john eden's top 100 cyberpunk rasta lps of all times

Matthew said:

there was a period round 94 when lots of dancehall tunes were sampling dub

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lots of these tunes

from the mykal roze onwards

looking farward to updates here

3. Various Artists - Leaders of the Pack: The Very Best of the 60's Girls (2004)

It's hard now to describe the long shadow cast by the sixties when you grew up in the seventies. Our memories have been tainted by endless retrospectives. For example there wasn't actually very much homegrown children's TV - just a few hours a day. And a lot of that was tediously educational. But what there was, was a lot of reruns of US shows from the 60s. Batman, Star Trek, The Addams Family, Man From U.N.C.L.E., Space 1999, Hanna and Barbera cartoons. These all seemed incredibly sophisticated and stylish. And they all featured young women who were witty, intelligent, resourceful and either excitingly bad or inspiringly good. Plus they all had incredible hair, eye make-up and... legs. And were multi-racial.

So on the radio - and sometimes in films and on the TV - you'd hear these amazing pop smashers with female singers that I'd associate with the TV characters. Songs with a sad sweetness that would stab you in your face. I can now understand these recordings as one of the peaks of human creativity and capitalist production values (in a good way). A voraciously promiscuous appetite for influences drawn from the blues, jazz, symphonies, soul, folk, psychedelia, protest music, ballads, easy listening, ska, bossa nova, you name it.

This music absolutely seeped into my DNA and it's why I like Girls Aloud and Bananarama and Shampoo and Misteeq and Mel & Kim. It's where the Blogariddims "Office Party Mix" came from - and my defence of Stock Aitken Waterman against Serious Music Men.

This particular comp is a cypher for a hundred other CDs you can probably buy in motorway service stations everywhere. I especially like it because it has just the right amount of completely obvious tunes that everyone's granny dances to at weddings, plus some more demented curveballs.

4. Colin Dale's Outer Limits (1994)

Colins Dale and Faver would always be on at weird times on Kiss FM and my consumption of this stuff was very unspotterish and not systematic. It was always great when you'd tune in and find them though. Dale always had a way of mixing it up that I liked, he wasn't scared of slightly experimental industrial/EBM type tunes (not the noise/harsh stuff). I couldn't tell you if I ever saw him DJ - there were lots of places like Tribal Gathering where a gang of us followed the sounds and who was playing was impossible to know. It took me years to realise he was black.

I'd always filed this CD under Techno but apparently bits of it are now seen as Trance. Which I'm actually OK with - that was a big thing for me and my friends for a while, even the Goa stuff. But tunes like these conjure up memories of a time before Trance became the cliched white-dreadlocks cod-mystical bullshit though:



All the cliches about early mornings on industrial estates, the concrete glowing, watching the sunrise. That hoodie you've dragged around all night suddenly being the absolutely best thing you own. Talking bollocks, the working week obliterated.

And this CD has other shades of techno futurism too. This one is made of a load of bleeps and sound effects from Star Trek:


It speaks of a time where Carl Craig and Luke Slater could rub up against EBM artists and Serious-Ambient-Composer Peter Namlook. It wasn't about a subgenre defining the exact bpm and direction of travel, it was freer than that. And Colin Dale had the vision and the skill to navigate the landscape like a Jedi on the surface of the Death Star.

Tellingly I've never delved into other tracks by any of the obscure artists on this comp. For me it will always exist as a complete piece of its own, played nodding into a cup of tea very early in the morning or very late at night.

Melancholia and optimism in equal measure. Bliss.

Thirdform is gonna send me to the techno saltmines for rehabilitating trance.

That's the kind of thing that would trigger 3 days of rage on UK-Dance too.

john eden said:

Thirdform is gonna send me to the techno saltmines for rehabilitating trance.

That's the kind of thing that would trigger 3 days of rage on UK-Dance too.

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lol. I am actually quite the devotee of faver/dale's early 90s, me and steph spoke about it a bit in 2014-15. trance as a descriptor rather than a genre always seemed apt to me. i always look for panicking in the club shot in the back trance.


the trance I'm really against is all that leftfield shit.


horrible, just horrible.

I have that outer limits cd. you know i might actually put it on now. this book on turkish secularism though, is 500 pages!

john eden said:

Thirdform is gonna send me to the techno saltmines for rehabilitating trance.

That's the kind of thing that would trigger 3 days of rage on UK-Dance too.

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lol. tbh trance does link to oldskool hardcore in some ways so that's always a danger of nuum fundamentalism.

banging!

in fact one of my favourite acid tunes could technically be considered a trance track.

labworks put out some great, dark hard acidic trance.

shame the sasha and digweed massive aswell as the public school goa numpties decided to lay claim to that term. revolting professional managerial class people.

