the late night city aesthetic

boomnoise

♫
Thanks for your Tokyo insight, Martin. All the talk of Pachinkos and given this thread, I'm reminded of Sarah Peeble's '108: Walking Through Tokyo at the turn of the century' (Post-Concrete) http://www.post-concrete.com/004/index.html

Not totally in line with the specific late night city aesthetic eluded to here, but a pretty special recording nonetheless, capturing the ambience and character of a city.

Did you get any audio recordings out there? I remember hot summer nights in china; Beijing in particular, with some fond sonic memories but no doubt they have been compromised with nostalgia and diluted by time. i wish i'd had a minidisc or something out there.
 

robin

Well-known member
just want to say that this is a great thread,made possible by a really great first post...
i might be back with more thoughts later on
 

bruno

est malade
dr.lloyd said:
I just finished a new mix here http://dr.lloyd.free.fr/mixes2.htm it is mix number 6. Will read the full thread here with a little more time later, but mix6 is pure night-time - feel it, baby.
LL
yes, pure night time. and again, the mystery of not knowing who anything is by! i recognised michael franks and gazebo, though. midnight cocktail, such a nice tune. overall the feeling of the whole thing (though obviously there is different terrain throughout, and my mood doesen't help) is terribly melancholic. be careful, dr. oh, and your site seems to be down.
 
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henry s said:
early Detroit techno totally captures the desolate vibe of that city after dark...listening to "Strings Of Life", it is easy to imagine Derrick May hunched over his 808 in his loft, the sun rising through the steam of the power plant outside the window, the Motor City preparing to slog through yet another everyday...

yeh, early detroit for sure, but also side 2 of FUSE "Dimension Intrusion" LP. used to love playing that whilst cruising the city at night in my battered old Ford Cortina...
 

dr.lloyd

Believing the music
bruno said:
yes, pure night time. and again, the mystery of not knowing who anything is by! i recognised michael franks and gazebo, though. midnight cocktail, such a nice tune. overall the feeling of the whole thing (though obviously there is different terrain throughout, and my mood doesen't help) is terribly melancholic. be careful, dr. oh, and your site seems to be down.

:) Hi Bruno, thanks for the listen and the comment. I'm surprised by the label of melancholia but there must be something in this because there have been other similar comments. One french friend said mix1 was too 'noir' and it had to be turned off. Key tracks like Theo's Missing You (mix2) is practically an intravenous infusion of this nitefeeling, sole music for when we are completely sole like you describe in your apartment at the beginning of the thread. What I think I might be aiming for is manic-melancolic with un-measured doses of headshredding sex. Contemplation of the void - yes, but let's not forget to celebrate the moment with a George McRae disco charge. One interesting thing to discuss might be whether the tape echo 'dub' sound which we all know so well and which I use a lot on my mixer, is this by nature a melancholic sound? Personally I know sometimes I hear the echoing trails of dub coda in a deep reggae joint and instantly feel like I am staring at the stars. Is this sound of space too close to emptiness for comfortable feelgood listening??

Hey I have been really busy lately so will hang on to contribute further with my own story of musical yearning for a sound locked in one's memory but never to be found as a material object...later for that.

For the mix6 tracklist, check this gif Matthew helped me with, glad you knew those Franks cuts, that record is super-deep...http://dr.lloyd.free.fr/mix6.gif
 

Lichen

Well-known member
dr.lloyd said:
One interesting thing to discuss might be whether the tape echo 'dub' sound which we all know so well and which I use a lot on my mixer, is this by nature a melancholic sound?

I've always felt that dub (reggae) has a palapable yearning quality to it, quite unlike any other music. I've always attributed to this to the scratch of the rhythm guitar, but the echo plays a part too.

Echos dirft away, repeat the past to us in a fading voice. Melancholia is a precious sentiment, though (as long as it lifts after a reasonable time).
 

sufi

lala
Mawaweel

imagine urban melancholia on the nightbus across north london, or blues after curfew in baghdad :cool:

 

bruno

est malade
dr.lloyd said:
:) Hi Bruno, thanks for the listen and the comment. I'm surprised by the label of melancholia but there must be something in this because there have been other similar comments. One french friend said mix1 was too 'noir' and it had to be turned off. Key tracks like Theo's Missing You (mix2) is practically an intravenous infusion of this nitefeeling, sole music for when we are completely sole like you describe in your apartment at the beginning of the thread. What I think I might be aiming for is manic-melancolic with un-measured doses of headshredding sex. Contemplation of the void - yes, but let's not forget to celebrate the moment with a George McRae disco charge. One interesting thing to discuss might be whether the tape echo 'dub' sound which we all know so well and which I use a lot on my mixer, is this by nature a melancholic sound? Personally I know sometimes I hear the echoing trails of dub coda in a deep reggae joint and instantly feel like I am staring at the stars. Is this sound of space too close to emptiness for comfortable feelgood listening??

