tango terje

paul simon - diamonds dub (tangoterje edit)

andreas vollenweider - belladona (tangoterje edit)

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now that I have my sandals back and everything is as it should be, I can finally post these. As tangoterje, trippy disco lord todd offers up only his most sunset-cruise balearic biscuits. you just can't lose with these two, they're two of my favorite jams ever, especially the vollenweider, the original from his 'caverna magica' LP which is killer 80s new-age electro harp bliss. You need these for memorial day, trust me. 

floating points - love me like this

floating points - love me like this

absolutely gorgeous downtempo lazer-funk, a housed-up remix of an 1983 original. recalls the trippy erotic depths of cole medina's beegees re-edit from last year. seriously killer tune. get busy with it.

ridin' high podcast 12.30.08: cavalier

download link

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to bring the year to a close and counteract the chill of last week's holiday disco darkness, cavalier presents thirty minutes of lullabic, syrupy-smooth grooves and heavy-petting edits, which bottoms out in the vocals of terry callier's 'you don't care' as they unspool down to 50bpms, disappearing into a black codeine abyss of infinite retardation. roll into the new year in breezy easy-lover style. 

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file under: deep repeat, chilling hard, jammy sinking

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tracks 

andreas vollenwieder - caverna magica

joni mitchell - passion play (unknown edit)

fleetwood mac - never goin' back again (tom croose edit)

the delegation - oh honey (gold code edit)

venus gang - love to fly

plastic bertrand - stop encore (ron hardy re-edit)

jurgen paape - so weit wie noch nie  

seth troxler - love never sleeps

terry callier - you don't care (cavalier mix)

1. vollenwieder is a German new-age wizard. He is also, along with Martin Denny, one of the occult forefathers of Quiet Village: Vollenwieder's "Steam Forest," from the same album as "Caverna Magica" is one of the backbones of the second half of QV's Silent Movie, that heavenly medley of maritime delight that feels like you're face down in the sand at sunrise. feel the drift.

2. I forgot who edited this. If it's you, write in and let us know. You should be proud. 

3. I got this on 7" from Phonica. 

4. If this isn't a blue-ribbon make-out on the couch with your girlfriend jam, then such a distinction is meaningless. It's also nicely kind of chaste. It sounds like you're smooching fully clothed with two feet on the floor. A warm-up, as it were, literally so. The edit is by gold code, which is the excellent blog where I found this. Very nice work.

5. this is from an insane compilation of prog-disco madness by Jean-Pierre Massiera, a David Alexrod/Joe Meek type, who has a rather incomprehensible discography full of amazing pseudonymic efforts - "Sex Convention" being only the best of many greats. Massiera's entire output can be found here. "Love to Fly" by the Venus Gang is officially up there with "Ridin' High" by Faze-O as a jam so saturated with funky erotic bliss, you can't re-edit it. It's already too high, it may never ever come down. 

6. Hardy edit! 

7. Acknowledged Kompakt classic. One of the most soulful dance tracks ever. Really. Guess what? it sounds just as good at about 100bpm. Vocals are sampled from "Vielleicht schon Morgen" by Daliah Lavi, a smoking hot Israeli singer. Here's the original: 

8. Soulful, minimal deep house, one of 2008's best tracks. Has that kind of moody, murky, elegant atmosphere that feels like Wong Kar-Wai at the disco. Put it next to Luomo and Superpitcher and that. 

9. The only words to this song are the title phrase, which confuse me. Either way I can think of interpreting them is weird. Either the You is Me, and I'm being told I don't care, which sounds slightly brainwashy, or they're being told to someone else who doesn't care, in which case, why would that be such a great thing as to warrant this exceptionally smoothed-out yacht jam? In any case, it sounds great slowed down, like really slow. I mean it. 

Ridin' High Podcast 12.23.08: Night Plane

just in time for christmas, it's the darkest ridin' high podcast yet, the soundtrack to fiercely frozen streets during the longest night of the year. featuring a new solo track by the singer from the knife, a special kanye remix, and for closers, a balearic cover of metallica. dark and shadowy, yes, but running the gamut from steel-edged midnight horror to smoothed-out twilight grooves.

