Harkive 2017

Here we are again, another Harkive and another excuse to use this blog and pretend that I still update it regularly. If my memory serves me right this is the fourth Harkive I've done (2013 being the first), and whilst I can't promise that anything exciting will happen today or that I'll listen to anything unusual and worth writing about, hopefully there will still be enough tracks to make a decent blogpost and perhaps even a playlist if I feel so inclined.

It's currently just gone midnight, 00:09 to be precise, and I've just gotten back from seeing Dune (dir. David Lynch, 1984) in the cinema. Whilst it isn't commonly regarded as his finest work, this is probably the fifth time I've seen it this year alone, and that must be worthy of some sort of award. Annoyingly, this year's Harkive has come at a point where I'm stuck in a bit of a rut with the music I listen to; I haven't discovered anything new for ages and seem to end up listening to the same ten songs over and over again for hours at a time. Two of these songs are Echo Beach - Martha and The Muffins and I Can't Go For That (No Can Do) - Daryl Hall & John Oates, and they are also the two songs I have listened to so far today. Just a warning - this post may end up looking like the track listing of an 80s hits compilation album by the end of the day.

It's now nearly 12:30 and I'm just about to head into town to run some errands and mope around Selfridges for a while. I intended to go out earlier but spent the two hours after I woke up at 8 listening to Kraftwerk and Jean-Michel Jarre. As I was getting ready I put on Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark's self titled debut album - because if it isn't from the 80s and it doesn't have a synthesiser in it - I'm not interested.

On the bus I listened to The Associates - a band I discovered in a Popular Modernism lecture at uni this past spring, and was frankly horrified that I hadn't ever listened to them before. Sulk has become my go-to album for when I don't know what to listen to, and today is one of those days. I didn't listen to anything whilst I was out and was instead treated to whatever background pop the shops and cafés had playing. Sometimes I'll get lucky and somewhere will be playing a song I love, but I wasn't so fortunate today.

It's almost 20:00 and I should probably put the oven on and cook something for dinner. Instead, I'm halfway through the Kraftwerk 3-D Catalogue that I've listened to almost every single day since I saw them at the Royal Albert Hall last month. It really is a brilliant album.

23:43 and Harkive 2017 is almost over. I watched several episodes of Seinfeld whilst I had dinner, and now I'm currently listening to some Suede to work out how to create a dumb Twin Peaks meme video I just thought up. It worked, and you can watch it on my Twitter here.

And that's a wrap on Harkive 2017! I'm editing this post the day after and I can't remember if I listened to anything else after I spent the best part of ten minutes editing the Suede song He's Dead to a clip from S3 E11 of Twin Peaks. As always, I never know how to finish these apart from with some drivel about how I absolutely 100% will start writing on here again and never do, so, see you in a year.

Yugoslavia? Yugosuaveia...

I'm not entirely sure how I ended up last Friday night listening to various new wave tracks from the former Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, but I'm glad I did. Once again I was on the search for new things to listen to, whether they be rock, pop, or another genre entirely. It seems I've left the 90s world of britpop and fringes behind (only briefly I hasten to add) and have found myself in need of synth solos and questionable music videos. But this time I sought to find something different to the usual synthpop/new wave tunes I know and love. Something unlike anything I'd listened to before. What happened next is a bit of a blur - partly because it happened at about 2AM and partly because in periods of excitement I seem to forget everything. For some reason I decided to read the Wikipedia page for Yugoslavia, and then decided to visit this page on it's popular music (I thoroughly recommend visiting that link - hours of fun to be had). I'm no stranger to music from Europe. Who can forget the days of Oh No Ono and all those other Danish bands I used to (and still do to some extent) adore; and through studying various languages I've used music as a way to understand a country's culture and further my knowledge of the language in question.

After studying various Wikipedia pages in various levels of depth I turned to YouTube to try and find some of the songs and artists that had been mentioned. I chose bands that I thought sounded interesting based on name and what their style was described as and ended up exploring the music of Dorian Gray and Električni Orgazam, among others. Despite not understanding any of the lyrics due to my lack of Serbo-Croatian language skills, I thought they were great. That night I listened to a handful of songs from various artists and two Električni Orgazam albums which surprisingly are available on iTunes. I also watched the 1981 film "Dečko koji obećava" (The Promising Boy in English) which served as a showcase for various bands of the new wave and punk scenes. Spoiler: it's very very good. A band that has really stuck with me over these past few days is Film, a Croatian rock group who formed in Zagreb in 1978, and who were also one of the most popular groups in Yugoslavia in the late 70s and early 80s. They also supported Lene Lovich (whom I love a lot) on her 1980 Yugoslav tour. Unfortunately I haven't been able to track down any of their albums yet and have been thriving off singles for the past few days. Specifically the 1982 single "Zona Sumraka" or Twilight Zone in English. When you start to sing along to a song that isn't in a language you know it's probably a sign that you've listened to the song in question too many times...

I've only been listening to this stuff for a few days so it's hard to write a full post on it, but my first impressions are that if I ever manage to get my hands on a time machine I am 100% going back to 1980s Yugoslavia (if not to just experience life in a Socialist state...but that's a story for another day). I'm sure I'll write another thing about this after I completely exhaust everything the internet has to offer and end up booking a flight to Croatia to try and find some records, but for now - doviđenja!