Remind Me - Royksopp

Everyone I know loves this song. Most of us discovered it as the music behind the Geico commercial with the cave man on the moving walkway in the airport. The song is wistful, atmospheric, catchy. A breath of fresh air compared to most contemporary pop in America. Royksopp (sorry, I don’t do umlauts) is two guys from Norway and has been around since 1998. They have two albums and a bunch of singles out, and thanks to the internet, many folks in the U.S. know more about them than this one song.
Having listened to a good portion of their material, I would say that within the electronic form, they are quintessentially modern and European, squarely in the Kraftwerk lineage. The video for Remind Me (below) is one of the most amazing things I’ve seen in a long time. It encapsulates their ultramodern, Bauhaus- and De Stijl derived aesthetics. It’s beautiful – and yet the wistfulness, even sadness, of the song questions everything that the modern, urban, metropolitan, cosmopolitan world has become. And who we are living in it.

Synthetic Classical

My knowledge and appreciation of classical music is pretty pathetic, especially given that I am a “classically trained” piano player. I like listening to classical music that is either off the beaten path (as much 20th century and contemporary classical music is) or that is interpreted in an unconventional way. My favorite examples of this are the pieces on this album of classical music performed on an early Moog synthesizer. For some reason, my parents (not great music collectors) had this LP when I was growing up and I really fell in love with these pieces, as well as the sounds used on this album (especially the version of Lecuona's Malaguenya, which makes my spine tingle every time I listen to it). I had looked for this on CD for a long time, to no avail. It turns out that this music has never been marketed on CD and has been out of print for a long time. Luckily an aficionado digitized a reel to reel tape of this album and made it available for free on the web (click link above). This is a great example of what should happen with all music that is long out of print.

Favorite recent song

It's from a year or two ago, but one of my favorite songs of recent years is All This Love, by the Swedish band the Similou. It's upbeat (but not too uptempo) dance pop at its best. Not much lyrical content but just great pop songwriting and production. And the best keyboard work I've heard in a long time.