RADIKAL TECHNO
If you want the hardest, best, most intense techno... stay away from anything with the name Radikal Techno on it. My theory is that they buy the rights to one known artist to put the album and all the rest of the artists, to use the term loosely, are unsigned "talent." I do have two of these discs, but will explain why I have them: 1) This disc is over 70 minutes long and I found used for $3. It has a few okay songs and a lot of crap on it, but for the most part, it's only $3, so who cares, right? 2) This one cost $9 and has one or two good songs on it, but two that are so especially bad they're hilarious; so I kept the album because it made me laugh so much. Leave it to the people who created tejano music to f*** up techno; both of the aforementioned songs are Latin entries. The first bad song uses the hook "Yo quiero puta" over and over in such an authentic barfly tone it would make any woman shudder. The second bad song uses a rooster as a sample in the song, at times making the rooster stutter in, I suppose, a scratching-like effect. Stick to the Moonshine label for general techno needs, it's not as funny, but the music is much better.
RAMMSTEIN
I don't think we're at a point in time where we need to be importing sh**ty music from overseas-- "Death metal" is the universal language of untalented lameness.
RANDOM
A strange little disc set that I never would have found if it weren't for the listening stations at Borders. This is a two-disc set with import-quality songs and is priced slightly under single disc price, go figure. Totally unpromoted in the US, you can hear such artists as Damon Albarn, St. Etienne, Dubstar, Moloko, the Orb, and others (including we-didn't-know-they-were-still-recording entries as Jesus Jones and EMF), all of them covering Gary Numan songs. Who is he? He had that song "Cars" in the early 80's. I don't know exactly how or why this album came about, but it displays a magnificent array of music from bassy techno tunes to piano ballads and was my favorite disc from 1997. Check it out. And if you ever find the marketing manager for this label, seriously kick his ass for me.
RED HOT AND...
The Red Hot series is one of the best resources of music this decade, a sort of AIDS-awareness project. The first album, a personal favorite, Red, Hot, and Blue had artists ranging from Annie Lennox to David Byrne covering Cole Porter songs in modern fashion. This was the album which inspired both my exploration of jazz and morbid fear of showtunes. Porter, in my opinion, was the greatest American composer of the century and is celebrated for his showtunes; which were adopted by the jazz community, and eventually other genres too.
Blue was followed by Stolen Moments: Red, Hot, and Cool, an acid jazz compilation which restored my faith in the genre. Previously I saw it has rappers bastardizing jazz, which is was for what I'd heard of it, but this project had rappers and jazz musicians working together to make the songs; and the result was my favorite acid jazz album to date.
The most recent release from the series coupled two of my favorite musical genres, techno and bossa nova. It's an exotic South American bliss of music with artists ranging from PM Dawn to Milton Nascimento in various musical stylings which all have bossa nova roots to them. Explore them all!!
