danielswensen ([personal profile] danielswensen) wrote2019-01-12 01:33 pm

Oasis

A lot of my musical taste was influenced by a local radio program here called Oasis, which played ambient, electronic, and new age stuff every week. I'd tune in and record the episodes on cassette, because this was back in the Jurassic era. I'd do my best to follow the announcer when he listed off the tracks and write them down, but I was just a kid and I'd do a sloppy job or lose the J-cards or whatever. So I had a lot of tapes with songs I could not identify -- after all, there was no Shazam back then, no massive database to draw on, not even a reliable place to look up discographies, really.

As an aside, one of the highlights of my youth was getting to appear on that show -- I donated $100 to the station and as a prize I got to be a guest and pick the music. I absolutely raided the host's LP collection so I could play (and record) all the rare stuff he owned and I knew I could never get my hands on. Ironically, a lot of it is on YouTube for free these days, but I would never have seen that coming. Somewhere in my storage unit is a cassette with young me playing DJ, absolutely thrilled to be swimming in a pile of rare Tangerine Dream tracks like Scrooge McDuck on a mountain of gold.

Anyway, today one of those lost tracks whose title and artist I never knew came on at random on Spotify, and I absolutely got the chills. It was like being transported decades back in time.

(The track is "Freeze" by Klaus Schulze, if that's important to you.)