Awake
08-11-2006, 09:29 PM
About ten years ago, I went to Russia, and there was one song that was really a soundtrack for that visit - the instrumental E55 by Simple Minds, which was a b-side on the She's a River single. I found out several years later that the song was actually written about the E-55 highway which led from Moscow towards western Europe through Czechoslovakia, as a reaction to what was happening at the time with the Velvet Revolution and the general collape of the Warsaw Pact and those regimes. That seemed to make it an even more fitting soundtrack for Russia.
So anyway, I always really loved this instrumental, and for a long time wanted to record a cover version of it, and after recent adventures, felt that I'd gotten a good enough handle on producing stuff on my little setup here that I could do a nice job of it here. I'll let Glen McDonald sum up the original (http://www.furia.com/page.cgi?type=twas&id=twas0003#entry12):Whether anybody but me will react as strongly to it I'm unsure, but I can't stop listening to it. It's resolutely mechanical, and simultaneously epic, in sort of the way Vangelis's Chariots of Fire theme was. It's completely synthetic, and largely repetitive, but it's got this great little trebly synth-piano hook, echoed sporadically in huge sweeping guitar strokes ... simple and unassuming, but I find it completely charming.
I reacted to it as strongly as Glenn did, so without further ado:
E55 (http://simondodd.org/noise2signal/music/e55.mp3).
If you like it, the original should be on Itunes or Ebay or whatever. I've added a coda with a bit of a bluesy guitar solo and a Guy Pratt-ish bass groove, but otherwise it's more-or-less as it was.
So anyway, I always really loved this instrumental, and for a long time wanted to record a cover version of it, and after recent adventures, felt that I'd gotten a good enough handle on producing stuff on my little setup here that I could do a nice job of it here. I'll let Glen McDonald sum up the original (http://www.furia.com/page.cgi?type=twas&id=twas0003#entry12):Whether anybody but me will react as strongly to it I'm unsure, but I can't stop listening to it. It's resolutely mechanical, and simultaneously epic, in sort of the way Vangelis's Chariots of Fire theme was. It's completely synthetic, and largely repetitive, but it's got this great little trebly synth-piano hook, echoed sporadically in huge sweeping guitar strokes ... simple and unassuming, but I find it completely charming.
I reacted to it as strongly as Glenn did, so without further ado:
E55 (http://simondodd.org/noise2signal/music/e55.mp3).
If you like it, the original should be on Itunes or Ebay or whatever. I've added a coda with a bit of a bluesy guitar solo and a Guy Pratt-ish bass groove, but otherwise it's more-or-less as it was.