the late night city aesthetic

Slothrop

Tight but Polite
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??

I think it's inherently introspective / dissociative - because it's an echo, it freezes a moment in time, and because it's not tempo locked, it pulls the listener out of the bodily immediacy of rhythm and into headspace - rather than being inherently melancholic, but I guess that makes it melancholic in most circumstances...

Interestingly I don't think this has much to do with the 'magic' sound of the space echo that everyone spends so much time trying to capture as a shortcut to dubby authenticity, more the way that it's used - as a non tempo locked echo that's on a send and dropped in and out of the mix, and is loud enough to stand out in the foreground of the tune...
 

Client Eastwood

Well-known member
Hi again, got to hear this Quincy track, which I don't think I know. Will tune into that soon and get back to you, I like the train of these thoughts, have a similar thing with a tune that has been nagging at my brain parts for a full 15 years, which I think I will never find. Will tell you about that later. Funny also that you mention Rude Movements by Sun Palace, a track I never ever managed to pick up but I was always intrigued by the descriptions I would read of it on the Resolution Records sales lists from the 90s. Someone tell me where it is on a compilation if you can.
LL

Surely you mean this ...


Quincy Jones, Al B Sure, El Debarge and Barry White all on one song. An absolute killer track for the late night listening aesthetic. Truly sublime... gosh
 
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tyranny

Well-known member
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The second verse especially....
 
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bruno

est malade
also crying song, both are so languid. pink floyd did the bucolic mediterranean thing really well, that is what i liked the most about them. the one you mentioned is typically starry-eyed. twink's tiptoe on the highest hill also has that quality. it could be a different thread altogether, the pastoral aesthetic, something like that.
 

tyranny

Well-known member
. it could be a different thread altogether, the pastoral aesthetic, something like that.


Presumably it would end up filled up with blood-and-soil folk-metal... Always wondered why metal was so rural in character...
 

bob effect

somnambulist
"Living in the city
trying to make it right
people acting shitty
each and every night"


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Dwight Yorke

GOOOOOOOOOOOOAL!
I was walking to a friend's house at about ten pm (not late night, i know, but still). It started to rain. I was halfway up the hill to her house. I stopped, turned round, saw Canary Wharf , Love Comes Quickly by The Pet Shop Boys came on my iPod. I'd never heard a voice as lonely as Neil Tennants in that song before. Perfect, perfect moment.
 

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
I was walking to a friend's house at about ten pm (not late night, i know, but still). It started to rain. I was halfway up the hill to her house. I stopped, turned round, saw Canary Wharf , Love Comes Quickly by The Pet Shop Boys came on my iPod. I'd never heard a voice as lonely as Neil Tennants in that song before. Perfect, perfect moment.

that song is just amazing. i saw the psbs at the O2 earlier this year (free ticket - the O2 is monstrous...), and when they played both that song and king's cross, it was as though all the rubbishness of the venue, of the inevitable go west bullshit, just melted away.
 

Client Eastwood

Well-known member
This is one I used to play will alone late at night, living in the attic of a house.

Some great production and harmonies. The whole album is awesome (Its on YT)

Perri Sisters - No place to go.


Plus as awesome cover of this - Steely Dan - Cave sof Altamira

"I recall when I was small
How I spent my days alone
The busy world was not for me
So I went and found my own
I would climb the garden wall
With a candle in my hand
I'd hide inside a hall of rock and sand
On the stone an ancient hand
In a faded yellow-green
Made alive a worldly wonder
Often told but never seen
Now and ever bound to labor
On the sea and in the sky
Every man and beast appeared
A friend as real as I

CHORUS:
Before the fall when they wrote it on the wall
When there wasn't even any Hollywood
They heard the call
And they wrote it on the wall
For you and me we understood

Can it be this sad design
Could be the very same
A wooly man without a face
And a beast without a name
Nothin' here but history
Can you see what has been done
Memory rush over me
Now I step into the sun"
 
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said

Active member
i absolutely fucking love this thread... lots of new stuff for me (didn't know that pet shop boys track and it's sublime), but all weird cousins and analogues of the record that has possibly meant more to me than any other this year, and is a well of the absolute essence of the thread imo... hats by the blue nile. so self-consciously modern in every way, hi-fi in a way that massively dates it but equally gives it such emotional heft... something i think is a big part of the appeal of many of these songs (your psbs and quincy joneses rather than strings of life i guess) is their application of a once hypermodern sound pallet that has since come to mean 'the formerly new', there's some kind of not exactly pathos but... something in that lost shine. which i feel is a process that the urban landscape is perpetually undergoing too. i guess maybe too that a lot of this stuff is redolent of a monied 80s decadence that has its own, err, gatsbyish notes of sadness. anyway, hats, a brilliant record that i love:
 

gumdrops

Well-known member
i thought this was going to be about a lot of burial sounding stuff. but im pleased it isnt. things like secret garden make me think of smokey robinson's quiet storm (and quiet storm soul in general really), or tony toni tone's anniversary (its pretty epic at about 9 mins).
 

Leo

Well-known member
its been mentioned earlier in this thread but, as an avid viewer at the time of "miami vice", the first thing that always pops into my mind when i think of this topic is phil collins' "in the air tonight".

in my mind's eye: 2:00 am on a sweltering miami night, sonny crocket and tubbs in silent contemplation of the challenge ahead, cruising over a desolate bridge in their convertible. plenty of other songs in this thread are cooler but, for better or worse, this is the one in my mind.

 

Client Eastwood

Well-known member
Leo, you reminded me of Crockett's Theme from Miami Vice by Jan Hammer. It just feels late, lonely and nostalgic for times gone by. The strings and those first keys set the mood so well. ( I reckon Derrick May must of listened to this, it's from 87 some of his intro's have a similar feel)


 
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