Monthly Archives: September 2003

Savoury Dream Cake

The image above is key. Some time in the last year, I had a dream (or dreamy nearly-asleep thought, I can’t remember) about a cake made of potatoes with spears of asparagus coming vertically out of the top of it like birthday candles. What you see above isn’t that cake exactly, but rather a first draft at it. The cake itself is larger and not quite so deep. And the asparagus spears were perfectly vertical. I must remember not to cook them so much next time. Do you think it would make a good record cover?

101 Strings: 'The Exotic Sounds of Love' (LP; Astor; 1970)
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This one is quite hard to get hold of, so I jumped at the chance to buy it recently. Why am I obsessed with porno records? I don't think I really am. But they do amuse me, so I tend to pick them up when I see them.



It's great to have this LP as a companion to The Sounds of Love. The cover designs are obviously done as a series, but while the cover star of The Sounds of Love has a kind of soft-focus 60s Playboy look to her, the cover star here looks like she's ready to get right down to it.



The music has stepped up a gear from The Sounds of Love as well. There are a couple of tracks from Les Baxter's great Que Mango album, but the standouts are 'Karma Sitar' and 'Whiplash', which appeared as bonus tracks on the 101 Strings Astro sounds from beyond the year 2000 CD. There also some other entertaining tracks that don't appear on any other records I have, such as 'I believe' and 'don't leave me like this'. Perhaps these are also on their Sounds of today LP; I'm not sure.



Overall, I enjoyed the LP quite a bit, mainly because the string sound is smooth in that great late 60s/early 70s way, with a nice groove to the rhythms in the background.

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Ok. I just completed some design tweaks at Musical Taste. It looked like a complete dogs dinner before, I now realize. It still doesn’t look great, but certain pages are better. If I can make it look nice enough, I might add a bulletin board. Would people use it? I have no idea. Only one way to find out…

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At the risk of sounding pretentious, London really is a great place to listen to the work of Scott Walker. Ok, I’m pretentious. I don’t care.

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An unrelated search engine query brought up this rather cool flash game thingy. It doesn’t exactly go anywhere or do anything, but it’s very cool: http://nlp.fi.muni.cz/~xsvobod4/amanita/samorost/intro.html.

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I was just checking out a song by the band ‘Lemon Jelly’, since I heard they were influenced by the ‘easy listening scene’. It’s quite pleasant music, although the track I heard, ‘elements,’ is overlong and slightly annoyingly beaty. Anyway, I’m writing about this because I was astonished to hear that it samples a track (watch me’) from that King’s Singer’s record I bought in a charity shop a few years back! Incidentally, that LP is one of the ones I didn’t ship back with me.

In other news, it turns out that Adobe has bought Syntrillium (makers of my beloved Cooledit software) and Sony pictures digital have bought most of Sonic Foundry (makers of my beloved Acid and Vegas software). I doubt this will make much difference to me, since I’m too mean to upgrade anyway.

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We have filled our 100 disc CD player, which we had shipped to London. It’s really great to have it again, and we have a pretty tasty batch of discs in there, although I say it myself. A couple of discs I’ve been consistently impressed by are Joao Donato’s ‘New Sound of Brazil’ and Money Mark’s ‘Change is Coming’. The latter is really remarkably good. I have the first two Money Mark records, and while I find them pleasant enough, ‘Change is coming’ has a remarkably authentic 60s sound that they lack. More very soon.

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I am back, and I will start writing again. Honest!

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