1992. Halcyon days. At least, if you like war in Europe and riots in America. Yep. So much has changed now. Better days.
One of the closing themes of my book, Stroke, is the subjective nature of time. So, it’s interesting to hear two remixes of Orbital’s Halcyon, thirty years on.
Logic 1000 strips it back and makes an asthmatic middle-aged stroke survivor think he could still rave it up in a sweaty whitewashed cube of a room somewhere in Edinburgh – if such a place still exists, Grandad.
John Hopkins makes some concessions to the passing of time and makes an A.M-a.S.S. think he could really dig it after the Wee Man’s gone to sleep, on a good pair of noise-cancelling headphones.
None of it convinces me that 17-year-old Ricky was right in his conviction that time’s arrow was dragging us into a future that could only get better [sic].
On the other hand, Long-sufferingreaderoftheblogpaul introduced me today to a trilogy of science fiction books which opens with Earth awaiting an invasion from the closest star system. So, things aren’t necessarily all bad.
Cheery-bye!!!
Those books are good
I have been thinking lately an inordinately large amount about the nature of time in music. Writing short emails with phrases like ‘the dictatorship of the metronome’. Sort of a continuation of a lot of thinking I did in 2016/17 about how modern composition tools and more folk music adjacent meters are difficult to collapse with each other.
The fact that halcyon has about as metronomic a bass drum as you can have in your blog on the nature of time is a lovely coincidence. But listen to the initial non-adjacency of the drums in the remix (until it gets going).
Also: Careful with that axe, Rick-gene. I saw that caption.
But anyway if you want to see a group who is hitting together on every part of the beat except the beat itself, here’s the Animal Collective tiny desk concert.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvIllmsp1J4