Hey I have been really busy lately so will hang on to contribute further with my own story of musical yearning for a sound locked in one's memory but never to be found as a material object...later for that.

For the mix6 tracklist, check this gif Matthew helped me with, glad you knew those Franks cuts, that record is super-deep...http://dr.lloyd.free.fr/mix6.gif
so have i, excuse the delay. i'm not too sure the echo you refer to has much to do with it, if anything that treatment is more about detachment than wallowing in melancholy. personally it's a bit of liberation to 'stare at the stars' as you put it, though i would understand other people freaking out. it was more a question of what songs you used and in what order, than how you treated the mix. and of course a lot of it was upbeat, but things like living on the inside are so painfully melancholic it's hard not to be affected!

i took mix 1 for a ride and have to say i'm impressed. (i'll stop the adulation after this, i promise) that don't stop ever loving me slow jam just did it for me, lovely tune. i don't know why it hits the sweet spot so much. i bought my first cassette at 8 in 1983 and sort of came into being musically in those years, a lot of what i heard was things along the lines of this, it's embedded in my brain i suppose.. so precisely the sort of thing i was aiming to discover with this thread, nice.
 
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dr.lloyd

Believing the music
I'm seriously glad you appreciate the sounds, Bruno. I've been ill (nothing serious) and seeing a lot of jazz concerts, and avoiding the internet as a favour to my girlfriend, so new work on the mixer is slow to be forthcoming. And it has got so hot here in France, storms every night here near Lyon. Now I'm recovering from some small surgery and don't have the physical energy to stay at the controls, nor the mental energy to think up the next ride. Plus, most of the music I've been feeling has been on CD after I had a binge at the FNAC sale (Morricone, Chico Freeman, Bojan Z (his stellar new disc), Django Reinhardt, loads of other good stuff) but I don't mix CDs. Mix 5 is here on my harddrive but it will be a while before anyone hears it.

That first post of yours made me think of the snippet of music which my brain locked onto in 1991 and has never left. I always associate in with nightdrives West to East on the M8 in Scotland. I don't have much of a wants list anymore, nowadays I just let the river of chance flow and bring whatever music comes my way. And even when I had a wants list I never found out what this was called. In 1991 I discovered acid house and techno and we used to drive from Glasgow to an extremely hardcore club in Edinburgh called Pure, it was Twitch pre-Optimo and a guy from Aberdeen called Andrew Watson or Brainstorm behind the decks. They were incredible DJs but that was only for the weekend. Me and my crew signed up for the complete mindfuck including the weekdays, in which case tapes were required because there wasn't much weekday acid house radio in Scotland at this time. We had some serious pirate radio tapes sent to us by contacts in London and my favourites ALWAYS came from Fantasy. That was one particularly hardcore station and the tapes we had were gangsta lean start to finish. It was such a buzz for me discovering the music and these young voices distributing the excitement to their community. One DJ was playing this spacey oscillating repetitive mid-tempo buzz I've never heard before or since. Not an arpeggio, not a 303, just this inherently UK sound from the time which I will never be able to describe to anyone without them thinking of any 100 acid tracks. The sound sort of plateaus and the DJ encapsulates my quintessential moment in this sort of awe-struck tone..."to all our followers...respect!" This little sequence is locked into my brain.
 

Dusty

Tone deaf
Your writeup on Tokyo is a brilliant read, its a place I intend to go when I've got my MA degree out of the way next year. Are there any other Tokyo online resources worth reading up on? I'm fascinated by all the little details of Tokyo that people relate, I wonder if there is a website dedicated to them? If there isn't, there should be.
 

Blackdown

nexKeysound
i mostly read the Rough Guide and then talked to people when we were there. I'm sure there must be online content about Tokyo, it's just whether it's relevant and in depth enough in this case.
 

zhao

there are no accidents
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polystyle

Well-known member
Keeping it late

Cheers Bruno
where ever you are

' The “Vertical Ascent” LP by Moritz Von Oswald Trio is everything I could have wanted from one of my favorite musicians. I’m not even sure what the appropriate comparisons for this music really are, but it made me dig out my Ike Yard “Night After Night” EP (which made me order their recent CD collection of all recorded material as well as previously unreleased and live joints) as well as Rhythm and Sound. A combination of those two seems pretty spot-on: dubby and driving live drum patterns combine with spacey atmospherics to create the perfect soundtrack for a night time drive through the city at high speeds. If anything, this release suffers from being too short! I want it to keep going and going, despite each track being between 8 and 14 minutes in length. This release will be taking its place alongside all the Basic Channel related releases for constant repeat listens, and Pattern 3 will likely be hammered in all of my deejay sets for a good long while. Amazing, brilliant music. '
 

Leo

Well-known member
cool thread, must have missed this thread when originally started.

what was the actual song bruno linked to in the first post? the link doesn't work, and i can't make out the track from subsequent posts. anyone remember?
 
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