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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 »

Live Tracks, brought to you by Grizzly Beer

Monday, November 4th, 2019

Live Tracks #2
In the above zip, you get live performances of:
Duran Duran – Rio
Fleetwood Mac  – Hypnotized
Romantics – Talking In Your Sleep
The Who – Behind Blue Eyes
Yes – I’ve Seen All Good People
Steve Miller Band – Fly Like An Eagle

Plus beer commercials! Let me explain.

Syndicated radio shows pressed to vinyl for national distribution are something that I sadly do not know much about. They aren’t the kind of records that one tends to easily find in used record stores (especially in Japan). That’s because they were never intended for any kind of commercial release, especially on the second-hand market. When one of these makes it to a used record store or online, I always wonder how it got out into the wild. Maybe a radio station unloaded its vinyl library without bothering to sort out the promos? Or perhaps a DJ snagged a personal copy for their own private collection, and they ended up selling it years later? Or maybe someone just stole it and sold it for cash. Who knows? And who knows how this one made its way to a tiny store outside of Ikebukuro in Japan?

Live Tracks was a syndicated radio program produced by DIR Broadcasting, perhaps most famous for their King Biscuit Flower Hour show. While King Biscuit featured complete (or near-complete) live concerts, Live Tracks was more of a sampler, a bite-sized one-song radio program with a single cut from a live concert. I suspect that a lot of the performances on Live Tracks were just repackaged performances taken from DIR’s substantial back catalog of King Biscuit shows. The radio host on these episodes doesn’t really go exactly when and where the recordings were taken from. Sometimes he gives rough dates (the Duran Duran show was recorded in Madison Square Garden in 1984), but other times he just says something like “here’s an old one…” so pinning down exact information on the songs is tricky. Pinning down much of anything on this show was hard, this episode wasn’t even on Discogs until I added it.

The live tracks of Live Tracks are quite good, recorded professionally and mixed well. Some sound a bit raw, but they capture the energy of a concert well. Just as interesting to me, however, is the wrapping that each episode comes in. The Live Tracks records were complete radio shows on disc. The DJ didn’t have to do anything other than drop the needle and let the show play. The band introductions are handled by DIR’s own emcee, and the LP even has its own commercials included.

For the episodes included on this LP, the sponsor is Grizzly Beer, a long-gone Canadian beer brand who apparently had a penchant for horribly inappropriate commercials. One features comments about college kids drinking beer, another drops in some absolutely cringe-inducing Asian stereotypes, and one even makes jokes about minors getting drunk on Grizzly. Holy shit that wouldn’t fly today.

Since an episode of Live Tracks is really just one song, radio stations got a lot of bang for their buck with each LP. This one features six episodes, each with an intro by the emcee followed by a Grizzly Beer commercial, another bit by the emcee, a complete song performance, and an outro by the host.

Given the format of the show, I had a hard time figuring out how to share it here tonight. I thought about just feature the live cuts, but then you’d lose a lot of the flavor of the beer commercials (which are seriously great). Also, the live cuts often fade in and out with the host, so it would be jarring to not to include them. So, I just went ahead and made the entire thing one zip file, cutting up each episode into separate tracks. I figured y’all would be just as interested in the historical wrappings of the episodes as I was. For the most part, the recordings sound good. There are few crackles here and there, a tiny bit of distortion at the very end of the Steve Miller track, but as a whole, these are well-recorded performances on a damn clean slab of wax.

Enjoy, and if you find a bottle of Grizzly Beer, for God’s sake don’t drink it, that thing is probably 30 years old.

 

Posted in Complete Albums, Duran Duran, Fleetwood Mac, Steve Miller Band, The Romantics, The Who, Yes | 6 Comments »

Japanese Ambient Chill Vibes with Dip In The Pool

Tuesday, October 15th, 2019

Dip In The Pool
Silence
Hinamari
Hasu no Enishi
Facing The Sea
Dip In The Pool is a strange group. One that not many people have heard, yet conversely, many people have written about. They kind of got swept up in that whole “city pop” thing a few years back, despite not even being remotely connected to it. Later on, they were more accurately grouped as “Japanese ambient pop.” I don’t know if there are enough acts around for such a genre to be a proper thing, but the tag fits good enough. Dip In The Pool are chill. Super chill. And quiet. Super quiet. Dip In The Pool have their upbeat numbers and pop tracks for sure, but when they slow things down, they take things so minimal and ambient that they push the very definition of what a pop song can be.

Oh, and did I mention their fucking incredible? Because they’re fucking incredible.

Very few acts pull of “ethereal” quite like Dip In The Pool. I often compare them to Cocteau Twins. Their otherwordly charms and haunting vibe create an atmosphere that is simultaneously comforting and alien. Both relaxing and off-putting. This is almost entirely due to the incredible vocals of Miyako Koda. Yes, the sparse instrumentation does well to create that distant-yet-calming feel, but it’s really her voice that puts it all together. Simply put, its heart-crushingly beautiful. An aural sedative. Nothing, absolutely nothing, rips out my anxiety and throws it into a sonic wading pool of chamomile tea and lavender essence quite like Miyako Koda’s voice. It’s heaven.

Of course, nearly everything the band has ever released is out-of-print. Because of course it is. As of right now, only a handful of singles and remixes on for sale on iTunes. And Spotify only has a smattering of tracks and one album, none of which are their best. Dip In The Pool’s early work, all of which came out in the 80s, is just heaven on earth. And it’s a hell of a situation that we can’t listen to any of it easily.

I’ve been lucky and have been able to snag up quite a bit of their work since I moved to Japan, but even then it’s not easy. I got two albums only because they were re-released (on vinyl only for some reason). Everything else I got is vintage, and I paid accordingly for it. I’ve never even seen a CD of theirs for sale. Some can go for a quite a bit online.

The tracks I’m sharing tonight are some of my favorite by the group, and make up the entirety of their 1985 self-titled debut EP. All of these tracks would later on appear on the band’s 1988 debut album, which was released as Silence in the UK and was self-titled in Japan. Rough Trade actually released the album in the UK, and if it was their decision to name the album after “Silence,” I can totally see why. For me, it is the stand out tune by a group that has loads of them. Koda’s vocals (did I mention that I like them) are absolutely angelic here, and the complete absence of any real beat lets the song just float over you like a cloud.

After the brief interlude “Hinamari,” things kick up a notch with “Hasu No Enishi.” There are actual beats! It has a tempo! A lot of Dip In The Pool sounds like this, honestly. I’ve been focusing a lot on their more minimal and ambient side, but they had their share of upbeat numbers. Still, “upbeat” for Dip In The Pool is rather chill. Koda’s not Madonna, even on a track that has the tempo to qualify as a dance number, she’s still going to take her damn time and deliver a sedate, prolonged vocal that slows the whole thing down to her pace.

The EP closes with “Facing The Sea,” which splits the difference between the purely ethereal “Silence” and more beat-driven track that precedes it. There’s a pulsing beat here, but it’s little more than a click track, pushed back in the mix in exchange for some lovely synthesizer bells that work to match the melody put out by Koda. Again, it’s the kind of lovely, happy, pretty music that, after the reading the news or dealing with an exceptional bad day at work, is all I want to listen to.

Let’s chill.

Posted in Complete Albums, dip in the pool | No Comments »

Universal Energy’s Space Disco

Sunday, July 28th, 2019

Tonight’s post was supposed to go up last week, it was also originally going to be much longer. But while writing it, the post kind of became a whole other thing that was way off topic and much more about disco, disco’s legacy, and anti-disco sentiments, eventually becoming a whole separate piece over at my other blog (that I’m once again trying to get into the habit of updating more often). So if you want to read my thoughts on disco, disco demolition, and why the later was NOT a homophobic racist reactionary movement. Go check that out.

And if you want to hear some goofy disco while reading that, I got you covered here.

 

Universal Energy
Universal Energy
Space Energy
Disco Energy I
Christmas From Space
Disco Energy II

I don’t know much about Universal Energy. Okay, scratch that, I know next to nothing about Universal Energy, because no one knows much of anything about Universal Energy. The group was a collaboration between French composers Jean-Pierre Bourtayre and Bernard Estardy. Their sole self-titled release features just six tracks and is barely more than 30 minutes long, and that’s all they ever did together. Both did a ton of music outside Universal Energy though. Bourtayre is an acclaimed composer and songwriter in France, and Estardy would continue to release dance music under a variety of pseudonyms throughout his career, and worked behind-the-scenes for more acts than I can even count.

I know nothing of their other work, so I can’t speak of it. But Universal Energy is pretty fun. This is prime space disco; combining sci-fi themes and sounds with four-on-the-floor dance beats. Space disco wasn’t the most popular of disco sub-genres at the time. There weren’t many mainstream space disco hits. The only one I can think of is probably Meco’s disco remix of the Star Wars Theme, which is kind of cheating. And actually, I really wouldn’t even call that space disco. Sure, the subject matter is literally space, but there’s nothing “spacey” about the song’s sound aside from the fact that it’s the Star Wars Theme.

A lot of Moroder’s work has been classified as space disco (at least on the subpar space disco wikipedia page it has been) and I don’t know if I agree with that either. Morder’s best disco was almost entirely electronic, obviously, but most of it didn’t really incorporate sci-fi themes or sounds. “The Chase” and “I Feel Love” certainly didn’t. His reworking of theme to Battlestar Galactica did, but again, that’s cheating.

If anyone knows any other space disco (not including disco by the group Space, I have all that), let me know in the comments. I want to hear more of this stuff. I would preferably like music from the 70s, but newer stuff that falls under the space disco moniker would be dope too.

Enjoy the intergalactic grooves. I hope to get a few more posts out in the next couple of weeks. I’m off to the states in the middle of August. If history is any indication, it’ll be hard for me to get more than a post or two online during the month I’ll be away. Family obligations (and alcohol obligations that come after them) usually limit my writing output when I’m in the states.

Posted in Complete Albums, Universal Energy | 5 Comments »

Enka Electronics by Hideki Matsutake

Sunday, July 14th, 2019

Tonight’s album is one of the most mysterious that I’ve ever shared.

Synthesizer ga Kanaderu Nihon no Meika (complete album download)

Hell of a cover, right? A lot going on there, typeface wise. It was even a struggle for me to figure out the proper title of it at first. But I think my boyfriend and I figured it out. Best we can figure, the name of this record is シンセサイザーが奏でる日本の名歌. That’s pronounced as “Synthesizer ga Kanaderu Nihon no Meika” and translates to “The Greatest Japanese Songs on Synthesizer.”

For the makers of this album (more on them in a bit) “greatest Japanese songs” meant “popular ballads and folk music, mostly from the 1960s.” A lot of the songs here were originally enka tunes. Enka is a bit hard to describe, there really isn’t an analog to it in Western culture. Basically it’s music for your grandparents, sentimental slow-moving ballads without a hint of that newfangled rock and roll the kids go on about. Imagine if someone combined easy listening, folk music, and American standards into one genre, that would be enka. It’s Barry Manilow meets Celine Deon with a hint of Perry Cuomo

I’m not going to be as bold as to say that its uniformly bad, but it’s not for me. I am not that music’s target market. I will refrain from critical comment. I must also refrain as to the accuracy of these interpretations. Maybe they’re as faithful as all-synthesizers cover can be. Maybe they’re radical re-workings that remake the songs entirely (I doubt that). I just don’t know.

Judging them solely on their synthesized versions though, they’re not bad. There are some good melodies here. I dig “One Rainy Night In Tokyo” quite a bit, it has a good groove. “Una Sera Di Tokyo” isn’t half bad either, with a playful yet melancholy sound. The person behind this album sure knew what they were doing when they put it together. All of the songs, even the ones where I can tell the source material ain’t all that, sound good. Excellent choices regarding audio effects and production all around.

So who the hell did this?

The credited artist on the cover is “Beautiful Shateau & Synthesizer.” I assume they meant “Chateau” but that’s what happens when you rely on katakana pronunciation to spell something. Trust me, I know. This is an English teacher in Japan you’re talking to.

A quick web search on them brings up next to nothing. There’s one incredibly crackly YouTube video of a single track from this album, a Discogs page, and the occasional online auction listing. All are pretty sparse in terms of information.

Even their discogs page is a mess. It didn’t even have this album on it (I added it last week). However, the pages for the two albums it did have credit Hideki Matsutake as a “synthesizer conductor.” That didn’t surprise me one bit. I actually suspected these records were of his creation the moment I first listened to them.

I’ve mentioned Matsutake here a few times in the past. He played some synthesizers and sequencers on some of YMO’s albums, and he also released plenty of music as a solo artist under the name Logic System. I think he’s a genius and one of the greatest electronic musicians of all time.

I met him once.

I’m a fan.

He’d be the Wendy Carlos of Japan if Tomita wasn’t already the Wendy Carlos of Japan. He is an incredibly early pioneer of electronic music and deserves far more recognition than he has. Dude is epic. Check out anything he put out, or was even associated with, from the early-70s to mid-80s and just prepare to have your mind blown. He was leap years ahead of his time with the kind of stuff he was pulling off with even the most basic tools.

I imagine that this record, and the others that he put out as “Beautiful Shateau & Synthesizer” have to be some of of his earliest releases. They’re definitely pre-YMO, with their ultra-minimal, definitely monophonic synthesizer sound. However, I can’t confirm this100% because, and here’s the crazy thing, none of the “Shateau” records have any kind of copyright or release date information on them at all. Nothing. Nada. Zip. Zilch. And if you know anything about Japanese albums, that’s pretty odd. Many of them label their release date down to the day. For these records to not even have a basic copyright date is just bizarre. And I know it’s not just my copies missing this information. Everywhere I look, whenever I can turn up anything about these albums, the year is always blank or listed as “unknown.”

They’re records outside of time. Creepy.

This one certainly falls under the “not for everyone” camp, and I know this. I’m not going to complain if you don’t like this (but don’t be a dick and comment about how much you don’t like it, okay?) but I thought that this had to be shared for a few reasons. First of all, it’s probably one of, if not the, earliest release by a true innovator of electronic music. If for nothing else, this deserves to be archived and shared for that alone. Additionally, while I’m an alien to the source material, I still find the versions on this album entertaining and worth a listen. The soothing melodies combined with the harsh synthesizer tunes make it sound like easy listening music from another planet or something. It’s groovy stuff. Beck would sample this shit if he knew about it.

Unfortunately, whoever owned this album before me really fucking loved it and played the shit out of it. Or they hated it and used it as sandpaper. Either way, it’s banged up pretty bad. I did my best to give a good digital polish with scratch and noise removal software, but there’s only so much I can do with an all-synthesizer record like this. The software that removes cracks, crackles and whatnot often picks up the harsh, peaking sounds of an early synthesizer as noise, and tries to remove them too. I’ve done my best to clean this up, but it’s a bit more scratchy than my usual rips and for that I apologize. I do plan on sharing more of the “Shateau” albums in the future, and while the other ones don’t sound great, they all sound better than this one.

Hope you don’t mind the scratches too much, and hope you enjoy some ultra-rare ultra-early ultra-awesome electronic music by an ultra-legend of the industry.

Posted in Complete Albums, Logic System | No Comments »

Bleachers – Terrible Thrills Vol. 3 #4 (High Quality Vinyl Rips)

Monday, June 24th, 2019

Bleachers
Foreign Girls (featuring Ani DiFranco)
And, Nothing Is You
And here we are, the final chapter of Bleachers’ Terrible Thrills Vol. 3. This one brings us a reworking of “Foreign Girls” that features folk rock legend Ani DiFranco, as well as “And, Nothing Is You”  which is a remix of “Nothing Is U” that removes most of the electronic effects from the original and replaces them with more acoustic orchestrations.  Both of these new versions feel like more low-key, intimate versions of the originals. While the album versions both started quiet but then built themselves up to grandiose, bombastic finales, these versions both stay sedate for their entirety. I don’t think either surpass the originals (I like my bombastic pop songs) but they’re still great, and DiFranco’s contributions to the new version of “Foreign Girls” are fantastic.

Like before, I have cleaned these up digitally to remove as many imperfections, scratches and other issues as possible. I also gave both a slight loudness boost. If you load the first track into an audio editor, you’ll notice that the very top of the waveform at the loudest part is clipped off just a little bit, but I can’t imagine that it’s clipped to a degree where anyone could hear a problem with it. If anyone does pick up any audio problems with these though, please let me know and I’ll do my best to fix them. I think they came out pretty great.

As fun and exciting as Terrible Thrills Vol. 3 has been, if Jack decides to do this again for his next album, I hope he forgoes the “record club” format for something a bit more accessible. As I mentioned last time, I had to delay uploading the second volume for nearly a month because my copy came to me completely scratched. That’s not fun. I get the appeal of something like this; it gives the music an emotional value that you don’t get from a stream or digital-only copy. But vinyl is intrinsically an unkind format that is easily damaged and incredibly inconvenient. And while it’s (relatively) easy for me to rip vinyl cuts to a digital format so I can rock them on my MP3 player, not everyone is so lucky. Music should be easy to listen to, don’t you think so? At least the cuts were on standard records that preserved the recording quality relatively well, and Jack didn’t go the Joyful Noise route, saving exclusive cuts for shitty flexi-discs or other novelty formats (seriously, fuck that label).

Anyways Jack, if you’re reading this, maybe for the next series you could try bringing back CDs, the most underrated of formats. It’s only a matter of time before CD nostalgia kicks in, might as well get ahead of the curve!

Just don’t put it on tape. If you put it on tape I swear to god…

So yeah, enjoy the rips everyone! And if you missed the earlier releases in the series, you can find part one here, and parts two and three here!

Posted in B-sides, Bleachers, Complete Albums, remixes | 4 Comments »

A Rare Zelda Theme Remix (and more)

Friday, May 31st, 2019

It must be said that 1986 was a hell of a year for video game music. According to the VGMdb, only one game music album came out the year prior; The Return of Video Game Music. In 1986, nearly 40 records and singles with some connection to video games were released. That’s nearly one a week.

Some stone-cold game music classics came out that year. The first GMO releases with music by companies like Capcom, Namco, Sega, and Nintendo all went to shelves in 1986. Same for the Dragon Quest Suite, the first commercially released LP featuring a symphonic arrangement of a game music soundtrack.

Those are in-demand titles by game music collectors, but at least most of them have been re-issued at some point. For example, you can pick up CD copies of Famicom Music relatively affordably online (and I suggest you do, that’s a fantastic album).

But a lot of key titles from 1986 remain out-of-print and command insane prices online. One such title is this.

Heroes 21
ゼルダの伝説 (The Legend Of Zelda)
謎の村雨城 (The Mysterious Murasame Castle)

This is a two-track 12″ single. The A-side, as you can guess from the image above, features an extended remix of the theme to The Legend Of Zelda. The B-side features a mix of music from The Mysterious Murasame Castle. There is also a 7″ single with the same cover art and tracklisting, but that does not have the same music. The versions on that sound absolutely nothing like the ones here. The 7″ arrangements are more traditional, while these are wacky sample-heavy and much more experimental. They sound like Art of Noise by the way of Koji Kondo.

Speaking of Koji Kondo….

Every source I could about this record credited Koji Kondo as the performer on the album. Even on Discogs and the VGMdb. This is not true. Yes, the two tracks on this album are both based on music by Koji Kondo, but it would appear that he had absolutely nothing to do with this release. The actual performers are someone or something called Heroes 21. Their name is right there on the Obi strip, with the kanji for “performed by” (演奏) right under them. But that fact was somehow lost to time.

So, that begs the question, who the hell is/are Heroes 21?

At first, I thought that they might be the same people who were behind Bonus 21, the group credited on the the equally hard-to-find Mario Syndrome release that also came out in 1986. The title treatment of both artists is identical, and both releases are from King Records.

However, when I compared the credits on each release, I saw that only two people appear on both, and they’re both engineers. The arrangers on both albums are different. Mario Syndrome was arranged by Shunji Inoue (currently the VP of Bandai Namco). This single was arranged by Hiro Yanagida, the keyboardist for the influential Japanese rock group The Apryl Fool who went on to a mildly successful solo career as a prog rock musician.

Doing further research (again, thanks largely to the amazing resource that is the VGMdb) I found that King Records also released a Solomon’s Key/Mighty Bomb Jack single in 1986. That release is credited to Replica 21. The arranger on that is Yoichiro Yoshikawa, a composer who put out a few albums and also worked with Togawa Jun, writing the music on her signature classic, “Suki Suki Daisuki.”

So all the artists are completely unrelated. Perhaps “_____ 21” was some kind of branding effort by King Records to lump all of their game music artists together? There’s so little information out there about these records, even less so in English, that it’s hard to say. I don’t think King Records kept the “21” formatting going in future releases either, so who knows what the deal was.

Even without the mysterious branding, these are must-have mixes for any game music aficionado. As I said, they’re really out-there, very indicative of what was happening with electronic pop music at the time. Samplers were a big deal when they came out, so there were a lot of tracks like this at the time, stuff composed almost entirely of samples. If you dig this, I recommend checking out Yellow Magic Orchestra’s Technodelic and Ryuichi Sakamoto’s Furturista, both are great albums built almost entirely out of samples.

And keep checking here to see if I ever score a copy of the 7″ version! Like I said, it’s totally different!

Posted in Complete Albums, Game Music, remixes | 1 Comment »

Who is that playing the guitar?

Monday, 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

Thursday, 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 »

Frank Becker’s Synth Vivaldi

Sunday, 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 »

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