Errors-To: owner-ecto@ns1.rutgers.edu Reply-To: ecto@ns1.rutgers.edu Sender: ecto@ns1.rutgers.edu From: ecto@ns1.rutgers.edu To: ecto-request@ns1.rutgers.edu Bcc: ecto-digest-outbound@ns1.rutgers.edu Subject: ecto #452 ecto, Number 452 Monday, 22 February 1993 Today's Topics: *-----------------* Re: My Top 10 For 1992 More abstrusenesses from the hapless rhodesphile k.d. lang Bing! Flamey things Judie Tzuke Re: Miranda again ======================================================================== From: special K Subject: Re: My Top 10 For 1992 Date: Mon, 22 Feb 93 15:57:59 EST Finney Tsaid: > Here's my Top-10 of 1992 list. The candidate pool is strictly > restricted to pop/rock/folk female vocalists/songwriters only. > No special order. > 1. k.d.lang, Ingenue: Even we are overloaded by too many > commericals, k.d.'s personality is still so charming. Elaborate, please! I'm never overloaded with kd commercials, if that's what you mean. I do, however, wholeheartedly agree with the charming personality assertion. ;-) I enjoyed your list, Finney. Good stuff. Even the delay of the year Sparc 10 (we are getting ready to order 10 of them...which will probably get here next fall, eh?) special K ======================================================================== From: Kjetil Torgrim Homme Date: Mon, 22 Feb 1993 23:28:58 +0100 Subject: Re: My Top 10 For 1992 Hmm, this *is* a little late, but so what :-) No category constraints, and they weren't all released in 1992 (I'm so slow, you wouldn't guess how long I've planned to write a post like this...) 1. Bel Canto - all three albums (Norwegian) [1987,90,92] Atmospheric, rhythmic, sheer bliss. 1992 was my Bel Canto year. (1991 was Yello :-) - Sagt mir, Nacht und Wasser, woh'st mein Kind? 2. Neneh Cherry - "Homebrew" (American? Jamaican? Swedish?) [1992] Elaborately amateurish, brilliant mix of music, rhythm and rap. - Guided by the blue light, I'm on my way home 3. Time Modem - "Transforming Tune" (German) [1992] Moody and dark synth-music, but still pure techno. - Kann ich dir sterben? 4. Fortran 5 - "Blues" (Bristish) [1992] This is truly a curious mix. Normal pop and ambient bleep all rolled into one. I love the use of the Door's riff on "Groove" - Another day, another dawn, I wake to find you gone 5. Happy Rhodes - "Warpaint" (American) [1991] Strong melodies, amazing voice, good arrangements, only let down by cheezy synthesizers. Let her have real strings and she'll be a star! - Shall we cut out his tongue? Yes, that will teach him. 6. Lush - "Spooky" (British) [1992] Sometimes, I just get a craving for their fuzz. The marvel is the rock solid melodic basis they have beneath the noise. - [ Lyrics? Do you mean there are lyrics? :-) ] 7. Anja Garbarek - "Velkommen inn" (Norwegian) [1992] Intricate pop on the surface, yet another 20-year old brutally honest about her feelings and experiences beneath. - Hvis du tenker som meg, vet jeg ikke om jeg t|r } f|lge deg ... 8. Suzanne Vega - "99.9F`" (American) [1992] A bit uneven, but overall very good. It has beautiful ballads and up-tempo songs. Mostly quite quiet though, and perfect to relax to. (now if she had scrapped "When heroes go down"... oh well) - How did this one life fall so far and fast? 9. Ministry - "The Land of Rape and Honey" (American) [1988] Get your aggression out! - I'm chewing on glass, and eating my fingers. 10. Kraftwerk - "The Mix" (German) [1991] The avant-garde synth band of the 70's has become pop. Who said charts have no taste? - Musik --- Non-stop. Musik --- Non-stop. Honourable mentions: Loreena McKennitt - "The Visit" Snap - "Rhythm is a dancer, 3rd edition" Shamen - "Boss Drum" Digital Orgasm - "Startouchers" [CD-single] Tori Amos - "Little Earthquakes" Mike Oldfield - "Tubular Bells II" Disappointments: Peter Gabriel - "US" Sugarcubes - "Stick around for joy" Kjetil T. (anxiously awaiting Equipoise!) ======================================================================== Date: Mon, 22 Feb 1993 15:15:30 CST From: Subject: More abstrusenesses from the hapless rhodesphile Some things never seem to change with me. Friday night I was watching Pat Sajak guesting on Leno, biding time until Suzanne Vega came on. As always, the next thing I remember seeing over my orthicon tube was Letterman touting the momentary visit of Mary-Chapin Carpenter. I felt a perverse sense of reassur- ance, thinking maybe that was my chance to salvage the evening. It came as no surprise to me, and presumably will not to any other regular reader of these pages, that my next memory is of a commercial (Dunno which one) at the tail end of _Friday Night Videos_. Saturday night I