editions of out-of-print albums, many of the counterfeit CD pressings of Continental Circus also feature various bonus tracks, also taken from hard-to-find or out-of-print sources.

One version includes several tracks taken from various French TV performances of the early 70s. The version I have, released by the one-off Giacomo Records label in 1994, includes two live tracks, which are what I’m sharing tonight. These live tracks were recorded in Lyons back in 1972, and were only released officially a decade later on the Live A Lyons Part Two album. That was a cassette-only release. I did not know that there were tape-only Gong-related releases. Turns out there are quite a few of them. Thank god most of them are not for sale on Discogs. My Gong habit is bad enough, I don’t need to be the asshole who digitizes out-of-print Gong concerts from tape.

(Let’s be honest with each other, I’m eventually going to be that asshole.)

Thankfully, the asshole who duped these two live tracks were from a tape did a good job with it. It’s a bit muddled, but it’s hard to say that if that’s because it was taken from a tape or if the source material itself was less than ideal. Sounds good enough for my old man ears.

Both these songs are bangers, especially the live version of “Flying Teapot,” which cracks it at nearly 30 damn minutes. I don’t smoke weed. And in the past I’ve said that I’ve never felt the inclination to smoke weed. But if I lived in a country where legal weed was readily available, I’d light up to this motherfucker in no time. They didn’t call themselves the pot-head pixies for nothing.

Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

Emergency Prince Remixes

May 12th, 2019

So I promised several people that the second I got the new Bleachers EP, I would rip it and share it here (Bleachers’ have given permission to anyone who has the vinyl-only release to do as such). However, when it finally arrived in the mail last week, I opened it up to see a gigantic gouge of a scratch on side two that made it literally unplayable. Yay me.

After reaching out the customer support at Bleachers’ store, I was told that they offered no refunds or exchanges for opened good.

After reaching out to Jack Antonoff’s (the man behind Bleachers) Twitter, he informed me that he felt “that was fucked up” and promised to send a replacement copy my way! So, I got to learn that Jack Antonoff is a pretty stand-up dude who likes to treat his fans right, and that’s cool to know, that doesn’t change the fact that it’s probably going to be at least another week or so before those tracks make their way to my blog. Sorry about that.

I can’t wait until the kids who grew up in the late-90s get influential enough to make CD nostalgia a thing so we don’t have to worry about the fragile nature of these vinyl-only re-releases so much.

So yeah, no Bleachers this week. But hey, Prince!

 

 

Prince
Letitgo [Caviar Radio Edit]
Letitgo [Cavi’ Street Edit]
Letitgo [Instrumental]
Letitgo [On The Cool-Out Tip Radio Edit]
Letitgo [Sherm Stick Edit]
Letitgo [(-)Sherm Stick Edit (J. Swift #3 Instrumental)]
Only Prince could write a song about a label dispute and make it sound like it’s about his dick.

Okay, maybe not his literal dick, but from a musical standpoint this track sounds very dick-centric. You can’t have a bassline like that, sing a falsetto and make me think you’re really penning a lament about the complexities of the recording industry. But yet, “Letitgo” is exactly that, a “fuck you” to Warner Bros. A musical sigh of a track where Prince literally waxes poetic about how his record label is stifling him.

I’m not entirely fond of Prince’s more R&B-titled tracks from this era, but that might be more to do with the sound of mid-90s R&B than Prince’s R&B sound in particular. In the mid-90s I was a grunge rocker metalhead, and the new jack swing style of R&B really drove me up the wall. Looking back, I think it’s a Pavlovian response. My brother was way into that stuff and my brother was also way into being an asshole to me. Maybe I can’t hear a Terry Riley-influenced beat without thinking of getting a beatdown from my big brother.

In the years since, (thanks to therapy) I’ve grown to appreciate the genre more. “Poison” is an all-time classic of course, and there are some other tunes I like from a nostalgic viewpoint, but something about the production of it still grates me. It’s just all beats and grooves, not enough hooks or melodies. And I’ve never come to Prince for beat-driven R&B (remember, “When Doves Cry” has no bass). I want to hear that guitar, his horny howls, amazing live instrumentation. Things that new jack swing ain’t exactly known for.

