Rad Nauseam · David Cole

With the release of Cloverfield and Lost coming back to television, alternate reality games are a flavorful ingredient in the thick soup that is the nerd zeitgeist. And maybe my soup spoon is too big, but I swore I was being wrapped up into a new ARG the other day when I received this text message from a number I didn't recognize:

I found the spy dog do u want it?

Everyone knows there's nothing more exciting than a spy dog, so with a mixture of caution and intrigue I replied:

I will require full specs before extraction of spy dog. Please send ASAP.

Where was this taking me? How deep could this rabbit hole go? Spy dogs are only ever trusted with the most dramatic of dossiers and microfilm. In the name of storytelling I've concealed the stunning reply. Prepare yourself, for the love of god, before you discover the shocking conclusion.

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Awesome signage from here in San Francisco, near Amoeba Records at the end of Haight. Photos taken by my lovely fiancée, Ashleigh. Expect more great signs once we have the time to go around and hit up our favorites. There really are tons here in the city.

In August of last year, a mixtape group I belong to had a new 'topic': history of a genre. The idea was we would each put together tapes that represented a survey of a musical genre of our choosing. 6 months have passed and I finally finished mine (in fact, I'm the only one to finish so far — it turned out to be way more ambitious than any of us expected).

I chose Space Age Pop, which is actually not really so much a genre as much as a collection of trends. I turn to the Space Age Pop Page for the best definition I've read:

This music might be characterized most easily by what it isn't. It's rarely simple enough in structure and instrumentation to be called rock (and certainly retains enough of a sense of humor to be disqualified as art rock). It's not serious or straightforward enough to be called jazz. It's often too esoteric or extreme to be called pop. It's in some middle ground between all of these, which means it's populated with the outcasts from other well-established genres. As a result, Space Age Pop is full of brilliant, bizarre, and exciting sounds, which are particularly striking to ears accustomed to the stereotypes that populate the more familiar genres.

In fact, I'm not even gonna bother trying to write about the genre, because that site is incredibly thorough and filled with tons of great recommendations and information about everything and everyone on the tape.

I will say, however, I decided on space age pop because I absolutely adore Esquivel and wanted to explore his contemporaries, roots, successors, etc. While he's still the god damned King of All Music, the best discoveries I made are Enoch Light, Buddy Morrow and Kai Winding.

Without further ado, here's the tracklist:

And you can grab it here! Feedback appreciated!