Exploring Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music has helped me find a lot of new music that I like, and it's also helping me organize my music a little better.

One of the songs I found was "The Night" by Valerie Dore, from 1984. I had heard the melody before, because Scooter did a sort of remix/cover of the song in 2003. Here's the video on YouTube of the Scooter version, although it's NSFW, as there are boobs.

Anyway, it's a cool song, of the Italo Disco genre, which is basically the continuation of disco music in Europe after it vanished in the USA around 1980. It's a bit of a misnomer since most Italo Disco music isn't necessarily Italian - so "Eurodisco" works too, only that covers the 70s and 80s, anyway, I digress.

The video is on YouTube, and there are so many silly things in it I just had to post it.

1) Most Italo Disco is clearly sung by people for whom English is not their first language. That seems to apply to Ms. Dore.
2) For some inexplicable reason there is a guy playing drums and a keyboard in the video - even though this is totally electronic music and would have been played by a DJ, not an actual band.
3) That drummer's hair! Seriously, if you do nothing else, go to 0:35 and gaze in wonderment.
4) As pointed out in the comments, Valerie is certainly a much better singer than dancer.
5) Why are two people in 18th-century clothing intermittently dancing in the background?


As totally ridiculous as the video is, I still love the song. Maybe it's just best left in audio form.

Another cool song, just because I feel like throwing it in here, is "Pulstar" by Hypnosis, 1983. It was covered by Vangelis shortly thereafter, and I think that's the more common version, but I like the original best. Of course it doesn't have a music video, which is probably for the better.


current weather: Cloudy, 25, Wind: S 9; Starting to warm up some, rain tomorrow, maybe that will help wash off my poor car

Tags: 1980s, electronic music, italo disco, music, nsfw, videos
Current Location: 41.197N 81.433W
Current Mood: amused
Current Music: Valerie Dore - The Night

If you've been to any sporting event (especially hockey) over the last few years, you have almost certainly heard the song "Kernkraft 400" by Zombie Nation - or at least some version of it. It also was in a part of "Shaun of the Dead," if you've seen that.

Here's the music video. The video's not that great, honestly, but the part that I think would be most recognizable starts at 0:46 if you just want to skip to it:


Anyway, what I think is so cool, and which I didn't realize, is that apparently the main tune for the song is actually taken from a Commodore 64 game from 1984 called Lazy Jones:


There are all sorts of videos on YouTube that give the origin for a lot of the samples in electronic music. This video gives the origins for a bunch of samples from Daft Punk:


This is all coming from my further exploration of Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music:

http://techno.org/electronic-music-guide/

Tags: 1980s, c64, daft punk, electronic music, music, youtube, zombie nation
Current Location: 41.197N 81.433W
Current Mood: amused
Current Music: Yellow Magic Orchestra - Behind The Mask