Monday, January 5, 2009

Geeks only



I don't know about you, but I remember seeing on PBS every so often this guy named Jack Horkheimer. His deal was that he told you what was going on in the night sky and what you should be looking for in the coming week as well. Southern cross? Orion vs. Taurus? Supernovae? He'll tell you all about it. But I wasn't so interested in all the the neat night-time things as I was obsessed with his theme song. I can't find a good version of the whole song online, but I'm ordering the album. It's actually Debussy's Arabesque #1 performed by Isao Tomita.



Isao Tomita - Arabesque #1 (30sec clip. Unfair, I know)

What is boss about Isao is that he does all this on his Moog keyboards back in the 1970's when playing electronic music actually required you to know how to operate the equipment at a low-level as to where all the cable connections go and how to connect and put in a series/parallel sequence of the 30+ pieces of oscillator/cutoff/compressor/etc equipment that are now normally all compacted in a single unit. Now, put on top of this all his experience playing music on an actual piano. Mind you most of the folks in the electro world now rely on the keyboard to do the playing and not on their hands.

Isao Tomita - Mercury (The Winged Messenger)

Isao Tomita - Jupiter (Bringer of Jolity) / Saturn (Bringer of Old Age)
From about 1:30-2:00 through this one you can hear the inspiration for a song in The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (I think the grove where the master sword exists and all the woodland creatures are running past Link).

More here.

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