Her Dark Materials: Spandex

As Olivia Newton John said back in 1981, let's get physical. And that is what we're going to do today in her dark materials the spandex edition. 

We all know that the material is used for working out, it's a heartrate of over 150 and jumping on the pads of your feet indefinitely. 

Rest is for the weak and shuffling songs is for the foolish. 

Like walking into a spinning class for the first time, there is a certain element of fear that goes into making/listening to this playlist. There will be no mercy or silence for the next hour and a half and you will struggle to keep up. This is because spandex represents the electronic music that reverberates in your chest and that gets confused with a splitting headache (in the most positive way possible). 

It is for this reason that I wanted to start with something familiar. For my sake, not for anybody else's, I'm the one that was feeling queasy about hitting it off loudly. You know what it is! by Jerb has this great sample of Wiz Khalifa's Black and Yellow. It's meant to make listeners think that although it is unknown territory, there is communion between this and the most mainstream music ever created. The song doesn't even start off that hard, it has this excellent build-up that acts as a warm-up for the next one. 

The first subset inside the set is made up of music I've been discovering recently, that is the electronic music which uses vocals from rap songs over the melody and works a treat. At times, I'll find full verses in the song so I've decided to dub it rap techno. Another subgenre of the Leviathan that is techno music. 

As I was making the list I realised how much easier it is to connect with some of these songs when they have at least some lyrics in them. Maybe it's the fact that it's such a machine-made sound that hearing something familiar and organic as a voice can bring it closer to us. This is not to say that I don't enjoy purely "instrumental" (that's so not the word) electronic music. 

Keep On by X CLUB. is particularly enjoyable for me because we're still in the part of the playlist where the aggressiveness is being turned up gradually and everything is still feelgood. In the middle it has these wave-like loops that are so fluid you can't help your shoulders moving along with them. If it's making me want to dance, it's a keeper. 

The feelgood vibes end immediately after that song and we enter the oh my word where the hell are we? part of the playlist. Samba Soccer 2001 by KETTAMA wouldn't have made the cut were it not for the fact that it samples a very popular yet very Spanish song. If you don't know it, it's fine, go on YouTube this instant and type in El Baile del Gorila - Melody. You're welcome. KETTAMA had the INDECENCY of using the English version. My brother, if you're going to sample such a track, use the original. By all counts, the combination of such an ugly loud sound should not work with Melody's artificially high-pitched pre-teen voice, but it does. So I added it. 

Once we reach TEKKNO we all know something is wrong. meet her at the love parade tekkno sounds so corrupt it should be illegal. Corrupt, in decomposition, just bloody wrong. Yet, it's screaming spandex at me and is at the heart of the list. The dj usually takes mainstream songs and just turns them poisonous with his terrifying techno, I was particularly obsessed with the version he made of A$AP Rocky's Praise The Lord. Have you ever jumped for 4:35 minutes non-stop? No? Give that a go then.  

What comes after that are a sequence of nightmarish hellsounds that reach their end in Rave Energy by Jhorman Peña, Niotech. I tried to keep it dark but bouncy although some parts are so dark that it gets a little daunting to keep bouncing. For example, MASSAGING ME by TRAYVP would've been put at the start of the list because it's perfect for describing this rap techno subgenre I was on about before but it's to fast paced and primitively loud that I couldn't fit it. It takes Massaging Me by Future, and in my humblest of opinions, makes it so much better. This is what the original should have been from the outset.

It doesn't get considerably lighter after that though, we're still not out of the woods. Nevertheless it's definitely a bit of a comedown. Songs get a tad more melodic and with SLIGHTLY less aggressive bpms. I wanted to finish on a more ethereal note (as ethereal as spandex can get) and added songs that had a bit of reverb and female vocals to them. Want U So Badly by KLOE just made the cut because at times I think it's too sweet for spandex, despite sampling vocals from the Black Eyed Peas. It's possibly my favourite out of the playlist which goes to show I haven't got a dark bone in my body and it's all persona. That harp in the middle of the track is the kind of quiet endorphin rush you feel when you're done working out.

More materials up soon. Rest yer ears.