Fan of The Call

The Call was a kind of religious band and Lead singer, composer and bassist Michael Been was the core of the band. 
They had a history of making 3 albums for a music company, had some success and get fired. I and my sister both bought albums and CDs of the band, which was strange. 
Most of the time we disagree about our musical taste. 

To be honest I only bought 1 album ("Into The Woods") and my sister bought several on CDs (from "Reconciled" till "To Heaven and Back"). 
I bought also the first solo album of Michael Been on CD, great guitar work, but the songs just not good enough to score a radio hit. 

The Call makes rock music with a meaning. The way Michael Been performs each song is not always a pleasure for your ears (sometimes like wolf crying) and it gets you always under your skin. Even today. 
I recorded once the best songs of The Call and it took me 90 + 45 minutes of tape to do so.

The Call had some success with songs "Everywhere I Go" with Bono in the background,  "Let The Day Begin" and "I Still Believe". But I found many other favs on each album. 

At the end like so many groups, the core of the band (M.B.) started a solo career, 
he wrote the soundtrack for a movie "Light Sleeper" and released a couple of albums himself. However, I think the best songs he ever wrote was with The Call. 

You can find here the 2 sides of the C90 tape, which was in good shape consider the date of the recording. The second tape was compiled with some fav of an other underrated band Chagall Guevara with Steve Taylor as lead singer. Maybe I post about them too. Check out one of my favs

Now I will name a few favs of The Call like "Oklahoma", "Into The Woods", "Red Rain", 
"A Swim In The Ocean".

To my suprise his son  Robert Levon Been plays also bass and has the same voice 
as his dad, Michael Been, who died backstage in 2010. And Robert played live with other members of The Call with amazing results. They also still have a website

On YouTube I found an very long The Call Playlist, a tribute to The Call by The Simple Minds and also a (short) Playlist of all the musicvideos they made. 

Listen and maybe you find yourself a new band to listen too.

TnC Internet Adventures : 8Bit-Guy / 8Bit-Keys

This is a YouTuber I am so happy to find by accident. Just searching on YT for Philips MSX keyboard belonging to the Music Creator package for the Music Module I found a guy talking about Meow keyboard, yes you heard it right , a keyboard where you can play a song like a cat , meow songs .It was 8-Bit Keys that demonstrate it and was also a bit exited about this curious thing. Well, other vids about repairing/restoring old keyboard are not that interesting, but I found the same guy has another YT-channel called 8Bit-Guy.
 

Again repairing / restoring, this time computers. But with a few suprises like this serie 
I found, about how old games were made. Very interesting even nothing is told about MSX, only "those" other computers of Nintend, Atari, Apple and Commodore.

And more technical stuff like about bad VHS tapes (or not).

Fan of Virtual Audio Project

Years ago I bought a 2CD pack online at ECI (now called bookspot), a shop with mostly books. They sell also a lot of music, computergames and some game gear, sometimes cheaper than other real games selling shops. The 2CD pack contains a CD called Mystery and the other Relax, I bought it cause I liked synthesizer music and the covers and titles seems interesting enough.

Well after a while I found myself standing at the cashout of a recordshop with more than 10 CD of the Virtual Audio Project (VAPs) in my hands. But most of the CDs I bought from their own webshop, not cheap unless you bought a lot of them together.

And so I did.

Virtual Audio Project is a CD-serie of a music-company in Italy called Cybertracks with maybe 15 composers. Each CD is recorded in Dolby Surround, has its own artwork, sometimes release notes (or inlay book). On each CD there are a lot of different composers with tracks that should fit the theme or title of the CD. 

After more than 35 CDs with different themes, VAP started to repeat themes and music. 

I lost interest buying more. Occasionly I listen to one of the VAPs, although most of the tracks are not house oriented, not a big problem, I still like some of the tracks.

Sadly, I dont have a stereoset with Dolby Surround, so until now I never heard how a VAP CD should sound. with Dolby Surround.

I played with the idea of uploading some of my favs CDs of VAP on YT, but as so many times, somebody else had the same idea. Not all, but bother the trouble of uploading the ones that are not on YT ?

When writing this post I ask myself do I want to buy the rest of the collection of VAPs ?

Well maybe someday, now I have more fun listening to Retro-Wave/Synth-Wave/Retro-Elektro mixes on YT.