The return of Michael has seen a bit of a spring clean for my listening collection. To be honest, ever since we met up again at varsity my listening has largely been filtered through his collection.
I don't know why I don't bother going out to find music on my own. While I don't buy much, I do get CDs from the library every so often. It just feels like whatever I listen to tends not to engage me. As for searching out new electronica, I usually get this 'I've heard THAT before' feeling, and give up. I suspect Michael largely gets the same reaction as well; the difference is that he keeps on looking.
In any event, what with Michael's record collection (also big shouts to the 1989-93 Onslow College massive) there is very little music that I've discovered on my own. Kraftwerk was one, and Tangerine Dream was another. And I've found that my renewed listening enthusiasm has had the benefit of refurbishing my listening experience to familiar favourites. One of these is Tangerine Dream's Zeit of 1972.
I'll have mentioned this album before, but one thing struck me as I struggled up Mount Victoria (the hill, not the suburb) the other day listening to its tracs: it is my one and only desert island disc.
The thing is that Zeit (a double album featuring tracks with absurdly pretentious titles like 'Birth of the Liquid Plejades'*) is so complete in its evocation of celestial splendour, it pretty much encompasses the entire fucking cosmos. So if I were on a desert island staring up at the inky blank empyrean of an evening I wouldn't need any other music. It's like every near-death (and near-birth) experience rolled into one gigantic galactic spliff. It's like the psychedelic bit in 2001 stretched to 80 minutes.
Okay, so Zeit is the work of Tangerine Dream, who were at heart a bunch of smelly hippies. Worse still, they've never cottoned on to the fact this album was by far their best, and their subsequent mucking around with sequencers and dry guitars was foolish. No, they should have spent the last 35 post-Zeit years doing all their work with whining cat guitars, cello quartets and bubbling moogs.
I fondly remember the first time I heard this album. At the time I was a particularly neurotic and strung out 17 year old. It was a sunny Saturday afternoon, and I listened to the first track and had something approximating an existential panic attack. I stopped the tape (for I was a tape kind of guy in those days) and pondered whether to keep listening or seek psychological treatment. I decided to be brave, and an hour later I was victorious; I vanquished space and time, and my own demons.
Any connections between this anecdote and the previous post should be drawn with a black vivid. And sniffed.
* This is probably a single word in the original German.