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Soundtracks To Our Lives w/e 2/2/03
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Serotonin
175 posts

C30, C60, C90
Feb 05, 2003, 11:01
had an interesting weekend for musical discovery. Actually got up early on Sunday morning for once so decided to get reacquainted with Edinburgh's famed car boot sale in the Greenside car park. Came away with a bag full of about 20 cassettes (total expenditure: around £5.40) and have been avidly listening to the whole lot since, which included:

Kraftwerk - Autobahn. Vertigo cassette, blue motorway sign cover. I've seen this very tape in at least three record shops going for no less than a tenner, so such a rare find for a quid is very good luck indeed.

Joni Mitchell - Shadows & Light. late 70s live stuff. The quality of the songs (Mostly Hejira & Summer Lawns material) holds the album together, but the backing band are a bit too wanky jazz-lite for my taste; the very name "Pat Metheny" churns my stomach at the best of times, shame he had to mar a Joni record.

Orchestral Manoevres In The Dark - 1st album. Great post-punk synth-pop fence-straddling.

New Order - Movement. I like "Dreams Never End", but the rest just sounds like a jaded Joy Division yet to hit their new stride.

Billy Joel - Piano Man & Streetlife Serenader. One of those great early/mid 80s relics, the two albums on one cassette phenomenon. Great witty songs and astonishing musical diversity, esp. on Piano Man.

The Best Of Belinda Carlisle. aw, what the hell, it cost a pound and makes me feel like a happy innocent 10 year old again.

The rest were all ancient blank tapes from the 70s and 80s, which I've always loved collecting. I suppose when cassettes were a popular format and getting a viable market share companies could afford to make them look like pieces of art with all these stripy colourful labels, white/black/blue shells and BASF's hilarious "Special Mechanism" (honestly, these two plastic bars will make the tape sound great): you can tell these are the ramblings of a slightly obsessed long-time cassette fetishist, but it's for the reasons above that I love collecting old tapes. These days, all you get is a clear shell with the company brand stamped on it. Bo-ring.

Then there's the music that I found on these tapes. One of them (a mid 70s TDK C60, if anyone at all is still remotely interested) had loads of guitar-led easy listening stuff that really started to cook in a lot of places; was that guitar distorted there? Fairly lets rip for a muzak session anyway. No clue as to the artistes, though. On the others, more easy listening, half of the Mikado, and, most interestingly, two people sending a spoken letter to someone. It was utterly fascinating listening to eavesdrop on something like that from years and years ago. I'm currently in the process of archving all of this on to CDRs, as the 20-30 year old oxide on the tapes is disintegrating as they play. Oh well, then there's next Sunday...
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Soundtracks To Our Lives w/e 2/2/03 (Fitter Stoke)		 Replies:
oops, sorry... (Serotonin)
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