The Listening Club - 16th May 2020

Greetings folks,

Hope you're all doing okay. Pretty average week here in Amsterdam, bit of sunshine, bit of showers, definitely a few tourists wandering around for the first time in aaaages too. And the wisteria is finally flowering, a good few weeks late, which is kinda appropriate, as everything and everyone seems to be emerging into the light a little later than expected right now... 

Last Sunday it was @simonlandmine in the chair, with The Creatures' "Anima Animus" from 1999, which seemed to go down very well indeed with the assembled. Many thanks to Simon for the pick, and for sailing the frisb over to @ohmyliver, who's here with tonight's intro...

"I’ve taken up exercise.  This is something that I would not have expected to write. Ever.  But these are unusual times.  I actually should have got into such a healthy habit years ago.  So essential for mood and motivation.

The key was finding a workout that gels with me.  The breakthrough was discovering Fight Klub, who do workouts to Drum and Bass, with proper DJs and emcees like MC Navigator.  Although, as I find the monstrous metronome of the 4/4 kick drum better for working out to, in my search for 160+bpm music, I’ve wandered through genres I’ve not really listened to before..   

UK Hard Bounce, apparently evolved out of Scouse House. Sirens, whoops, old school rave samples, and a dominant synth sound which sounds like what I’d imagine beating a block of plasticy adulterated “hash” known as soap bar, with a hollow metal pipe, would sound like. It may be the frantic sound of nihilistic hedonistic annihilation, but going by the data from my fitness band, it’s pretty good at being a heart rate raising, calorie burning workout soundtrack.

Hard House, similar to the above, albeit with slightly more variety in synth sounds.   French Hard House, as before, but someone seems to have left French daytime TV on in the studio, and it’s been accidentally mixed into the music. 

Fast Italo.  This is either what going to a Club Med cheesy disco on huge amounts of uppers of questionable purity sounds like, or the sound of Euro Pop singers like Sabrina on the 2nd or 3rd day of an ill-advised sleepless teeth-grinding hedonistic marathon.  I mean, listen to Sheila - Summer Dream Of Love (B1 Mix) you can almost feel an impending horrific multi-day comedown hiding behind the extremely catchy ‘la lala laa’ pop chorus, squelchy synths, and pounding 4/4 kicks. Obviously for legal reasons I hasten to point out that I’m not actually suggesting that Euro Pop singers like Sabrina ever actually did that sort of thing, nor have I ever been to a Club Med disco.

But have no fear, I’ve not chosen any of the above for this pick.  I mean those genres are fine in varying degrees for ludicrous but efficacious exercising, but not everyone wants to do that on a Sunday night.   So I’ve picked this.  

Let's go back to the early 90s. To the land where they put mayonnaise on chips, clubbers danced to the dark of the Cherry Moon, rearing horses aggressively insisted that people danced, and huge hoovers, saws, and supersaws menaced the dance floor.  To a time when primitive electronic devices simply responded with ‘E’ to anything that blew their computational minds, and people who worked as secretaries typed all day.

But imagine that it’s at least couple of decades since you were raving to this music, and you wanted to do a mix to pay homage to this music, which both spawned a range of genres mostly prefixed with ‘hard’, and influenced the sound of British rave, and the genres that spun off from that. Well, you’d probably want to slow it down from a tempo ideal for over-stimulated teenagers, to something more palatable to the now middle-aged raver, wouldn’t you?

So that’s what they’ve done.  The slowness accentuates a synthetic psychedelic side which can be otherwise obscured by the intensity of the tracks when played at their more usual speed.  It may be a bit like the sound of the robot takeover defragging an industrial zone for better post-human  utilisation, but I’ve rinsed the f*ck out of it recently at a variety of speeds. 

If you don’t like overbearing synths, crunchy overdriven 303s, and the thud and skitter of various 80s drum machines, albeit at a sedate 115bpm, then you might well struggle with this one. 

Drinking club? Trappist monk beer?  Isotonic drink with a double overproof rum? Warmish tap water with a hint of nostalgia for a misspent youth, and a nice sit down on the side?"

Right then. Download's here, stream's below

See you at 8pm BST (GMT+1)