RC 384: Tender Silence of Night – Deep Dive #2

It has only taken me a year and a half to get around to the second Deep DIve (!) – I was going to put this out in a few months after the first Deep Dive but never got around to it. The catalyst for this bonus podcast was a new controller – the five year old trusty Numark DJ2Go2 as seen in my old streams has started to have That Button Problem. So I decided to slightly upgrade to the Hercules Starlight – and despite the frankly pants name, it’s a great controller. Much better than my old one.



So after already speaking for over an hour on an interview about podcasting (news on that to come), I decided to wreck my voice even more and do a rare theme podcast – this one is rather downtempo, but not depressing, Night flex and chill, as ver kids might say.



So we range from acid country to new age, Arabic electronica to Bollywood disco, Japanese city pop to Scottish indie/folktronica, indie covers to library music, psychedelic disco and songs about trees, social programming and microchips as we drift through time and space, deep dive deeper and deeper into the inky black.



Deep Dive Into A Musical Black Hole of Night (2:25, 197Mb)



Listen to RC 384: Tender Silence of Night (Deep Dive #2) by Radio Clash on hearthis.at




Mashrou’ Leila – El Mouqadima



Martyn Bennett – Hallaig



Michael Nesmith & The Second National Band – In the Afternoon



Camera Obscura – I’m Not in Love



Kumar Sanu – Piya Tu Ab To Aaja



VC People – Bomarzo



Enya – Aldebaran



Halim El-Dabh – Wire Recorder Piece



Alisha Chinai & Vijay Benedict – Zindagi Meri Dance



Takeuchi Mariya 竹内 まりや – Plastic Love (12” Original Length Remix)



Ron Geesin – Mini Molecules



Playback – Microprocessor



Verb T & Pitch 92 – Mechanical



Hannah Peel – Ecovocative (Paddy Kingsland remix)



Videosex – Space Lab



Ron Geesin – Upon Composition



Bernard Fevre – Odyssee



Enya – Deireadh An Tuath



Belbury Poly – Time Scale



Sheila – Tender Silence of the Night



Al Massrieen – Hatgeni Tani



Kaleidoscope Band – I Get Lifted



Strawberry Switchblade – Trees & Flowers



Suzzy & Maggie Roche – A Day In The Life Of A Tree



Arab Strap – Another Clockwork Day



Mort Garson – Didn’t You Hear?



Beverly Glenn-Copeland – Color Of Anyhow



The Monkees – Tapioca Tundra



The Horrors – I Can See Through You (Blanck Mass Remix)



