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Richie Hawtin has been on this beat since 1993!!!

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Ordered a CD from Germany a few weeks ago and thought it was stuck somewhere in Europe because I hadn't received any kind of update on it since Monday and USPS had no tracking info on it either. But guess where it was today? My mailbox 🤯

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Underworld - "Born Slippy" 1996 Techno

Original video for the most commercially successful techno tune of all time, Underworld's enigmatic and signature "Born Slippy," which went to #2 on the UK singles chart in 1996 after it was included on the soundtrack to Danny Boyle's iconic film about drug addiction, Trainspotting. The song was originally supposed to be about frontman Karl Hyde's relationship with alcohol, but it seemed to fit the flick's heroin theme quite well too, as it was very manic, with intensely percussive sections sandwiched separately between iconic and heavenly bouncy synth chords. Could be interpreted as being drunk or high, then experiencing withdrawal, and then being sober or maybe drunk or high again. Music video doesn't use any footage from Trainspotting, but a later 2003 version would. Regarded as electronic music's "Bohemian Rhapsody."

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Today's compilation:

Guitar Speak III 1991 Hard Rock / New Wave / Alternative Rock / Prog Rock

I think most of you probably know by now that I'm a total fiend for all different kinds of instrumental music, but this 10-track album of guitar exclusives from pioneering alternative and new wave label I.R.S. Records' instrumental sublabel, No Speak, is just so fucking empty and bereft of anything that could possibly make it worth anyone's while. Big names from the alternative space line this thing too, including Tom Verlaine from Television, Bob Mould from Hüsker Dü, Robert Fripp from King Crimson, Adrian Belew, and Nils Lofgren, but everything here just feels like totally mailed-in ass, caught in the dead period of the late 80s and early 90s, when so much music across many different genres just sounded so utterly flat, gormless, and uninspiringly shitty.

Hard to think of a comp that I've ever heard in my life that's more worthless than what was assembled here. Just anodyne nothingness from top to bottom. A complete, disposable waste of 41 minutes. And I.R.S. was a great label that gave rise to a bunch of big acts like The Go-Go's, R.E.M., Fine Young Cannibals, and a sizable amount of kooks and quriky characters too, but none of that satisfyingly fun and/or endearingly goofy spirit is in this album itself. This is much closer to being one of those old demo CDs that you'd pop into your player to test and adjust your speakers—banal and generic music without any modicum of heart. Far better used as a drink coaster than a compact disc.

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Ross 154 - "Mayflower" X-Mix-4: Beyond the Heavens by Dave Angel Song released in 1993. Mix released in 1995. Deep Techno / Ambient Techno

One of those unique pieces of early 90s techno that can't be described as anything other than techno despite the fact that it doesn't employ techno's most utilized element: the thumping four-on-the-floor kickdrum. A track off of the Netherlands' Jochen Peteri's 1993 solo debut release, Fragments, which he issued under the name of Ross 154. Heard here at a raised pitch, as the opening track on UK legend Dave Angel's installment in German label !k7's terrific X-Mix series from '95. Chilly and sparse, atmospheric stuff.

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Love songs that gallop like this 🐴

Iron Maiden - Run To The Hills (Official Video)

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JX - "Son of a Gun (Red Jerry/JX Mix)" 1994 Euro House / Handbag House / Hardbag

I just really adore the hell out of this song, folks. A super catchy, diva-sampled piece of upbeat handbag house from the mid-90s that paired an anthemically dubby synth riff and lyric together. People called stuff like this handbag because the girls at the club would throw their purses into a pile and then dance around it. JX's original version of this debut tune of his was decent, but this co-mix by him and Hooj Choons co-founder Red Jerry made it an irresistible piece of dance gold that slotted in nicely alongside all the Eurodance that was pumping away at that same time too. Music video captured off of a broadcast on UK MTV's Hit List UK program, which was something like one of those top video countdown shows. A shame that the US never really got a taste of this one 😔.

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Today's mix:

Clubstitute Vol. 1 by Koen Groeneveld & Addy van der Zwan 1994 House / Garage House / Euro House / Tribal House

Really terrific trip back to 1994 in this 70+ minute house set from the prolific Dutch DJ and production duo of Koen Groeneveld & Addy van der Zwan. Together, these guys became a Dutch dance music institution with all the mixes that they put out, including a bunch for the famed Turn Up the Bass series, which I'm set to do some exploring of soon too. Later on they'd go on to become known as Klubbheads, and then co-produced the inescapable eurotrash dance anthem, "The Launch," with DJ Jean in 1998—if you don't know that one by name, there's still a pretty good chance that you've heard it before; it's a bit of a sports arena staple at this point.

