Saturday, March 19, 2016

Diary of Musical Thoughts Podcast Episode 29

"UFO tribute mix, 74 minutes"

This isn't a tribute to unidentified flying objects, or anything mysterious or supernatural, rather, it's a mix that was inspired by this record that I bought over 25 years ago.

The track on the B-side of the single is called "It Must Be Obvious (UFO Mix)", and for some reason it popped into my head for no discernible reason several months ago.  It's a strange and curious remix no doubt, and can be heard here.  It straddles a line between the cut and paste chaos of "Revolution 9" and the hazy weirdness of KLF's "Chill Out".  There's an incidental connection at best to the Pet Shop Boys song that is nominally being remixed.  A short snippet of the song appears at the beginning, halfway lost in a haze of buried voice samples, as if stuck between two imprecisely tuned radio stations.  Six minutes of wildness later, the original song reappears.  The Pet Shop Boys are essentially irrelevant to the story, it could be almost any song bookending the middle part of the track.

It has never been one of my favourite remixes, but it's always been a memorable one.  I could say the same about the KLF's "Chill Out" -- the concept is better than the results, which makes it a memorable and enjoyable album, if not necessarily a great one.

This mix was meant to be a stylistic cousin to that 25 years old (!!) UFO mix, stretched from nine minutes across more than an hour of ambient noodling and crackles of noise and static.

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