Ahmed Fakroun – Nisyan



Hannah Peel – Unheard Delia, Pt. 1



Ego Ella May – How Long ‘Til We’re Home




Transcript
Hello and welcome to Radio Clash, this is 384 and it’s the second of the Deep Dive series finally after year and a half and it’s Tender Silence of Night. That was Martyn Bennett, they’ve sadly missed Martyn Bennett with Hallaig and that’s sampling Sorley MacLean, one of the best Highlands poets ever and I love that by the end which I left where you hear him here speaking in Galleg which was his native language, his first language. That was from Bothy Culture, very influential album, Bothy Culture from 1996 and then before that you heard Mashrou’ Leila, also sadly departed although the members are still alive but the band called it a day. Back in September that’s El Mouqadima, I don’t know, probably pronounced that wrong and that’s from 2019’s Beirut School and when I put this mixed together they were still a going concern although they were having a lot of aggro from the authorities and this is 384 Deep Dive 2 or the first of the Deep Dive podcast was done all the way back in January 2022 and the idea was to do a Deep Dive, hence the name, in the something like a hundred gigabytes of tracks I’ll have a look, it is 103 gigabytes of music that I have in my to play folder and the idea was to do many more of these and this podcast was a stopgap of when I’m like oh well I just want a podcast but I don’t have a show prepped and it just happened to be I never got around to doing the next one which is crazy, I looked I was like really a year and a half ago and I don’t do many theme podcasts, I’ve just done an interview with Dean Whitbread for the History of Podcasting podcast and I mentioned that, that I don’t do many theme podcasts anymore and I just finished the interview and went well it’s all set up anyway I’m here as we’ll do another podcast even though I’ve just put out 383 so I’m not exactly sure when I put this out but it’s a bit of a summer stopgap because I don’t know what’s happening with the summer and when I’m going to podcast and what’s going on podcast wise so this is a useful thing and also I have to say I was rather reticent to put this one out well for a variety of reasons but main one being initially I thought it was a very dumb tempo it was created around the time Michael Nesmith died so there’s a couple of Michael Nesmith tracks in here or there’s a Michael Nesmith track and a monkey’s track later on which is coming up next and I thought oh it’s too downbeat it’s got lots of things you probably don’t know things you should know and there’s some known things in there as well but there’s some known unknowns I don’t know if there’s any unknown unknowns but there is lots of new music and I’ve just been listening to six music and now start doing the New Music Fix at 7 p.m just playing new stuff and I’m sort of inspired because that’s sort of why I’ve been moaning about six music for a long time they should play new music and it’s like well do what I preach about so these are very much deep cuts deep dives through what I like the kind of off cuts that didn’t make it into other podcasts because not because they’re not amazing they’re all amazingly good music it’s more the fact that I worry about whether anyone will get them and whether anyone will like them because the hard sell playing either very new stuff or ambient out there stuff so this is a lot of library music a lot of new age a lot of it’s not all down tempo but it’s not depressing I was worried that it was like and listen I went through it a couple of days ago because I’ve got a new controller it’s the other thing I want to blow my new controller I’ve got a Hercules Starlight controller which I have to say an amazing upgrade from my old Numark DJ2Go2 the one before all the touch wheels they brought out the touch wheels in response to this controller and just the problem is that a bit like Adriana’s controller she’s got an old Kaos controller Korg Kaos the buttons started to go so I was like well it’s not worth trying to fix something like that and I’ve always wanted to get one of these even though it’s about the same sort of price and I do recommend it I think it’s better than Numark but the touch DJ2Go2 is good as well but mine was the old one and I love the fact that you can do spins and you’ve got the touch and stability you can just stop tracks by touching that’s very helpful for DJing so anyway enough DJ talk I said I’d play a track by Mike Nesmith this is from his second national band something that I think a lot of people don’t know there was this hinterland post Monkees where he did very psychedelic country even more so on this album which is tantamount to treason uh volume volume one and it’s really beautiful it is very similar to some of the things he did during the Monkees which are more psychedelic I’d say it’s a shame that people don’t know more about Mike Nesmith’s post Monkees career people know Rio but they don’t seem to know much about the other stuff well we’re checking out so this is in the afternoon And that was obviously well not obviously I mean I’ve heard it before but I suspect everyone’s heard it by now that’s