Codeine - Natural High (Sy & Unknown mix)
Codeine - Natural High (Sy & Unknown mix)
Bang! - Break of Dawn
Okay I miffed it yesterday. Stealth wasn’t an alternate name for DNA, it was an alternate name for Bang!. Or for the Nick Arnold/Jo James incarnation of Bang!, anyway. And so were Oblivion and Blaze? Seriously? Seriously.
And Nick Arnold was one of the people behind Smart E’s Sesame’s Treet, which in 1992 was the ur-text for lazy happycore nostalgia-rips. Seriously? Seriously.
Juicy Cuts - Juicy Cuts 7 (Bittersweet Symphony)
Charly Lownoise & Mental Theo - Your Smile (radio mix)
I actually prefer this to the happycore mix. And that announcer at the end! The accent! The absolutely inane/absurd shoutouts! (John Peel was not enough)
* That announcer is Stu “Visa” Allan, funny that.
Interactive - Forever Young (Jon Doe remix)
QFX - Every Time You Touch Me (Seduction & DNA remix)
I didn’t even know this was a remix until I looked it up just now. Not too far from the Eurodance original, actually. Take a look at the… the everything on this Top of The Pops performance from 1996.
Force & Styles - 12 Midnight (Bang! remix)
DD Zion - Blue Sky Day
For how short this song is, it’s got an amazing number of memorable moments and samples.
Back in the day on the US happycore listserve, this was one of the two great vinyl envy objects, the other being Seb’s Rainbow Islands, which I’ll drop on you in a few months.
Force & Styles - Shining Down (Brisk remix)
Trixxy - Sunrize
Why yes, that is Tubular Bells sampled there. Did you know Richard Branson’s entire Virgin empire can be traced back to the profits from Tubular Bells? He named one of the Virgin planes Tubular Belle in honor, which is one of the many reasons Richard Branson is awesome.
Hixxy & Sharkey - Toytown
This was Sharkey’s first venture into production, in 1995. I learned that because I have this track credited as “Hixxy & MC Sharkey” and I was like “wait where’s the MC?”
Brisk - Dancing Thru The Knite
Now that I think to look it up, the top hits suggest it’s Dancing Thru The Night, but Knite makes it into the top 10, and it could plausibly be a reference to Luna-C’s label, Kniteforce.
DJ Slam - Into The Night
Hey kids, did you know that before it was backed by 4/4 kickdrums, happy hardcore was backed by breakbeats? Did you know that back in the day techno songs were made with like, machines, that some engineers diagrammed up somewhere and had people wire by hand, and you had to kind of rig up or punch in lighted buttons on the front like old futures? Did you know that Fairlight, which is like mithril in cyberpunk, was a sampler and synthesizer company?
I took a course in college, “Learning Music Theory Through Digital Music Technology”. I came in a drummer and learned no music theory. The teacher was the original tester of the first Moog. He was kind of a space case and the lectures were basically whatever minutes of him going off on tangents while his assistant tried to make the computer stop crashing. The real prize of the thing was keycard access* to a lab with a rack full of MOTU crap and a Mac with ReBirth (that they actually paid for, with money!) and a sequencer that system crashed basically once a night.
* that you had to sign up for in 2 hour blocks such that I had like 2 AM on Tuesdays at one point
I’m not actually that old, it was more like I did this like the exact year it all became obsolete.
Vinylgroover - Rave Party
I had this one rated as ** in iTunes, that’s maybe one star too low. It’s not terrible, it’s just okay but embarrassing. I dunno, that’s a thing about being a dance genre with lyrics but no sexual identity - at least a third of the narrative concepts are “I am on ecstasy”, and another third are “I am at a rave”.
Plus fuck, that lead-in is literally half the track.