Tag: post punk

  • Towards the Within — There Must Be So Much More

    When I first saw the the Berlin-based band on the upcoming playlist, “Pink Turns Blue”, I almost outright dismissed them. The name evoked for me a sound other than what I thought I was looking for because it reminded me of the song “Pink Turns to Blue” on Hüsker Dü’s 1984 seminal album, Zen Arcade. I figured that if a band had intentionally named themselves after a hardcore band from my youth, they would probably play hardcore punk as well, which is not the music I was looking to discover at this time. If the name shared an accidental (or esoteric) relationship, it still seemed like an odd name to choose for darkwave. But, following my commitment to discovery via music “radio” I gave them a whirl anyway, figuring that I could skip the song part way through if it turned out not to be the genre I was looking for.

    I’m glad I didn’t instant-skip.

    Pink Turns Blue photo
    Pink Turns Blue; Photo: Daniela Vorndran, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

    How I have never managed to hear of Pink Turns Blue is a bit surprising to me. I’ve found plenty of indie bands over the years that were not easy discoveries to be made back in the 80s and 90s. A German band playing a darkwave, guitar-based sound during my old-school goth days falling off my radar? That seems almost criminal.

    The band was formed in 1985 and, yes folks, they named themselves after that aforementioned song (which I’ve included on my YouTube playlist for this series, if you are curious). The song that I heard first heard was “Your Master is Calling”, but it is one of those songs from the 80s that, while it caught my attention, also followed the habit common to the period of overstaying its welcome at over seven minutes, so I elected to share a different song that still captures the vibes of the band but is of a shorter duration.

    This is not like the synth-oriented sounds of the genre, but has more of a 3-piece sound: guitar, bass and drums. Some people would likely class the band as more gothic or more straight indie rock, but I can heard some of the precursor sounds in the band’s songs that feel very borrowed from earlier acts like Joy Division while avoiding some of the more Velvet Underground sound of Sisters of Mercy.

    If you listen, you’ll have to let me know what you think of this discovery in the comments below.

  • Towards the Within — If I Had a Heart

    pexels-photo-4480527.jpeg
    Photo by cottonbro studio on Pexels.com

    As I described in my last post for this series, Towards the Within, I have decided to do a bit of discovery when it comes to music and report back what I found on that adventure. Briefly: I seeded a “radio station” on YouTube Music with several darkwave and experimental folk bands, set it at high discovery and high artist variety. I tried to give preference in my “seed” to non-English-speaking artists to drive the algorithm in that direction. And then, I set off a darkened path and into the labyrinthine woods I had just created.

    Did I find something interesting in the deep woods? Or did the monsters eat me?

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  • Towards the Within — A Musical Odyssey

    One of many plans I have with migrating from my previous site to this new site, one was to begin a musical odyssey of sorts that I would call Towards the Within. The focus of this series is introduce myself to entirely new musical experiences. I hope to encounter new sounds and bands during my experiment. As I do so, I will share the more interesting discoveries with you in a series of posts.

    Establishing the trailhead

    I deciding that I wanted to avoid having too heavy of a hand in determining the direction of my musical exploration. Instead, I would only determine the trailhead at which I would enter a new wilderness. After which, I would let the algorithms of the internet guide me. Part of those initial guardrails would be set based on my mood of the month.

    This month, my mood happens to be international music mixed with non-english darkwave. I added a dash of some traditional influences as well to drive the music in a folksy direction. YouTube’s has a “Create a Radio Station” feature where you can set up some basic parameters, then seed it with an artist list. Doing just that, I set the radio to high artist variety with a high discovery ratio.

    And now I’ll wait to see what there is to see as I wander into the wilds…

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