Saturday, May 12, 2018

Top Ten FB Album Challenge Part 1



            Most of you have probably heard of the top 10-album challenge thing on the social media spheres, it’s primarily on Fakebook.
            Yours truly was nominated and did it. A real friend on the site, Laura Clifford of the great cable show, Reeling: The Movie Review Show, nominated me. Another real life friend Mike Langlie of the incredible toy piano band, Twink suggested that I do an essay on each of my choices; so here it is on this here blog.
            The way I viewed this challenge is believe it or not they aren’t necessarily my favorite albums of all time, but rather they are records that came at a formative time of my musical experiencing life and have stood the test of time, consistently staying in orbit of my tune conciousness as well as being in the stereo often enough to be on this list. The albums are listed in the order that they were placed in on FB, which is to say merely in the order that they occurred to me; not at all in order of how much I dig them.
            So having given you that entire foreground, let’s proceed.
            Day 1.
            Tangerine Dream: Zeit.
            This isn’t a standard musical album; it’s a pure experience. At time’s in the double album’s worth of tracks, it’s not even music, it’s pure sounds. Unearthly, unhumanistic, strange, creepy, shape shifting sounds, this thing is all that and more.
            It has only four tracks. Each of which consumed an album side back in the day. There are distorted cellos, an early Moog synth, distorted organs, and sounds no other human probably ever made. All of this blends through an amorphous filter of gurgling soundscapes that wash through the conciousness.
            This is the soundtrack to a dream.
            Upon my first listening to this record I knew that there was something that beautifully defied reason bursting into my ears.
            This album has been well traveled throughout my life. It was the soundtrack to many Halloweens worth of handing candy out to the kids with it blaring through open windows giving them a freak out as they received treats. The album is still played regularly during late night writing sessions. The atmospheres greatly helped to shape the Dracula novel I’ve been constructing. One Halloween at the long gone amazing Middle Eastern bakery/coffee shop/restaurant the Crescent Dragon we used this album as the soundtrack to the silent movie Nosferatu as we heckled the film. A friend told me about listening to this album in black room with a head full of LSD; it’s hard to imagine that not being a life changing experience.
            Here is a link to the album. Listen to it and allow it to change your perceptions of what music can be.


Yours in sounds beyond the human race,
Count Robot

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