Takeuchi Mariya I think Mariya Takeuchi with Plastic Love the 12 inch original version the remixes just the original version from what was it have I put the dating properly no it says 2014 it’s 1980s it’s 1980s Tokyo City Pop and for some reason in the 10s it was recommended to a lot of people because YouTube algorithm picked on it and then it suddenly everyone went into whatever on but a lot of people got into city pop had it appearing on the timelines probably because it sounded like something else that was big because a lot of that 80s pop is very similar I mean Dua Lipa definitely influences I’ve heard mashups for that would do a lipo and various other people but I love that and they’re in an English version there was bits of English in there but I always prefer the Japanese version it just seems to have something to it that just works way better than the English version recorded at the time so it’s not like they’ve since put it together and again at the time when that was released completely just not a hit just thank without a trace even in Japan and then just gets resurrected 30 years later by YouTube algorithm and suddenly it forms all over it and I fell into a rabbit hole of City Pop then before that we had Alisha Chinai and Vijay Benedict with Zindagi Meri Dance there’s going to be lots of pronunciation problems in this podcast there’s going to be lots of issues with pronunciation I can tell you that for free and that’s from Bollywood Freak Out compilation from 2013 again a big fan of Bollywood music and psychedelic Bollywood or disco Bollywood specifically you might have heard of Cheeky Abba Steel they all your love on me was stolen in that but I love the space theme I don’t know the movie I assume it’s for a Bollywood movie but it’s you know Venus and Mars and whatever it’s interesting because I was listening to Planetarium by Sufjan Stevens and Bryan Dessner and Nico Mohlny that kind of hits the space theme way better than most of the album does the album has got very strange production even though the songs are good sometimes it just doesn’t really hit on the production and and that works better as a space theme than than most of that album then before that we had some very old-school Arab Electronica that’s Halim El-Dabh with Wire Recorder Piece from 1959 yes early acoustic electronic electric experiments and that’s from a compilation called Crossing into the Monetic Electric and again I am a matter fan of Arab Electronica Arab disco Arabic world everyone has this assumption that anywhere outside the west is a bit behind the times that’s not necessarily true and also they had a lot of funk and disco and it kept that torture live a lot longer than the west and all this disco sucks and all that stuff as well so anybody who still likes disco post in 1980 yeah I’m a fan and then before that we had Enya talking to Electronica at Aldebaran from 1987’s Enya and I think that might be why it says 87’s Enya I think it might be from the Celts album I think it’s interesting how Enya’s been reapplied because I mean Clannad haven’t unfortunately and I’m a big fan of Clannad and so of course I was all over Enya figuratively phrasing but you know she was briefly or for about a year or two I mean she’s a sister of the people in Clannad she’s part of that big Brennan family and Eithne that she’s Enya Ethni I’m probably pronouncing that wrong but it’s Eithne Brennan I think is her name but although then yeah that’s probably probably how you say it actually I don’t know much about Gaelic and my Gaelic is very limited and yeah she started out doing a BBC Celts and then her first album was around this sort of times yeah I was very much into that melding of electronic and Irish music because Clannad also branched out into more pop and more electronics but she was in there when they were very very trad very trad and then before that we had Vc People Bomarzo from 1980 now that is obscure I can’t remember much about them they are part of a cosmic folder I found on Soulseek many years ago it is wonderful when you find a big dump of files in a certain genre and someone’s collated them and you’re like this is brilliant this is all hard to find anywhere else and you’d spend decades trying to find on vinyl so you know it’s always good to find that sort of thing and I’m not sure who put it together but it was a lot of music on this podcast that is of a more obscure electronica sort of 1980s 1970s Krautrock Cosmic Disco weird stuff a lot of it especially in the early years after I after the hiatus came from that it’s just you know a wonderful wonderful folder of music I spent quite a few months delving through all that’s one of those I think then before that we had from the Rough Guide To Psychedelic Bollywood we had Kumar Sanu with Piya Tu Ab To Aaja I think I’m sure people who know Hindi are laughing at that and that’s from 2014 although it’s not from 2014 but the compilation is from 2014 again a lot of that more psychedelic disco electronic Hollywood is from 70s 80s some sort of 90s the taste became more slender on more pop in the 90s with Bollywood there’s always quite a lot of stealing from the West and borrowing genres and the styles and