CRC Retro Mix #36

Clearance Rack Classics Retro 80s and 90s Dance Mix by DJ Tintin

1. The Chase - Propaganda

2. Follow the Rainbow (Razormaid! Mix) - Joe Machine

3. X-Rated (Moonitor Version) - Psyche

4. 19 (Destruction Mix) - Paul Hardcastle

5. Humatic (Razormaid! Mix) - League of Gentlemen

6. World in my Eyes (Oil Tank Mix) - Depeche Mode

7. Situations (Razormaid! Mix) - Cetu Javu

8. Thinking of You - Seven Red Seven

9. Handsome (Psycho-Ray Mix) - Camouflage

10. Komputer Pop - Komputer

11. Heaven (Extended Version) - Until December

12. Spooky (Magimix) - New Order

13. Render - Lassigue Bendthaus

14. W.Y.H.I.W.Y.G. - Front 242

15. One World - Ajax

Notes and other random things:

Update as of (02-01-12): God golly ... is it already February?!?!

Just realized I forgot to do my notes and random things for this podcast, which was already over a month ago! Jeez. Well, it's on the way, plus a new podcast once I find time to record. New job, new family member, new year and a cross-country move on the horizon are taking up all my time at the moment. Did you notice all the "newness" in that last sentence? Yet here I am dishing out what Bryan Ferry would call "The Same Old Scene" when it comes to reasons why I can't seem to get podcasts up in a reasonable amount of time anymore. Or, like ABC's Martin Frye crooned, "Excuses have their uses, but they're all used up." Seriously, though, I can't recall being any busier in my entire life and I beg your indulgence with my slow updates of late.

Update as of (02-04-12): Let's look at a few of the bands in this particular episode (finally, right!?) I want to start with League of Gentlemen. Funny I want to start with a band I know almost nothing about, but it's really the concept of this song that intrigues me so much. Back in the 80s, there were a lot of industrial-sounding bands that were fascinated with the synthesis between man and machine and what it might entail for the survival of the human race. Mysterious Art, for instance, if you recall from an eariler episode, touched on the theme with Men of Glass. There were plenty of others. This excellent number from 1987 does the same.

On a side note, I have always been fascinated how Eastern Bloc industrial artists could always seem to write cool songs even though they barely knew English. Somehow they take sentence fragments and comma splices, add the letter "z" wherever there is supposed to be an "s", pluralize words like "informationz" and still manage to give me chills. That's talent! Of course, this band only had enough talent to do one song because I haven't, to date, found anything else by these guys ... at least in this incarnation. As we have learned with producers like Morton, Sherman and Belucci they can "seed" an entire genre by doing hundreds of one-off bands to create a scene as those guys did with the Belgian New Beat dance scene years ago. So, maybe the guys in LOG reformed under another moniker. I'll have to look into it sometime.

But there's more to this "Humatic" phenomenon than meets the eye. As with other electronic groups who explored man's servitude to the rise of machines there is an inherent lack of logic there that makes me chuckle. I've played it out for you below, though names have been changed to protect the innocent. (Note: this is a completely fictional account)

Klaus: Hi, Gert.

Gert: Howdy, Klaus.

Klaus: Say, Gert, how would you like to be in a band with me?

Gert: Sounds great, Klaus. But is this another one of your band concepts that requires I wear lederhosen on stage while dumping a stein full of Krautspatzle over my head?

Klaus: No, Gert. This one is much better. I want to explore the relationship between man and machine and how eventually, due to elementary chaos theory, all machines will morph and rise up against their masters and enslave them, breed with them and create a hybrid race of automatons that will exterminate all humanity.

Gert: Count me in!

Klaus: Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go get the drum machines, sequencing keyboards, electronic samplers and Commodore computers that we'll be using.

Gert: Sounds great, Klaus. I can't see anything that can go wrong with this utterly ironic plan of yours. By the way, do you have a band name yet?

Klaus: I sure do, Gert. I wanted something memorable and easy to recall, so it's come down to either Braunschweiger Umweltverschmutzung or League of Gentlemen.

Gert: Rad.

Update as of (02-17-12): I don't have anymore fantastic re-enactments for the next band in the arsenal. In fact, like League of Gentlemen, I have little to no information at all about Joe Machine either, though I think I came across his social networking page on MySpace ... or at least some guy who goes by the name Joe Machine. Anyway, we have ZYX records in Germany to thank for this release and divinity to thank for the voice that is eerily reminiscent of Daniel Ash from Bauhaus/Tones on Tail/Love and Rockets fame.

As is the case so often with electronic music of this era, "Kraftwerk creep" rears its head a couple of times in this episode. Seeing as how they are one of the most influential collectives in electronic music history it's not surprising that so many others to follow were touched by their genius. From tempo to timbre to replicating the "Musique non-stop" mantra found in the Kraftwerk tune of the same name from the Electric Cafe album, Psyche's X-rated is a delectable morsel of synthetic cyber-porn sleaze that captures the Kraftwerk-ian spirit perfectly and garners this episode an "explicit" tag in the process. Sebastian Komor of Icon of Coil remixed the track. Then, there is the awesome, sub-splitting frequencies of the track Komputer Pop by the band Komputer. If you recall, I mentioned this band when discussing the group I Start Counting several episodes ago as they, Fortran 5 and Komputer are all brain children of David Baker and Simon Leonard. If you haven't done so and you are a Kraftwerk fan, I highly recommend Komputer's first album called World of Tomorrow. It's a fantastic concept album and is about as close to replicating the Kraftwerk sound as you're going to find. There are a bunch of great tracks to boot. And in case you missed it, Baker and Leonard recently released a compilation of tracks spanning all three iterations of their long-time collaboration. Called Konnecting, it contains 15 tracks. For die-hards, they also released a companion 60-track digital deluxe set of b-sides and rarities with tons of remixes. If you have never owned anything by these guys, the new set is a fantastic place to begin and perhaps end if you're not a completist when it comes to music collecting.

More to come ...