Tripping Over

Miwa Ogasawara - Indifferent 01 (2016)

Now for something I've been wantin to post about for a while but had a tough time finding some neighbours for it. So the main tune I wanted to talk about was the Cyberia Mix of Duvet by very obscure British band Bôa, it's one of my all time favourite flips of a song, turning a post-brit pop indie jam that reminds me a lil of Mazzy Star into a more trip-hop meets slow techno piece instead that's got more in common with early Sneaker Pimps. If it weren't for the mix subtitle you could easily be forgiven for thinking this was the original, here's hoping you dig it as much as I.



The Sneaker Pimps comparison should have come up sooner, all that time I spent searching for similar things to pair with it and the answer was staring me in the face on the little spotify playlist we have on the sidebar. It''l be changing come November so I can let myself off with putting this one up. A slightly reworked version of 6 Underground, with the poppier elements stripped out. Playing them back to back like this they are pretty similar, thanks in a big way to Kelli Dayton's delivery (or Kelli Ali, as she's now known). It's got more in common with the Cyberia Mix than I thought, I've only just seen that they're both from the same time-frame of '98/'99, must've been an in vogue style at the time, with the release of Massive Attack's Mezzanine too it was definitely a good year to be into the sound.



And finally, another revisit from the E-Z Rollers, again from around the same time. The LP this is from Weekend World is a largely Drum & Bass affair, though it is broken up fairly frequently with short interludes and more importantly, dips into things of a lower tempo. Nightfall is one of the tunes from it I've posted a couple of times but I think it warrants it, not only are the E-Z Rollers fairly obscure these days but this tune in particular I feel does a fantastic job of showing off the Jazzy undertones of the album which you might not expect from an electronic album.



-Claude Van Foxbat

We Don't Need No Edumacation

Johannes Itten - Education (1966)

Apologies for the lack of updates as of late, as I've said before we're in pretty much peak busy time for university work, and I've spent most of this week teaching Photoshop, commuting and sleeping. I'll try my best to write some things come the weekend but no promises.

Anyway, I was looking over the recent posts and decided to combine two themes to start off, we're keeping it Daft Punk like with Alive '07, but I'm also archiving a tune from the Tron: Legacy OST. So for whatever reason the Punk lads decided to make this one an Amazon exclusive track, between that and some iTunes and Nokia exclusives it means that no matter which version of the OST you get you'll be missing a couple of tracks. Which is a massive shame because they (and this tune in particular) are absolutely smashing. Get a lot of those downright terrific synths, its gorgeous and sadly a little overlook thanks to the amazon business



Keeping a digital theme with a return to Jormungand. Another of my favourite electronically tinged bits from the OST, it builds in a quite interesting way. I won't lie it does lose me a little bit towards the end just because it gets a little bit clustered, and I think that super distored vocal could do with being less so. But other than that it's a short sharp sweet little number, both at home in the show and seperated like this.



And i might as well round out the soundtracks and make it 3 for 3 with another piece from the Ghost In The Shell OSTs. I can't say that Cornelius' contributions to the series are my favourite, but that's only because of the previous soundtracks by Yoko Kanno and Kenji Kawai are nigh perfect. Though as I said on a podcast a long time ago, I appreciate the electronic focus of the Arise OST, and thematically I think it fits wit hthe series super well. The ambient tracks are where Cornelius really shines, but there's some upbeat stuff to get stuck into too, from the future beats style of the opening theme, to the obviously more techno and IDM inspired feel of this one.



-Claude Van Foxbat

The Mad Archivist

There's been a running theme in the last few posts of preservation, there's tunes I've found and like that either only exist in one spot of the 'net, or simply aren't there at all. This has always irked me a bit, I've never liked the idea of something just being gone, which has happened over the years I've been out there. Now I realised early on that you can't save every piece of music out there just because there's too much of it to go around but I do my best to grab bits and pieces of what I like, it's a bit of a quirk of mine, one that I've come to define as being a 'digital hoarder' (not to demean any folks with that issue in real life mind).

Richard Hamilton - Archive I (1981)

I have all sorts rolling around on my drive for that very reason. The work of Karin Dreijer's first band in her pre-The Knife days? I have that. I saved one of my favourite game soundtracks of all time in the early 2000s, and I was actually vindicated in that case, the company went bust and the soundtrack wasn't available until the composer put it up on bandcamp. I still have both copies regardless too, because in my mind they're both different though the bandcamp one does have some extra tracks on it. Similarly, I ripped the Soundcloud version of Brian Reitzell & Daniel Lopatin's The Bling Ring Suite because it was at a different tempo AND structured differently to the release version, and that version is no longer on Daniel's soundcloud.

This might seem like a futile effort, but it's super important to me, I believe archival of media is crucial for not only records sake, but to hopefully inspire future creatives too. A few of us are doing our part though, here's a Oneohtrix Point Never mix I posted back in 2010/11, and it exists nowhere else on the 'net than my old soundcloud. I thought about adding it to discogs, but there's really not too much info I could say. It's a CD-R with a little bit of text on that says "Objects In Mirrors Mix" that was a bonus pack-in when I ordered Rifts from Bleep.com back then. I've tried to fill out the tracklist as best I can, but even so it's still thin on the ground (808 State's Flow Coma and Ann Steel's My Time being most prominent.) It used to have downloads enabled but the limit's been hit in the years gone, so if anyone wants to add this to their own archives, you can do so here.