Still, the album version of “Letitgo” is a good amalgamation of the new jack sound and classic Prince. It has the funky, hip-hop influenced beats for sure, but the entire thing still has the organic vibe that made great Prince songs great. The drums sound like live drums, not a computerized backbeat. The guitar solo is short-but-rad. Even the little things like the tambourine jangle and the backing synths over the chorus, it has one foot in the past and one foot in the (then) present.

For me, the remixes of “Letitgo” while still good and worth listening to, are all inferior to the original album version. They all strip out the more organic and natural elements of the original. The “Caviar” edits transform the track into almost an entirely new jack swing piece, with a much heavier bassline and most of the instrumentation removed. It sounds like Prince singing over a rap beat. And it also has a completely extraneous added rap, by someone calling himself Young Soldier Of Time. This moron squawking that he has “to be real in ’94” is just embarrassing.

The other remixes also inject some hip-hop motifs into the tune, but they work a hell of a lot better. The dope “Sherm Stick” versions include a sampled guitar hook (that I know I recognize, but I can’t place) and this really cool yet hard-to-define bass drum beat that gives the song a good oomph.  The “On The Cool-Out’ edit is also an improvement. Instead of incorporating hip-hop into the track via new jack, it straight-up goes gansta with some effects and beats that wouldn’t have sounded out of place on The Chronic.

As the Prince re-issue and vault releases start to ramp up, it’ll be interesting to see what the estate does with this era of Prince’s music. There’s a lot of it, and a lot that remains officially unheard. But popular opinion of it at the time wasn’t all that great, and I can’t imagine that most people’s views of it have aged all that well. If the estate ever does decide that the remixes of fairly unsuccessful singles are worthy of official re-releases, then I’ll stop posting them. But until then, I got plenty nearly-forgotten (and still damn good) Prince that I’ll keep on sharing.

However, I would be remiss if I didn’t at least plug a few recent and upcoming Prince releases. Ultimate Rave, a 2CD/DVD set that combines both the underrated Rave albums with a live DVD of Prince’s New Year’s Eve rave is rad as fuck and well worth a purchase. And if you want to go the vinyl route, you can get both the Rave albums on (purple) vinyl now, along with fellow later-era Prince albums 3121, Musicology, and Planet Earth. They even come with download codes! Planet Earth holds up well, and with all that’s going on now, it sounds a hell of a lot less preachy and more (sadly) prophetic. 3121 is still good too. Musicology…eh…the single is good (Prince put out 37 albums, they can’t all be home runs).

Also, next month Warner Bros. will release Originals which features Prince’s original versions of songs that he gave to other artists, including his never-before-heard versions of “Glamorous Life” and “Manic Monday.” Words cannot express how stoked beyond stoked I am for that one.

I really want to commend the Prince estate with their work so far. They’ve done a good job of re-issuing stuff at a solid pace, starting with what was commercially available at some point and slowly branching out to the legendary “vault” material. Did you know that you can get nearly ever Prince album on iTunes now?! It used to be that if you wanted a legally-obtained copy of Crystal Ball you had to chuck out over $100 for a CD version. Now you can buy the sucker digitally for $20.

I know that a lot of people out there want Dream Factory, Camille and other legendary unreleased, allegedly completed, albums released. But, and I know I’ve written about this before, I hope they get to more out-of-print stuff first. Yo, The Family album is still out-of-print. All of Mazarati’s material is locked away somewhere, and that’s just prime for a deluxe re-issue that could include their version of “Kiss.”

And there’s Madhouse, and the (two) third Madhouse records! And so much live material that hasn’t seen the light of day since VHS or the early days of DVD. Give me that stuff first, then start digging more into the truly unreleased stuff.

Just don’t go the Bowie estate path and shit out a vinyl-only demos collection and charge seventy bucks for it.

Seriously, fuck that shit.

Posted in Prince, remixes | 2 Comments »

Who is that playing the guitar?

May 6th, 2019

The first week in May in Japan is usually “golden week,” a period where a number of national holidays are in a row to allow for a four to six day holiday. This year, with the abdication of the emperor and the ascension of a new one, extra holidays have been added, effectively giving the people of Japan a motherfucking 10 day holiday.

