halloween has always been a personal favorite.  childhood memories of traipsing through dim neighborhoods with elaborate hand sewn costumes i designed myself, and the irrepressible  fascination and draw to the occult and high strangeness.  the season of the witch provides the most comfort.

01. krzystzof komeda – rosemary’s baby theme
02. underworld – winjer
03. fever ray – coconut
04. herbert – foreign bodies (plaid remix)
05. matthew dear – you put a smell on me
06. siouxsie & the banshees – she’s a carnival
07. the knife – like a pen
08. twin shadow – castles in the snow
09. the golden filter – dance around the fire
10. massive attack – pray for rain (tim goldworthy remix)
11. brian eno – sombre reptiles
12. fever ray – here before

romanticizing hazy, teenage suburbia experiences is something that rarely goes well.   teenage life in storytelling always has the dark underbelly of Things Gone Wrong.  a picture perfect description of girls and cars always leaves you wondering what else is there.  the duality is usually addressed with a heavy hand, like laura palmer’s entire existence and in veronica mars’ neptune.

forget is another animal entirely.   in the video for slow, twin shadow perfectly shows us the uncommunicative sullenness of a teenage boy who likes muscle cars and playing the drums.  it’s easy to think that forget is just an album about teenage experiences of sneaking out of your parents house and school dances, until you slowly piece together (as i did) that the songs have frequent references to ghosts.  exactly what kind of haunting is this?

figurative ghosts – this is the missing piece of the puzzle that most albums in this subset of hazy teenage nostalgia seem to forget.  i may try my hardest to pretend that me at age 13 was a weird imagined event that didn’t really happen,  but the ghosts never quite leave.

The winter sets in
It has a way of crystallizing the bad times, the fevers, the heartaches
This is all of it, this is everyone I’m wanting to forget.

01 the knife – heartbeats (live)
02 m83 – kim & jessie (montag remix)
03 kate bush – hounds of love
04 herbert – harmonise
05 glasser – treasury of we
06 depeche mode – halo (goldfrapp remix)
07 björk – all is full of love (guy sigsworth mix)
08 the knife – marble house
09 chromatics – running up that hill
10 larry heard presents mr. white – the sun can’t compare (edit)
11 kylie minogue – the one (freemasons edit)
12 goldfrapp – number 1 (múm remix)
13 edith piaf – la vie en rose
14 david bowie – wild is the wind

~*~

i remember standing in my backyard with my friends at the age of four, my snoopy encyclopedia piled around us and we are earnestly discussing our mothers not allowing us to watch flashdance. bundled up in front of the sofa watching top gun with my older brother, and that song going through the final credits. buying my first blondie album at the age of thirteen, and waiting til my mother was at work to blast ‘call me’ as loud as i dared. discovering coast to coast am, with ‘the chase’ leading in ominous witching hour talk of men in black, ghosts and government conspiracies.

giorgio moroder was the ghost behind all of these things, shaping popular music from the late 70s to the mid 80s. gently guiding us from club-focused disco to something housewives sang to themselves as they washed dishes. his work as a producer was so prolific and so overwhelmingly popular that today we are still discovering tracks he wrote and released but were essentially lost to time.

giorgio moroder became such a part of our collective unconscious, secretly showing us what music should be like that 30 years later albums are still being released with traces of his ghost on it. if nostalgia makes us see giorgio moroder’s heavy synth pop sensibilities as the ideal standard, it also tells us that giorgio moroder is what childhood sounds like

this is my love letter to giorgio moroder, architect of my childhood dreams and also my friend ANDREW. this love letter to GM started brewing in my head over a year ago, when andrew and i went to see kylie minogue. we were waiting to watch hellraiser, and were killing time by flipping through the cable music channels and the berlin track came on. it was a lifechanging revelation, and of course it would happen with the only other musical lighthouse i have met.  so here is something i made with my bare hands – tracks influenced, produced and written by giorgio moroder.

