Sep 22, 2010

Outer Limits Recordings. Foxy Baby.


As my girlfriend is fond of saying about a certain genre of my music collection, “this sounds like something you’d listen to”. And it is. Originally released during the microsecond the Outer Limits Recordings website was operational (so presumably the work of Sam Meringue. See also: Wingdings), Foxy Baby has been reissued on lovely marbled pink vinyl by Not Not Fun. It’s officially described as telling "the strange, fragmented story of a young weirdo artist who has an encounter with an exotic otherworldly woman (the titular Ms. Foxy Baby), becomes obsessed, loses her into the cosmic blur of the city, then slips backstage at one of her shows to find her, where they mysteriously share a final cigarette while staring out across the metropolis’ skyline, then ascend into a holy void of alien lights”, but unless that story line is inscribed somewhere in the wax itself, I defy you to figure it out from listening to the album.

It’s always intriguing how much this stuff evokes the 80’s without ever sounding like any specific part of it. It’s synth-pop by way of Ariel Pink and James Ferraro; a tumultuous mulch of new-wave sounds, answering-machine beat-boxing, trippy FX, and the speed of submerged highways specially built for talking Camaros. A Xeroxed copy of a memory. It’s the music of apocalyptic sci-fi movies that only appeared on late night Canadian TV channels, flavored by the scaly rust of industrial decay under neon light. Fitness video grooves and phazer fire commingle and jumble while squeezing through wormholes into desert supermodel dimensions. I can never tell if anyone is actually making these sounds or if they’ve just been found and subjected to some mysterious process that involves dubbing them through millions of generations of cassettes dug out of the back seats of abandoned cars.

Foxy Baby

Buy it from Not Not Fun

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