Anyway, here we've got Koen & Addy banging out a class mix on behalf of Clubstitute Records, and if Clubstitute (is that a portmanteau of club and institute, prostitute, or substitute? 🤔) was ever known for anything, it was probably for introducing the world to the Dutch Eurodance duo of Doop and their signature hit, "Doop," which incorporated a very old style of dance music, namely that 1920s sensation that we all knew and loved, the Charleston. And here we've got a pretty nice and cheery, horn-splashed remix of it by Doop themselves, operating under the name of Ferry & Garnefski, which are their actual names. This one sounds like something that Fatboy Slim might've once kept towards the front of his own record crate; a presage of all the sunny optimism that would come baked into his own sound, as his big beat stylings would come to fully consume the UK by the turn of the millennium.

And beyond that is a further showcase of the sturdy Clubstitute catalogue along with other tunes that came from elsewhere too. From Clubstitute come a pair of tracks from the great Jaydee (no, not Dilla) who performs here as Daydream, with the spiritually tribal "Indian Blood" to kick things off and the uniquely deep "Killing Field" that serves as the penultimate track. And then right smack dab in the middle comes some work from a pair of oceans: Dutch duo Atlantic Ocean's expectedly aquatic and rippling "Waterfall"—another Clubstitute jam—and the Latin garage tribal "Love and Happiness (Yemaya y Ochun)" by River Ocean aka the legendary Louie Vega from New York, which features frequent collaborator India on vocals and none other than Tito Puente on percussion!

So, all in all, mostly an excellent early-to-mid-90s Dutch affair here. If you thought the Netherlands was more of a hub for trance and significantly harder rave music like gabber, you're not wrong, but here's a mix to show you that they could make some killer house cuts too. And with expert mixers like Koen Groeneveld & Addy van der Zwan here to serve it all up, you really can't go wrong with this slate, folks 👍.

Unfortunately, I can't find a link anywhere to stream this right now, but if anyone's interested in hearing it, I have it on mp3, and you know where to find me.

Highlights:

Daydream - "Indian Blood" Sound Environment - "Had Enough" Spacebase - "I Need You" Doop - "Doop (Ferry & Garnefski Remix)" Blackwood - "All I Gave to You (Lensen Mix)" Sure Is Pure - "Disco's Dare" Subsurreal - "Steam" Atlantic Ocean - "Waterfall" River Ocean - "Love and Happiness (Yamaya Y Ochun)" Inner Tube - "Pump Me Up" Edward's World - "Soul Roots (Piano House Mix)" Semper - "Forever (Atlantic Ocean Remix)" Gat Decor - "Passion" Phoney Fables - "Spring! (Is in the Air)" Daydream - "Killing Field" Eastern Vibes - "Mathar"

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It's nice that IG finally added the ability to repost other ppls posts on there, bc I'll probably be doing that a bunch now too. And that gives you all a reason to follow me on there, bc I just reposted a really cool reel about how drum n bass & jungle came to be used in so many videogames throughout the 90s and 2000s 😎.

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Westworld - "Painkiller" Steve Masters Presents: A Trip Back to the 80's Song released in 1987. Compilation released in 1995. Synthpop / Pop-Rock / New Wave

Westworld are probably best described as having been something like a rockabilly-pop-rock band. They had one major hit in the UK, another minor one, and then they never succeeded particularly in the US, but "Painkiller," which wasn't released anywhere as a single, nevertheless experienced a moment specifically in San Francisco, when it got a considerable amount of burn on Live-105 KITS in the late 80s, where it'd been spun by local legend Steve Masters. Here the group lays down a somewhat unique blend of an electro-type drum track with their rockabillyish guitar stylings being fed through Art of Noise member Trevor Horn's patented sampling technique that landed him the moniker of "The Man who Invented the 80s," resulting in something that's fun, catchy, and also extremely goofy. Guitarist Bob "Derwood" Andrews came from punk band Generation X too, which was fronted by Billy Idol.

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Basement Jaxx & Metropole Orkest - "Samba Magic" (live @ the Muziekcentrum Frits Philips in Eindhoven, Netherlands) 2010 Latin Jazz / Samba

One surefire way of knowing that you've really made it as an artist is when you land one of those special concert dates where you get to play some of your biggest hits alongside a renowned orchestra. Sometimes the results of those collaborations can be pretty tacky, but not so with this one, in which Basement Jaxx and the Netherlands' Metropole Orkest closed out a night in 2010 with BJ's "Samba Magic." Not a very housey performance like the original version, but it nevertheless still goes, and then the following year, a whole live album ended up manifesting too.

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Today's compilation:

Lounge-A-Palooza 1997 Lounge Revival / Pop-Rock / Cocktail Nation / Singer-Songwriter / Traditional Pop / Chamber Pop

OK, so, I think this is probably hands-down the worst compilation that I've listened to all year. The late 90s really brought in this weird fad of early-to-mid-60s bachelor pad/cocktail lounge revivalism and within that whole aesthetic came the retrofuturism of that era too, all of which was more or less tied together by James Bond, a still-prominent debonair character from the 60s who hadn't really changed much since then, but was constantly using state of the art and cutting-edge technology to thwart his foes. In the 60s he was more or less just this goofy spy character, but in 1997 he was representative of a bridged gap between a distant past and present. And Austin Powers was a similar, absurd parody of him too.