When I say “people of Japan” that’s a bit of a stretch. I sure as fuck didn’t get a ten day holiday, as I’m in the service industry. Ditto for just about anyone working retail. But a lot of office workers are enjoying an extended break, and good for them, they all work too hard and they deserve a break. But the post office also has a fucking ten day holiday. That means that, in a post office not 2km away from my home, my Bleachers EP is sitting in a box of packages somewhere. So, sorry to the new followers I’ve gotten who are checking up on my blog for those rips. It’s not my fault they haven’t shown up yet. Blame the monarchy.

They Might Be Giants
The Guitar (the Lion Sleeps Tonight) [Williamsburgh Mix]
The Guitar (the Lion Sleeps Tonight) [Outer Planet Mix]
Welcome to the Jungle
I Blame You
Moving to the Sun
The Guitar (the Lion Sleeps Tonight) [Even Further Outer Planet Mix]
I almost never, ever seen They Might Be Giants records or CDs here. I would imagine that the group’s lyric-focused college-rock doesn’t translate. But I got lucky yesterday when I happened to find the maxi-single for The Guitar just sitting out at Coconuts Disk in Ikebukuro for a steal of a price at 500 yen (about five bucks). Not only that, it was sealed.

Often I wish I could find out how these oddball and random releases make their way to Japan. Did a college rock DJ bring his collection to Japan and unload it one day? Did a wholesaler buy a shitload of random CDs cheap with the intention of dumping them off at various stores to make a quick buck? Did someone buy two by accident and decided to offload their extra? The world will never know.

In the 13 years I’ve been writing this blog, I believe that this is only the third time that I’ve shared They Might Be Giants tracks. This speaks to how well the group works to make sure their “rarities” don’t stay rare for very long. Nearly ever bonus track, B-side or remix that TMBG have ever released have eventually made their way to a compilation of some sort or another. The only fault I would give the band is that their compilations seems to have no rhyme nor reason to them. They really need a proper re-issue campaign with the rarities included all together. Who knows if we’ll ever get that though, considering that the band seems to still be putting out new music as a lightning pace. Did you know that they put out three damn albums last year?

I didn’t. Sadly TMBG are one of the bands that I’ve lost touch with sine moving to Tokyo. As you can imagine, the group doesn’t have much of a following here in Japan, this EP is the very first CD by the group that I’ve ever come across in the country, and the only vinyl I’ve ever seen are some 12″ singles for Flood-era tracks. A large part of my TMBG-fandom was seeing them live, and since I can’t do that anymore, I guess I just stopped thinking about them. Also, let’s be honest here, I love the group but their output a while ago wasn’t all that great. Nanobots was goofy, but completely forgettable, ditto for The Else and Join Us. Their albums for the past decade or so have just been hovering in three-star limbo. The last album by the group that I listened to with any regularity after its immediate release was The Spine, and the last album by the group that I absolutely fell in love with Mink Car (CYCLOPS ROCK FOR LIFE). Without the dangling carrot of their (still) amazing live shows, I just haven’t been able to keep interest in them. But hey, anyone know if those three albums that they put out last year are any good? I’d love to jump back on board the TMBG fandom if the tunes are there.

Anyways, about these tracks; the “Outer Planet” and “Further Outer Planet” mixes are a lot of fun, and make the trippy song even trippier. To be honest though, I can’t figure out how the Williamsburgh mix is any different than the album version. At first I thought it was just the album version, or a single edit, but it’s a bit longer than the album version. So hey, beats me. The B-sides are cute, 90s-style TMBG tracks with very witty and clever lyrics, “Welcome To The Jungle” is a hilarious-slight-of-hand, taking the title of the GnR classic and nothing else to create an entirely different song that is 100% literal about its titular jungle. “I Blame You” is a bit of a forgettable yet pretty mostly acoustic tune, while “I’m Moving To The Sun” is silly bit of hilarity about a man so fed up with someone that he’s packing his bags and quite literally moving to the sun. Maybe they met my brother.

