Welcome to the Dark New Age

Sunday, August 14, 2016

Stranger Things Soundtrack Review

Analogue Dialogue

This soundtrack album unpacks a slick vintage synth picnic, a moveable feast of 80's style sci fi score offerings from tense pulsing bass runs to pieces beamed in from the beautiful but sickly hazy wooze universe of Boards of Canada or early Ambient Eno.  


Seriously, there are like 18 plus tracks on here, definitely worth the money. I have purchased a few e.p.s from S U R V I V E; this is the guys who made this album's "Synthwave" band. I don't call it synthwave, I didn't call it witch-house or dark-wave back then. These are the progeny of Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze, Kraftwerk, Cluster, Harmonia, Bruce Haack and all the unsung greats who knew drum machines and keyboards could be used for much more than moving your booty. I don't call this kind of music anything, I just say; "turn it up, to Eleven! that's my jam!"  


The pieces here are minimalist, like little frozen sound paintings and all have that quality I look for in synth music which is really capturing an emotional state, like freezing consciousness in a pattern, like emotion affecting and making patterns in water.

Flesh-Portal/ Interface

The show itself was a lot of fun though the story gets bogged down a little towards the end. The weekend it premiered I had just been reading a bunch of this series on Reddit known variously as 9M9H9E9 or Interface but it is basically about Government experiences involving flesh-portals to other dimensions and the LSD-addled children who are able to go thru and come back but do so changed; psy powers, glimpses of unknown realms and higher beings... hmm, sounds a lot like Stranger Things?

Tapping In

 But that brings us to what this series did so well which was to Tap In. Tap in to what those images of seventies and eighties sci fi do to us, those images from the movie-dreams of our youth. Tapping in to what these sounds do to us, the soundtrack of Hope, of the Promising Future, now turned mournful and nostalgic, echoing around our skulls like empty chatter. Cosmic love to cosmic fear. The Gnostic Realization.

I am listening to this album now as I read William Gibson's Mona Lisa Overdrive, which has it's own synchro-mystic connections to these stories or flesh-portals and "interfacing".

Highlights:

The Upside Down - pulses flash and beat around octave pitches while a bass drum tiptoes up behind you

Stranger Things (Main Theme) - Amazing, has more heat and movement in it's one minute plus running time than most whole songs. 

Kids - That sad but sweet Emotive-Synth like early OMD or Yaz.

Friendship - small but sweet and soothing, like a little audio pot de creme!
...

I could gush on and on but instead how about you get this album for yourself? Stop youtubing and spotifying and start supporting artists?


Red and Black Attack

Monday, May 30, 2016

Welcome to the Dark New Age/ Sound Defense

Sitting With All the Cosmic/New Age Music to find the BEST... So you don't have to:

Ray Lynch - Deep Breakfast

It's Memorial Day Monday, waking up late after a heavy night. Waking up to a Bowl of Maybe not the most nutritious breakfast in the world;
starts with a song called Celestial Soda Pop; hey, what do you have to do today? That cover is unfortunate but the music is gorgeous, not too cheesy, lots of space and well-formed melodies and deep warm synth-strings. Reminds me a little of the second side of Brian Eno's Before and After Silence, that same stillness and quasi-classical synth work...

In Space No One Knows what You had for Breakfast!


New album way out experimental lo fi cosmic rock from my band Sign of the Crow:

https://mystery-saint.bandcamp.com/album/cosmic-mass

Friday, April 15, 2016

My band Sign of the Crow has a new album of lo fi sci fi cosmic desert rock!    https://mystery-saint.bandcamp.com/album/psy-spy-saucerhttps://

mystery saint

mystery saint
METAPHYSICAL FOLK BLUES FOR THAT ASS