called Vickie and asked if she'd seen any of all that. She told me that she'd been out and about (possibly at the cinema seeing _Lorenzo's Oil_, I forget) at that time, and plumb forgot about SV. You have undoubtedly psyched out the punch line by now, with the possible exception that I shall ask this one for Vickie as well as for I: 1) Did anyone catch either or both of SV and/or MCC? 2) If so, what can you tell us? Saturday, I paid one of my periodic visits to the Music Box to see _Wax: How the Bees Discovered Televison_ and _The Match Factory Girl_. The former got four stars in the _Sun-Times_, but I found it heavily abstruse and difficult to follow--albeit arguably not unlike my average posting to this list in that re- gard :-). The latter was much better; I wonder what percentage of Finnish film s are that weird, in its own low-key sort of way. But to make a long story longer, I made a detour on the way home to Rose Records on Ashland (hope I've just managed to divert some of the onus from the Grammar Cops away from Michael B.--though it may sometimes seem like might as well live there, I actually don't) to overspend for the umpteenth time at the storewide sale. Among the many fascinating things I saw there, some of which I bought and many others not , were two Rhodes II and an Equipoise CD. Also a large format paperback on KaT e which a salesperson on the floor told me had come in only recently, but which the whole staff had already enjoyed reading. (Vickie implored me to recheck the title and post it to these pages, but I forgot. These things happen.) The more significant component of this experience had its roots in my search fo r Judie Tzuke, whom I didn't find, in the bins. I asked the aforesaid salesper son, describing JT as being English and in the Kate Bush genre. Coming up as dry as I did, she asked a colleague, who had also not heard of Judie and opined that at any rate, they didn't have any. A bit later, as I was queued to be rung up with all my audio swag, the latter salesman hailed my attention, and I noticed he was brandishing the Happy CDs I'd recently seen in the bin. He said that if I liked Kate Bush, I might like those. I replied that I was ind- eed familar with Happy, and that a friend of mine who used to work in the com- pany's central office had turned me on to her a couple of years earlier. He inquired who that might be; I told him that it was Vickie, which it really was. His face lit up, he said he liked it when she worked in the front office, and to tell her hello from Kevin [presumably no relation]. This I did that night. The small world phenomenon pops up once again. All this has, in the meantime, suggested to me an admittedly drastic measure which might be useful to those ectophiles in Greater Boston who may be going through the musical equivalent of the DT's due to both Tower locations being out of Equipoise (not to mention other Happy CD's) for the moment. As fate would have it, in this neck of the woods the CTA has just gone in for naming all the rapid transit lines, MBTA style, after colors. This should make it easier for the affected people among us to relate to how to reach this newly- discovered retail outlet for Happy's music. Just take the Red Line from Harv- ard Square downtown, then switch to the Blue Line to Logan, where you catch the next available plane to O'Hare. Remember: It has to be O'Hare, because they just announced another couple of months' delay in the opening of the Orange Line from Midway. Once the Great Silver Bird has interfaced with Terra Firma once again, you do more or less the same thing as in Boston, only with the colors reversed: Take the Blue Line from O'Hare downtown, then take the Red Line up to Belmont; switch to the Belmont bus for the six blocks or so over to Ashland, then walk the remaining block up to Rose. Do this while the storewide sale is still on (for the next few days at least), and you'll save 15% off the suggested retail). Also WRT Boston rockers: Saturday's _Night Flight_ announced that the show's second hour, which Channel 66 here unfortunately doesn't carry, would be devote d to Boston artists, including but not limited to 'Til Tuesday. Hours later, _Echoes_ announced that a number by Happy would be upcoming. By the time that WBEZ carried it, I'd gone back to sleep. WRT other stuff of interest on WBEZ, yesterday Stuart Rosenberg played a cut from Mouth Music's new album, which seemed to combine Spanish and Middle Easter n influences to produce a more pop-oriented sound than they did on the first album. Unfortunately, the train on which I was riding at the time descended in to the