Posted in B-sides, Complete Albums, remixes, They Might Be Giants | 2 Comments »

Madonna – You Can Dance Single Edits

April 25th, 2019

Madonna – You Can Dance Single Edits
Spotlight
Holiday
Everybody
Physical Attraction
Over and Over
Into The Groove
Where’s The Party
I’ve been obsessed with hunting down Madonna remixes for about as long as I’ve been collecting vinyl, so for about 15 years now. Learning that there were exclusive (and often very good) remixes of Madonna songs that were on vinyl were one of the reasons why I got into the format in the first place. According to Discogs, I own 101 releases that feature Madonna, and I assume that a good chunk of those are 12″ singles. I think that the only artists for whom I own more 12″ singles are probably Depeche Mode and Erasure, but to be honest I like Madonna more than both of those artists.

And while both those artists have some remixes or edits that are pretty hard to find, neither can hold a candle to level of rarity that some Madonna remixes hold. For example, did you know that there’s a mix of “This Used To Be My Playground” that’s only on a special Olympics-themed compilation called Barcelona Gold? Or that there’s a unique mix of “Human Nature” that was only included on a promo CDr that was never intended for commercial release? Madonna remixes are the Pokemon of music; there’s a million of them and I want to catch them all, regardless of quality.

If I knew the slightest about Pokemon, I would continue that metaphor to express the rarity/demand of these particular remixes. Instead I’ll just fall back on a crutch of a comparison and call them my holy grails. These mixes are from the You Can Dance promo LP, which was released solely to radio stations to promote the 1987 remix compilation You Can Dance.

You Can Dance is a bit of a footnote in Madonna’s discography, but the album was something of a big deal when it came out. It was one of the first remix albums released by a major artist, and featured mixes of many of her biggest dance-friendly hits, as well as an exclusive track, “Spotlight.” One thing that made the album stand out even among current remix compilations is that most of the songs are mixed together to create the feeling of a live DJ set. The only concrete break in the album is halfway through, as it was still primarily an LP release and such a break was needed to flip sides.

It’s a great concept and works great at parties, but didn’t lend itself to radio play. Hence, the creation of this special radio-only promo. It served as as a way for listeners to hear the newly remixed versions, while at the same time fitting them to into a more radio-friendly format.

The songs on You Can Dance weren’t the first Madonna songs to get radio-friendly single remixes. Hell, most of her singles from the era have separate, often radically different, single remixes. However, it’s the only album that locked those mixes behind a promo release (and an obscenely rare one at that). While many rarer Madonna 7″ singles would be released on commercially available singles, or make their way to a greatest hits compilation, all of the single edits for You Can Dance remain ultra-obscure rarities secluded to this release to this very day.

Some of the remixes aren’t very different to ones that are more widely available, to be honest. The version of “Spotlight” that was included on Celebration is pretty similar to this mix, with only a slightly different opening. Most of them, though feature some pretty notable deviations, especially in the breakdowns and instrumental sections, which are often heavily re-worked to be more dance friendly and use a lot of techniques that were common at the time, like vocal looping and reverb.

Discovering this record has re-kindled my interest in tracking down the remaining Madonna rarities I have yet to acquire. As such, I will hopefully update/finish my Guide To Madonna Remixes that I started on my other site eons ago. While a lot of people seemed to like that, to be honest I mostly did it for myself so I would know which remixes I still needed to get!

One final quick note about these rips; this record is absolutely flawless, with nary a scratch on it. I also gave it a good clean just to be sure before I played it. The resulting rip was nearly perfect, and once I ran it through my digital scrubbing I think I was able to remove damn near any imperfections, save for some incredibly minor sibilance. When “mastering” the recording, I made these tracks just a smidge louder than usual. If you ran them through a visualizer, you’d probably notice some slight clipping. However, you probably won’t actually hear said clipping, I didn’t. And making them just a tiny bit louder than usual gave them a much brighter sound in my opinion. They’re still far quieter and less compressed than the album versions, trust me.

Now that I got this one properly ripped and secured in my stacks, I don’t know what else I need to find in terms of obscenely rare Madonna remixes. Maybe the It’s That Girl cassette tape? Although the prospect of spending over $100 on a tape kind of makes me wanna throw up.

Tape is the devil’s format.

