rfg #31 - "The together loving plan"

Please note: Due to illness, there was no new show for the week of August 25th, so the first hour of episode #31 was replayed instead before abruptly cutting to salsa?? Barring any unforeseen prolongment in my ability to stay awake longer than two hours, I'll be back next week. Thanks

This type of show tends to my favourite, whereby the songs chosen for the playlist accidentally coalesce into little groups with themes that I wouldn't have of intentionally detected.

The first three songs gelled like a parfait, though I had to take the added step of the language warning at the beginning right before the Girl Talk song, which forced everyone in the studio to nod their heads and sing along (Henry's show had a guest co-host, much like Gavin's did after my show). Seriously: if you haven't heard Feed the Animals yet, especially fist-pumpingly loud and with friends, your 2008 has been deprived.

From there, the hip-shaking set scuffed its shoes as the songs got dirtier as one Baseball Fury became another. As the noise shifted to rhythm, particularly the long-queued but finally played Pixeltan track, ambience set in, which lead to another highlight: David Byrne and Brian Eno, together again on their new album Everything That Happens Will Happen Today. I had another song chosen from their 1981 album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts selected before choosing one from the re-release: the abandoned Qu'ran, which has a fascinating history with modern parallels. I'll look into playing it in the future since it is quite gripping, but I wanted more disjoint sounds, hence Mea Culpa.

Otherwise, blowing through some of my soul led to Marvin Gaye and his score for Trouble Man (with its grim yet unintentionally hilarious trailer). I only heard about this film recently and have been warned about its dodginess. Still, I didn't know about Gaye's interest in Hollywood before and there appear to be a few other soundtrack pieces to hunt down.

The show wasn't flawless, mostly as more equipment in the studio has become faulty and other people toy with the settings. The iPod couldn't go off its usual channel for some reason, which knocked the second CD player offline and messed up Gavin once he took control. I forgot at one point about the channel change, hence the bit of silence at the onset of the Baseball Furies set. News of the apparent problems with the half the turntables doesn't help matters, though as the school years grows closer, the drive to get all this hardware fixed hopefully accelerates. But everyone's loose and having fun whilst summer has a few weeks left.

Oh, the playlist, it follows.