put them together a bit like a lot of Japanese music it’s interesting because they don’t necessarily understand the context so they’re put together in sort of very unique ways but I would say the heyday of that very strange wonderfully strange wonderfully unique sounding mashup it is a kind of a mashup of Indian culture and western culture happened around the 70s 80s and early 90s and then before that we had Camera Obscura from Scotland that’s I’m Not In Love that’s a session that’s a radio session Dermott O’Leary session from 2015 and then the start of that section we had Michael Nesmith and The Second National Band with In the Afternoon from Tantamount To Treason I re-recommend you check out Tantamount To Treason it’s from 1971 I think it was a second one because I think there was a couple of albums by The Second National Band and I think that was good and the other one’s a bit not so interesting I think it was the second one and it seemed to be that he went more and more psychedelic and then he just cancelled that and went into doing basically inventing MTV and doing the video stuff and and going more pop that’s a shame I did like a national band but again no one was interested or honestly no one but not very many who were interested at the time and that’s such a shame because I would say it is brilliant so we’re gonna play a track by Ron Geesin and this is from a library record but a lot of Ron Geesin’s work is library music but his electronic artist is Scottish and very well worth listening to that was Belbury Poly with Time Scale from 2009 from an ancient start a brilliant album what I think Belbury Poly has ever really beaten the album although their work along with advisory circle with John Foxx is the high point of Ghost Box Recordings but yeah I think the best Belbury Poly album is still From An Ancient Star although I’ve not checked in with them very recently although I occasionally look into what Ghost Box are up to then before that we had Enya with uh here we go Deireadh An Tuath I think as I said my Gaelic is not good and I checked though it’s called Enya album it was a rebranded version of the soundtrack for the Celts so BBC production and that’s before Watermark which is 1988 which was a big thing where she hit the big time Sail Away Sail Away and then before that we had Bernard Fevre with Odyssee from 1977 I love Bernard Fevre I’m now blanking on whether it’s actually someone else under assumed name so many of the library artists are somebody else under an assumed name but I don’t think so in that case but I could be wrong and somebody who is always himself Ron Geesin with Upon Composition and that’s from his 1973 As He Stands album yes he’s Scottish I was looking up his bio and I was like yes Scottish I work with Pink Floyd and Roger Waters I think I’ve done a fair bit of how do you describe it engineering and helping people realise sound like a lot of the early synth pioneers had to build their own synths and I think he’s one of those they built his own instruments and they quite often helped other people to to do things as well pop stars and established acts to sort of help realise their ideas and that obviously covers not only is this taste for Radio Wonderful leave Wonderfully Empty whereas Radio One but also talking about composition and interruption but you can see the humour in there and Ron Geesin’s work is full of humour and I really recommend you check Ron Geesin out then before that we had Video Sex I love the name I forget where they are in the eastern bloc are they I don’t think the Ukrainian but they’re that part of the world and that’s Spacelab bonus track from their reissue of their album Ljubi In Sovraži from 1991 but it’s reissue 1992 with the Spacelab graphic cover on it and it is long I mixed it in there but it’s what nine minutes eight minutes long something nine minutes 40 but it’s a really good cover of Spacelab with those voices and yeah I can’t exactly remember where video sex is from I don’t know if they’re Hungarian Bulgarian that part of the world or they’re Czech I could always I could always check I could always check haha that’s Czech where are they from Slovenian former Yugoslavia but not the former Yugoslavia that’s the band but Slovenian I knew they were Eastern bloc-y and pre the fall of the Berlin Wall as well so then before that we had Hannah Peel with Evocative the Paddy Kingsland remix Paddy Kingsland channeling I think Spacelab I mean that just that’s the reason why I put this two together all those many years ago or you know I’ve got they yeah it sounds like Spacelab especially the star I was like Spacelab and that’s from 2021’s Unheard Delia I think it was an EP I’ve played one of the Delia sampling tracks before and you might hear it later on but that was one of the originals of Hannah Peel but remixed by someone from the Radio Funny Workshop so it all tracks and then before that we had Mechanical and I totally agree it’s interesting listening to things from a past because kind of either forget what you were thinking about or you sort of remember dimly but that’s still even more so with AI that still tracks that idea of you’re programmed you’re a computer like