Like the proverbial London bus (or Melbourne tram), you wait forever for one of these playlists and then a second one appears almost immediately. (Relatively speaking.)
"The Secret Field (Todd Terje
Remix)", by Kaoru Inoue. A field day for the head-nodders.
"Friends", by Westerman. Imagine that the "World of Echo" iteration of Arthur Russell tackled The Steve Miller
Band's "Fly Like An Eagle" while under a John Martyn narcotic haze. Hey, you don't have to. You're already there.
"Can
You Ever Really Know Somebody", by The Juan Maclean. New Juan Maclean for
the win.
"Faith (DJ Koze's Grungerwomen
Remix)", by Ada. Ada is the kind of gal who is perfectly capable of getting
it done without anybody's help, thank you very much. (Witness her remarkable version of The Yeah Yeah
Yeahs' "Maps".) But if DJ Koze puts his hand up,
it is never less than fascinating to see what might result. Here, it's like the track (which,
I just discovered -- hey, I only work here -- is another cover; this time, of a Luscious Jackson song) has
been channelled through a dense wall of fog, scattered about with shards of piercing
light. Or something.
"Beat Bop", by Rammellzee vs
K-Rob. What they call "a classic". Notable for bearing one of only two (as far as I know) purpose-designed
record covers by Jean-Michel Basquiat (the other belonging to a downtown
ska-punk band called The Offs, who at one stage also had Richard Edson (from
Jim Jarmusch's "Stranger Than Paradise") on trumpet). But we're here
for "Beat Bop". It has its own story. (Which you
can read here.)
"Paper Thin", by MC Lyte. Hip hop
was not just for the fellas. There are days when I think music never improved
on this. Also the video is priceless. And the sudden appearance of "Hit The
Road, Jack" is about as likely as Neil Young singing "Oh Susanna" to the tune of "Venus".
"Sputnik", by Sidney Owens And
North, South Connection. Being, as it was, the b-side of the only known record by this combo,
circa 1976, "Sputnik" was understandably lost until resurrected by The Gaslamp Killer on a 2007 mix CD. And
I'm so glad it was. The guitar on this is, as the title of the song might
suggest, out of this world. The voice is not a million miles away from that of
Lux Interior, who I'm sure would have warmly embraced this song. "People
are running ... Where are they going?"
"Arabam Kaldi Yolda", by Edip
Akbayram. Which translates, it says here, as "My Car Broke Down". I am guessing they don't
make records like this any more. (Bonus: album cover of the month.)
"Staying Alive", by Machuca
Cumbia. The Bee Gees as you've never heard them before.
"Hot Love (Gas Mix)", by Love
Inc. This is a case of alias upon alias upon alias. To be precise": Love
Inc is an alias of Mike Ink. Mike Ink is an alias of Wolfgang Voigt, prolific
musician and co-owner of Cologne's venerable Kompakt record label. Gas is
another of Wolfgang Voigt's aliases. And here, in the guise of a re-working of
a T Rex song, is alias Gas doing a mix of a track by alias Mike Inc's alias
Love Inc. Got that? Gas is a terribly important component, not just of Voigt's
work but also of modern electronic music in general. He went on, in the latter
part of the 1990s, to release four albums of strikingly defocused, well,
something: not really ambient, not really techno, but also not really neither
of those things. It is what it is, I guess. (I could be less helpful. Or not.) This
particular track, one of the earliest appearances of the Gas name, is actually
a lot more structured and clear cut than the later records. You can hear very
clearly here its influence on Axel Wilner's work as The Field (whose
"Cupid's Head" Gas remixed a couple of years back).
Gas reappeared this year with a brand new album, "Narkopop", which
sounded like all of the earlier albums but also, and I suspect not just because
of the passage of time, entirely fresh.
"Blue And Moody Music", by
Hiroshi Sato. So smooth and clean you could eat your dinner off it. You would
have to be wearing a razor-sharp dinner jacket, tho. (Australian music alert:
there is also a quite different version of this song featuring vocals by Wendy Matthews. I'm sure there's a story there but I
don't know what it is.)
"Ocean", by The Phantom. And away
we go, into the sunset, with the help of 12 minutes of transcontinental drift
from Poland's own Bartosz Krukzynski.
... And relax.
