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Sweet Sweet Fantasy Baby
Final Fantasy alert! Over the past week, the always-lovely Good Hodgkins has twice graced us with new Owen Pallett tracks.
First came a grand total of six tracks from Owen Pallett and rapper Cadence Weapons’s CBC Radio session in mid-April. Pallett is featured on three of Cadence’s tracks (check out “Sharks,” in which Pallett incorporates some sweet Andrew Bird into the mix) and then has three of his own songs: “What Do You Think Will Happen Next?”; “Paris 1919,” a cover of ex-Velvet-Undergrounder John Cale’s song; and the old stand-by, “This is the Dream of Win and Regine.” Though you may be tempted to listen to hear how “This is the Dream of Win and Regine” sounds with phat beats on top of it, avoid the track—really—and jump to the untainted “Paris 1919” instead. Then, sing along: “you’re a ghost / la la la la la la la.” “What Do You Think Will Happen Next?,” which sounds something like a more hurried random version of “Win and Regine,” is also worth the three-and-three-quarter minutes listen.
As if this weren’t enough, yesterday Hodgkins posted “Flare Gun,” a track from the Esopus #8 compilation. Esopus is a twice-yearly arts magazine that includes a CD with each issue. The theme of this one is spam: as Esopus puts it, “ten musical acts scoured their junk-mail folders to find inspiration from the scourge of the cyberage.” At about 1:10, “Flare Gun” breaks down, lulls, lurches, then collects itself and returns, back to the same violin loop that was holding the song together before. Godamn. Now if we could only figure out what spam-related topic Pallett is singing about.
Photo from tomlab.