I'm grinding away on my latest and greatest (due September 10, 2025), so why don't you get yourself out of the hot summer sun and get under the cool and rejuvenating Secret Sun?
You can start here...
We were driving back from the Totally 80s concert Friday night and enjoying the fact that literally every geographical location in America has infinitely better radio than the NY/NJ metro area.
Indeed, you can travel to the absolute middle of nowhere and find three dozen better radio stations than the rotting, stinking pile of aural garbage spewing from Manhattan.
I’ve never been able to understand why radio there is so unlistenable these days - we’re a million years away from Lou Reed singing the praises of New York airwaves in “Rock ’n Roll.” Those great stations are all long gone, destroyed like so much that once gave this country meaning. And destroyed for nothing but pure spite.
But that’s nothing compared to how it felt going to a giant casino sitting literally in the shadow of the rotting ruins of the once-mighty Bethlehem Steel Works, the foundry that literally built America.
Forty years ago, Billy Joel sang a lament for neighboring Allentown, lapsing into oblivion from the closure of the mills, so this certainly isn’t a new problem. But it still made me long to see every outsourcer, in-sourcer, off-shorer and globalizer hung upside down like human piñatas all the same.
Even that is far too kind a fate, considering all the damage they've done.
All the more so since whatever benefits consumers once got from imported goods made by virtual slave labor are as much a memory as decent radio in NYC. No sane person thinks that all the junk flooding in from China or Mexico is better-made or more affordable than it would be were it made here these days.
All the more so since whatever benefits consumers once got from imported goods made by virtual slave labor are as much a memory as decent radio in NYC. No sane person thinks that all the junk flooding in from China or Mexico is better-made or more affordable than it would be were it made here these days.
Actually, I don’t think anyone thinks that at all...
Once in a great while you find something you were looking for, but didn’t realize you were looking for.
It’s one of those moments when the dreaded algorithm takes pity on your poor soul, and throws you a lifeline while you’re drowning in an ocean of ordinary.
Or more accurately, when the Signal bursts through all the digital noise, as it slowly trains itself to finally burst forth from the ultimate Trash Stratum.
Which, make no mistake, it is going to.
Now, you all know how much I love electronic music - ambient, synthwave, and all the rest of it. But I have this special fixation on early-mid 80s electronic music, especially solo synth work, as I feel that the Signal had found a particularly favorable environment for enchantment.
Maybe it’s because I got my first Yahama Portasound in 1986, and it was like I suddenly had the entire world of sound and music at my disposal. It was one of most exciting times of my entire life.
I was also listening to radio shows like Synthetic Pleasures and Hearts of Space, and felt like I’d fallen onto an uncharted alien world, ripe for exploration...
