Image copyright Frank Schindelbeck

I’ll reveal a secret to all y’alls. The best place to get your filez on is on USENET . That’s where I just collected Hooper Bay, Boards Of Canada’s ultrarare 1994 mini-cassette/12″ extremely limited release. I’ve been burned before with non-BOC tracks tagged as BOC before (badly tagged, and mis-tagged Old Tunes mp3s are ubiquitous on soulseek), so I checked on over at Frederik Claes’ BOC fan site for the authoritative track listing and song length duration. Sure enough, it is really Hooper Bay. This sort of file sharing is exactly what USENET and the file sharing networks are good for. Grabbing files of out-of-print and intolerably rare limited pressings. I have no idea why Warp hasn’t re-released this material to the BOC craving (and crazed) masses. Until then, I will have to make do with my low-fi 128kpbs encoded, usenet downloaded, mp3s of Hooper Bay.

This short album really is lovely.

Well, I really liked Terrapin Station and quickly noticed that Dead music covered a number of flavors of prog: folk-psych, funky folk, and improvisational prog rock/space jams. This was all well and good, but I have no taste in funky folk, and little taste for the Dead’s brand of space jams, no matter how hard I whirl like a Bektashi Dervish.

So I’m hoping that in the world of MOG , someone can turn me onto songs by the Grateful Dead that are not funky folk songs like “Samson and Delilah” and more like “Terrapin Station, Part 1.”

But I think the more significant thing about this album is the cover art. Check out those slit glasses. Remind you of anyone?

Geordi La Forge from Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987)

And speaking of slit glasses. How come I can’t find them anywhere? Why if fashion repeats itself has it taken so long for these to make a comeback? From my blog to your ears, Soho fashion geeks. I mean, take a look at this young gangster from John Carpenter’s whimsical 1986 synth-pop opera, Big Trouble in Little China.

I should also note that the soundtrack to Big Trouble in Little China by John Carpenter and Alan Howarth is excellent. Here’s a quality review of it written back in 2003 by the fantastically named, Messrob Torikian. I don’t have a copy of the soundtrack. It is rare! It is also expensive. If you have it, please share it with me. Also, if you know of a supplier for retro sunglasses, please pass on my request.

UPDATE: Some follow-up thoughts to this post are blogged about here.

Below, “378″ by EBN (courtesy of youtube and user electricmonk).

I am sharing this with you because you would never come across this song. It is the final track at the end of Danny Elfman’s score to the Clive Barker film, Nightbreed (1990). It doesn’t appear in the film, not even in the end credits. But it made it to the cassette soundtrack. I’m thinking that Danny Elfman (formerly of Oingo Boingo) had wanted “Skin” covered by a country artist for years, but he had to wait through ten years of making soundtracks for Tim Burton films before one came along where he could sneak the cover of “Skin” into the budget.

Please take a listen. Here is “Country Skin” by Michael Stanton. And here, for comparison is the non-country original “Skin” by Oingo Boingo. And here is El*Argento’s beautiful new skin for winamp. What is hiding underneath this skin? The boring old winamp skin. If you use windows and winamp, you can download this skin and make your winamp look more like a late 1990s Warp label album cover here.

Still, the album has its place, especially here on MOG , for track 2 is entitled “Re-Entry to Mog.” Heh. Work that into your Story of MOG , collaborative fiction moggers.

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MOG has given me a list of the 50 most popular artists/bands in my collection according to the number of tracks I have for each of them. (There’s a widget that indicates this if you haven’t noticed) The “popularity” of this chart is skewed by artists who have many short tracks (such as J.S. Bach), or many tracks that I just don’t listen to that often (such as John Williams).

Meanwhile, my charts at Last.fm\audioscrobbler provides a list of my 50 most popular artists/bands according to how often I listen to them. Since I listen to so much of my music using shuffle, the “popularity” of this chart is skewed again by those artists in my collection who have many tracks (i.e., J.S. Bach). My listening isn’t entirely random however, since I often skip albums by artists I’m not interested in listening to.

If I can compare “artists with most tracks” with “most listened artists” I should be able to locate the outliers and get a true sense of who I really most like.

I set up two columns with the 50 most listened to artists (via last.fm) in one column, and the 50 artists with the most tracks in my collection (via MOG ). After sorting the two columns and arranging the artists so that they appear alphabetically I have their two rankings side by side. (For example: J.S. Bach ranks 15th in most tracks I have, and 5th in most listened to. Other artists such as Legion of Green Men, are ranked in the popular listening column but don’t even make MOG ‘s cut in number of files).

Now I need to perform some equation on the two popularity values to determine a most popular score. Any ideas?

Assumptions: Artists that score high in listening but low in tracks should have their scores amplified.

The album comes in three parts, really: “Sur Le Them De Bene Gesserit” (Parts I-VII), “Duncan Idaho,” and a thrity minute Fripp-ish multi-track guitar improv jam with drums and accompanying synth sounds entitled “Paul Atreides.”

The connection between science-fiction and the evolution of electronic music is deep. Just consider the influence of György Ligeti and Wendy Carlos’ scores for Stanley Kurbrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (Arthur C. Clark) and A Clockwork Orange (Anthony Burgess). I’m wondering now what the musical accompaniment may have been for Karel ÄŒapek’s play Rossum’s Universal Robots (and its numerous adaptations).

Please comment if you know of any other electronic music inspired by fantastic or fabulist literature.

And in the book, there is a subversion, and the illusion is broken for one character, at least briefly, through an intervention enabled by a character’s meditation on a trinket. The thing, hidden by it’s apparent worthlessness becomes the most valuable thing in the universe. The trinket was created by a man who smokes marijuana cigarettes sold under the brand name “Heavenly Music Corporation” (a Japanese brand sold in a parallel California where the Japanese won the Pacific front in World War II).

Brian Eno and Robert Fripp named side A of their 1974 proto-ambient album No Pussyfooting: “Heavenly Music Corporation.” Two years earlier, Klause Schulze had composed “Study for Philip K. Dick.” Was Klause Schulze meditating on what the Penfield Mood Organ might have sounded like, had its moods been conveyed by sound? It’s worth a listen. But it is “Heavenly Music Corporation”, by virtue of its homage to the inspiration of gnostic subversion, that can be listened to as a means of revealing for ourselves the illusion of the “Black Iron Prison.”

It’s significant to consider that Dick wrote this ten years before We Can build You (1972) where he introduces the idea of the Glock Frauenzimmer, electronic organ, six years before the “Penfield Mood Organ” in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (1968). Fripp & Eno chose an obscure prop name from an older PKD novel. I don’t claim to understand why they chose it, just that the name is well suited on a number of levels to the concept and the potential of the composition and genre Fripp & Eno were helping to invent.

Later, in the 1990s, Kim Cascone of industrial project PGR and founder of the defunct Silent/Flask label (also out of San Francisco) and reviving ambient in America, named his newly christened ambient project, Heavenly Music Corporation. Kim produced four excellent ambient albums in the mid 90s under this name: anechoic (1996), consciousness iii (1994), in a garden of eden (1993), and lunar phase (1995).

Below, I am linking to a collection of cassette rips of what appears to be interviews with PKD in the early 1980s. I’m also adding to the stream some of the music I referenced in this post.

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