Under The Influence

Good stuff. The kind of dirty noise you want to be blearing while you're playing up at the sort of late night parties your mother told you never to go to. It's really dark - almost a tad sinister in places. Beautiful.

Their cover of White Horse is definitely going into my record bag. It's like the original, but with filthy filthy bass. High-Rise is going in the bag too for that matter. The songs seem to mellow out a bit towards the end of the album - then War Against Sleep brings things back to where they should be.

Got a funny desire to get mashed up at a dance party now.

Hey, it's Chromeo but cooler! Far cooler. To be fair I've only ever listened to Needy Girl but somehow this feels slicker. I guess the Chromeo comparison really comes from the over the top use of vocoderesk sounds. No, actually, the synth sounds are pretty similar too. This is much lighter and much funkier. It's pure dance goodness.

Where to start? It seems that every track is a disco-pop masterpiece. There are downbeat numbers but it's the dancer tracks that tickle my fancy. Arcade Love and Sturdy are the ones that are really doing it for me presently.

Oh yes, and it's called IV because every single song is exactly 4 minutes long. Go figure.

It's pretty hard to classify this stuff. I purchased a couple of tracks from their singles Center Stage and Sweat after one of the American lasses I met at the Dan Deacon gig pointed me their way. I think of it as a kind of cliché retrospective look at 90s dance music with all the emphasis on having fun. You remember those pianos right? They also incorporate more recent elements from electro music.

At about 3:40 Center Stage descends into an acid rave mashup... before it forgets itself again and slips into distorted digital noise.

They haven't really released a whole lot yet but they're definitely one to watch out for over the next year. I'm picturing one of their live gigs as a place to be.

In my mind these guys are another Nextmen or Unabombers; a DJing duo that put great lesser known tunes that make you want to dance before everything else. I accidently caught them at The Big Chill in 2005 and really loved what I heard. I think they Manchester based too.

They definitely swing more towards the soul / funky / disco side of the dance floor. The mixing is really simple - in fact, it's not really mixing at all, blending would be a better term. It's primarily a showcase of good tunes.

I've only heard a couple (consistently showing my ignorance, eh?) of the songs on here before (Word Up and Low Rider), though not these versions. Of course they're all killer. The music itself sounds like good old funk/soul stuff - but it can't possibly be. I need to do a bit of digging but I think some of these songs must be from the last couple of years (Lindstrom & Prins Thomas' Ballerina for example).

Yes yes, I have some friends that are about to find out they've been missing this all their lives.

A few moments in and I really wasn't sure about this (one should choose carefully what one listens to first thing in the morning - it can be a delicate time). At the end of the album now and I just have the typical complaint to make - far far too short. 18 minutes for Pete's sake - what a tease.

In some ways it reminds me of My Own Flag - another far too short work. This is a lot like a lighter (and heavier in some ways), more electro version of that masterpiece.

Each track is a glistening little pop beauty that hits you like a train and is gone again before you even get a chance to right yourself. It's not really 8-bit but the essence is there - that's all it takes to get me interested.

Lord, what a week. Celebrating Fastnacht is hard work (though it's a good excuse for my recent absence). While the holdrio (tea laced with schnapps) is still flowing the bands keep playing. While there are still bands playing, we keep dancing.

Fastnacht most certainly is a local festival for local people - just the way festivals should be. The general idea is that everyone gets dressed up (in outfits ranging from bizarre to the downright scary) and then makes a lot of noise to drive out the spirits of winter. The noise comes in the form of more than 100 brass bands, some with as few as 6 people and others as large as 70.

Hilariously it's almost like this is the land that time forgot - thankfully it slipped from the loving grasp of the 80s. Hang out with the right people and you may even be treated to the theme from MacGuyver though more commonly you'll hear things like Holding Out For a Hero and Time After Time. There were about a dozen absolute Swiss classics that popped up continuously - I was amazed at how many I had learnt (read: was happy make roughly melodic noises to at the top of my lungs) by the end of the festival (having said that I was pretty happy to sing along one first listen).

I made dozens of recordings throughout the week, unfortunately while the best of them were playing I ran out of batteries. This one, I think, captures the spirit of the event nicely.

Love, love, love, love, love... oh please make it stop. Listening to this with the boat healed over beating through the waves at 10kts and me in the galley trying to bake bread, bad idea.

The whole thing felt a bit amateurish to me. The lyrics were really the killer though - too much ecstasy makes you think you can heal the world tih love. Any lyric that wasn't about love seemed to be thrown in for the sake of creating a rhyme - despite how non-sensical the sentence became.

Obviously Love Generation is going to stand as a classic summer anthem. Just wish I hadn't heard it in the context of the rest of the album. Had it not been for the dough all over my hands I would have torn my headphones off.

I like computer game music. In particular I like the music of the games I spent hours/days/weeks/months/years playing as a kid. Unlike most kids in NZ I had an Amstrad (CPC6128) while everyone else seemed to have Amigas and Sega systems. As a result many tunes of my childhood differ from those of others. Remember, often different themes were composed for the same game on different consoles.

I really admire the games composers of yesteryear. They had so little to work with and they managed to squeeze every bit (excuse the pun) of goodness out of it. Even as an 8 year old I recognised in this work. Just as I salute those still creating magic with little more than 8 bits I also salute those reworking the classic 8 bit tracks that have inspired the geekiest among us. Thanks to Rob Hubbard for writing this one and to Marcel for bringing it back to life.

Sweet sweet cover of a sweet sweet song. And you can really feel The Smiths in there when you listen to the vocals. It has this great happy little guitar loop that makes the whole thing so special. Wow, 2001! I just assumed it was a recent ditty.

'I would go out tonight but I haven't got a stitch to wear. This man said "It's gruesome that someone so handsome should care"'. mmmmm, Love it.

We were having a dinner party the other night and I had a mix on that I've been wanting one of my very well educated electro mates to hear for years. This track came on and those of us who had heard the mix before all agreed that it's one of the great moments of the mix. Said well educated Person identified it instantly as Hale Bopp (something of an old track as it turns out).

There are a number of phases that build and build during the track. It's the moment right at 1:43 where everything pulls together and it really kicks off. It's interesting how subtle the changes are throughout but somehow they give the whole thing a great momentum. Thanks to Gabriel and Dresden for throwing this on to their essential mix a few years back (and top work to the man that identified it). The rest of their album is downloading right at this moment.