Tuesday, March 4, 2008  12:59 am 

Ice Tempos

In an icy cave in the deepest forests of Canada (forests where the leaves have all long gone, but are instead replaced with dangling icicles that chime to an incessant beat), there lives a creature with bright yellow spherical eyes and pale blue skin, wrapped up all snug in a pea-green parka jacket. He sips hot chocolate from a chipped mug with “Get Happy” splashed across the side in comedy pink balloon text. When bored, which is often, he reaches for his pristine iPod (white obviously), applying pressure to the play icon. The sounds that unfurl in his inner ear smears a contented grin across his frosty face and his limbs begin to twitch then roll, slink and slap.

Arcade Lover - Fantasy Lines (In Dub)

The postal system is bad in the creature’s area, lily-livered postmen won’t venture into the icy forest for fear of becoming a delicious lunch to a Snow-Shoggoth. But the creature could purchase his latest digital favourite on sexy vinyl 12″ from the Tirk store.

Nevertheless, he’s down with this crazy sound of Arcade Lover (one half Darshan Jesrani from Metro Area and the other half Escort’s Daniel Balis) imagining two old skool 8-bit arcade protagonists meeting in the snow of the iced woodland to have a sex-fuelled strut to the low slung cowbell and lusty guitar licks. He appreciates the fact that Arcade Lover are streaming the love-rocket consciousness of Kano (italo version, not grime) and the femme-fatale disco nonchalance of Belle Epoque. He dances hard, but a glassy tear forms in his left eye as the singer coos of starship endeavors never to be had by our lonesome creature friend.

But iPod shuffle is kind to our creature and the tempo slows and dusk creeps in as a track from Skinny Joey’s latest edit bonanza 12″ on Mindless Boogie loads up and begins to play.

Mindless Boogie - Peel Speed (Skinny Joey Edit)

He twists and moonwalks in a darkly hypnotic refrain as the wind-chime synths are carried in on the glitter-flecked solar winds of Venus and perfectly assimilate into the iceberg-like strikes of the cold drum machine tones and the deep freeze hits from the piano keys. The impossibly beautiful lady with silken white hair and faded blue eyes from his dreams hisses into his ears and a new world appears before him as klaxons constructed from icicles call down a frosted mirror ball that catches the light from a thousand stars, and suddenly the disco that he replays in his mind is real and surrounding him.

labels >> Arcade Lover, Mindless Boogie, disco, dreams, ghosts, italo, xxjfg