Yes, International Women’s Day was a week and two days ago, but I promised Lola the Car Chick I would blog for the gentle women and men for whom the gospel of feminism has not yet reached. This past March 8th I was traveling all day and being computer-less, left my MOG sullen and blogless for the day. Now I’m back in Baton Rouge after a particularly amazing retreat to the wilderness in upstate New York, and ready to write something. This comes from Zach, a smashing gender queer friend I made on said retreat. Somehow, as happens on road trips, the subject of Ms. Pac-Man arose — in this case because BZ (another friend) was describing how he had purchased one of those 64-in-1 game controllers with built in NES emulator chip. Apparently, this included Pac Man but, alas, not Ms. Pac Man. The difference? Well, besides the level changes and the appearance of floating jumping, musical fruit, the orange ghost from Pac Man, also known as Clyde, in Ms. Pac Man, has been “replaced” by an identical orange ghost named Sue. This was news to me, but Zach was adamant, authoritative, and of course, correct. Zach calls Sue a feminist pioneer. I think Clyde/Sue is gender queer, possibly transgendered but not transexual like Walter cum Wendy Carlos. It’s obvious to me that what with my earlier posts on arcade and video game music, I have the subject of a blog post once I arrive back in civilization. I’ve always been a fan of Clyde/Sue, being orange, my favorite color.

This brings me to the musical subject of this essay: Conemelt — or more specifically, the music of Ashley Marlowe. As with my previous post on Squarepusher’s remix of “psultan” and “bedroom glow” by Kiyoshi Izumi’s , “Under The Hood” by Conemelt has that break in rhythm and shift to new melody where everything becomes even more intense and delicious sounding. The track appeared on a 12″, Rocker’s Ruin E.P. (1997) I discovered at the 611 record store after much much browsing. And similar to “psultan” I needed to find my own pitch for the track to sound right. On the version you’ll hear on the MOG player, it’s been shifted down from 45 to about 42. (vinyl rip by yours truly.)

Ashley is an amazing drummer and listen for yourself below:

About Aharon N. Varady

Aharon's Omphalos is the hobbit hole of Aharon Varady, founding director of the Open Siddur Project. He is a community planner and environmental educator working to improve stewardship of the Public Domain, be it the physical and natural commons of urban park systems or the creative and cultural commons of libraries and museums. His advocacy for open-source strategies in the Jewish community has been written about in the Atlantic Magazine, the Yiddish Forverts, Tablet, and Haaretz. He is particularly interested in pedagogies for advancing ecological wisdom, developing creative and emotional intelligence, and realizing effective theurgical praxes. He welcomes your comments, personal messages, and kind words. If you find his work helpful to your own or you'd simply like to support him, please consider donating via his Patreon account.

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“Belated International Women’s Day Blogging” is shared by Aharon N. Varady with a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International copyleft license.