Somewhere There's a Morning Sky / Bluer Than Her Eyes

Time for a customary middle-of-the-night, blurry-eyed, half-asleep, doing-fuck-all but not in bed even though I'm fucking tired stream of conscience post. I've been listening to selected pieces from Bowie's 1976 Station to Station album. I too have stopped blinking - and I think I'm approaching the sort of mental conditions that precipitate the formation of such an album... "It's not the side-effects of the cocaine / I'm thinking that it must be love." Currently I'm listening to Human League's WXJL Tonight (from the 1980 album Travelogue - not the shite pop of the mid 80s they put out after Marsh and Ware left to form Heaven 17) over and over again (3 hours as of 4AM in rotation with The Black Hit of Space). There's something captivating and disturbing about it. "I don't want you to go tonight."

This week I discovered early pre-'Breakfast Club' Simple Minds. I've been hooked on the 12" remix of New Gold Dream (81-82-83-84), the 96kbps encoding which sounds like vinyl, despite it being way lo-fi. It's a miracle I could hear Florian Schneider breathing between bursts of recorder on Morgenspaziergang at all. On Thursday afternoon I got round to digging out the Padre's original copy of New Gold Dream and giving the 'surround' treatment - sitting on the floor, with the speakers angled to my head on either side at high volume. You have to get the equaliser settings right, since the other cretins in this house think pushing all the switches up makes it sound better. There are other excellent songs that benefit from this treatment (preferably tracks over 5 minutes long):

Distance Fades Between Us, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, 1978, Bonus EP with the first 10,000 copies of Organisation - almost entirely Andy McCluskey's bass reverberating for 3 minutes
Subterraneans, David Bowie, 1977, Low - closing track owing more to Eno than Bowie. A building masterpiece of ambience
The Other Side of Life, Japan, 1979, Quiet Life - right before they became elegant art-electro-pop. It has an orchestra in it!
And a few others that escape me at this time of day.

I've still to get round to listening to Bowie's Station to Station this way. Eno's An Ending (Ascent), Vangelis' Rachel's Song, OMD's Dazzle Ships (Parts II, III, VII)/The Romance of the Telescope, and everything on Propaganda's A Secret Wish would have been great to listen this way had either of my parents purchased the respective albums on vinyl.

Now for some customary musical quotes that might give you an insight into my upcoming mental breakdown. 19.

[All The Young Dudes chorus hummed backwards]
Feeling like a shadow / Drifting like a leaf / I stumble like a blind man / Can't forget you / Can't forget you

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