Music You've Barely Glimpsed

I have this experience, sometimes with music, but mostly it's with girls. I remember certain faces i pass on the street, on the subway, or in the park or grocery store, faces that I fell in love with, if but for a moment, and I wonder what if I had aproached them? would my life be completely different now? and then the deterministic equations and chaos theory thoughts start making their rounds inside my head...

with music... I am still searching for this kind of japanese classical music I heard on a college radio station over 8 years ago. I caught about 2 minutes of it and thought it was amazing: like a very slow and minimal gamelan... it had muted metal percussion tones... very zen, very cagean... cyclical in nature... it was like a Calder (with nice muted tones instead of the awful bright colors) just revolving by itself in an autumn garden. I have gone to the library, to all kinds of shops, and listened to Gagaku and all types of Jap classical but still have not found this music...

Yeah. Was out on a rare bender some time ago. Had to stay on one side of the street because it was busy and we lacked the coordination to safely cross the road (we tried, cars tooted, we retreated). Anyhow the DJ was playing Photeks 'Mine to give' and eqs out the highs and brings in this gorgeously hazy sounding honey-throated woman moaning a looped chorus of pure pleasure and then cuts across as it drops this funky-ass disco b-line.

Took me about 2 years to find out it was Intro by Alan Braxe, and every bit as great as I remembered.

uhh ahhhh ahhhh ahhhh ahhhhhhh oohhhh

yeah - i used to play john peel on headphones in bed on school nights as a teenager and have loads and loads of tracks I can just remember snatches from because I was falling asleep at the time. In some ways I prefer it like that...

Similarly, I've heard so many reggae tunes on soundsystems that I have hazy memories of and have never tracked down, possibly because they were dubplates or whatever...

I think what's being described here is what I refer to as the Omega Man Syndrome, wherein revisiting something you experienced once, long ago, after years of building it up in your head, inevitably leads to disappointment...(the name comes from the Charlton Heston film of the 70's: a friend of mine would just go on and on about how awesome it was, only to rent the video one night and found it was just crap)...

my musical experience with this involves a band called Weasel Hunter, who I heard on some late-night college radio show in the 80's, and whose song had this "awesome" riff: skewed, wailing guitars with some immense drumbeat that came off like a rock band trying to do Belgian Newbeat, or Electronic Body Music...I have mentally mutated the riff over and over the last 17 years into something that probably bears no resemblence to what I actually heard (and haven't heard, since)...it probably sucks, in reality...Weasel Hunter?!

originally posted by bleep
uhh ahhhh ahhhh ahhhh ahhhhhhh oohhhh

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not meaning to go off message, but what other song samples this?...I know I've heard it elsewhere, but just can't nail it...

forever
tapes and tapes never to be found again

got hold of billy boyo one spliff a day which i;d be after for years and its still ace-
got loads of things of childhood dub and reggae tapes i'll never have or be able to afford
music pulls strange shapes at that age and it's hard to graspthe whole mechanisims of getting hold of it.

My favorite record-tracking-down story concerns a half-remembered track I heard Laurent Garnier play at Final Frontier (at Club UK on Buckhold Road) back in 1995. It was the last tune of a truly amazing night (one of those 10 hour sets Garnier used to do) and as soon as I heard it kick in properly I knew that I had to have a copy. It started as a fairly minimal techno track: a kick-snare-fill affair with a single piano chord hammering away on top slightly off the rhythm. After a minute or two, this amazing high-pitched, oscillating, analog synth sound came in, underpinned by warm, bassy pads. It built from there and had the entire room going bananas for a good five minutes.

I spent about a year describing this to friends, acquaintances, and strangers in record stores to see if anyone had any idea what it might be. Finally, a mate of a mate said that he thought it might be by PA Presents. Cut to me regularly checking under the ‘P’ section of every dance store I browsed in for the next three or four years, still without any idea of the tune’s name or label (these were pre Discogs days). By 2001 I probably hadn’t thought about it in a while. Then someone on the 313 mailing list happened to mention a (different) PA Presents tune that Carl Craig used to cane. I responded, asking if anyone could ID the PA Presents tune matching the description used above and within a few minutes I had a title and label (‘Entangled’ on Deviate Records). I figured I’d chance my arm and see if anyone on 313 had a copy they’d be interested in selling. No takers, but a week or so later someone contacted me off-list and said I should email his mate, a Dutch guy called Peter Aarsman, as he might have a copy to sell. I emailed the guy and he said he’d be happy to send me a copy for free, as he still had a bunch lying about his house (it was at about this point that I made the PA / Peter Aarsman connection).

Anyway, I got a copy of the record I’d been looking for for over six years. It wasn’t as utterly mind-blowing as the tune my 20-year-old self had remembered Laurent Garnier playing, but it’s still one of my favorite chunks of vinyl. These days, I check the ‘P’ section of record stores for the ‘Panic in Detroit’ compilation on Buzz Records. PA mentioned he’d been looking for it for years himself, and I figure it could only be good karma to pick up any copy I found and mail it over to him.

