2004-08-05 - 9:15 a.m. It all comes back to Young Marble Giants for me. I can remember the exact moment I discovered this band's music--I was 15 or 16, and I was sitting at my desk, in front of a large boombox/radio, scanning the airwaves for music, dazed with insomnia at 3:00 in the morning. R. Stevie Moore, on his overnight show on WFMU, played "Wurlitzer Jukebox." I was mesmerized and waited through a long, trippy, stream-of-consciousness set of music and monologue to find out who it was exactly that had entranced me thus. I had never heard music that sounded so ethereal and yet simple and earthy at the same time. Its sparseness was the embodiment of purity and truth. I added the album Colossal Youth to my list of "albums to buy" that I carried around all crumpled in my front pocket, and didn't get to cross it off til months later, when I finally found it at a shop on St Mark's Place. Fast forward to the space age. I recently bought the CD version, which contains the Colossal Youth album as well as the TEST CARD EP, the "Final Day" single and an extra song, "Ode To Booker T." and have been revisiting it bigtime this week. There are a lot of albums from my youth that I can't listen to anymore, or whose appeal is strictly nostalgic, but this album holds up for me in every way. It's its own universe, its own set of aesthetic principles, and it's darn catchy to boot. I started out loving music this simple, and in my dotage I think I'm returning to that: the stripping away of all adornment. thoughts? (6 comments so far) previous - next blog archive contact