And now maybe I'm the corny dweeb here, because I think a lot of that specific revivalism was actually pretty cool from a visual standpoint, but the music, on the other hand, was almost all atrocious. And with this 60s bachelor pad/cocktail lounge revival comp from Hollywood Records that brings in some big contemporary names to cover lounge classics and proven lounge entities to cover big contemporary hits, you kind of get a mishmash of the worst that either of these two concepts could offer. Fastball, that two-hit wonder staple of late 90s contemporary hit radio who graced us with "The Way" and "Out of My Head," deliver an awful take on Herb Alpert's "This Guy's in Love With You," and lounge husband-and-wife stalwarts of the 50s and 60s, Steve & Eydie, turn Soundgarden's "Black Hole Sun" into tender Las Vegas-residency piano dreck, yielding something that's honestly not even worth a listen for the sheer novelty of it—in an annoyingly similar vein to when white rock and/or ska bands did ironic covers of gangsta rap hits too 🤢.

But here's the fine line to all of this: if people wanted to repurpose these 60s sounds into more modern approaches, that's fine and dandy. Fatboy Slim utilized some of the 60s lounge and exotica stuff and succeeded with it, and I have a comp I wrote about years ago that's on this modernized James Bond cocktail party tip that was surprisingly very good and not really a gimmicky cash-grabbing nuisance at all; and Britney Spears' "Toxic," a brilliant pop hit from the early 2000s, used those patented James Bond guitar chords too. But if you just wanted to reproduce the loungey early-to-mid 60s vibes with modern instruments and recording technology and then not bring anything fresh to the table along with it, you were really doing something that was unlistenable.

And thankfully, none of this specific kind of music ended up having much cachet in the late 90s, because at that same time, our early-to-mid-60s lane of revivalist music nostalgia was actually being taken up by something else instead: the swing revival movement, which gave us such goofy oddities as the Cherry Poppin' Daddies' "Zoot Suit Riot" and the Brian Setzer Orchestra's "Jump, Jive an' Wail." And while all that stuff was terrible too, believe me when I say that it wasn't as bad as the early-to-mid-60s lounge revival crap that's presented on this CD here 👎. Everyone should've kept every single one of these ideas to themselves when they had them, but if we had to choose between being made to endure a bout of either swing revival or lounge revival, I'm glad that we ultimately chose the swing.

Best song on here is PJ Harvey's "Zaz Turned Blue," which is the least loungey tune of them all, but I wouldn't exactly consider it a highlight either.

No highlights.

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Now listening:

Little Earthquakes by Tori Amos 1992 Singer-Songwriter / Piano Rock / Art Pop

Having trouble accessing my Plex server right now, which is what I usually use to listen to all my music remotely, so I'm picking back up on this silly idea I have where I try to go through each major freely available online music database (AllMusic, Musicbrainz, Discogs, Rateyourmusic, and mixesdb) in sequential order from when each database started. When I kicked this off over a month ago, I began with the first entry in the AllMusic catalogue, and now I'm gonna do the first entry in the MusicBrainz catalogue, which is American singer-songwriter Tori Amos' critically acclaimed 1992 solo debut LP, Little Earthquakes. I really enjoy a lot of the stuff that came out of the female singer-songwriter boom of the 90s too, so I'm expecting to dig this one especially 🤞

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Someone sent me an Instagram reel about this album yesterday so I decided to give it a listen & it's fuckin' wild, folks. Lo-fi, musty-dusty instrumental hip hop, trip hop, illbient, and chiptuney beats that were made by someone who clearly loves high-grade weed and medieval fantasy rpgs. The gimmick is that you download the album, turn your player's crossfader to 5 or 6 seconds, and then hit shuffle so you can get a completely different experience every time that you listen to it. I was too lazy to do all of that though and played it from front to back instead, and it's still quite the experience. Released in 2013.

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Pop Will Eat Itself - "Like an Angel" Take the Subway to Your Suburb Song released in 1986. Compilation released in 1994. Indie Rock / Noise Pop / Neo-Psychedelia

UK alternative band Pop Will Eat Itself, who would soon start dabbling in hip hop and alternative dance and pioneer a brief British sound known as grebo, went full-on indie-noise pop-60s psychedelic revival with this one in 1986, a roaring and scratchy cover of The Mighty Lemon Drops' "Like an Angel" from the year prior. Originally released as one of two contributions to pioneering indie pop label The Subway Oragnisation's Take the Subway to Your Suburb comp, PWEI would never make their own proper release through them and would end up staying on another indie instead called Chapter 22, before later landing on the much bigger RCA in '89.

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United Future Organization - "His Name Is..." 1996 Downtempo

Japanese-French acid jazz trio United Future Organization going the cinematic, placidly classy, and dub-infused downtempo route with this strange music video of theirs for a song from their 1996 album, 3rd Perspective. Appears to use a bunch of footage from their own concerts and aired on MTV somewhere, but probably not the US. Maybe best watched at 3 in the morning while in a half-daze.