Mr eel
Italo-Disco Music is Cheesy and I Don’t Care
Hooray! Another new music genre, or in this case a re-discovered genre. Some people like to argue about what precisely Italo-Disco is. Most people use it as a broad term to describe synth-centric disco from the early to mid-eighties originating in Europe.
The real pedants like to argue that Italo-Disco is from strictly Italy only, and everything else is Euro-Disco. Who cares really? The term is useful to describe a sound that’s all. Hell there is even some Italo from Canada.
Oh how to describe it? Heavy Disco influence, but focussing more on technology, both in terms of instrumentation and lyrical content — ‘I am a dancing, loving robot’. Anyone listening to it now would easily fit it into their idea of House. Four to the floor beats, repetitive structure, vocoders, synths! Still, Italo is a product of its times. Most Italo wants to be pop-music. In that sense it bears some similarities to electro-pop. I’m falling into the same habit as alot of other punters. I can only describe Italo in terms of other music. Oh well.
Anyhow, its cheesy isn’t it? For sure. Some really cringe-worthy lyrics, bad english, twee melodies and generally bad ideas. That said there are still loads of great Italo tunes. I thought I might just highlight a few that I really dig.
Azoto - Exalt Exalt
I chose this one first because in many ways it typifies an classic Italo tune. That no-nonsense beat, the hi-hats snapping up and down, bleepy synths, vocodered vocals and that crazy chorus. At a running time of nearly eight minutes. Most Italo tracks seem to run for a fair while.
Hypnotic Tango - My Mine
This is cheese. Not completely, but it has some seriously cheesy moments. I love it to bits though, in fact it’s the cheesy bits I like the most. The chorus is pitched up! It’s really cool.
Fun Fun - Give Me Your Love (remix)
I love this track so much. For awhile there I listened to it consistently while walking to work. Once to work, once on the way home. Nearly got me run over a few times. It’s an eighties track for sure. Big Snare Drum. I just love the melody and the washy synths. Can’t go wrong with the lyrics either — ‘you, give me your love, DJ you’re my passion…’.
La Bionda - I Wanna Be Your Lover
This is such a cute song. The lyrics really do it for me. To summarise; our narrator is listening to the radio and ahhh, an inter-stellar transmission! It’s an alien wanting to seduce him. How great is that?
The Immortals - The Ultimate Warlord
This song just kills when you’re driving or walking. The strident drums and that repetitive bass-line. Spoken word lyrics from our warlord, pitched down for extra-ominousness. The chorus is like almost choir. The interplay between the vocals and the synths is really cool in places. This goes on for ten minutes. Yay!
Gary Low - You Are A Danger
This is so twee, it’s like all the tweeness in the world has gathered in one place. Some ohhh eeeeh aaahhhh vocals, some chirpy synths, a bit of piano and yeeeees, a cheery high-pitched chorus. It rules.
That ought to keep you occupied for awhile. If anyone else has got any cool tunes to recommend, please post in the comments. I’ve always got my ears open for new stuff.
Venetian Snares Rocks Your Face
Venetian Snares fucking rules. I remember way back when… my poor little mind got blown when I first heard Squarepusher. I didn’t know what Drum and Bass was and I’d never come across any of its bastard children before.
Breakbeat mania. Drum loops sampled, edited, filtered and re-sequenced into an avalanche of noise. Love it, love it, love it. The more manic hardcore influenced stuff has been labelled Breakcore.
Venetian Snares is making some of the best Breakcore out there at the moment. I picked up his latest album Rossz Csillag Alatt Szuletett this week. I’ve been thrashing it ever since. This is Breakcore with finesse. Built around orchestral samples and some fucked up breaks, it alternates between harsh noise and melencholy strings. The emphasis is very much on sadness, which is unusual in this kind of music — not that it’s exactly happy stuff anyway.
Reccomended to anyone who likes P-Diddy, John Farhnam or Maroon 5. This shit will sort you right out of that nonsense.
Obligatory Tiger Post
I’ve given in. Here is my post about Tiger — Mac OS X 1.4 for non-mac-heads. I like it yeh. It feels a bit snappier than panther. Dashboard is nice and I imagine it will be useful, but not until we start to see some really good widgets. Spotlight is a nice idea, but is too slow and the interface is annoying. Search results jump about in the list, which is a pain when you actually find what you want, but it moves before you click on it. Spotlight windows should belong to the finder. Instead they’re orphaned, which is stupid. Smart folders are awesome, but not as flexible as they could be — the filter options are limited. Why no ‘is not’ operator? Even iTunes does that.
