It’s an almost rainy Saturday afternoon and Bowie’s ‘ch-ch-ch-ch’ came to my mind. I just finished organizing my works-in-progress. What had happened was, I had an epiphany about creating a spreadsheet with all my current projects, their genres and wordcounts, titles, loglines, and info listed with their last ‘worked-on’ date.…
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It’s the 20th day and alas, we’ve reached the end of the road. For now. We’ve done jazz, gospel, industrial, instrumental, and more, which makes it difficult to come to the penultimate of such a journey. However, I think I have to give it to two of the greatest musicians…
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I’ll have to stick with the ‘80s for today and yes, I’m doing it … It’s the 19th day of the series, so what better day to talk about Paul Hardcastle and his runaway hit, ‘19’? Please note that the video might not play, depending on your settings, because it…
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Figured I’d take it down a notch since we’re fast approaching the end of this 20-day musical journey. There was a late-70s(?) band called Japan, who were part of the UK androgynous New Romantic era sound. Lead singer David Sylvian went on to his own solo career and in the…
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Another group emerging from the industrial landscape of music is Laibach. They weren’t just identified as an industrial band, but were also labeled as neo-classical and were part of the then-emergent New Slovenian Art, a political-cultural movement. Two of the founding members of Laibach were in the Yugoslavian Army; their…
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Speaking of the 1980s, one can’t leave out industrial music. I don’t know what it was about the sound, but it grabbed me hard in my radio station days. I started my shows with Antagonism by Skinny Puppy nearly every week as I recall. What it was about them, specifically,…
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One name that emerged from Yellow Magic Orchestra in my musical archive is Ryuichi Sakamoto. I think of him like an Andy Warhol of music; he has many songs with one-word titles that sweep across the acoustic canvas like Mr. Warhol’s works — unique, quirky, and at times creepy —…
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Kraftwerk’s ‘Computer Love’ came out in the early 1980s, but for me, the future arrived in 1978. To be an ‘urban’ R&B radio station, WDAS-FM out of Philadelphia was more progressive back then; I didn’t realize it until other stations, like WRTI-FM, which had been a major source of jazz,…
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Who’d have thought it … we’ve now entered the future. There was a time that the future was much earlier; looking back on it now, it’s pretty funny. The personal computer age was a mile marker for a world many of us never imagined. I always wanted my own Jetson’s…
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Happy 2020! Before we get into all the future-talk to come, I would be remiss to not begin (again) the musical journey with some seasonal sounds. It is a rare person who hasn’t heard the soundtrack for ‘A Charlie Brown Christmas’, with all the amazing music therein. However, there’s more…