Connie Stevens - Sixteen Reasons

[1959]

Back in the 90s and 00s I was often tuned into 3MP and Magic 693. 40s, 50s and 60s pop and easy listening. Lovely songs like this all the time on the airwaves. I need a station like these today. Anyway Connie was a good catholic girl of Irish/Italian descent from New York who ended up in Hollywood. She starred in movies and tv, dated Elvis and did this tune. She's still around at the grand old age of 87. The impeccably produced and arranged Sixteen Reasons was a top ten hit in America and Britain in 1960 and it subsequently showed up in David Lynch's 2001 masterpiece Mulholland Drive.

[1964]

Speaking of easy listening there's a great instrumental version of Sixteen Reasons by Lawrence Welk here on his LP The Golden Millions at 20:19. 

The Savage Young Taterbug - Syrupy Evenings

[2010]

An inspired piece of sound collage Americana style where hypnagogia and hauntology deliriously intersect. Ride the creepy ghost train into the American dreams of the past. Fragments of decayed American pop culture are reanimated for a phantasmagoric ye olde carnival revue on Halloween. 

Stars Of The Lid - Music For Twin Peaks Episode #30

[1997]

Dug out some old Stars Of The Lid cds recently from a scary cobwebby box at the bottom of the cupboard. Twin Peaks and the music of Twin Peaks influenced a lot of 90s artists and groups on Kranky were the most inspired in their influence. Stars Of The Lid were the crème de la crème of the ambient drone contingent of so called "post rock". They weren't particularly popular though none of my friends ever said can I borrow that groovy new Stars Of The Lid cd Tim. I'd love to know the sales figures rankings of early Kranky releases. When they were the coolest underground record label on the planet before signing Godspeed and Low I imagine they didn't shift vast quantities of cds to rival the likes of Fugazi. There is a book I've been meaning to read You're With Stupid written by Kranky co-founder Bruce Adams that might shed some some light on this topic. Anyway SOTL are probably known to the kids these days because many of their tracks feature prominently in Adam Curtis Documentaries. 

On Music For Twin Peaks Episode #30 we get tenebrous tones and unsettling dark drifting drone-scapes or the eeriest kind. It wouldn't have been out of place if used on the legendary TV show. A fitting musical tribute for Agent Dale Cooper emerging from The Black Lodge after a tumultuous time in the red room with his doppelgänger only to smash his head on a Great Northern Hotel bathroom mirror revealing Bob has deleteriously entered his psyche.

Haunted.

"How's Annie?"

"How's Annie?"

Videofashion presents: Channel Surfing

All the daytime and late night tv nostalgia from the 80s and 90s brought to you on VHS by Pepsi. 

A  V A P O R W A V E extravaganza.

Tonetta - Hitler

[2011?]

Everybody's favourite dodgy cross dressing Leonard Cohen meets Suicide jam. 

骨架的 - microwave

[2010]

When the cosmic ambient end of hypnagogia became vaporwave. If someone said this was a lost track from peak Oneohtrix Point Never from 15 years ago you'd believe them. The exhilarating shapeshifting sound design here is random and disorienting.

unknown caller + tesseractive(TV) Live @ LATE NIGHT LIGHTS II

[2022]

Plunderphonic sound and vision. This warped  hazy nostalgia of the 1980s in the 2020s is vaporwave to infinity. If you love surfing videos, garish and smeared neon synthwave video graphics, slow-mo 80s funk and stretched early 90s smooth jazz saxophones then this is for you. Degraded and deformed VHS psychedelia. 

Stand By - Videofashion

[2018]

A vaporwave video masterpiece. 

VHS memories.

Pop art.

氷床 Earth - 暗い自然 [Dark Nature]

[2016]

One of the best ambient albums from the last ten years. I guess 暗い自然 [Dark Nature] come at ambient from a vaporwave angle but there are sequences here that could have come straight out of the 90s Isolationism era of dark ambient. The recontextualised source material is chopped and slopped, slowed down, put through a hypnagogic echo chamber and into a fog machine creating superior dark ambience and sonic decay. Amongst the cold and murky terrain an eerie and sombre mood descends. 

Hank & Slim - The World Turned Gingham

[2000]

One of the great post-industrial dark ambient albums. This gets chucked into all sorts of categories now like ambient Americana and hauntology. Anyway this was an inspired collaboration between Zoviet France's Robin Storey and Nigel Ayers from Nocturnal Emissions, I mean that's industrial-ambient royalty innit. You've gotta think that this was probably influential on the likes of Moon Wiring Club, The Focus Group and IX-Tab.

The World Turned Gingham's got the lot it's pretty surreal, psychedelic and quite intense. Not really all that ambient in the "sonic wallpaper" sense as these sound collages have disorienting moments and jarring passages. It gets pretty eerie with all the disembodied voices and chopped and slopped slow motion backwards swarms of sound. There's all sorts of haunting reverberations, mysterious echoes, distant whistles, occult vibes, hallucinatory American radio transmissions, back-masked ghosts in the machines, hazy hypnotic loops, lonesome nocturnal atmospheres even an eldritch death ballad. 

Psychedelic musique concrète of the strangest kind. Far out.