Posted in Complete Albums, Madonna, remixes | 5 Comments »

Jingo Jango Morning

April 22nd, 2019

Jellybean
Jingo (Fun House Mix)
Jingo (West 26th Street Mix)
Mirage (Dancers Dream) Part II
Yeah, you know this song even if you think you don’t. It’s one of those numbers that’s been covered by a thousand people, sampled by millions, and referenced by billions. The original is by a Nigerian musician by the name of Babatunde Olatunji. That version came out in the 50s. Notable artists that have covered the tune include Santana, Gong (holy shit what) and Fatboy Slim, which is probably the version that I’m most familiar with. Jellybean’s version first appeared on his 1987 Just Visiting This Planet. That album was re-issued at some point with some bonus tracks and remixes thrown in, but for some reason none of these mixes made that cut.

I have to imagine that this was a dance hit back in the 80s. Like all of Jellybean’s work, it is immaculately produced, seemingly created in a lab to get you off your ass and onto the dance floor and/or jazzercise workout (god, this had to be a part of a Fitness-style workout routine you just know it was).

As “classic tunes transformed into electro cuts by Jellybean” go, “Jingo” is no “The Mexican,” and that’s probably the worst thing I have to say about it. Whenever I listen to it, I think “this is good, but I should probably just be listening to “The Mexican'” and then I go ahead and listen to “The Mexican.” You know what’s one of the greatest tunes of all time? “The Mexican.”

Also, the song doesn’t really have much song to it. It’s more or less two 30 second bits looped over and over again. This is fine when you’re on the dancefloor (or working out) but when you’re sitting in front of your computer, looking over job listings for teaching gigs in the greater Tokyo area, it sort of wears out its welcome. Even more so when you’re listening to not one, but three remixes of it back-to-back-to-back (the 12″ also has the UK House Mix, which I’m not including here because it’s on the CD you can buy legally). After listening to these remixes a few times each, I think I’ve gotten my lifetime fill.

The b-side “Mirage (Dancers Dream) Part II” has even less to it, but I strangely enjoy it more. It’s minimal in a way that works. As if the title wasn’t a clue, this was obviously intended to be a dance track, and from the sound of it, a breakdance track at that. I’m not popping and locking it all that much these days, unless you count my joints popping in and out, but I still dig this one quite a bit. It has that hard-to-define electro sound that’s timeless. Drums machines on drum machines on drum machines (with drum machines).

Rad.

Posted in Jellybean, remixes | No Comments »

A song you won’t like and some remixes by Holly Johnson

April 12th, 2019

I’d like to take a moment to say thanks to some of the more thoughtful and interesting comments left on my past few posts. It was interesting for me to read some viewpoints on music ownership, MP3, blogs and so on.

One comment about my blog in particular brought up a point that I’d like to talk about: the idea that my blog has changed in some way since I moved to Japan, and that’s why my readership has dwindled in the past few years. It was a good, well-written opinion and thanks to who wrote it. I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned this in the past, but I want to elaborate on it once more.

To a certain extent, yes, I agree with this. When I started this blog eons ago I focused primarily on dance remixes of popular pop songs (usually from the 80s and early 90s) with the occasional dip into the obscure worlds of soundtracks, offbeat old records, and imports. More recently, that’s flipped. Now, most of what I write about and share is from records very few people have heard of, leftfield releases from Japan or other countries, prog oddities and so on.

Again, I’d like to point out that a lot of that to do with the fact that, in 2019, it is very, very hard to find out-of-print tracks by popular artists. I would like to remind everyone, that is a good thing! When I was sharing Dead or Alive, Erasure and Depeche Mode remixes, it was almost out of spite over the fact that the record companies were blowing it by not making these releases available for the die-hards who would buy them. But, hey, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, that’s not the case anymore. Depeche Mode is currently going through the process of re-releasing the majority of their 12″ singles, complete with download codes. Dead Or Alive put out that massive box set that literally has nearly their entire musical output on CD. The same goes for many other acts.

For me personally, I am very much against sharing music that people can listen to legally. I feel that people should support artists anytime it’s possible. That’s one of my many problems with Burning The Ground, another Mp3 blog that deals predominately in 80s music that I know a lot of my readers visit. Checking out that dude’s site, I see that he’s recently shared remixes of Bonnie Tyler’s “Holding Out For a Hero,” Sheena Easton’s “Strut,” and Cory Hart’s “Sunglasses at Night.” Yo, check it, all of those songs are available for purchase on iTunes! Or on re-released deluxe edition CDs if you favor a physical format. If you like Cory Hart that much, buy his music for real. I’m sure he’d appreciate the extra dough.