Looking forward to how this goes as a person of a similar age. Really like the write ups with tunes. 🔥

5. Dougal and the Blue Cat OST (1972)

The Magic Roundabout was a family favourite for us when we were children. The genius of the show is the combination of its French creators and the absolute liberties that were taken with their plots by the English narrator Eric Thompson. Thompson would be sent the reels of each show and then project them onto the back of his front door and basically improvise the English dialogue - and even the plots to some extent. This process and the overall weirdness is dumbed down these days by commentators portraying it as another 70s show that had drug references in it. Yawn. For us kids, the show itself was like drugs.

At some point in the mid 70s my parents got a decent hi-fi that my sister and I weren't allowed near. But we inherited their Dansette with its built in speaker. It was shipped out of the living room along with the handful of children's records we had.

This album was the standout initially. It's pretty nuts to listen to even now. There are a handful of songs, but most of the LP is the lightly edited dialogue from the film, in character and primarily by Thompson. We hadn't seen the film and so bits of it didn't make total sense to us. But we knew the characters and, crucially, this allowed our imaginations to do the heavy lifting.

Why this stuck with me is that there is a terrifying undercurrent to the plot, which is completely unlike the gentle jeopardy you would get in the TV episodes. Fenella Fielding makes a guest appearance as a sinister disembodied evil force that initiates Buxton the blue cat into some quasi masonic militaristic secret society. A society dedicated to eradicating everything which is not blue. All of the cast except Dougal are rounded up by blue soldiers and chained up in the dungeon of a disused treacle factory. Blue cacti sprout aggresively throughout the landscape. Florence weeps.

There is an eeriness to the soundtrack that's hard to explain - Fenella and Buxton's characters both have a vicious menace to their voices and the initiation ceremonies are nightmarish bad trips with echoing mocking laughter swimming around the room. We loved this precisely because it scared the shit out of us. And then we discovered that it was even more terror-inducing when you played those sections at 16rpm.

In retrospect my dalliance with industrial, dark ambient and sinister musicks began right there.

Douglas and the Blue Cat - wow, never heard of that before, and i am just the right age to have.

seems like it should be a key text in the canon of hauntology but none of those guys have mentioned it as i recall

Perfect role for Fenella Fielding.

6. Philip Glass ‎– Akhnaten (1987)

800,000 people visited the British Museum in 1972 to see the gold death mask of 18th Dynasty ancient Egyptian Pharaoh Tutankhamun. I was not one of them, being 3 years old, but I believe my parents went. Certainly they had a fabric print of the mask hanging above the toilet in our semi detached home in St Albans.

That print had a profound and enduring effect on me. This mainly manifested itself in a recurring nightmare in which my friends and I were chased around a graveyard and similar locations by a floating version of the death mask, emitting a sinister green gas. Gradually my friends would disappear until I was the only one being chased. And then I would wake up. It's a dream I still have occasionally now when stressed or ill.

There are lines from Egyptology to Sun Ra and afro-futurism - and also to Aleister Crowley's victorian enthusiasm for exotica. But those are for another time.

On Sunday January 18 1987 an edition of London Weekend Television's The Southbank Show aired on Philip Glass. I vaguely recall this being about minimalist music generally and also featuring dire new age nonsense from the Windham Hill label, which I hated. I was gripped by the Philip Glass stuff though. I'd probably read about him in the NME and Bergman and Horn's Experimental Pop: Frontiers of the Rock Era which I had got out of the library because it had Laurie Anderson on the cover and included a photo of Einsturzende Neubauten looking deranged whilst burning something. I was transfixed by the Glass section of the show and the commentary about minimalism and what it did. My parents walked past the living room and nagged me about sitting too close to the screen. We didn't have a VCR so that was it - focus intently on the moment or lose it forever.

I later discovered that my Dad has a cassette boxset of Glass' Einstein on the Beach, so I would play that on his fancy stereo when everyone was out. It was too long, but I liked the repetition, the riffs, the spoken word interludes. I found the overlap with the New York experimental art punk scene incredibly exciting. And later on the resonances with techno and ambient.

In recent years my Dad and I have been to a few gigs together including a few performances of Philip Glass material. We were due to see the man himself at the Barbican last week but Phil was ill. The Philip Glass Ensemble still did us proud though.

Akhnaten is about a Pharaoh who isn't Tutankhamun, but close enough. It has a bunch of readings from the Egyptian Book of The Dead and is cosmically massive in the way that you would want a 14 part 3 hour long Philip Glass opera about ancient Egypt to be.

nice post! the tempo of this topic reflects your selection of music as well i think. it's comforting and peaceful.

Don't rush yourself John!

The tortoise not the hare, Barty!