Monday, August 4, 2008

my life in the bush of college radio nostalgia

Kronos Quartet - Plays Terry Riley: Salome Dances for Peace
This is not really my favorite Kronos or Riley piece, or even combination thereof, but it is a solid wave of strings and pulses and turbulence-in-a-bottle that completely works in the background. There is, however one movement one here called "Half Moon Dances Mad in Moonlight" that I used to play frequently on my late-night radio show eons ago, often segueing in with some "angular" scintillating rock splendor like

Television - Marquee Moon
I really have nothing to add to the piles of exaltation Marquee Moon has received over the decades. Everyone played this record and continues to do so.

Funkadelic - America Eats Its Young
I would play this a lot too. If kaleidoscopic spininess is our underlying theme today (like it is most days), this is likely Funkadelic's greatest example. It is a flaming disco ball meteor plumetting to the very center of Blaxploitation funk, sending radiation into the groundwater of 1972 setting forth the mutation antigens necessary for the spawning of disco.

It's no Maggot Brain, but I still really like this record a lot. The dense percussive bed here is likely the precursor to the hyperkenetic anxiety funk the Talking Heads were doing a decade later, as well as the much hollered about...

David Byrne/Brian Eno - My Life in the Bush of Ghosts
from 1981. I bought the vinyl version of this at a campus yard sale on the parade grounds during my first semester at LSU in 1987, casually even. I was a fan of both back then and Ghosts was a largely unspoken part of both their catalogs then. I was actually more excited about the Del Fuegos t-shirt I bought from the same person, which, unlike the album, I still had until just a few years ago.

So many records back then. I was entertaining fantasies about paying the rent off a copy of it now, but there is a copy of it in Atlanta going for $5, so its just as well that I haven't been hauling it around all these years

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