Summer Songs

The return of grey skies and the low clouds clinging to the tops of the North Shore mountains mark the beginning of autumn and the end of another summer in Vancouver.  The quietude of summer evenings and dry roads is to be replaced by static wash of cars on wet roads and that constant cold, damp Vancouver climate clinging to us all under our clothes. And on top of that, we have to put up with ubiquitous reports of the Vancouver Canucks' failures as they play out over another meaningless season of professional sport. God we miss summer when it's gone.

More interesting though, are the soundtracks we compile for ourselves through each summer. While we all have our own little lists that remind us of beach day x, awesome night y, and camping trip z, we've been provided with something a little different to share with you all, namely a list of songs that Mr. Sean Orr compiled to share with you. I really wish I had spent some time with Sean this summer, somehow, doing whatever he was doing, because next to Sean's, my list of predicable feel-good summer jams, club hits and balmy classics just seems a little too easy.

So, lets take one last trip into the sun with Sean as he recounts his favorite songs of the summer. Just don't drink the kool-aid, bro.

Chairlift- Evident Utensil. My psychic brothers of the cyber sphere, those cave dwelling Brightonians; the Binary 1 to my 0, slinging laser documents through space; they’ve changed my life, 20 Jazz Funk Greats take us on an quantum adventure.

Weird Tapes- The Heavens. OK whoa, where am I? OK. Right now I’m in race with three identical 24 karat gold DeLoreans. We’re all wearing leather racing suits, mine has a CMYK theme. The sun is high, contrast is up, tinted windows and platinum blondes. We are in Capricorn. We are in future bliss.

Crash Course in Science- Flying Turns. Here, we have been interzoning with Hugo Capablanca again, looking for hidden doors in alleys that we speed between on our scooters, trying to beat this weird fascist cult where Paul Jones is some sort of Mod version of Christ.

Services- She Made It Big In A Small Mexican Village. OK you outran the cops who like they're from Gattica. You’ve found the door. You are inside some epic, 2D Megaworld, where Princesses need to be rescued, or dragons need desperately to be slain. All the time. Power up.

Ras-G- 5AM Spliff. Jesus, all these circuits are certainly messing with our heads. Must be the radiation. We're stumbling about in a lethargic codeine stupor again. Switch to analog mode.

Telepathe- Chrome's On It. Things are shifting. You are becoming the lights, shifting in sequence like a deep space pulsar, there you are, you were moving just like them. How did you do that? You were like when a really cool cherry red, sportscar pulls up next to you and their wheels look like they are going backwards. Basically, we’ve ripped a hole in space time. No biggie.

High Places- The Storm. Now we are beached on an island, a stasis leak in a vast ocean of dark matter. We are the eye of the storm. We have got to learn to love again. Transcend the here and now.

Salem- Dirt. Wormwholes eddy on either side of us, electro-magnetic particles fold and twist into beautiful patterns while clouds of methane gas give it all a gloriuous green glow. The death knell of dying suns drone in a steady hum beneath our feet.

Santogold- Shove It (Switch remix). What does summer look like from space?

Rainbow Arabia- See no Hear no. There is panic at the base. Moonrakers dart into their command units. Everyone on standby. Could be a freighter full of gypsies coming through the wormhole "wearing their kaleidoscopic militia uniforms, and armed with unforgiving jet-black machine guns adorned with rainbows of ribbons, stampede into town on crystal war elephants, painted red with Nubian scrawl and decorated in chains of silver plated animal skulls, firing bullets into the sky to announce their arrival".

Telex- Haven't We Met Somewhere Before? Turns out it was just a party cruiser full of fashionable young men and women with black hair, pointy ties and acid wash jeans. Our Odyssey continues, dear Argonauts.

Throbbing Gristle- AB-7A. The band that gives our mighty cosmic sherpas their name. We’ve been on a gondola ride across a chasm of dark matter, a massive abyss "rotating in the darkness, unbearable and portentous like an iceberg of awfulness, part of some Lovecraftian clockwork mechanism of torture, ready to crush your bones and suck your marrow, to survive", while plumes of neon gas colour the folds and turns of the four dimensional event horizon down below, like pouring paint onto a spinning wet ceramic shape.

Queen Of Dreams- Strawbs. So now we’re obviously on some sort of planet of forests and oceans much like earth only completely unpopulated but for one, ghostly apparition: The Queen of Dreams. (There are no rules when you fuck with Space-Time dude). There she is, right in the middle. It feels like everything has stopped, but then we sort of come to and keep exploring the mountains.

Sic Alps - United. Sooo I guess the next place we’re going, wherever it is, is in the ocean because I’m pretty sure we’re currently on a giant cosmic surfboard riding the tubular curves created by all the rods and cones. "Poisonous flowers open up tantalisingly slow in the emerald sand of an alien planet orbiting around the imploding red dwarf of a fucked up, yet unbreakable, love".

Dog Bite- On the Air. OK so I have a feeling we’re not ever going to get wherever we’re going, yet everything has an eerily familiarity to it. I dunno maybe we’re in some parallel universe where the 50’s never ended, they just got weird.

Women- Black Rice. Yup. This is an epic cosmic surfboard ride into the centre of the Sun. All of our best friends, and all the people we ever wanted to meet, all of a sudden pull up on their space-mopeds and old-time air glide rocket cars. It feels like Quentin Tarantino adapted the screenplay to Logan’s Run and was directed by Takashi Miike. Are we dead or alive?

No Age- Sun Spots (100dBs Remix). And now we enter the Sun’s Corona. Its so beautiful. Its like we are apart of it somehow, I can’t explain. Its like the sun is inside of us. For seven years I spoke with God. He told me to take us all to Heaven.

Sean Orr, 24 Sept 2008.

Comments

Post new comment

The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.
  • Web page addresses and e-mail addresses turn into links automatically.
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.

More information about formatting options