Ambient but melodic, mostly drumless but rhythmic, shimmering, magical. I had never heard this particular Windy & Carl record before today but the algorithm provided. One of my top 3 bands from Michigan, without a doubt. They also run a record store, should you find yourself in Dearborn. My college dream was to get Windy & Carl to score a planetarium show and I haven’t given up on that yet.

In the last post, I mentioned it was an Orb remix of a song I liked when I was young that tipped me over into a full-blown 90s rave revitalist. That would their remix of Penguin Cafe Orchestra’s Music For a Found Harmonium. Deep cut.

I was never quite sure why this Penguin Cafe Orchestra hit me as hard as it does. I mean, it’s extremely catchy, sure. But it was so deeply engrained that it caused me to burst into tears when it appeared in Napoleon Dynamite. (Now there’s a movie to revisit after 15 years.) 

As with many of life’s great mysteries, the answer was in a youtube video, waiting to be discovered. A trailer for the 1988 John Hughes’ move She’s Having a Baby, starring Kevin Bacon, apparently only seen on VHS copies of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Like most people of my generation (Generation Jordan Catalano aka Generation Oregon Trail aka Generation Analog Youth Digital Adolescence aka Generation Here’s A Thinkpiece On Why I’m Not A Millenial), I probably watched Ferris Bueller on VHS upwards of… five hundred times? More? And this is a truly brilliant trailer, a masterclass of film editing. I don’t know why anyone would bother with the movie. The entire human drama of trying to become an adult in 90 seconds. More than any other piece of media, this shaped my entire concept of the idea of “growing up.”

PCO was also famously remixed by the departed Avicii, and you know what, I fucking love that too. This is EDM for people who listen to NPR, but here we are. The heart loves what it loves.