atomic_fungus (atomic_fungus) wrote,
atomic_fungus
atomic_fungus

The Alan Parsons' Project song "Nucleus" is being broadcast! (O_O)

It's a little-known track from their album I, Robot. It's a song which you never (almost never?) hear on the radio. It's an instrumental, it's from 1975 or 1976, and it's slow. Most rock stations won't even touch it because it's so "non-rock"; in fact if anything it's some kind of proto-ambient music, and not rock at all.

I've got the DirecTV box on, playing one of the XM Radio music channels--"Audio Visions", which is channel 856 if you've got DirecTV. I'm not sure what XM channel it is, but it's worth a listen if you like the kind of music I like; most of it is pretty good stuff.

I first started listening to "Audio Visions" when WNUA, here in the Chicago area, abruptly took the show "Musical Starstreams" off the air after some 18+ years. (Bastards.) Before they did that, when I had to work on Sunday nights, I'd set the DVD player to record it onto DVD-RW. Then I'd have a week to listen to the show before erasing the disk and recording the next week's show. Well, WNUA put a stop to that, didn't they? Instead they'd rather re-run Ramsay fucking Lewis' crap-ass show rather than run "Musical Starstreams". They produce Lewis' show locally and they had to pay for "Starstreams", of course, so the lousy time slot (10 PM-12 AM on Sunday night!) combined with low ad revenue, I guess. I'm pretty sure that the decision was economic, so I can at least understand (if not accept) it; if the decision was not an economical one, then WNUA sucks utterly and should be cast into the outer darkness, where there is a great wailing and gnashing of teeth. (And those who have no teeth will have them provided, free of charge.)

Anyway, "Musical Starstreams" (MS) seems to fit well with the type of music played on "Audio Visions" (AV). They also play another similar show called "Hearts of Space" (HoS), although I have found that I don't like HoS very much.

So: after WNUA took MS off the air with no warning whatsoever, I got another DirecTV satellite box and hooked it up, and so now I have one here next to the computer, and my entertainment system, so I can record shows from the satellite without inconveniencing my family. Also, of course, I can record MS, and listen to AV when I'm not doing anything else.

In the 1980s I was a dedicated Projectologist (ie fan of the Alan Parsons' Project [APP]). I knew the music so well that you could drop the needle, at random, into any track of any album, and I could pick up the music from that point and sing it. (I've since lost that skill, but I don't listen to APP nearly as much as I used to.)

So: Here I am, surfing Pennock's Fiero Forum. One song on AV ends and another one begins. About five seconds into the song I have recognized both the song and the album, and am gaping in astonishment at the DirecTV receiver: they're playing Nucleus!

Five seconds, yeah. Know what the first five seconds of "Nucleus" sounds like? Like a bunch of teletype machines going, plus a few barely-intelligible spoken words. Not very much to go on; certainly no actual music has started at that point--any song could have started like that, and in fact there is another song on I, Robot which sounds almost the same, and other songs by APP and other artists which start similarly--yet I knew, 100% certain, that was the song...and I was right.

I guess the sound data is still stored in my head, but it's just buried under a bunch of other stuff. The wonders of the human brain!
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