subway tunnel before the backannouncing. WRT Bob's comments on WXPN: Professionally-staffed, university-run stations ar e probably more common than one might think. WILL in Urbana, owned by the U of Illinois there, is one of them. My guess is that the ones with network affili- ations are more often staffed by professionals than by students. Random thought, inspired by Dirk's random thought: Could Vern and Gabrielle become the Bob and Justine of the ecto world? Mitch ----------------------------- in memory of Harvey Kurtzman ======================================================================== Date: Mon, 22 Feb 1993 14:52:11 -0800 From: piaw@pure.com (Na Choon Piaw) Subject: k.d. lang I don't know... I bought her album, and listened to it. It sounded nice, but I didn't see anything special in it. Am I wrong, or was the entire album composed of love songs? (It's so hard to tell, sometimes... But I for one am sick of generic love songs) Piaw "I'm living on the wrong planet." --- Brian Harvey, 1991. ======================================================================== Subject: Re: More abstrusenesses from the hapless rhodesphile Date: Mon, 22 Feb 93 18:21:22 EST From: Angelos Kyrlidis Mitch writes: >You have undoubtedly psyched out the punch line by now, with the >possible exception that I shall ask this one for Vickie as well as for I: >1) Did anyone catch either or both of SV and/or MCC? >2) If so, what can you tell us? Well, I managed to catch SV. It was hard to convince my friends who were visiting me to keep the TV on that channel, as we had to listen to a horrid interview with some guy who ate 260 prunes, and was the prune-champion of the world... And Leno's chat with SV was pretty pathetic. She had to endure questions about her brief career as an Avon Lady... But let me get to the point. She performed 'When heroes go down' and '99.9 F'. She sounded a bit too nasal, and I wonder if she had a cold that night. I wasn't very impressed. On a related topic, I thought that the new songs Sting performed on SNL were rather boring... I taped the show, and even fast-forwarded through parts of them. I was *very* disappointed, and wonder if his new album will also disappoint me... Then Mitch goes on to explore alternatives to finding Happy's CDs by going to Chicago from Boston and says: >Just take the Red Line from Harv- >ard Square downtown, then switch to the Blue Line to Logan, where you catch >the next available plane to O'Hare. That's incorrect, Mitch. It's too simple. You have to take the Red Line from Harvard to Park St., then the Green Line to Government Center, then the Blue Line to the Airport and then take the MBTA shuttle bus to the terminal. [Or you could take the Red Line to Downtown Crossing, and switch to the Orange Line til State St., and *then* get on the Blue Line, but since the Orange Line isn't the nicest one to be on, i.e. people occasionaly get shot, I would recommend the first choice :)]. >Do this while the >storewide sale is still on (for the next few days at least), and you'll save >15% off the suggested retail). Hey, that's worthwhile if you get a free flight to Chicago! :) Angelos ======================================================================== Date: Mon, 22 Feb 93 15:57:27 -0800 From: Michael G Peskura Subject: Bing! Vickie writes: > ... When we moved up here we > had to give away so many books, hundreds! We kept particular favorites > and ones we didn't think we'd be able to find easily again. One of my > favorite books is still in a box, _The Best of Cordwainer Smith_, which > contains a story "Mother Hitton's Little Kittens" ... Holy Moly! I LOVE Cordwainer Smith! Why can't i write like that? Happily, Mp ======================================================================== From: boek@mullian.ee.mu.oz.au (Christopher Boek) Subject: Flamey things Date: Tue, 23 Feb 1993 12:35:35 +1100 (EST) > > This is my response to Jon Drukman in rec.music.gaffa. He y'ain't gonna > get no rise outta me! :-) > [nice reply deleted] > > *kisskisshughug* > > Auntie Vickie > I love it!! *:) Chris. -- | ||| ||| | ||| ||| ||| | ||Christopher Boek - boek@mullian.ee.mu.oz.au | ||| ||| | ||| ||| ||| | || Dept Elec Eng Univ of Melbourne Australia | | | | | | | | | / "Anybody remotely interesting is mad in |___|___|___|___|___|___|___|___| \_/\_/\_/\_/\__/(:*- some way or another" ======================================================================== Date: Mon, 22 Feb 93 18:18:41 PST From: tsai@ikos.com (Finney T. Tsai) Subject: Re: My Top 10 For 1992 :> 2. Neneh Cherry - "Homebrew" (American? Jamaican? Swedish?) [1992] :> Elaborately amateurish, brilliant