Canada J Soup said:

These days, I check the ‘P’ section of record stores for the ‘Panic in Detroit’ compilation on Buzz Records. PA mentioned he’d been looking for it for years himself, and I figure it could only be good karma to pick up any copy I found and mail it over to him.

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I've got that Panic In Detroit comp. I can rip it to a CD for for you if thats any use. Props for tracking that tune down BTW.

I don't know if it's smearing Loki's original concept but there was an amazing track I had on a mixtape recorded off the PA at Pure when Derrick May was playing. There was just a minute or so of it before May moves on, so tantalising, It sounded like a bit of Fingers Inc (segues out of something like "Washing Machine" if memory serves. Led by a drone stealthy cymbals chatter and a bassline lurks at the back, each 4 bars the drone drops away and the rest of the sonic disappears, drone returns etc.

For a while I thought it was one of his own unreleased tracks, someone said it might have been called "Nightstalker" or summat, but when the R&S box came out there was a track named similarilry to that and it wasn't it.....

Sighs

henry s said:

not meaning to go off message, but what other song samples this?...I know I've heard it elsewhere, but just can't nail it...

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It's the intro to Crush On You by The Jets.

originally posted by AshRa
It's the intro to Crush On You by The Jets.

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hal-a-freakin-loo-yah!...that's it...thanks!

originally posted by WOEBOT
I've got that Panic In Detroit comp.

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that tune "Satisfaction" on that comp, credited to Inertia: is that in fact A Guy Called Gerald?...'cos it sure sounds like...

henry s said:

hal-a-freakin-loo-yah!...that's it...thanks!


that tune "Satisfaction" on that comp, credited to Inertia: is that in fact A Guy Called Gerald?...'cos it sure sounds like...

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yep he did no where to run on fragile too

this happened to me during an erol alkan set at the end. out of the standard house beats emerged this pulstaing, joy division-esque bassline and me and my mate - sitting there bored, the only ones in our group not dropping - sat up and took notice. then he mixed in this ridiculously over-the-top-euphoric female vocal and everyone went nuts. few months later i downloaded the erol alkan bugged out mix and, lo and behold, there was the same mix - the bassline is from a slowed-down etienne de crecy track and the vocal is by simian. of course, it was nothing /like/ as good as i remembered it being....

i've had this experience so many times in clubs. i suppose it's just an example of the situation and the music coming together in a never-to-be-repeated way, with the added excitement and magic of hearing the track for the very first time.

WOEBOT said:

I've got that Panic In Detroit comp. I can rip it to a CD for for you if thats any use.

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Cheers for the offer, I reckon he's a vinyl only guy though. The hunt is half the fun anyway

dogger said:

i've had this experience so many times in clubs. i suppose it's just an example of the situation and the music coming together in a never-to-be-repeated way, with the added excitement and magic of hearing the track for the very first time.

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Then there's the flipside of hearing a tune you've checked out before but didn't really rate at the time in a totally new light because of the mix or the context...and suddenly getting it for the first time. I had this with a lot of Matthew Dear / Ghostly stuff which I was never that wild about when playing on a listening post in a record store but totally loved when I saw him do a laptop set.

I once heard this lovers rock version of First Cut Is The Deepest, which was so sad and sincere that it was just heartbreaking, especially as they kept on dropping out the rhythm. I dunno who it was, I don't think it's Phyllis Dillon who did a version.

Ah man, it was ghostly. Ghost-lover-rock. In fact they should have used it in pottery wheel scene in Ghost.

john eden said:

yeah - i used to play john peel on headphones in bed on school nights as a teenager and have loads and loads of tracks I can just remember snatches from because I was falling asleep at the time. In some ways I prefer it like that...

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better still: music that you hear when you've crashed out somewhere and then suddenly woken up to. most likely at some festival or other.

Loki said:

Anyway, the version of Tainted Love in my head is way groovier than anyone else has managed.... reminds me in my head of Coils 'AYOR' in the way the beats fall over themselves ...

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that version is AMAZING. i think its just the second track on the 12" where the beat from tainted love blends into that mental one in 'where did our love go'.

I've only ever heard the vocal of Keith Hudson "In The Rain" once on the radio many years ago and have been after a 7" ever since. It made such an impression the vocal still sounds crystal clear in my mind's ear when I hear the dub LP but it's probably completely different to how it actually sounds...

Best thing I never heard was about 10 years ago driving round with the radio on at night, reception shifting in and out and somehow tuned into Mixmaster Morris's top 3 records of all time, one was Nort Route (which i was already a fan of), one was Pop Group (which i'd never heard before and just sounded like pure noise) and one was something by somebody called Arthur Russell which just sounded like the most bonkers thing i'd ever heard in my life - like an improvised version of old school Mr Fingers!

I never did find out what track it was but it led to my buying everything I could get my hands on by this mysterious Mr Russell - which was nice!