Spoilt Victorian Child offers a 1968 live performance of All Night Flight by Terry Riley alias Poppy Nogood and the Phantom Band. A kind of cosmic psychedelic jam session. Here is the 2001 interview I got the liner notes from and here is an ILM thread on the (grand)daddy of minimal and ambient music.

Driving to work this morning I listened to one of the CDs in my 1993 best of list. The Apartments Drift. The music clicked immediately. I was taken back to 1994. The year I met Catherine. Our first holiday trip was to les Landes in the South-West of France, the sandy soil South of Bordeaux. The gîte, the pine woods near the coast, the ruby colour of the Graves. It was all there in my mind's eye. I even had the taste of the Basque omelette on my palate.

But not only did I go on a nostalgy trip of that specific year but I started pondering on the transitoriness of life in general. An aunt of mine is in the hospice. I thought how incredibly sad it is that my second youngest aunt, who always seemed like an elder sister is about to leave this world. And that there is absolutely nothing I can do about it.

All this when listening to this lush sounding indie guitar pop CD by the Apartments which have this lightness, innocence, freshness and the gift for melody and wistfulness that only bands from down under seem to have. Is there a reason for this? Maybe the weather? The sunshine in specific? There are many more great records to relisten to from 1993. I am very much looking forward to them. 1993, what a terrific year in music. The next album on my list is the sugargliders compilation.

You have to hit the ground.

P.S. If you don't want the ground to hit you first.

I have got 116 releases from 1993. No way I can condense this to ten right now. Therefore I put 21 instead of the usual 10 in the poll. Sorry folks.

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When you open the CD tray (I wish I had the vinyl) you can read the name of the band on the CD: Joy Division. This mysterious seemingly innocent name is a provocation with a sexual allusion. Like the names of the two punk bands which played in Manchester, July, 20th 1976, the Sex Pistols and the Buzzcocks. When three of the later members of JD were in the audience. The mauvais goût of their name is unprecedented in rock history though. Joy Division is a quote from the book House of Dolls by Karol Cetinsky, referring to the brothels in the concentration camps for Nazi officers and/or camp detainees. JD flirted with WWII-Germany, eg Bernard Sumner changed his name to Bernard Albrecht, shouted "You all forget Rudolf Hess" in the 1977 Electric Circus concert and there was the cover of the Ideal Living EP with the Hitler-Jugend look-alike drummer boy. I guess it was a juvenile opposition thing without any political meaning. They wanted to shock, they wanted to be extreme. And they were. Just listen and forget about all this...

Next to the name of the band you will find the title of the album imprinted on the CD. Unknown Pleasures. We all know the pleasures of life. Be them physical like drinking, eating, having a shelter, having sex. Or immaterial. Like having friends, being in love, being loved, hoping, believing in something. Unknown pleasures are the ones we didn't know they existed. Pleasures we never imagined, we couldn't even dream of. Pleasures which may hurt occasionally but which are still pleasures. Moving pleasures. In the physical (those hard-hitting beats) and spiritual sense. Touching something deep inside the listener. JD offer these kind of things. To those who are willing to lose themselves to JD's music. It is as simple as that.

There are at least two prejudices about Joy Division which are totally wrong. Their music is neither cold nor depressive. Unknown Pleasures is a manifestation of intensity. It is dark and occasionally heavy but what really sets it apart from punk and most of post-punk is the energetic cohesive band sound. Stephen Morris drums kick forward and reverberate backward reversing the movement of the supernova on the cover. Exploding first and imploding after within a millisecond. Peter Hook's bass is playing the melody most of the time. Fast and full like an apple tree in October after a hot summer. Martin Hannett's synthesizer and noise samples add the sometimes ethereal sometimes discomforting touch. Bernard Sumner's electrical guitar provides the melancholia when gyrating in distortion around the bass. Ian Curtis finally aspires human life into this music with his baritone. Even when he intonates like someone singing the dirge for his own funeral. His first line is:

Here is the overview of the series 40 years, 40 albums of which part XV was this post.

P.S. I have been too lazy to upload an mp3. Just tell me if you are interested and I will try to do something about it.

P.P.S. I lost more than half of the post last night. That's maybe one reason why this review is a little bit on the shallow side. I finally more or less gave up on the chronological order thing.

Everything has been said about this album already, I can only reiterate that you should forget it all and listen to the music. It is rewarding on its own. And you would have missed something as a consumer of music if you hadn't listened to this album. Listened to at the right time it can be life-shattering. Some words on it in a kind of chronological order though.

The first thing striking about this album is its cover. It looks like a ragged mountain range rising from the ocean. Maybe there is such a mountain range somewhere in the universe. But I don't think it has been spotted yet. It is still unknown. The cover is a reproduction of 80 (not 100, I counted them!) consecutive pulses of the first pulsar discovered in 1967, the CP1919. A pulsar is a neutron star (a star condensed to 20 km diameter or so) which is what stays of a mass-rich star after a supernova, i.e. an "implosion" of a star making it flash up like a galaxy. A pulsar emits pulses of electromagnetic waves on a regular base. The picture is often referred to as the "dying star logo". The colours have been inversed though. Originally the lines were black and the background was white.

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Buked & Scorned is an mp3 blog by Mike McGonigal with some phantastic rare music ranging from West-coast psychedelia, British indie rock, New Zealandish indie pop, gospel and back. Mike is writing the Loveless book in the 33 1/3 series at Continuum. Four songs I downloaded and enjoyed today:

• My Bloody Valentine - Sugar
. A rare flexi-disc I had never heard of before. An absolutely fucktastic drone.
• Velvet Underground - I Can't Stand It. Bootleg recorded next to Lou's guitar amp. You hardly hear anything else than his noisy guitar.
• Neil Young - Wonderin. Another bootleg from a 1970 Neil solo. Luverly.
• Antony & the Johnsons - You Stand Above Me. I really can believe Mike that this guy has released the best album of the year already. He has got the most expressive voice I have heard for a long time. Marc Almondish. Antony almost sounds like a castrate.

Mission statement:

More visits in the last 24 hours than usually during two weeks. It all comes from this Yahoo! search which leads to my old mp3 blogs post from almost a year ago. A little bit frightening. Were mp3 blogs mentioned in the main news or what?

Great Patti Smith cover online over at Lost Bands of the New Wave Era: The Feelies doing Dancing Barefoot. Warm, airy, dreamy power pop guitars. You should hurry up as the downloads don't stay online for a long time.