V/A: The Planets

A few weeks ago I had to be out of my apartment for the better part of the afternoon due to a planned power outage on my street. As I stood around that morning watching people panic as they realized the electric gate wasn’t going to open so they could get their cars out of the lot and go to work, and thinking how awesome I was for remembering to park out on the street, I couldn’t help but feel abnormally positive about my planned day of driving around and touching dirty things. For once my high hopes weren’t cruelly mocked.

As I pulled this at an especially dire thrift I tried not to get too prematurely excited. The crudely silk-screened cover had me aroused to the point of nearly mounting a broken rice cooker on a nearby rack. No, I must control myself. It was more than likely going to be lame. I couldn’t think of exactly how a record with a clear outer space theme could be lame, but life has taught me time and again that these things are possible. Likely even. Just then a single xeroxed sheet of ancient paper dislodged itself from the pocket, and, to my near disbelief, I began reading the dense essay about electronic music printed on it. Concluding with credits to Third Semester Electronic Music Students at a local community college. How bad ass is that?

These kids are fully rad too. I mean OK, it was probably pretty hard not to be rad as a 1977 kid in Jr. College Electronic Music class, but still. These guys get pretty way out with it. It’s not just your standard, sterile, knob-twiddling academic bleep-fest.

“Earth”

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“Saturn”

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“Uranus”

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(Note: You’ll probably need to crank the volume when playing these as the record was pressed super quietly)