Spotlight on German electro/trance project Cygnus X...

Here's the playlist, etc. for my eleventh show (Apr. 25, 2011). However, despite the fact there is apparently no host for "Mid-Day Mind Control" which runs after "The Dollar Bin", I was only able to do my show because I had a doctor's appointment lined up (I did something to my foot... nothing serious, but I wanted it looked at). Since nobody showed up, and dead air is not acceptable in my books, I threw on the Delerium album "Poem" on continuous play and repeat in hopes that there was enough diversity to catch the attention of anyone tuning in that hour before I headed off. As a reminder, my show is broadcast live and prone to random chaos every Monday (woot!) from 2PM to 3PM (Eastern Time) on 93.1FM in Ottawa or streaming audio on http://www.ckcufm.com/. You can always go here to find out when the next show will be (or read my playlists). Of this show, I wrote:

The show was divided mostly into funk and electronica with some Charlatans 'UK' and off the beaten path Sugar Ray tossed in for seasoning. Glad I finally got to play some Neotropic on one of my shows, it just didn't fit into any other mix so I jumped at the chance to sandwich it between a couple of Cygnus X tracks.

I did the "distributed spotlight" thing again where I have tracks for the spotlight band spread over the course of the show. I thought it worked out well, and as I said, finally allowed me to play some Neotropic. The show started with a track off one of the albums that started me on my fascination with dollar bin albums: Greazy Meal's "Digitalize World Greaze". When I lived in Charlotte, North Carolina for a year, I found a record store called Manifest Disks that had an awesome used CD section... everything from 808 State to Sarah MacLachlan for awesome prices... and their new CD section was one of the most eclectic and diverse I've ever seen. They also got indie acts to play in the middle of the store every few weeks... the sort of thing that Ottawa is sorely lacking, I might add. Along the side of the used section, they had half a dozen tables, several square metres, of used CDs for between 1 and 5 dollars. I decided to flip through them (I was a bit broke at the time and was hankerin' for new music), and I figured with prices like that at worst I was buying some coasters, so I picked up five albums for a dollar each, and one for 2 dollars. I was surprised that some of the albums were excellent, and that all of them were good. All of the albums were from artists that I would not have pulled off the shelf new because I didn’t know any of them at all. I also played a track off a little gem I found: Hal, off their "Extremis" single, which features the voice of Gillian Anderson (Agent Scully from the X-Files). And I also decided to play another of my favourite tracks on the "wtf" section of the show: "Buffalo Wing Pizza" by Greazy Meal, where they recorded a guy trying to order that from a pizzeria. Very funny!

Greazy Meal, Digitalize World Greaze, "Vitamin U (The 8th Essential Remix plus Iron)"
Hal, Extremis (CD single), "Extremis (Qattara Remix Edit feat. Gillian Anderson)"Cygnus X, Hypermetrical, "Kinderlied Part I"
Neotropic, 15 Levels of Magnification, "Laundry Pt. 3"
Cygnus X, Hypermetrical, "Hypermetrical"
Greazy Meal, Digitalize World Greaze, "Buffalo Wing Pizza (Bonus Track)"
Green Room, Funk It Up For The Universe, "New Mother"
The Charlatans UK, The Only One I Know (CD single), "The Only One I Know"
Sugar Ray, 14:59, "Personal Space Invader"
Cygnus X, Hypermetrical, "Inda Kasa"

Cygnus X began as a collaboration between Matthias Hoffmann and Ralf Hildenbeutel, who later left and everything after was just Hoffman. Other projects of the pair include A.C. Boutsen, Brainchild, and Dee.FX. Their first release was "Superstring" in 1993. Their third trance track, "The Orange Theme", released in 1994, was the project's best received track. Their releases "Positron" and "Hypermetrical" became also well known hits of the genre. Pretty much a one gig wonder, although they released a “collected works” album in 2003. A the UK electronic music artist Riz Maslen with as Neotropic off her 1995 album "15 Levels Of Magnification". She has released almost a dozen recordings under the Neotropic moniker and another half dozen as Small Fish With Spine, and appears to be still active in making and recording music. Oh, and if that wasn’t enough, she also makes films. I really liked Green Room, but could not find much info about them other than they were Canadian and from the west coast. Good funk!

And that was it this time around. I like the lyrical hook in this one after about 2:20!

And how about a bit of Can-Con? Not Sugar Ray, but rather Big Sugar (notice what I did there? lol)... love this song, and they have the coolest bass player of all time!