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file under: moody machines and paranoid androids

download link

track list

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excellent swoon - dear scott

fever ray - if I had a heart

eno, moebelius & roedelius - the belldog

woolfy vs. projections - return of starlight (invisible conga people remix)

night plane - walls of stone

lawrence - miles

anthony rother - welcome to my laboratory

ssion - clown (glass candy remix)

kanye west - welcome to heartbreak (night plane remix)

nine inch nails - down in it

motor city drum ensemble - stripped down

killing joke - almost red

honey bane - guilty (jd twitch edit)

leda - endless race

tiedye - nothing else matters

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if i had a heart: a new solo track by the singer from the knife, singing the tin man's solitary 3am lament.

the belldog: one of my favorite eno vocals tracks, a collab with cluster. a haunting interlude about technology and transformation. because you see, there are two kinds of art, the kind that tells humanity about itself, and the kind that reminds humanity that it is actually at its core something other than itself, that the essence of the human is inhuman.

walls of stone: inspired by a late night trek through the financial district, with ghostly facades of financial institutions staring back at me. 

clown (glass candy remix): cool remix by johnny jewel, nicely italo with good vocal line. 

welcome to the heartbreak (night plane remix): my detroit version. every piece of art has two parts, it has itself, and it has that penumbra of possibilities around it that were never realized, but that glow like a halo. it's the dj's job to capture and engage with this halo, like those old photographs that claimed to capture a person's aura around them. in a good mix, the halos from two songs, when placed together, appear to be of matching colors. that's how I feel about placing kanye next to nin. In other words, if you think about it, 808's and Heartbreak = Pretty Hate Machine. enough said. the move from kanye's crying robot to trent's screech is really satisfying.

guilty (jd twitch edit): another of optimo's awesome punk edits. This is some more echoe-y postpunk with sexy girl gasps. 

endless race: much sought-after cosmic disco track by one of the dudes from tangerine dream. far-out twisting outer-space acid synth with ghostly girls riding high. the guys from bumrocks put this on their new el bum comp. 

nothing else matters: lars, james and crew set off towards the sun as it disappears over the ocean.

W//K/ND PR/NZ Podcast: A Case of Balearia

photo of Weekend Prince by Zade, lifelong balearia sufferer: Fort Tilden, 7am

Weekend Prince Presents: A Case of Balearia

David Crosby - Orleans
Giorgio Moroder & David Bowie - The Myth
Thin Lizzy - The Sun Goes Down
Tiedye - Nothing
Night Plane - Stroke You Up
Todd Terje - Bodies (Prins Thomas Orgasmatron)
Lemon - A-Freak-A
Lee Douglas - Cum N Go
Piston Fiston - Pluto's Retreat (Fabrizio Mammarella Remix)
Kelly Polar - Sea of Sine Waves
Lindstrom - Grand Ideas
Max Essa - Back to the Beach
Zero 7 feat. Jose Gonzalez - Futures
Steve Hillage - Palm Trees - Love Guitar

We: are swathed in days of stuporous heat. The search for delicious, crushed-ice refreshments and dabutt trumps all others. Every summer has its share of ailments and remedies, and every summer around this time the disease known as Balearia begins to manifest its symptoms in those it has afflicted.

The name Balearia refers to an incurable parasitic infection both contagious and hereditary. It is derived from the musical term "Balearic," which refers to a certain style of beachy, sun-melted smooth trippy disco. The designation Balearia is used in conjunction with the symptom of: always needing to go to the beach, all the damn time. Sufferers are unable to find pleasure in non-beach activities such as: extended hanging-out in an urban environment, having to wait in line for stuff, and wearing pants.

Once an addict, they say, always an addict. Do not attempt to reason with the Balearia victim or otherwise curtail his/her efforts to get a fix. This mix is intended to be played in the car ride on the way to the beach, so that those suffering from Balearia can earn some morsel of respite while they patiently wait to arrive at the shore, like white-knuckled junkies clinging to the handrest.

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I've always wanted to open a mix with "Orleans" by David Crosby, which shows up at the very end of his solo record, and has a haunting chamber music vibe. "The Myth" is a soundtrack piece from "Cat People". "Stroke You Up" by Night Plane, you know. The Lindstrom track is fiery and is from his upcoming album release, "Where You Go I Go Too." It's three tracks long and each is an epic disco voyage ala Moroder's theme for "Battlestar Galactica."

Smooth Sciences: An Introduction

Wong Kar-Wai, "2046"

One of this site's guiding principles is to avoid posting entire albums. The reasoning behind this is evident in its exceptions. An entire album may be posted without derision or scorn here only when it is out of print or otherwise difficult to obtain. Or, lastly, when it is really important to do so. Because music, the most incorporeal of the arts, not only sooths beasts, on humans it can as well compel and possess.