(Also, Burning The Ground often plagiarizes its copy wholesale from Wikipedia or AllMusic without proper attribution, so as a writer – fuck that dude.)

Basically, it is literally impossible for me to predominately focus on remixes of 80s pop acts. You can get almost all of them legally and the few you can’t, I rarely care writing about. Of course, that’s not to say I’ll never write about or share that stuff again. If I somehow stumble across an out-of-print Pet Shop Boys single again, bet you’re ass I’ll share it here. Just don’t hold your breathe.

One thing that perplexes me though; to the people say stuff like “I used to like your blog but now you post weird shit,” have you tried listening to the weird shit? I mean, our musical tastes obviously overlap to some degree. I reckon most people that come here like synth-pop and other forms of electronic music. You’ll probably like Steve Hillage, I bet you’d dig on some electronic-focused prog rock, and you’ll most definitely love Shojo-Tai. There’s nothing I love more than discovering new music. I wish I had more friends or read more blogs that shared my musical tastes so it would be easier for me to track down shit I never heard before. The music I share here is free, we all like Erasure, why not trust me and give it a shot?

Anyway, here’s some weird shit that you’ve never heard of. If you like it, share it with a friend. If you don’t come back in a week or so, I might share some other weird shit that you have a chance of liking! It’s exciting.

Harue Momoyama w/Ryuichi Sakamoto
虚空の舟唄
Stoked for the five people who will like this one.

Momoyama was a well-known shamisen player in Japan who recorded music for over 30 years, before her death in 2008. She was the very definition of NOT a crossover artist, focusing solely on classical compositions, folk songs, and other traditional music. This piece, which was originally released in 1979, seems to be the closest thing she ever came to “modern” music, thanks to the guest appearance by Sakamoto, who serves an electronic accompaniment to her playing and vocals. Even with him, this is some sparse-ass music. If I didn’t run my recordings through noise-reduction software, large parts of this piece would’ve been lost to the background noise of the record.

This is interesting music, but it also feels kind of like a blown opportunity. It doesn’t really combine modern electronics and traditional music all that much. Momoyama seems to keep Sakamoto’s electronic contributions at arm’s length. They play off each other for a bit at the beginning, but as the piece progresses it quickly changes into an either/or situation. You get Momoyama’s singing and shamisen, then you get Sakamoto’s electronic soundscapes, then you go back to Momoyama, then back to Sakamoto for a brief coda. It makes me wonder if they were on the same page with this. I’m sure Sakamoto would’ve loved to have had a more collaborative effort, at the time, he was all about combining eastern and western as well as modern and classical. Regardless, it sure is an interesting experiment, and I’ve certainly never heard anything like it before.

Holly Johnson
Americanos (Liberty Mix)
Americanos (Radio 7″ Mix)
Americanos (Mambo Dub Mix)
Oh shit look what I found, a 12″ remix of an 80s pop song. This one’s okay. I guess. To be honest I’ve been sitting on this for about a year because I didn’t have much to say about it. Still don’t really. It’s very much late-80s synthpop, when the genre had played itself out and there was nothing left for it to give. Still, it’s fun. Good remixes too. If shamisens and electro-acoustic soundscapes aren’t for you, then here you go.

Posted in Holly Johnson, remixes | 9 Comments »

Frank Becker’s Synth Vivaldi

April 7th, 2019

I was really surprised my last post didn’t take off. I’m not going to say that I wrote that specifically with getting a larger audience (at least for a short time) in mind, but it was definitely a factor. This may sound selfish and whiny, but having an audience feels good sometimes. That’s the main reason why I’ve severely curtailed my other site. People really dig the record store guides, and that makes me really happy. But damn never everything else I wrote fell on death ears, especially the posts that I enjoyed writing the most.

