Your new favorite band is your other favorite band...

I just picked up an album by the band Cybotron. You know, the pioneering Australian prog-electro band? Wait, I mean the pioneering Detroit tech-electro band. No no no no no. The AWESOME Cybotron. Wait. Which one do I mean?

It's pretty rare that two bands that knock you on your face have the exact same name. But, in a world with a finite amount of prefixes and suffixes suggesting a totally rad future, I guess there was bound to be some overlap.

The Detroit Cybotron is already enshrined within the lucite pantheon of electronic music. Vacuum-sealed, ice-cold, breakdanceable, afro-futurist bliss. Their tunes are as "classic" as anything less than 30 years old can be. Clear is the most famous song, having been homage/sampled by the likes of The Rich Man's will.i.am.

Right now though, I'm feeling Cosmic Cars.

The automobile-worship makes it a sinister Detroit auto industry counterpart to the Germanic beauty of Kraftwerk's Autobahn. (Cybotron's Juan Atkins would go back to this well again with his other band Model 500.)

Speaking of Kraftwerk, the Australian Cybotron may as well be a krautrock group. They'd be neatly filed beside Ash Ra Temple and Tangerine Dream. Instead of urban futurism of the other Cybotron, here we have a spiritual ecstatic dreamworld filled with allusions to classical mythology and Frank Herbert's Dune.

Here's Colossus. It will crush you

These guys had the name first and apparently resented the americans for using it. Let's reconcile everyone! Sometimes great minds just think alike!

All Good Things...

Ahhh Vangelis.  How I love thee.  Fairweather favorites come and go but the sensual, melancholic synth brilliance of his Blade Runner score will have a place at the summit of the Top Ten List that shall be chiseled upon my pink marble tombstone.  

Many put Vanglis down as a Yani-esque new age ding-dong, The Greek Rick Wakeman, or cheese purveyor.  Something that's difficult to dispute if anyone's heard the Enya meets Air Supply space-yacht-rock of Vangelis and Jon (which I still like).

Less a pleasure of the guilty variety is Vangelis' old Greek garage-prog group Aphrodite's Child.  Check out Magic Mirror, a terrific Proto-Metal tune in which the vocals play Echo to Vangelis' organ's Narcissus:

Aphrodite's Child had quite the apocalyptic streak.  Their first album is entitled "End of the World" and their swan song, the cult epic "666" is a psychedelic concept album about the book of revelations.  Here's an awesome track off it (which proves that even back in the early seventies Vangelis loved him some echoed-out tinkley bells) accompanied by a video apparently made by someone in a high school computer science class in 1995: