i've been hesitant to post this because i'm sure everyone's heard it 1,000 times. it was on the 1,001st listen, though, that i discovered how nice the instrumental track to the game's hate it or love it is - a classic dre beat with fantastic production.

large portions of this track sound like they came right off of moby's play, which is mildly ironic considering moby's beef with dr dre's partner in crime, eminem. i wonder if all of moby's work could be similarly improved via a good retooling by dr dre.

as pleased as i was with my costume (and i was very pleased), i was somewhat disappointed to keep hearing "giorgio who? what's a moroder?" every time i tried to 'splain who i was. so i thought i should help remedy the unfortunate state of giorgio knowledge amogst my peers: here's a nice mix, mostly of his solo tracks and donna summer productions, which is the the stuff he's more famous for.

not included on that stypod mix, but personal favorites of mine, are his production of a song with phil oakey (of the human league), and one of my "favorite songs ever", his production of sparks' the number one song in heaven (after all the build-up, the release at three and a half minutes in is so so good).

there's probably no respectable way to follow up the last post, but if anyone can possibly trump roroder, it's my main man, freddie mercury. there's got to be a good book about freddie and queen out there, and i can't wait to read it. maybe it can explain where the hell this had its artistic inception. it's the theme from an 80s movie about flash gordon. i can't remember if the movie was any good, though i suspect not. regardless, the song is a work of beauty.

does this answer your question?

alternating between extremely busy and extremely lazy during the last few weeks, i've been content in the role of consumer, passively downloading the tunes posted by rmd. this is an attempt to reacclimate myself as a contributor. it's a collection of moonbootica remixes that i assembled after reading a post at house is a feeling. the tracks are consistently good and surprisingly diverse.

i've already decided on a costume, mostly because it will take like no work to make me look like mr moroder. BUT, someone should use my other brilliant ("brilliant") idea and dress up as mike jones, mostly so that whenever someone asks you who the hell you're supposed to be you can shout "mike jones! who? mike jones!" at them like 50 times.

the music on my computer, about which i've tried to be good at weeding out stuff that i rarely listen to, just crossed the 50 gig mark, which translates to approximately 700 hours of music. working eight hour days, it would take me about four months (weekends off) to get though it all, no repeats. holy shit. (nb sasha frere-jones reputedly owns a terrabyte of music. hopefully some of that is high quality masters for his bands, 'cause if not that's like seven years of full time work to get through)

last night i did that thing i do where i get obsessive and try to track down an artist's entire back catalogue. so now i have almost every trentemøller track, which is like four hours of music. so i am not helping the situation any. i'm about halfway through it though, and it's mostly all really good. i'll report back when i'm finished.

ps anyone who has the serenetti 12" or his remixes of ayia napa, decorated with ornaments, les djinns or coincidance, hook me up, i will love you forever.

trying to scrounge up some space for new albums, i decided to clean up some of the crap that accumulates on my hard drive and stubled across some songs i had grabbed a while ago and never listened to. lo and behold out of the half dozen i found, three of them KICK ASS.


take off by harlow (~1980) is damn near a lost disco classic to me after two listens. peppy, poppy, slightly spacey horn'n'string disco. as good as most of the songs on the salsoul comps i have, and worthy of much wider recognition (to my generation at least, i'm guessing that it was rather popular in the clubs upon release). i had never even heard of harlow, and still can't find out a whole lot about them. but holy shit, this song is hot.


luna square by boytronic (~1983) reminds me of early depeche mode, mostly because of the bouncy, propulsive synth groove and melody. add vocodered vocals and how could i not like this?


i see stars by roboterwerke (~1979) is really odd. another group i had never heard of, they were apparently early synth music pioneers (built ther own synths 'cause they weren't yet comercially available, how hot is that?) and inspired kraftwerk, bambaata, hancock etc to get into the sound. i was expecting more obtuseness from folks with such experimental cred, but shit is catchy. i need to find out more about these guys.

follow-ups to the rock remixes discussion:

• jesper dalhback remixing dfa 1979. so off the wall good, a fucking monster.
  
• erol alkan remixing franz ferdinand. glam racket indeed.
  

random songs i've been into lately:

• lindstrøm's i feel space, which i first heard on the second get physical comp (mixed by m.a.n.d.y.), a cd i'm loving more and more as the year progresses (and i liked it a lot to begin with).
  
• trentemøller's remix of what else is there? by röyksopp. square-wavey, squechly, bleepy insane synth riffs. reminds me of lcd's yeah in spots, and also the moonbootica remix of tessio, and chelonis r jones's one and one. like lots of good stuff actually. og, if you don't really really like this i'll be very surprised. [update: this song now has it's own thread at ilm]
  
• dominik eulberg's remix of dj hell's follow you. i'm really getting into this guy's style. this song isn't on his kreucht & fleucht mix, but it's pretty representetive of it. i've only listened through the mix once, but it was fucking great to do field theory to, if that's any kind of endorsement...

rode my bike up to capitol hill and caught ada and superpitcher spinning at chop suey last monday; they were both really good, as expected. ada played first, her set was mostly bangin' electrohouse mixed in with the warm synth sounds of her own tracks (which i think she played, and ocassionally sang, live). hearing "the red shoes" on a sound system loud enough to do it justice was awesome, but the highlight of her set (and the night) was when she closed on her cover of maps. i love that song soooo much. it was one of the most euphoric music experiences i've ever had: warm, enveloping, drony synth goodness, so loud you can fucking feel it, the level of ott nostalgia evoking melodies so palpable you want to wrap your self up in them and ignore the rest of the world, solipsism be damned. mmmmm... i want to hear it again right now...

superpitcher was good too, but i was more into the stuff ada was playing i think. his set sounded a lot like his mix cd, which is good, but not exactly the kind of stuff that'll pry me off my ass and get it dancing on a monday night (i am lame, i know). with dude playing the same venue, comparisons to michael mayer's set there last year are almost inevitable, so i'll just go ahead and make them:

mayer was straight-up one of the best shows i've ever seen. superpitcher... was good not great (although "following up" mayer would make almost anyone playing similar music look not so hot). admittedly, this might be because the turnout for superpitcher/ada was about a fifth of what mayer drew, and one of the reasons i enjoyed his show so much was the relatively crowded dancefloor and the fact that i finally saw people actually, you know, dancing to this kind of music, rather than talking about it on the internet. also—and this may be because i wasn't nearly as inebriated as during mayer's set—i didn't get the same feeling of personal connection from him as with mayer. as anyone whose seen/heard him dj can attest, a mayer set feels like a big friendly hug; superpitcher's felt like... a tastefully affected blown kiss, or something similarly suitably gothy. this is all based on this fist two-thirds of his set though, as i foolishly let someone talk sense to me and decided to take off at 1:30, and missed his last song of the night, which was apparently johnny cash's cover of black hole sun. maybe mr. mayer had told him how well playing a nirvana song had gone over last year...

oh me, oh my...

umlauts, along with dirrrty pop, has been my recent go-to for sating my pure-pop (whatever, it is a genre... maybe) cravings ever since the freakytrigger crew started slacking and decided that they like comics more than music (comics, you say? hmmm...). found the gem "de fact" by t & f vs moltosugo featuring moony in this post. go grab it, its great.

ok, so maybe rock is no longer the envelope-pushing force in music that it was three or four decades ago. i will even agree with those who, out of some mysterious sense of duty, declare that rock is dead (as for me, at least, this is true). this doesn't mean that i can no longer appreciate a great rock album. the two most recent that fall into this category are the debut lps of franz ferdinand and lcd soundsystem. i thoroughly enjoy these albums as such, but they also both have amazing singles. and what i really love are the remixes of these singles, particularly the tiga remix of tribulations (by lcd ss) and the playgroup remix of this ffffire (by ff). other fantastic remixes include the m. geist and daft punk remixes of take me out by ff.

i suspect that the artists of these songs knew that the music would be improved upon by some of the world's finest remixers as they were making it. i will even go so far as to speculate that they were counting on it and therefore made the music as remixable as possible, keeping it beat driven and fairly poppy.

from my perspective, the rock that i am interested in these days is more of a rough sketch - a handful of rhythms, guitar and vocal sounds that sound spectacular when sampled and mixed with the perfect synth sounds. in this roughness, rock, although playing a new role in the society of musical genres, remains true to it's roots.

the maddeningly consistent frenchman french-born, assumedly englishman strikes again. dude usually brings the coked-up club vibe (and works it), but this is some over the top next level shit... tranciest thing of his that i can think of... maybe the cheesiest too (these are both not bad things). that flute sample is driving me crazy, anybody care to id it? i know i've heard it bofore...

UPDATE: aha! it's an ABBA sample! maybe that's why i think the remix is so good...

weak post i know, but good god is the lemon-red mix series a beautiful thing. was worried about how someone would follow that amazing caps & jones mix, but the banana boys come through with solid solid shit. tons of great stuff in there that i don't recognize, but def nice to hear someone drop that effing massive jlc lose control remix in a set. well that and some simon & garfunkel...