Since I was so young and it was on the radio, I didn't discover the title or lyrics of the song until more than 16 years later, but I will remember it forever, as it is embedded in my melodic steering memory.

The song is actually about the singer's woman, who has suddenly and inexplicably moved on to another guy. Oh, but then she comes back and the singer is happy. Happens to everyone, right?

I've heard this song thousands of times, I've copied this song into a dozen different player formats and electronic instruments. I've come up with at least three original songs while I was actually TRYING to make this song. For a good portion of my late teens, I wanted to be this song.

The song is about falsifying emotion for dramatic purposes, and creating sincere emotion in the process. It's kind of about Madonna, really. The song's working title was, in fact, "Madonna", and faith no more wrote it as such on their set lists.

Ooh, weird coincidence: the clicking percussion sound at the beginning (which I've spent days poring over) turned out to be a sample of the beginning of Cecilia (above!). Eeeeerie!!

One day, Nelson handed Kris a mix tape which contained the song Headhunter v3.0. Kris wasn't so much into it at the time and would skip it (with the handy dandy car stereo skip-song fast forward) (he was still heshing pretty hard, though he also liked the ambient and trancey strains of M-1 Alternative and Cocteau Twins, HNIA etc) but I would insist that he let me hear the song from time to time.

It turned out that I really liked industrial music, and this led to Skinny Puppy, X marks the pedwalk, Cubanate, Mentallo and the Fixer, Psychopomps, EN, Leaether Strip, Laibach, KMFDM, Spahn Ranch - oh my god too many to list. Basically half of my present-day CD collection. But it was Headhunter that caught my ear. Turns out it is insanely popular in goth clubs - so popular that the DJ will roll their eyes at you if you request it. Go fig.

One day I was hanging out with chris gray wolf in his blacksmithy and this song somehow came up. "That's a great song, Good for hammering things to," he said. And really, I can't think of any song better suited to it.

This song is about being a person hunter, so to speak. The video (which I own. VHS, old skool!) is a silly affair involving lots of eggs. Eggs breaking, people with big long eggs on their heads, and an obviously hunted dude carrying a giant egg around. Front 242 are Belgian. I am not, so I don't pretend to understand their disastrous ways.

I am, however, a card carrying member of their official fan club.

Anyway, the way that you pirated software in those days was ... em.. well never mind that. Forget about bulletin boards. Suffice it to say that a lot of creative guys with lots of spare time learned assembly language and got to add little pieces of it to programs that were widely distributed. Eventually they started adding little graphic signatures, leading to animated graphic signatures, leading to animated, wacky sequences and musical signatures, and so on.

One of these guys went by the name "Static" and he wrote this little protracker song (which I found in the demo "Vectors"), which I loved dearly, though by today's standards it is very simple. I took his song apart and used the parts to make my own song, on my tracking program, learning how he did it in the process. After that, I did not stop making my own songs.

I have written versions of "Planetarium" on the DR-660 drum machine, the MC-303 groovebox, and the Elektron SFX-6 monomachine. Every time I do it, I learn something. Planetarium also showed me that there is no such thing as too much Hi-Q. Since then I have enjoyed many demo tunes by a staggering array of talented musicians, but this was the first that I really went nuts for. This, and 4-mat's tune for Search for Madness II and In The Kitchen. Ooh, those would all make awesome ringtones. (my current ringtone: 2nd Reality, Jonne Valtonen ("Purple Motion"))

Since it's way past time when the Rebels might've been arrested, Static's real name is Anders Bukh. He was from Denmark, but I don't know what he's up to these days. Making movies or something? Well, I owe him a drink.

So I was listening to all these C64 tunes, all these European authors, and I loved their style. They had this melodic sense which was more folky and modal than most of the pop music I had around at the time and I wasn't sure why. Eventually I started collecting SIDs, raw distilled versions of the songs made to be played by SIDplayers of one type or another, and I noticed that everyone that I liked seemed to do, at one time or another, covers of a few Jarre songs.

I had heard that he was kind of regarded as pretentious or bad or something, so I didn't rush right out and get one of his albums. One day I finally did, and it was an annoying relevation - he was the common element tying these sid composers together! Argh! The pretentious guy! Well, it turns out that he's not so bad, and I don't really mind whatever other people might think. You find his CDs in the "new age" section for some reason, even though you can get an exactly the same sounding derivative band's CD in the "Electronic" section. I guess he got classified before there was an electronic section.

When my Dad passed, I inherited this record. I'm no analog purist, but it sure as hell isn't the same on CD. Did they wipe all the dirt off? That was important dirt. I also have a collection of motown, dixieland, and bluegrass records that came from Dad, but they seem content to hang out in their sleeves. Ray, though, is bugging me to get a turntable.