Far Out There Character Soundtrack: Astrid

Okay, this is the soundtrack I’d started writing for last month, before I decided to give myself a present and did Aunt Domino’s instead. It’s also another entry on the “Seriously? You gave THAT character a soundtrack?” list, especially since it’s been YEARS since she’s appeared in anything other than a holiday comic or bonus incentive. But still, she’s been in more of those than some characters have actual comics, so it’s not like there’s nothing to work with. Besides, I’ve mentioned before that I’m inordinately proud of Astrid as a creation. No, she’s not especially sympathetic or likable, but she managed to develop from a nameless one-off gag to an unexpectedly nuanced character with no plan whatsoever. That’s just the sort of thing that makes me feel good about myself as a writer (and Lord knows I need all the help I can get) so she gets a soundtrack as her reward.

So, what does Astrid listen to? Basically, anything that’d play as background music for the sort of scene that an all-ages comic like Far Out There can’t show. Smooth Jazz, Quiet Storm, Chill-hop, Downtempo, pretty much anything that could conceivably play during a particularly trashy late night movie on Insert Old Premium Cable Channel Of Your Choice HERE. You know, during THOSE scenes. Whether that's because it’s the sort of thing Astrid spends her time doing when she’s not on-screen, or just what she wants people to THINK she does so they don’t notice her actually being an undercover super sleuth is left up to the imagination. Because, again, Far Out There is an all ages comic (though just between you and me, it’s probably a little of both). But yeah, Astrid’s jam is slinky, seductive, slow jams… and I’m not afraid to tell you that it’s NOT my own jam, so this was one of the harder soundtracks to put together. It’s not so much that I HATE any of this stuff, just that I don’t normally pay close enough attention to actually notice what a given song is even CALLED, let alone make any serious judgment calls about its quality. As a result, somebody with a deep, encyclopedic knowledge of baby making music would probably thing I’ve left out a lot of blindingly obvious choices and included a lot of pointless oddities. And yeah, I bet you’re right, hypothetical expert on pay per view love scenes. You probably should have put this soundtrack together instead of me. But here we are, I’m as good as you’re gonna get for this thing, so let’s get rolling.

If you’ve been reading the other soundtrack posts, you’ve already heard me mention stuff like Downtempo before (see Mariska’s soundtrack in particular) but “Quiet Storm” might be a new one for you. An offshoot of the lusher, more laid-back side of Motown and Soul, sort of in contrast to where Funk and Disco would end up going, Quiet Storm is one of the few sub-genres I know of that can trace its identity and even NAME back to a single song: Smokey Robinson’s “Quiet Storm.” This song actually shows up twice on Astrid’s soundtrack, once early on in its original 1975 incarnation, and later bookending the whole thing as a 2005 Chill-hop remix. That later versions actually features Roy Ayers, who also has a solo entry earlier in the soundtrack: “Everybody Loves The Sunshine.” That’s one of those things I wish I was clever enough to have done on purpose. Anyway, I can’t for the life of me believe Quentin Tarantino didn’t use “Everybody Loves The Sunshine” in Jackie Brown (despite including FOUR other Roy Ayers sons) which probably tells you everything you need to know right there. There’s honestly not that much authentic Quiet Storm stuff on Astrid’s playlist (though I did strongly consider The Floaters’ “Float On” as a joke) though we do have “Dreams” by Smoke City, of whom I have a frustrating lack of luck finding information on due to there being at least one other band to have recorded under the name. And that, unfortunately, provide me with the most natural segue possible into all the Smooth Jazz songs that make up the actual bulk of Astrid’s soundtrack.

