8 Tracks – Darshan Jesrani (Metro Area)

My parents, sister and I took a trip by train to St. Louis (my mother’s hometown) in 1981 or 82 to visit my grandmother, who was in the hospital at the end of her life. I was 8 or 9. I heard this song on the radio in my cousin Lisa’s car and still remember leaning forward, over the gearshift from the back seat to listen closer and ask what it was. I bought the “Moving Pictures” album when I got back home, from a store in the mall called Book & Record. What I loved about this song was the intro and the sparseness of the verses heavy on the synth, with a scifi vibe that I was kind of un knowingly searching for.

When I found 98.7 KissFM on my dad’s FM tuner, an “urban”/R&B station broadcasting from NYC, I was in heaven. A lot of time was spent sitting on the carpet by the speakers, listening, or recording parts of radio shows. They used to play this song constantly along with a lot of early drum machine rap records. The beginning is melancholy and sparse, in keeping with the subject of the song, drawing your attention, but then it turns into the most buoyant, bouncy party record despite that it’s about the protagonist being torn up about her love who is cheating. The subject made an impression on me and the tunefulness of the track itself made it all stick. Melancholy/sad and sweet at the same time.

I heard this song on the same station around 1984 and recorded it to a really short cassette. The other side was a super long “megamix” of Herbie Hancock’s “Rockit.” The breakdancing craze was in full swing at this point, and it was all over TV and movies. Of course I was completely captivated by the whole thing? the moves, the gliding, the beats and the space/video game themes. I’ve always had a little bit of a romance with technology, science fiction, futurism. It’s only in the past decade or so that I’ve sort of fallen out of love with it, feeling that real life is actually becoming more and more “futuristic” with each passing year, but with an aim toward marketing, tracking and surveillance, which I find hard to get excited about. Anyway, what was it about this record? Oh yeah, breaking and scifi, and vocoder!

Continuing with the theme of technoromance, I had a parallel interest in the burgeoning world of home computers and modems, which led me into the underground scene of hacking and phone phreaking. My friend gave me Kraftwerk’s “Electric Caf” cassette when I was about, 13 and I fell instantly in love with this song and it’s lonely synthesizer melodies about connecting with another human being remotely, over the wires, which was exactly what I was doing afterhours in my own life. We used to “hang out” on electronic bulletin boards, accessed by landline and modem, and illegally use corporate conference call bridges to chat and trade information.

I have another cousin who absoutely loved David Bowie and was really into him when I was first starting to get into records. I was too young, at the time, to really understand his music, but his alien look and titles like “Alladin Sane” and “Ziggy Stardust” were really good for my imagination. I used to sit in her room, amongst her sketch books and many pets, and stare at these album covers. I didn’t get into this song until high school which, I think, is around the same age she was when she introduced this to me. This song and “Space Oddity” blew me away. More melancholy space stuff.

The summer after my senior year in high school I had a girlfriend who was a little older than I was, who was a student at the Fashion Institute of Technology. We used to hang out at her place in Manhattan. She introduced me to David Sylvian’s music, and I remember feeling content and kind of positive and sure about the future when I heard this for the first time, for some reason. It felt refined and sexy, but also hinted at a little recklessness and artiness, maybe due in part to Robert Fripp’s bold guitar playing. The rhythm track has a slow R&B swing, with a little bit of a familiar Trevor Hornlike mix. Just a little bit of everything in a song which, to me, made a statement that there are sophisticated “middle” spaces in between styles to explore.

I was a music director at my college radio station and we used to receive these boxes of 12″s from a record pool which was fed by a distributor called Intellinet. They handled a lot of labels from the midwest US and Canada, some of which are legendary in hindsight Ron Trent and Chez Damier’s Prescription Underground being one of them, Richie Hawtin’s Plus 8 being another. I loved every Prescription record with their soulful but restrained melodies and deep, moody vibe. This one seems to evoke the spirit of disco in a really truncated, hammering, abstract, ultramodern, Chicago way. To me, this still feels fresh and unmatched by most of today’s house productions.

When I first moved to New York City in 1997 I was staying with a friend from college, paying her a little bit of rent to sleep in her tiny living room on east 33rd st. Another good college friend of mine gave a cassette to me of this whole EP 5 songs, all written and performed by Gwen Guthrie, strippped down and remixed by Larry Levan. I copied this to a minidisc and listened to it constantly while walking and taking the train around the city. To me It is the quintessential postdisco electronic soul record, having everything that Prelude and West End were experimenting with, plus a rich, bigstudio sound and great playing. Futuristic and soulful to my ear, it was an amazing soundtrack to my first city experiences and it still informs what I do.