xoxo, frau

01: robyn – in my eyes
02: debbie harry – rush rush
03: giorgio moroder – the chase (edit)
04: javiera mena – primer estrella
05: zeigeist – pressurized chamber
06: nancy nova – the force
07: goldfrapp – number 1
08: telefon tel aviv – helen of troy
09: berlin – take my breath away
10: M83 – we own the sky
11: javiera mena – al siguiente nivel

Whirlpool Vessel (52:58 total time)

1. Michael Aubry • petite table en suite régulière
2. Biosphere • schenzhou
3. John King • movement 6 of 10 mysteries
4. Laszló Sáry • ludus cromaticus
5. Ross Bolleter • save what you can
6. Max Eastley • whirled music
7. Conlon Nancarrow/Arditti Quartet • study for player piano nr. 31
8. Guus Janssen • music for hens
9. Len Lye • blade #2
10. Hermann Keller • 29 stücke
11. Magic ID • loopstuck (excerpt)
12. Greg Davis • star primes (for James Tenney)

Simple lovely songs for saying goodbye to summer. It’s been swell.

01 Nico Muhly – Twitchy Organs
02 Múm – Boots of Fog
03 Fennesz + Sparklehorse – Goodnight Sweetheart
04 Archetti & Wiget –  Stück 22
05 Jonsi – Tornado
06 The Books – The Lemon of Pink
07 Balmorhea – Truth (Helios Remix)
08 Matthew Dear – Slowdance

(Photo by Nico*2006)

Underwater (1) the pitch-shift thug rap vox are witch-haus haunted (8). Or maybe you prefer your hip-hop masked and spiked with blunted butter (3)? A black moth super rainbow master wields a hand-clap gospel bandsaw weapon (4) and noise gets wordy (7) in electro-loop sighs (10) or suck-my-dick static (2, 6, 9). Cheeky boys from Brooklyn drill a magic twenty minute braingrind in modern sonata form (11) and somewhere on the other end of this BlackberryMobile rotor-slip waterlog Lindsay Lohan gets all circuit-bent out of shape (5).

1. Tim Hecker – 100 Years Ago
2. Cold Cave/Prurient – Stars Explode
3. MF Doom/Madvillian – All Caps
4. Tobacco – Six Royal Vipers
5. Stalker – Disconnection (Disconnected)
6. Oenida – What’s Up, Jackal?
7. Dälek – Ever Somber
8. Salem – Tair
9. Mike Shiflet/Burning Star Core – To Spread Your Dying Flower One Last Time
10. Oneohtrix Point Never – Grief and Repetition
11. Zs – New Slaves

(51.7 min total)

Hi. I’m kristin.

Image by Robin Rhode

Welcome to my premiere playlist and first of the RADIO RADIO Vessel series.
I will celebrate this prelude with a haiku:

In extraction, implosion
in delivery, inverting
sounds stubborn, travel

And now a question for you: what comes after one?

Yours, MSSR. VESSEL

Hollow Vessel (39:05 total time)

1. Lucio Capece & Mika Vainio • sigilo
2. Ilmar Laaban • i revolutionens snö
3. Mamoru Fujieda • the sixth collection pattern xxvi
4. Tamaru • stream
5. Streifenjunko • plutonium blues
6. The Story Of Modern Farming • someone new
7. Robert Black/Giacinto Scelsi • mantram
8. Philipp Vandré/John Cage • the unavailable memory of
9. Frits Weiland • study in layers and pulses
10. Asmus Tietchens • erste nachtsücke

nothing much to say about this mix other than that its what i’ve been listening to lately to help drift off to other places, anywhere but here…

01 zola jesus & la vampires – bone is bloodstone
02 black ox orkestar – bukharian
03 noveller – almost alright
04 oOoOO – nosummer4u
05 gabor szabo – concerto de aranjuez
06 oneohtrix point never – returnal (voice by antony)
07 the gentleman losers – honey bunch
08 lee hazlewood – your sweet love