mix of music, rhythm and rap. :> - Guided by the blue light, I'm on my way home Neneh Cherry was born in Sweden and moved to NYC at the age five. Her father is a famous jazz musician(sorry, I forgot his name). "Homebrew" is her second album, a very interesting combination of Jazz, Rock, Rap...etc. I didn't list it out cuz I thought it should be a jazz album. :) :> Honourable mentions: :> Loreena McKennitt - "The Visit" :> Snap - "Rhythm is a dancer, 3rd edition" :> Shamen - "Boss Drum" :> Digital Orgasm - "Startouchers" [CD-single] :> Tori Amos - "Little Earthquakes" :> Mike Oldfield - "Tubular Bells II" Tubular Bells II is Mike's best album so far, isn't it? At least it's the most complex one? Glad to see another Mike Oldfield fan here. -finney --------------------------- Walking on Walking on broken glass --- Annie Lennox ======================================================================== From: Kjetil Torgrim Homme Date: Tue, 23 Feb 1993 03:31:12 +0100 Subject: Judie Tzuke As mentioned previously in these pages(R), I picked up Judie Tzuke's album "Wonderland" when I was in London (call me crazy, but I must admit to being almost disappointed when the sales assistant [is that the right word ?] seemed to know very well who Judie Tzuke was when I asked at Virgin. She must be a well known, but local, British artist). Oh, and thanks, Vickie, for mentioning her in the first place. In my previous one-sentence review I called it "above average female pop", but I have found upon deeper contemplation that is too weak a review. It is actually very good, there are no weak songs. It could have been among my top 10 favourite 1992 records if I had bought it in 1992... Anyway, I wish to protest fervently against the comparing Judie Tzuke to Kate Bush. They don't sound similar at all. Item 1: She's blonde. Everyone knows that a brunette has a lot deeper voice than a blonde. Besides, JT can't possibly smoke. Item 2: The sound of JT's music is "lighter". The main reason for this is her voice, but the overall arrangements back this up, ie. the drums are very subdued, the guitars are floating and there are no heavy-handed piano/synthesizer themes. Item 3: Item 2 was written while listening to the song "Wonderland", and it shows :-) In places, especially "I can read books", she reminds me strongly of "One 2 Many", a Scandinavian band with emphasis towards piano instead of guitars. [ I love piano. David Foster is great, and my favourite track on "Two Rooms" is actually Bruce Hornsby's incredible rendition of "Madman across the water" :-] The cover of "Wonderland" is *SO* nice. It is a painting, at first looking very bright and cosy, the dominant feature (apart from an inset photo of JT) is a child with some kind of clown outfit running into the picture from the right, white flowers, and a bird (a robin? We don't have that bird in Norway, in any case). However, if you look closer, you will notice a skull, a minotaur and a lot of snakes in the dark borders of the painting. Mmm, I think I should scan it in. (BTW, IMO she looks a lot like Stevie Nicks, and actually, her music is a lot more similar to Stevie Nicks than Kate Bush even if Stevie Nicks' voice bears even less resemblance to JT's than Kate's :-) Kjetil T. PS. If you find my writing style difficult to understand, please send me a note... -- "in these pages" is a registered Mitch-ism. ======================================================================== Date: Mon, 22 Feb 93 22:40:40 EST From: David N. Blank-Edelman Subject: My Top 10 For 1992 > Her father is a famous jazz musician(sorry, I forgot his name). Don Cherry. A great musician in his own right. Peace, dNb ======================================================================== Date: Mon, 22 Feb 93 22:58:39 EST From: WretchAwry Subject: Re: Miranda again Laura says: > It's Louis Malle's 'Damage' starring Jeremy Irons. Actually I thought it > was her most impressive performance of the three films she's been in > this year. Surprisingly, so did the Academy. This isn't current, or well-known in general, but Miranda Richardson also appeared in The Comic Strip episode of "Les Dogs" playing the bride's mother. The bride was played by.....Kate Bush! (_Dance With A Stranger_ is the first thing I saw Miranda in. I used to have a poster from the film hanging in the bedroom. What a per- formance!) Vickie ======================================================================== The ecto archives are on hardees.rutgers.edu in ~ftp/pub/hr. There is an INDEX file explaining what is where. Feel free to send me things you'd like to have added. -- jessica (jessica@ns1.rutgers.edu)