Gay Nineties Village (Eakins, Paul) – “Nickel Music” – [Audio Fidelity Records]

Bringing back visions of monkeys bashing cymbals, music to eat pizza by, bad dates at the Santa Cruz boardwalk arcade, pre-digital ice cream vendors, and certain unsettling episodes of “The Twilight Zone”, this is the sound of machine music, pre-Kraftwerk. Like the Musee Mecanique LP (also in our library), the repertoire draws from popular song of “the good old days” and depending on how old your are, you’ll either recognize every tune here (although perhaps not by title) or walk away confused. Recorded in a “you are there” fashion that includes a coin being dropped into the slot to start some of the machines, these recordings each fly by in an instant. The variety of tones and devices is varied enough that each track has its own mood, and from time to time it would actually bring to mind “normal musicians” with pretty decent robot simulations of banjo playing and sounds evocative of Garth Hudson of The Band, who is old enough probably to have studied devices like these in his youth… maybe he still does. ((( crimes )))