Friday, October 27, 2006

Funky Friday Says "Just Do It!"

Sports apparel giant Nike has been commissioning music for it's own imprint, Nike Sports Music. James Murphy, aka LCD Soundsystem, is the second contributor to the label's Nike+ Original Run series - the Crystal Method were the first. LCD Soundsystem's installment is called 45:33 - Nike+ Original Run, and it is a continuous mix of music specially recorded for this project. The title is the actual length of the recording, and it's a pretty cool listen, James Murphy says "In testing I found that hard, fast, propulsive music was not the best running music for me. Sometimes the best way to keep running is to find the parts of the run that are actually the rests - that while you're still running you're viewing some of the run as soothing and recuperative." He mentions loving the time honored concept of one song taking up a whole side of an LP, and how it would be fun to abandon "making easily digestible lumps of music for albums or radio or whatever." The result is typically LCD, a funky mix of electronic and rock elements, with a nice ebb and flow to it. There are some lovely, spacy keyboard bits, some choice horns, and vocals courtesy of Terra Deva as well as James Murphy. I'm not a runner, but this mix sounds like it would work pretty well as the soundtrack to some sort of athletic activity. Or you could just to dance to it. I really dig it's scruffy vibes and shuffling beats. The catch here is that it is a limited run mp3 release, and that you can only get it from the iTunes store for the next six months. It's pure speculation on my part, but it might get some kind of a physical release once that six month period lapses. Here are a couple of excerpts - the titles are rough takes on where they show up in the mix. Now get ready to get your groove on...
16:54 - 28:53
28:33 - 37:45

Buy the full track at the iTunes store

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