Progam Me by Bruce Haack that we’re programmed by society to do things like computers but it seems like AI is making that even more obvious as Mechanical by Verb T & Pitch 92 from 2017’s Good Evening and then before that we had Playback otherwise known as Player One you probably know them better as Player One if you know them at all they released an album of their hit Space Invader and a lot of people probably know Space Invader because it was a it was quite a big hit around the Space Invader boom they did that’s not about Space Invaders they also didn’t can basically a concept album about that Tronix Microchips called Space Invaders but it’s different to their big hit their big hit was sort of like a novelty pop hit and that’s Micro Processor and as they said in an interview a lot off all the 13 or 14 year olds it was like you’ve lost them but they’re known as Playback there and I really recommend checking out the album because it is a really odd album because a lot of those early computer game cash-in things there’s quite a few of them they certainly don’t get critical about it and critical of that technology that’s coming in like that song you know as the valley’s becoming it’s looking it seems to be about the early chip boom and early computers and interestingly even if you haven’t heard Space Invader you have heard the things that’s influenced because the baseline was sampled for Jesse Saunders On And On it’s the first Chicago house record it’s not the first house record the first house record as we know is by Imagination and it’s a song called Burnin’ Up Frankie Knuckles is a source of that information and if Frankie says it it’s true then it’s true it is true that piano house thing if you listen to it you just speed up slightly and apparently they used to play at parties and and then they were like oh we could do this that’s where the house music came from it’s from my favorite chartered pans Imagination so brilliant and then before the start of the section we had Ron Geesin again with Mini Molecules from 1975 take notes children KPM 114 eLectric Sound Vol 2 so we’re gonna play a track that gave this podcast its name Sheila – Tender Silence Of The Night I dropped the of don’t know why I did that and this well i’ll speak about it in a bit That was Hannah Peel I mentioned before on her Delia part one I played part two on the podcast over a year and a half ago a long time ago before that we had Ahmed Fakroun with Nizyan from a 2010 compilation and you probably know Ahmed Fakroun more for a track called Yo Son which seems to pop up every once in a while occasionally a play on radio or something then before that we had The Horrors that’s a track that has been in the stack for a very long time as I Can See Through You Blanck Mass Remix from higher from 2012 yeah I think that predates the hiatus I really put it back in there because I actually deleted when I had the three year hiatus i deleted the old podcast directory which is a very silly thing to do because I was like oh well you know I won’t need these anymore and I don’t have copies of these so I rebuilt it from 2018 but that one went back in because I just love that and it’s something very almost 28 days later sort of very dark wave very maybe synth wave but pre that about that you know and that’s what that was Black Mass at the height of their powers then before that we had the Monkees with Tapioca Tundra that’s Mike Nesmith writing and singing and that’s from a release a re-release always some compilation called bIrds And The Bees And The Monkees but yeah that’s from 67 I think 67 or 68 but I love that sort of stream of consciousness and very much you know acid country feel to that then before that we had Beverly Glenn-Copeland played a song or referred to Beverly Glenn-Copeland in a recent podcast because of the sampling of La Vita by Romy from the xx but that is Beverley Glenn-Copeland themselves Color Of Anyhow from their first album from 1970 which is also you know eponymously named and then oh we have a song that means so much to me and never seem to fit anywhere else it’s Mort Garson from the soundtrack of didn’t you hear that’s Didn’t You Hear I can’t remember who actually does the vocals on that don’t seem to have worked with Mort Garson again or just for that film and didn’t you hear is a very strange I don’t have to describe that film if you can imagine a more psychedelic version of Mazes And Monsters it’s kind of like that I mean it’s not about Dungeons and Dragons but it’s about someone who is at a university and fantasy life their dream life starts coming through into the real world but involving so a bit like Wizard Of Oz it’s like the people up here and this person’s life on campus start appearing in their fantasies but you don’t really sure if they are really fantasies it’s a strange strange film I only watch bits of it it was Gary Busey’s first film I knew there was somebody who went on to do other things but it was kind of a student project but it was a properly released film the soundtrack was unreleased for a long time well worth checking out the soundtrack of Didn’t You Hear then before that we had Arab Strap Another Clockwork Day which was