Music 30 #10 — A song that makes you fall asleep

This is a hard one for me since I hardly EVER can fall asleep to music. It's happened but usually drugs or intense tiredness was involved...thing is I CANNOT do muzak, background music and not be distracted or concentrate on the music at some point. I really have to be really busy and focused and concentrating, then I don't hear the music at all. This is not a state you are in waiting for the blessed myoclonic jerk.

I have TRIED to use music to help me sleep - there is one album I used to do that with, a new agey medieval vocal album that does just have the frequencies in that precise order that induces almost a meditative state - and of course few changes in the music to jerk me out of them.

It was a present of a former straight crush of mine, Andy (a wiccan) - Anonymous 4, a female acapella vocal group with 1000: A Mass for the End of Time. Medieval chanting and polyphony, done by women but makes Miri it is and Sumer is Icumen In sound like veritable modern rock and roll songs...laced with paganistic feeling and melancholic end of the world doom cults. Yes this thing helps me sleep (or meditate). Can't find the embed on this Chinese site, but you can hear some here. It's all a bit Hildegard of Bingen. I stopped listening to it and indeed meditating or trying to, I was crap at it when I got a rather strong by effect that freaked me...something to do with what the wiccans were doing. I really didn't want to go there.

Leads me to a funny story - another album I've fallen alseep to while drunk or wasted (probably the latter) is Can - Sacrilege, the remixes album. I must've put it on for Kirk to hear, or left it playing - and it was playing quietly in the background, almost so you couldn't hear.

Forward to the middle of the night and I get a terrified Kirk nudging me. He's freaking out at an ominous repetitive chanting coming from the corner of the room. The album eventually got to Westbam's mix of Yoo Doo Right, and all you could here was the ooh aah oooh aahh in a sort of spooky gregorian techno style in the corner in the dark. It was pretty funny but also understandable, as if the monsters were doing some sort of beatbox boogie in the dark.

Music 30 #11 — A song from your favorite band

Hmm well you can guess what's coming here...and if you follow Jeb50poundnote  AND me, lucky person you get New Order in stereo - but I'll post something you might not have heard.

New Order - Turn the Heater On (Peel Session)

One of my favourite NO songs and it isn't even off an album or studio release, it's also a cover (nicely linking to Jeb's post) of Keith Hudson and unusually it's reggae, and off the first Peel Sessions LP (the bronze/gold one I think - they both had metallic ink covers, one bronze/gold the other silver - I have this on 12" like the vid, and original CD singles for both, I might have the other 12" too...originally they were 2x12" LPs on Peel's record label Strange Fruit.

As Jeb pointed out, New Order covers were rare, and them doing reggae apart from this, never. But I loved this when I first heard it on that 12" many years ago, and still love it. It keeps the reggae feel but also the echoing Martin 'Zero' Hannett style production, even though by then he wasn't around. Whereas dub reggae tends to go for warmth and bass, this seems to go to the chilly empty dark side and even to my ears relates back to Joy Division.

Music 30 #12 - A song from a band you hate

Well I'm going to assume band can mean act or artist...

It's strangely quite hard for me to think of an act I entirely and totally hate - yes I have REALLY strong opinions on music and most of the time can back them up - but usually a band has at least song I don't despise, or someone did a mashup or remix of it that made me see it in another light.

The following acts have no redeeming features EVER:

Jason Donovan.

Yes I know some of you 80's Cheese Queens are going 'WHAT? NO WAI!!!' but really, it doesn't get worse than this...well maybe Spagna and Taylor Dayne but their careers were mercifully short. Stock Aitken Waterman the producers started well - doing pop versions of black house tunes, Roadblock, Mel and Kim and Dead or Alive. But at some point in 86 or 87 they decided to go for the money and produce soap stars as pop artists. Now the only one that really paid off and actually probably could sing was Kylie - but Jason especially on that first duet couldn't. Stefan Dennis, Dannii and Rick fucking Astley followed, and some really bad Charidee singles. Nothing Jason Donovan has done can I like, and I've left a club for playing both him and Rick. There's good 80's cheese and there is bad wedding disco from hell 80's cheese. Most S/A/W/ after 1987 falls into the latter.

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Music 30 #13 — A song that is a guilty pleasure

Guilty Pleasures...hmm. I know starting by any of these questions by questioning them is a little anal, but true guilty pleasures are hard to find since a lot of what I grew up to be TRUE guilty pleasures have been reclaimed by hipsters, something that actually pisses me off a bit. I liked this music for what it was, and like owning a computer before geek = cool got real shit for it.

So Sonic Youth or someone turns up and says that's like, SO COOL and everyone's into it (which I admit is a sort of hipster responses - anti-hipster?) which means in the end you should like what you like and stand by it...although the guilty pleasuress are usually the ones you cannot defend.

So these are the songs I probably cannot defend and used to be slightly embarassed about, but are probably now strangely cool, or something. I lose track.

Carpenters - Close To You

This could be any of theirs...and yes I had the best of Carpenters 1 and 2 as a kid, it's a pretty faggy thing to like but at 13/14 I didn't understand that. I did understand that they were hella unfashionable, that sha-la-la production even grates with me - it represents the worst of 70's AOR slush, but THAT voice. OMG that voice. I like this Bacharach cover best, but also later stuff like Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft, or We've Only Just Begun written by the Muppet-molesting and Bugsy Malone songwriter/performer Paul Williams.

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