This was the show destined to be prior to me falling ill, so this show was mostly in the can for a couple weeks before airtime. There were naturally a few tweaks as time marched on, so the Walkmen/Beck set lost its poignancy as the concerts passed.
Fortunately, having this show prepared worked well since I had spent most of the week before travelling: three days with my folks and then a weekend in wonderful Winnipeg for a friend's wedding. I returned to Vancouver five hours before the show with very little to worry about. Since classes at UBC officially started this week, the campus had liveliness for the first time since early April, which gave the station a bit of a jolt as new volunteers provided evidence of wanting their first taste of radioland wonder, mostly in the form of sign-up sheets filled with phone numbers and random doodles.
The Bruce Haack/Fantastic Plastic Machine segment was one of those things that was less of an accident and more just a bit of whimsical fortune that had been residing in my collection waiting for a moment to shine. Haack remains one of those enigmatic individuals that made music on his own terms, so despite how eerie his repetoire is — especially when you consider that children were his target audience — the charming quirkiness provides so much character that you wouldn't otherwise readily find.
Instead of a specific soundtrack feature this week, aside from the experimental flair with the two tracks from the Extracted Celluloid compilation, the scores used had been piling up in my cache for a while and didn't readily fit into earlier shows on their own, but the variety invoked did flow into each other quite quite naturally. After the ersatz opening, with weird electronics, German new wave and precocious Canadiana, allowing songs from widely-known films to shine grounded the ceremony.
The only main excitement behind the scenes were the various asynchronous clocks, giving the actual time a delta spanning 10 minutes, which led me to avoid stating the time that often this week, which benefits the podcast listener over those using the dials and the coils.
Gaze upon yonder playlist:
Peter Bjorn and John: Inland Empire (Seaside Rock, 2008) Almost Gold/Star Time
Bruce Haack: School for Robots (Hush Little Robot, 1998) QDK Media/Forced Exposure
Fantastic Plastic Machine: I'm Bruce [Dimension 5 Mega Mix] (Dimension Mix, 2005) Eenie Meenie
Harry Betts: Theme from the Fantastic Plastic Machine (The Fantastic Plastic Machine OST, 1969) Epic
Die Töedliche Doris: Tanz im Quadrat (Berlin Super 80, 1981) Monitorpop
Twin Crystals: Two Girls (Two Girls 7", 2008) summerloversunlimited / exo records
Abe Vigoda: Hyacinth Grrls (Skeleton, 2008) Bella Union
Primal Scream: Necro Hex Blues (Beautiful Future, 2008) B-Unique
Eye Was An Ion: I Will Hunt You (MySpace, 2008) Ha Ha
Für Amel: Pink Eyes (unreleased, 2008) Hees&Schultz
The Walkmen: Four Provinces (You & Me, 2008) Gigantic
Beck: Chemtrails (Modern Guilt, 2008) Interscope
Thomas Newman: Theme from Six Feet Under (Six Feet Under OST, 2002) Universal
RuDJak Manigz: SingKingHeart (Extracted Celluloid, 1999) Illegal Art
Natasha Spencer: The House She Flew In On [Excerpt] (Extracted Celluloid, 1999) Illegal Art
Ted Atking and his Orchestra: The Man from Nowhere (Pop Music for Dancing, 1970) Concert Hall
Tom Waits: Los Angeles Theme [Another Private Dick] (Night on Earth OST, 1992) Island
Elliot Goldenthal & Kronos Quartet: Predator Diorama (Heat OST, 1995) Warner Bros.
Trevor Jones: Walking the Circle (In the Name of the Father OST, 1994) Island
John Barry: Play It Again (The Tamarind Seed OST, 1974) Polydor
Kool & the Gang: Summer Madness (Light of Worlds, 1974) De-Lite
The song in the background during the concert listings, as mentioned during the show, is Henry Mancini's Lujon, one of those lush numbers that doesn't feel like it was composed, rather it collected itself delicately into existence on its own.
The podcast server had been acting up, but you can download Cinema esoterica as an MP3 without any human effort if you so desire [82.0 Mb, 89:16]