All in all I’m glad I upgraded, but I think the really interesting stuff is yet to come.
Asian Cinema
At the moment, there is alot more interest in Asian cinema than there was in the past. Although many countries in Asia are markets for Hollywood — which often dominates the industry — there are still many healthy film industries. Hong Kong is an obvious and oft cited example.
For some time I’ve been keen films coming out of Aisa, but recently I’ve begun to take a more active interest — now I actually read about and hunt down films I find interesting. I’m not gonna turn this into a mock-scholarly post about Asian Film, instead I thought I would just highlight some of my favourite flicks. This might not be off much interest to a film buff, but perhaps others might be inspired to chase these films down.
But firstly. These are genre films. If you prefer your movies with some film award dusting, you ain’t gonna find it here.
Lone Wolf With Cub
This isn’t actually a single film, rather it’s a series of 6 films (I think). I remember as a kid my older brother and I were obsessed with martial arts films of any sort. I especially liked a film called Shogun Assassin, which featured a wandering Samurai and his young son (pushed about in a baby cart), roaming the country and getting into all sorts of bloody fights.
Shogun Assassin is actually a compilation of serveral films, edited together and dubbed for the western market. The original series is much better.
Anyone interested in Samurai flicks needs to see these movies. Fantastic camera work, cool music, total bad-arse protagonist and lots and lots of violence.
Dark Water
This film is being remade in Hollywood at present. I don’t see the point actually. The original is an excellent film, a remake can’t improve on it, only fuck things up.
Anyhow, this is a horror movie written and directed by Hideo Nakata, who is also responsible for the Ring series of films (and the second of the remakes). A divorced mother short on money is forced to move into a cheap dingy appartment with her daughter. As she continues to fight a custody battle, she comes against all sorts of strange goings on. Ghosts, damp patches and a handbag (seriously).
Hideo takes a naturalistic approach to the subject matter and it really pays off. The banal setting throws the supernatural goings on into stark relief. You can empathise with this woman and her fear — despite the seeming harmlessness of the events — because you see things from her perspective. From this point of view, even damp patches and red handbags can seem ominous and scary.
Its something I really love to see explored in film. I think even the most rational people are succeptible to thinking the most crazy things in the right conditions and that their reactions might be extreme. Anyone up for a good scare should check this out.
That’ll do for now. I might expand on it a bit in the future with some more films.
Don’t Say the Z Word (zombies…errrrrr)
This is actually a quite alarming bit of news. Zombies are for real! It’s got my brain ticking now. In George Romero’s flicks, the exact cause of the zombification (is this a real word?), is never actually explained. I suppose you could think of zombies as people who are severely brain-damaged, but still ambulatory (I just wanted to say… ambulatory!).
This inspired me to have a bit of a look at the wikipedia entry on zombies, which lead me to this useful guide for dealing with the undead.
I’m actually a bit of a fan of zombie movies. I’ll have to make another post later on about my favourites. Hell I might even make it into a pretend-intellectual essay!
Addenum: The fantastic Dr. Karl gives us a pharmacalogical method for making zombies. Hooray!
Model View Control in Javascript
Recently I’ve been knocking about some ideas for developing a Web App framework using a MVC architecture. In the future I will need to create some quite complex interfaces for web applications. I’ve decided to take a more planned approach this time — as opposed to my usual scattershot approach.
The great thing about the internet is this; someone has probably already done whatever it is you were thinking about. In this case Trim Junction, a web app framework using MVC and inspired by Ruby on Rails.
Rather than coding something myself, it may make more sense to contribute to an existing open project. I’ll have to investigate it a little more.
New tune: Spooooky
I’ve just uploaded a new tune. It’s inspired by those fantastic Goblin soundtracks for Dario Argento’s films. I can’t say that they are directly influenced by them, but I just wanted to make something that has the same vibe. Put it this way, this is a tune that I reckon would work well in a horror movie. You can check it out here.
Welcome, to this my fantastic first post
Well, here is it, the first post on my brand spanking new weblog. Of course, it’s not all that interesting to begin with. I’m sorry about that. Perhaps in the future when I have some more content, you might like to come back. Please?