Mysterons After having followed the ILM thread Portishead - are we fickle or did they deserve to become dated so quickly? and having read Josh's recent post on them I relistened to "Dummy" as well. I was sure that the record would not have the same impact as in 1994 when I heard "Roads" on MTV and was completely overwhelmed by the tristesse and Verlorenheit (forlornness) emanating from that voice, the trembling synthesizer and the slow beats. I hadn't listened to it for a long time and back in 1994 I definitely had listened to it too often so that it had become one of those loved-to-death records. But I had a nice surprise. Especially the first track "Mysterons" with the extremely addictive slow drum machine rhythm which has a drum roll at the end did it for me. Already the start of that song is gorgeous. A guitar plays some ascending notes and the synthie sounds like a quacking duck. First the duck is quite shy and not too loud and then it bursts into some serious quacking which comes from scratching I guess. The song is then dominated by a low synthie sound layer. After a while the theremin (apparently only a patch on a minimoog according to this thread) joins in and produces some long beautiful sounds. They seem to come from the sky and remind me of the whoosh of a fast-blowing wind. Absolutely otherworldly. At the end of that song the drumming becomes very shaky and rolls like a thunder in slow motion. The less poetic technical term for this is reverb I think.