Sirocco by The Icicle Works
Album: Nirvana (7″ single)
The Icicle Works belong to a category I call ‘October Music’. It’s autumnal and pagan. You can see the smoke hang over the village. All of 1984, I listened to their first album, and enjoyed the world it created, as the best albums always do.

This song predates the first album. I think this single on Troll Records might be quite rare.

My Old School by Steely Dan
Album: Remastered: The Best of Steely Dan Then and Now
I’ve always loved Steely Dan for their jazz-tinged close harmonies, even as a kid. I’m not as familiar with their early catalogue though. I don’t think it had the smoothness and sophistication of their later work, like Aja or Gaucho. It’s interesting, though, to listen to stuff from just before I was born. I don’t usually go there. I will say this: it’s so much better than pre-disco, like Al Stewart or Leo Sayer, even if I’m not very interested in it all the time.

Sor: Rondo by Andrés Segovia
Album: Andrés Segovia
Quote from Fernando Sor, His Life and His Music

The guitar used be called a tavern instrument; one that could not meet the demands of classical music. In the early nineteenth century, Fernando Sor set in motion the quest that continues today, to raise the guitar to the greatest musical level possible. Sor was one of the most prolific composers for, and promoters of, the guitar as a “concert” instrument, in the last two hundred years. He, and others like him paved the way for Andrés Segovia to emerge and bring the guitar to the immense popularity, and respect it enjoys today.

Easter by The Choristers of St. Paul’s Cathedral
Album: An Elizabethan Chorus
This track is presented as part of an Easter church service, complete with lector. I confess that I now have mixed feelings about having religious music in my collection. On the one hand, I’d hate to get rid of it all. Mozart’s Requiem? Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater? Vivaldi’s Gloria? Bach’s oratorios? Great stuff — we’ll never see music like that again, and I’d be poorer without it.

On the other hand, now that I no longer have a certain set of religious assumptions, I find it unexpectedly irksome to be confronted by a style of music, the overt purpose of which was to promote adherence to a set of absurd dogmas. And it irritates me that generations of musical geniuses chose to promote such systems with their wonderful music — or that they were conscripted to promote same. I still sing it, because it sounds wonderful and it’s something we’ve inherited from the past. So I suppose I shall have to adjust and not worry about it too much.

New Orleans Instrumental No. 1 by R.E.M.
Album: Automatic for the People
A moody and contemplative piece, especially poignant for what’s happened to New Orleans since the recording. Watery electric organ with somewhat off-kilter timing from the other instruments give this track a feeling of a rough draft from a sketchbook.

Praise You by Fatboy Slim
Album: You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby
Just think, all the time Norman Cook was playing bass in the Housemartins, Fatboy Slim was lurking in his head. And the first time I heard ‘Rockafeller Skank’, I couldn’t decide whether it was the worst thing I’d ever heard or the best. A listen to the whole disc didn’t help. It was a badly-scratched library copy, and it kept skipping and repeating. Took me five minutes to figure it out.
However, you can’t help but enjoy the funky bass line, the bongos, and the oddly manipulated vocal on this track. Not to mention that the video features some of the best public dorky dancing ever committed to film. Who could dislike such an offering? The elderly and humourless, that’s who. Tell them I said that.

Pretty Good Year by Tori Amos
Album: Under the Pink
I first saw Tori Amos on Letterman doing “Crucify”. I thought, “Hmm, a new wave of Kate Bush’s musical heirs.” I’m not a huge fan of Tori’s bombastic keyboarding. Do I find such passion offputting?

Under the Cap by The Golden Palominos
Album: The Golden Palominos
Jeff got me into this one. I think his dad walked into Mirage Records in Spokane with no idea which record to get him for a present, and Brent Beever the Record Store Guy suggested this one. And what a fantastic choice. This is the first Golden Palominos record, pre-Michael Stipe. The personnel list reads like a Who’s Who of the Celluloid label. Arto Lindsay, Anton Fier, Bill Laswell, John Zorn; they’re all here, and they’re doing amazing and strange things with bird calls, proto-drum and bass, and improvised lyrics and howls. Find this and listen. You’ll be annoyed or inspired, but it says more about you than about the record.

Okinawa Song – Chin nuku Juishi by Ryuichi Sakamoto
Album: Neo Geo
A song (possibly a folk song) that combines unison female vocals with industrial noises and heavy rhythm. I don’t know why, but when I hear it, I immediately think of this still from “Red Detachment of Women“.

Getting Away with It (Raindance Mix) by Electronic
Album: Art of Mix Volume 4
So there I was doing homework one night in 1990, and this song was on MTV. “Dang,” I thought, because I wasn’t in a swearing stage, “this song sounds like the Pet Shop Boys.” Only to look up and find Neil Tennant’s face floating across the screen. Aha, I’d found the new supergroup. Johnny Marr from the Smiths, Bernard Sumner from New Order, and Neil from PSB. And wonderful string arrangements from Anne Dudley of the Art of Noise. Could this be the perfect band?

Disappointingly, no. My original theory was that it was too much Bernard and not enough Johnny, but then the later New Order albums sounded a lot better than any of Marr’s post-Smiths output. I honestly don’t know why the disc didn’t work. But this song does. A perfect slice of sophisticated pop. And this version from Art of Mix adds in clips from New Order songs, and the ‘beat’ vocal from PSB’s “Heart”. I respect it when a remixer drops in historically relevant samples.