Longtime readers might recognise the name Untra. I certainly do, even before I was on the writing staff let alone running the place they've been around, and who's avatar has always been quite fittingly the word "Revive". And this next tale is actually the reason for this post, as after a quick exchange on twitter, we got our virtual crate digging boots on with a goal: resurrect a long forgotten mix from a dead website (lasermag.net for those curious). Thanks to the Internet Archive & The Wayback Machine, I was able to pinpoint the year and month of the mix being posted, but unfortunately not the page itself. In what was a total crapshoot I tweeted at the author of the mix, who longtime readers might also recognise, GMGN. To my surprise and delight, he came through and happily DM'd me a link to the mix, and (with permission) Untra has archived it among many other mixes from years past (including some from ilictronix!) on mixcloud, where it will hopefully be preserved for many moons to come. And thanks to mixcloud's tracklist system, you shouldn't have nearly as hard a time tracking down individual tunes from it. So with all that out of the way, please enjoy.



It feels like we've come full circle here, after all emailing an artist to get a copy of a long forgotten tune is precisely what led to me getting on the writing staff in the first place. You can still read Jordan's initial posting, and the full tale of how I came into possession of the track in the comments from a pre-blogger account Claude Van Foxbat.. We'll continue our mission to keep records of all things electronic for now and ever, if you have any leads on, or copies of any obscure mixes, drop me or Untra a line, our twitters are: @ClaudeVanFoxbat and @Untra. Super special thanks to GMGN for coming through with the mix, having it stored for all this time, giving us a copy and allowing us to archive it on Untra's Mixcloud!.

-Claude Van Foxbat

Alive '07 - 10 Years On

I know I bang on a bit about how old some parts of my collection are, waxing nostalgic about getting my lil mitts on anything electronic via limewire in the early 00's. But today's something I've been planning for a while: with all those anecdotes I don't have a solid date for when they first entered my library, there's been at least 3 PC rebuilds since then so "File Created:" is no good, but today's tale is a little different because I know exactly when I got it. November 2007.

It's hard to believe it's been a whole decade since Alive 2007 entered my life. Young Foxbat was a 13 year old high-school student who'd recently gotten together with his first proper girlfriend and was deep into rekindling his love for electronic music. And what a year I picked for it, 2007 was (and remains) and absolute scorcher for all things electric, and it should come as no surprise that Alive 2007 is one of the keystones of it. It's an absolute tour de force of the Punk's discography up until that point, using material from all their albums and a few extras. As seen here with the use of Busta Rhymes' Touch It, mashing it with Oh Yeah From Homework, then transitioning that into Technologic proper, garnished with oddly enough a small part of Voyager from Discovery. Typed out like that it sounds like a bit of a mess, but if for whatever reason you've never heard it before, trust me that it is nothing short of fantastic.



It's not ever a one off though, as immediately it's followed up with Television Rules The Nation with a touch of Around The World (and as the title says, Crecendolls later). One thing I've seen about Alive 2007 but never really understood is the people who say they didn't like Human After All until this album. I'll admit I'm a little biased as I was in the throes of an electro overload at the time but nothing much about the HAA songs is really changed on these early tracks so I never could understand it. That's not to say that these live versions aren't bloody fantastic regardless though. This is one of the tunes I use to test out new soundsystems, when the full grit of Television Rules The Nation comes in at 1:00 is pretty special.



Safe to say my little mind was pretty happy with the events up to this point, but the Punk weren't even close to started yet. This one marks the first appearance of some original accompaniment, the backbone of the entire song doesn't appear elsewhere on their discography (and came to be dubbed Aura Rock by the community IIRC), you can find a million and one re-creations and edits to remove the crowd sound on the 'net but I don't think it needs it personally. The album was up there to begin with, but this was setting it well on it's way to becoming a 10/10, I try not to swear too much on here but if you've never heard this I urge you to, for it's nothing short of fucking fantastic.



Not content with just that, the album rockets straight into the top 10 of all time with a live version of perhaps the two most famous Daft Punk songs to ever exist. Oddly enough it was also released as a single from the album, but the full fat one here beats the radio edit by a long way. If the last few tracks haven't convinced you yet, Alive 2007 is more than just a glorified Daft Punk DJ set with some extra stage design, It's just an absolute masterpiece, and a milestone for electronic live albums.



If I had it my way I'd do a full track-by-track breakdown but I don't fancy getting into yet another copyright headache, so skipping forward a little in the track-list to perhaps one of the more creative re-samples on the album, Face To Face here is backed with a cut & pitched up version of the vocals from Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger, it even gets a little solo time to shine around 2 minutes in or so. It's not a floor shaker like the previous examples but it's still a damn fine listen. Oh, and the ending portion of Short Circuit is one of my favourite breaddowns/outros of all time, and it's put to masterful use here, I will never not love that slow decent into glitchy-ness.



I'm skipping a few more tunes to finish off (including the Aerodynamic/One More Time mash up, which is almost criminal). Instead I'm going to leave you with the Encore to the show,which does a fantastic job of summarising my initial point of it being one huge discography tour. The Encore starts off with a reprise of the Human After All motif from the very start of the album, incorporates some bits from Para One's remix of The Prime Time Of Your Life before adding the vocal hook from short lived Thomas Bangalter & DJ Falcon collab Together. It all goes off at 5:24 though in amazing fashion, if you're wondering why the crowd goes mental, here's a video of the light show at that time (this was before the Tron OST too!). AND THEN on top of that One More Time makes another appearance, and so does Stardust's Music Sounds Better With You to boot. Absolute perfection.



I'm in love with it still even after 10 years, the same can't be said of the girlfriend I had at the time though. I still can't really wrap my head around how long its been, safe to say a whole lot has changed but the album has always been a constant, and I'm showing no signs of getting tired of it anytime soon. Here's hoping I'll be back here in another 10 come 2027 to write about it's 20 year anniversary. Until then stay tuned, stay safe, and I'll see ya soon.

-Claude Van Foxbat