kind of new then or new ish then it was in 2021 and that’s from As Days Get Dark and I love that how it’s it seems quite seedy and quite literally mentioning spermatozoa but I love that you’re wearing nothing but your postcode but then at the end you sort of have this it’s actually quite a wholesome thing although very sad and also quite a lot of onwy and melancholy in there as it would be with anything by Aiden Moffat and it it’s very true a lot of people live I know I do you know that sort of clockwork way you know you do things by row and it’s it feels like a grind a lot of the time then before that we had Suzzie And Maggie Roche with A Day In The Life Of A Tree 2004’s Why The Long Face which is one of my favorite titles of an album any if you’re going to have a title of an album make it one half of a pun it’s is brilliant but yes if I ever do a the long threatened exhibition of my tree paintings that will be on the soundtrack you know it’s something i’ve listened to while painting trees and so it’s like it’s a full circle then before that i’m out trees but not really about trees that’s Strawberry Switchblade Trees And Flowers well it says four piece demo from 1982 I thought it was a pill session but could be the demo version and one of the members of strawberry switchblade had agoraphobia i’m not sure if they stayed with them being in a touring big band is a bit of a problem as you’re agoraphobic but that’s about you know yeah you should go out and feel the trees and flowers but you’re too scared and then before that we had a cover for ages I thought this was the original version Kaleidoscope Band with I Get Lifted but that’s a cover and that’s another one from the Cosmic Dudes folder I mentioned earlier that yeah it’s a beautiful disco song but it’s only a very psychedelic about that version whereas the original version is more straightforward disco then before that we had had Hatgeni Tani by Al Massrieen and I know nothing about that apart from it’s where it says it’s from 2017 it’s obviously older obviously older must be a compilation and in the start of section we had Sheila otherwise known as Sheila and Black Devotion Sheila B Devotion B Devotion is actually a group Black Devotion but in France you just known eponymously as Sheila because she was quite famous in France and that’s Tender Silence Of The Night it’s from 1979 I think yeah 79 it tops out her album Disco D’or which probably wasn’t the english english version but yes and you know anything that’s sort of like cosmic ballads cosmic feel like some of the Sylvester stuff i’m always there and it just shows you that Sheila did more than Spacer which is actually quite late in her career after b devotion had left to become another band so you know everyone remembers Spacer but she had hits before that some really good you know ones like hotel a plage which you might hear because i was obviously on a Sheila kick at this time because both deep dives have Sheila tracks in so yes it whenever whenever you get to hear number three in this series hopefully not another year and a half and let me know if you want to hear more of these because I would say it’s easy because i have to dive through some really old stuff but it is interestingly random but also you can hear see threads of what i’ve been playing over the last five years the arabica electonica is a thread that runs through back to my trip to egypt so that’s what that was that 2011 if you’re doing The Revolution yeah so you know it’s been a part of the podcast for a long time so there’s always things which are part of the fabric of the podcast and it’s nice to kind of you know have them and and as I said these tracks are very much ones which are are square edges straight and they’re not round they’re spiky just like my profile spiky and hard to fit in anywhere like they’re too long or they’re too weird or people don’t know them whatever but it’s nice to give them a home finally and you know it doesn’t mean they’re not good in fact they’re good in their own way and I always feel bad when these tracks get taken out as some of these have and many times been put into podcast and taken out they don’t fit the mix they don’t fit whatever I wanted to do and I feel sad for that because they they deserve they deserve better they deserve far better so i’ve reached the end of this podcast finally and we’re gonna play out with a track which is I think I wasn’t that new it was 2020 but this is Ego Ella May I think I just heard it about that sort of time probably from Don Letts sounds like a very Don Letts track this is How Long Till We’re Home from the Honey For Wounds album I think I think it’s from the album so I hope you’re all well and yeah the controller has gone very well I only made one mistake which you won’t hear but yeah the lights for the beds aren’t always lit up so unlike the other one I did some kind of weird so I made the mistake of mixing in when the beds were on it was like still running I was like I need a big flashing light says beds are on but i’m losing my voice when I did a now and a half interview and then this podcast which is a bit silly so i’ll speak to you soon anything else is your own problem right