Monthly Archives: January 2026

Thinking About: more early 90s techno

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Another thing that showed up in early 90s electronic music was the seemingly misplaced vocal sample that somehow fit perfectly in the song. I used to love those, partly because I enjoyed the game of ‘hey I know that bit!’ and how creative they slid it into the track.

Like “Papua New Guinea” by The Future Sound of London, whose main vocal line was lifted from Dead Can Dance’s “Dawn of the Iconoclast” (a track off my favorite DCD album, 1987’s Within the Realm of a Dying Sun). Several of my classmates at Emerson loved this track, and they’d play it all the time at the clubs on Landsdowne Street.

….or Utah Saints’ “Something Good”, which made liberal use of Kate Bush’s “Cloudbusting”. I loved cranking this one up in the car when it came on the radio.

Then there’s Apotheosis with “O Fortuna”, lifting the famous choral movement from Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana. This one I remember well because they’d lifted the sample from a classical recording and hadn’t gotten clearance, making the single hard to find.

And then there’s just the downright silly “Sesame’s Treet” by Smart E’s. Somehow they made this work despite how ridiculous it is. Peak Gen-X retromania here, mixing our present and past into one.

Much later in the decade, a friend of mine introduced me to the equally silly “Speed” by Alpha Team, and I literally had a coworker at the record store writhing on the floor in laughter when I played him the breakdown part of the Hardcore Mix (about 3:30 in).

I suppose this is partly why I eventually latched onto electronic music in the 90s, because it wasn’t always about the scene or the vibe. It wasn’t always serious. Sometimes it was just about having fun being creative with the technology you had, even if the output was more for laughs than anything else.

Thinking About: early 90s techno

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As mentioned a few weeks back, I’ve been catching up on Orbital, an electronic duo that I passively listened to in the 90s. I was vaguely familiar with a lot of their earlier singles like “Halcyon + On + On”, “Chime” and “Lush 3”, but it was 1996’s “The Box” off their album In Sides that caught my attention, especially with its otherworldly and unsettling music video featuring the always intriguing Tilda Swinton as a time-traveling alien visiting the grimier parts of East London. It’s one of my all-time favorite videos of the 90s and was one of the many influences for the Bridgetown Trilogy.

While listening to them, it got me thinking about my experience with electronic music in the 90s. Even then it had all sorts of different genres and names: techno, house, EBM, electronica, chillwave, trip-hop, and everything in between. If I had to pinpoint when I first started paying attention to this kind of stuff, it was hearing “Chime” on the techno show on WFNX during my freshman year in college. It intrigued me, because it wasn’t exactly the melodic synthpop of the 80s that I was so used to, but nor was it the vaguely creative club music that producers like Stock-Aitken-Waterman were churning out on the regular. To me it was somewhere in between: creative enough that you could groove to it at the clubs, but you could also chill out to it in the comfort of your own home. [Mind you, this was also during the height of rave culture so you could do both while completely blissed out, heh.]

Another track that stood out for me, of course, was Moby’s “Go” with its use of Laura Palmer’s Theme from Twin Peaks as the music bed. Creepy and weird yet somehow hypnotic and groovy. This was well before his huge breakthrough with 1997’s Play.

Trip-hop didn’t quite gel with me right away, as it didn’t get a lot of play on the local alternative stations in Boston at the time other than Massive Attack’s “Unfinished Sympathy”, which also got a lot of attention for its hybrid of dance, soul, and heavy vibe. It wasn’t just about the lyrics or the melody, it was also about the mood, and that kind of thing always captured my attention. It also helped that its one-continuous-take video was so simple yet so cinematic. A lot of the best electronic music in the 90s strived to capture that.

I could go on, of course, but this is merely an overview, so perhaps it’s time for me to do another WiS series!

New Year, New Music

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It’s been a couple of weeks into the new year, so I’m sure you’re curious as to what my first downloads of 2026 are. So here we go!

Kula Shaker, Lucky Number EP, releases 2 January. They’ve always had that similarity to Oasis but with more mysticism and less drunken swagger, and this one definitely feels like that. I’ve always loved this band since their K album back in 1996, so I’m looking forward to what the new album (curiously entitled Wormslayer…?) sounds like.

DIIV, Boiled Alive, released 5 January. The sludgy-shoegaze band drops a live album/concert film featuring several songs from their 2024 record Frog in Boiling Water, and they sound surprisingly tight and heavy.

SAULT, Chapter 1, released 9 January. I will always check out whatever this enigmatic band releases, because I never know if it’s going to be jazz, gospel, soul, orchestral, alt rock, or something in between. And they are just so flipping amazing at whatever they do.

Dry Cleaning, Secret Love, released 9 January. These 4AD oddballs talk-sing their way through such weird yet catchy tunes that I can’t help but sit back and take it all in, wondering where it will lead.

The Cribs, Selling a Vibe, released 9 January. This band might be known more in the States for having had Johnny Marr as a full member for a few years and kind of riding on the coattails of The Strokes, but they’ve always been a fun listen.