Dundee Lad

August 21st, 1983

Well, so far we’ve just been seeing what was happening in South Australia in the 80s, so now it’s time for a glimpse into the national charts.

Not surprisingly, a real eclectic bunch of tunes. A few crap ones (IMO, natch) but also some fucking killer tracks. The UK is well represented with Blue Monday by New Order, Speak Like A Child by The Style Council, Come Dancing by The Kinks, Fascination by The Human League, a couple of Eurythmics’ songs, and a host of others. Aussies get a good look in with Pressure Sway by Machinations, Show Me Some Discipline by The Sunnyboys, and tracks by Sharon O’Neil, Tim Finn, Real Life, and INXS amongst others. Pleasantly surprised that the US is the less represented for a change.

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July 13th, 1989

Not going to say much here because…well, frankly, there’s not a real lot I find interesting. Not back then, and not now.

Click image to make real big!
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Lossless Audio Checker is a free program that can allegedly tell if a FLAC or WAV file is truly lossless or whether it’s transcoded or otherwise adulterated. Yeah Nah. It don’t work, I’m sorry to say. How do I know this? I converted a .MP3 file to a .FLAC file, and L.A.C. told me it was “clean”. Wut??

At least Spek can see the difference.
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Jason Becker

In the mid 80s I was still living in Elizabeth South and one day I was checking out the boxes in a local 2nd hand shop I frequented. Nothing caught my interest until I came across this bizarre album cover. I’d never heard of Cybotron before but one of the tracks was titled Arrakis and that immediately caught my attention because I’d already read Dune cover to cover three times. On top of that, the cover made no mention of vocals but did list synths, and the vinyl was in excellent condition so buying it was a no-brainer for me. I kind of still own the vinyl but it’s not actually in my possession—long, sad, embarrassing-for-me, story—so it had been decades since I heard it, and to be honest I mostly forgot about it. I mean, I have all the Tangerine Dream albums from the 70s, plus a heap of excellent bootleg live recordings by them, plus Klaus Schulze, and other similar artists, so I wasn’t lacking in that department. But imagine my surprise when, on a whim, in 2022 I searched Cybotron on Bandcamp and this appeared…