Inundated as we are with dystopic images of future days, it was striking to watch the future-segment of "2046" and encounter a tomorrow that seemed beautiful, naive, decadent, suffused with the neon streaks of an opiate light. Not a political warning or cultural satire, or PKD-style engagement with the schizo-dissociative powers of technology, just a completely oneiric escapist fashion-magazine spread, one that produces a radiant digital narcosis.

So here now are three works that can be said to intersect with such a dose of bright tomorrows:



Gas - Pop

"I believe in the signal of the bass drum. It it the heartbeat of my life." - Wolfgang Voigt, aka Gas, Mono.Kultur #08

The real name of ambient-techno artist Gas is Wolfgang Voigt. Voigt is the co-founder and co-owner of Kompakt records, and is a highly influential and prolific electronic musician.

There's much that can be said about the maternal heart-pulse of the techno bass drum, and as well for the warm, pulsating, embryonic womb that the well sound-system'ed club attempts to emulate (Fabric Room One, for example). This sound is compelling enough that it can keep me in its sonic amniotic suspension for minutes at a time, until the spell is broken and I am reminded that I'm in a weird dingy club in the immediate vicinity of NYU, surrounded by total randos.

A new luxurious Gas boxed set will soon be released, meaning that technically Pop still remains out of print, and well within an acceptable domain of full-album posts.

As for a description of this record, we would be hard-pressed to beat Voigt's own, from the same interview:

"I had an image in my mind of a gaseous and nebulous sound, of an exhilarating streaming music which literally flows over, which has no beginning or end no hard edges, only softness. My association was this music drifting through the coppice of a misty wood in vast sound spheres, a very elegaic sound repeated over and over in the far distance, held together by an invisible bass drum that comes marching by somewhere hidden in the woods coming closer and fading away again."

It's an amazing sunday sunset record, preferably one of those hazy interminable twilights, one of those blue-gray and feathery evening come downs.

In a sense, The Field is a kind of punk reduction of Gas's near-classical sense of dynamics and ornament - The Field takes up this loop-based ambient techno approach and fidelities it way down, brutes it up, takes it from the Germanic sylvan idyll and kicks it back into the city streets.



Manuel Gottsching "E2-E4"

So in the case of these records, geography is everything. Gas is the Germanic sylvan idyll, when you're out stamping in boots for boar among the brush.



e2-e4 is a beach record. Recorded in 1981 in Berlin on a two-track in one take by Gottsching, guitarist for supreme face-melters Ash Ra Tempel, it effectively helped invent techno music. It consists only of an unspooling of an infinite synth, and the soaring, tremulous clusters of an electric guitar windblown across the waters. Like Gas, it doesn't ever seem to be going anywhere, but unfurls blissfully in place. Again, the timelessness of the womb, the sublime "oceanic feeling" that Freud describes in Civilization and Its Discontents.

E2-e4 is often regarded as a founding track of Balearic, which is an extremely broad dance category, but generally associated with electronic beach beats. It covers everything from trippy yacht disco to the filth enjoyed by the worst baggy bepanted pill poppers the imagination can conjure.
The Guardian ran this article on the Balearic resurgence a few months ago. The descriptions of the DJing style parallel those describing Baldelli's sets at Cosmic, which marked the birth of 'cosmic disco': slow (11obpm or so), eclectic, an emphasis on experimentalism and texture.

http://arts.guardian.co.uk/filmandmusic/story/0,,2253890,00.html#article_continue






Vangelis - "Memories of Green"

The original version of "Memories of Green", which would later appear in rerecorded form on the Blade Runner soundtrack, here taken from Vangelis' 1980 album, See You Later. The soundtrack's voluptous digital sheen is absent here, leaving behind the hairier, lower-fi predecessor.

Quiet Village - Silent Movie

The reader will be forgiven if it is thought that to say something is 'smoothly bearded' would mean getting lost in a contradiction in terms. However, if this something were in fact the new album Silent Movie by Quiet Village, then such an odd, yet intriguing adjective phrase might in fact gain new linguistic currency. The album is in fact bearded, in that it is drifty and psychedelic, yet it is smooth, in that makes one want to ride around in a sail boat and wear a hat.

Here is a montage video from the aforementioned album, consisting of what appears to largely be clips of 'Planet Earth' type nature documentaries. Visuals don't kick in until around 1:30. Enjoy.

Quiet Village - 'Silent Movie'



Quiet Village - "Can't be Beat"

Quiet Village on Myspace