Moon Dice/voopoowoo/new nostalgia sounds

Many years ago, I put in a big order to Night-People (now defunct it looks like, sadly) and I got a big package in the mail with a lot of thoroughly aesthetically unified cassettes, as well as a T-shirt that weirds everyone out when I wear it, all eyeballs and dizzy-making warped op art.

One of the cassettes with said aesthetic was from also-now-defunct Melbourne act Moon Dice. They have that lost-inside-a-VCR sound that I can appreciate every so often without actually dipping their foot into the dreaded vaporwhatever genre trappings, especially now that vooporwoover is getting appropriated by a bunch of loathsome types eager to mix 80s nostalgia with nostalgia for late-30s Germany. MD just sound like a weird out-of-time facsimile of an 80s where everyone was listening to, well, not the Clean, but maybe Stephen? instead of A Flock of Seagulls.

Also, warbly pop music like this is one of the few scenarios where I can see tapes making sense. Because it does have the exact correct amount of bad sound on tape.

Looking forward to voopoowoo fading out, along with its fash hangers-on. Next step is making music on the Palm Pilot.

The Tortures of the Memory of a Lost Love

Schulz again with what might be Lucy's best moment of combined mayhem and regret

The way she uses the over-the-top phrase "the tortures of the memory of a lost love" not once, but twice, just to make sure that Schroeder (and the reader) are absolutely clear about why she is reducing his toy piano to dust!

I've largely left all the tortures of my memories of lost loves in other states, thank goodness*, but this one is just so great.

*(c.f. "All My Exes Live in Texas," a song that needed to be written, as inevitable as "Honky-Tonk Badonkadonk" - the language was laying it out there, saying, hey, here's that rhyme that will bring you the large amount of money and fame you were looking for)

Noon whistle/Siren enthusiasts

Today my son was obsessed with expressions that include the word "whistle": clean as a whistle, bells and whistles, etc.

This naturally led me to do a search for noon whistles, that fixture of rural life back in my days in the hinterlands. Do they still exist? Yes! Are people obsessed with them and warning sirens in general? Yes!

A brief search and I was down a serious rabbit hole. Midwest Siren Productions, IASIRENSANDMORE. Sirens of NY. North Dakota Sirens and Roblox. Iowan Siren Recordings.

None of the videos actually, you know, really LISTENABLE unless you crank the volume way down. Does siren fandom include owning a siren? If so, do the fans crank them up? What went down at SirenCon 2021?

What a world!