I’ll be honest (and I think I’ve mentioned this before) but my readership for this blog continues to decline. When I started this up I was quickly getting thousands of hits a day thanks to the attention given to MP3 blogs. Now, thanks to Twitter and Facebook, I get a fraction of that. People don’t want to read about music anymore. And people don’t even want to download it (legally or otherwise) it seems. They’re more than content to give a service 10 bucks a month for the right to borrow poor-sounding streaming music that they don’t even own.

Whatever. I’m an old man. I’m nearly 40 and feel more and more out of touch each year. When my clickwheel iPod finally croaked earlier this year, I really had a difficult time finding a decent replacement. I wondered why, but then it hit me – people don’t buy MP3 players anymore. They just listen to music on their phone because they’re getting most of it via Spotify or a similar service. I would say that made me feel old, but even people my age don’t buy music anymore, so I guess my obliviousness to current trends is more than just a generational divide.

Anyways, rambling. All this to say that I was once again reminded by all of this that I should never ever bother writing posts strictly “for the hits.” The posts will inevitably fail to find a substantial audience and I’ll just get bummed. Best for me to stick to my wheelhouse and write about things that will never find a meaningful audience.

Keep them expectations low.

So yeah, here’s a post about a synthesizer rendition of The Four Seasons by Vivaldi.

Frank W. Becker – Synthesizer Four Seasons
Spring
Summer
Fall
Winter
This is the second time I’ve shared a rendition of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. The first was an interpretation done entirely on the Japanese koto. This time I’m going the opposite route, with one done predominately on synthesizers.

One of the the many things I absolutely adore about Japanese record stores is their tendency to break things up into the most specific genres imaginable. Stores here don’t just have “rock” sections. For example, a rock section is properly segmented to include special sections dedicated to prog, punk, heavy metal, jazz fusion, and so on. It makes it so much easier to find new music. You can go to a sub-genre you like, find an interesting-looking album, and give it a whirl.

And while most record stores in other areas would neglect synthesizer-centric albums to a general “electronic” section, here they get their own placard. I chalk this up to the relative influence that Japanese musicians had on the early synth scene. Even before YMO, many Japanese musicians were embracing the synth craze started by Wendy Carlos. The most notable of these is, of course, Tomita, but there were many more, including new age darlings Kitaro and Fumio Miyashita, who both made a killing with “healing music” in the early 80s.

But a lot of synthesizer albums in Japan weren’t made by Japanese musicians. As I dig through the crates looking for obscure pieces of moog-ephemera, I often find Japanese exclusive synthesizer albums by artists from all over the world. Sometimes the albums are just reworked versions of records already available overseas, with altered tracklistsings or covers. However, on occasion, the album is an entirely new creation made specifically with Japanese audiences in mind.

That’s the case with the work of Frank W. Becker, who released six albums of synthesizer-focused music in just two years, from 1978 to 1979. His work with the instrument runs the gamut. A few are entirely original compositions that he made specifically for the synthesizer. Two are Beatles covers albums (and are quite good).

But the one I come back to the most is his rendition of Four Seasons. Of course, that has a lot to do with the source material. Four Seasons is a classic for a reason, and like I said in my first post where I wrote about it, very few pieces of music calm me down like Four Seasons. I also like it because it doesn’t force itself to be limited to only synthesizer. On the album, Frank’s synth work is accompanied by a violin. Why some who enjoy synthesized renditions of classical music might be let down by this, I find it to be a welcome addition. It gives the record a sense of life that would not have been possible by synthesizer alone in 1978. Also, the violin isn’t used as a crutch to hide imperfections or weaknesses with the synthesizer material. It’s just an accompaniment and nothing more. The crux of the album is still Frank and his amazing synth work.

Frank is still with us and still making music. He has a website. I even tried contacting him (several times) to see if it was okay for me to share his music. He never responded. (Frank, if you do find this and don’t want me sharing this, let me know and I’ll delete it immediately.) His website mentions his electronic work, but only in passing, and this album is absent entirely. Perhaps he only wants to focus on his original material, which I guess makes sense.

I have five of his six albums and cherish them all. His covers are fun, his classical pieces are soothing and well-done, and his original pieces make great use of the synthesizers of the day. I hope to share more of his work in the future.

Frank, if you stumble upon this, just wanted to let you know, your shit rocks and you kick ass.

Dope beard too.

Posted in Complete Albums, Frank Becker | 6 Comments »

Bleachers – Terrible Thrills Vol. 3 #1 (High Quality Vinyl Rips)

March 25th, 2019

Bleachers
Let’s Get Married (by Mitski)
Mickey Mantle Comes Alive
There are probably two groups of people reading this right now; my regular readers, and Bleachers fans who stumbled upon this site somehow or another.

To the Bleachers fans (I assume you outnumber my regular readers), welcome! Here are some high-quality vinyl rips of those songs you’re looking for. They sound better than the ones you found on Dropbox. Trust me on this. And hey, if you like Bleachers, bookmark me, I occasionally share 80s pop and other shit you might enjoy. And you don’t need to jump through any hoops to download those songs. Just right-click and “save as.”

Now, if you’re not a die-hard Bleachers fan who came here specifically to find these songs (and hence, already know what they are), an explanation/backstory.

In 2016, Bleachers, a side-project of Fun’s Jack Antonoff (who also produced at least one hit song you like – he gets around) released Terrible Thrills Vol. 2, a track-by-track covers album of the group’s debut album Strange Desire that featured new versions of the songs on that album reworked by woman singers.

(In case you were wondering, Terrible Thrills Vol. 1 was a single by Jack Antonoff’s earlier group, Steel Train).

While Terrible Thrills Vol. 2 can be easily purchased digitally on iTunes and other digital storefronts (and I assume it’s on Spotify, but fuck if I care),(edit: apparently this is no longer true) it only received a limited, vinyl-only physical release. That sucker is pretty rare now, goes for about $50 on Discogs. Even if you can’t track down a vinyl copy of it, I highly recommend buying the digital versions. With vocals by such amazing artists like Charli XCX, Susanna Hoffs, and Sia, in some ways, it’s better than Strange Desire itself, not a small feat considering that’s probably my favorite album of 2014.

Now Bleachers’ sophomore effort Gone Now is getting the “Terrible Thrills” treatment for Vol. 3. But this time, Antonoff has decided to do something a bit different. For starters, it’s not a track-by-track collection of covers by women artists, half of it is that, but the other half consists of new versions by Antonoff himself, featuring reworked lyrics and different production. Secondly, it’s not an album at all, and is instead a collection of 7″ singles that are now being released piecemeal.

The first part in the set came out a few weeks back, and I finally got my copy in the mail this week (I live in Japan, shit takes time).  And if this introductory volume is any indication as what’s to come, I’m very stoked to hear the rest of the records when they come out.

The A-side is a cover of the single “Let’s Get Married” that features new vocals by Mitski. I’ll be 100% honest here. I don’t know anything about Mitski at all (I’m a middle-age out-of-touch gay white man in Tokyo, I can’t keep up with everything). But after hearing her take on this track, I’m eager to check out her stuff. The song is entirely re-imagined. What was once a big, bombastic ode to gated reverb (like most of Antonoff’s stuff – and I mean that in a good way) has now been reworked as a ballad with the majority of the instrumentation coming by way of vocal harmonies and simply synths. It sounds halfway between a demo and the fully-fledged final version. Love it.

The B-side is reworking of Gone Now‘s opener “Dreams of Mickey Mantle,” retitled “Mickey Mantle Comes Alive.” It’s an odd rejiggering, featuring purposely distorted vocals and an extended outro that’s a barely audible conversation. Taking what was previously a rather standard (if fucking great) pop song and morphing it into Sleigh Bells-lite was a bold choice, and I’d be lying if I said I’m 100% in love with it. I do like the added drums though, and the new production on the choruses is good too.

I mentioned at the top that these rips are better than the ones that have already been made available. I think the fans that ripped these earlier didn’t really know what they were doing. Not their fault, they’re not idiots like me who have been ripping vinyl for over a decade. While those were just straight-up audio rips, mine have been cleaned up a bit. I ran it through some noise reduction to get rid of the background noise, and also scrubbed it clean of clicks and pops. Finally, I gave it a slight EQ boost to give it a richer, fuller sound. If none of that is your game, then hey, those raw rips are still on Dropbox.

If you do like my rips, please feel free to share them however and wherever you like. Antonoff said himself that we can rip and share these tracks!

Posted in B-sides, remixes | 6 Comments »

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