Seriously, I can feel a bit less bad about not knowing all that much about most of these artists, because when I DID try to look up more on them, there was barely anything to find. Remember, I’m first and foremost a Rock guy. Rock and Roll is full of crazy stories of larger than life characters engaging in ludicrous debauchery and exhibiting madness-fueled creativity, the stuff people love to write about. Turns out professional session musicians and stay-at-home producers making background music for fancy spas don’t have many stories worth telling, so some of these artists just end up left as faceless names of some compilation’s track list. Probably the best documented artist from this side of the soundtrack is Paul Hardcastle, who made his name as a techno pioneer before launching a side-project in the late 90s called The Jazzmasters. Despite what the name might imply, the three Jazzmasters songs featured here –“Quiet Groove,” “London in Springtime,” and “Children of the Getto”– are slick, glossy, drum-loop-driven slow jams that wouldn’t sound out of place playing in that one New Age-y store at the mall that sells all the expensive moisturizers you can smell from all the way across the hall. They’re also a bit atypical for Hardcastle’s Jazzmasters work, showcasing actual singing by vocalist Helen Rogers instead of the usual easy listening guitar or sax. That’s more identity than I can assign to some of the other artists here. “Get Back To Serenity” by German act Vargo appears to have been a pretty big turn of the millennium Chillout hit, but I can find VERY little information out that doesn’t seem to have been a promotional piece written by the artists themselves. Even worse is “Relax” by the apparently pseudonymous Megabyte. Not only is both the song and name annoyingly Google-proof, what little I DID find makes a tantalizing suggestion that Megabyte might be somehow related to electronic innovators Software. That’d actually be a fascinating historical tidbit, what with Software’s “Island Sunrise” being pretty much the blueprint for the entire Vaporwave sound 30 years before it was even a thing. Alas, I can’t say for sure what connections Megabyte has with them, if any. Speaking of both Vaporwave and not knowing anything about the artists, though, there IS one Vaporwave selection on Astrid’s soundtrack: “simply” by luxury elite… which is to say a clip of “One Love” by Bobby Caldwell played lo-fi and at half speed. However, up until I started writing this blog post, I’d have told you there were TWO Vaporwave songs here, the other being “Never Alone In New York” by Groovecatcher. It wasn’t until I went and tried to track down the samples used to make the song that I discovered there actually aren’t any, and the whole thing was actually built from the ground up to SOUND line a wall of 70s string section clips. Convincing enough to fool me.

And then we get into the weird stuff. My repeated admitting that I don’t know much about the “music for hotel masseurs” genre shouldn’t make it too surprising that I drew a few tracks from outside that particular scene. 80s Swedish indie artist Virna Lindt provides “Underwater Boy,” a weird bit of neo-lounge that ALMOST sounds like that not-genre I kept taking about in Mariska’s soundtrack. It’s a bit to quirky to truly fit that “late night Cinemax” theme I established for Astrid at the beginning, but I can still see her grooving to it while drinking something obscenely expensive. Odd in a different way is “You (I Wanna Be Like You)” by Pizzicato Five. No, it’s not Jungle Book related, but it’s also not too obviously related to the rest of the band’s discography. One of the best-known Shibuya-Kei acts, Pizzicato Five tended to be known for fast, bouncy, retro-60s Jet Set throwbacks, but “You” is as much of a slow, slinky jazz groove as anything else on Astrid’s soundtrack.  If you didn't know the context of who made it, you wouldn’t give its inclusion here a second thought. But the IMPORTANT thing is now I’ve resumed my streak of squeezing at least one Japanese artist into each playlist!

There’s still one more song, and even more than “You” it’s hilariously weird in ways that won’t be obvious to most listeners who don’t know the backstory: “Mellow My Mind” by Simply Red. Most listeners would just chalk it up as another mellow ballad by the “Holding Back The Years” guy, not noticing that it’s a cover. A cover of a Neil Young song. A song off of Tonight’s The Night, one of Young’s most infamously dark and ragged albums. I don’t know if it’s even possible to explain to somebody unfamiliar with Neil Young’s “Ditch Trilogy” of albums just how astonishingly wrong-headed it is to hear a song from one of them presented as a polished, professional pop song. It’s a little bit like hearing Michael McDonald covering a post-breakdown Skip Spence song, or Christopher Cross doing a yacht rock tribute to Jandek. It isn't even ironic, like all those Richard Cheese lounge covers of other songs, because at least those have an obvious disconnect between the music and lyrics. Neil Young’s version of “Mellow My Mind” is what it is thanks to its hoarse, strung-out delivery; the fact that somebody could ever listen to it and even CONCEIVE of it as the kind of easy listening song you’d year on a shampoo commercial is either a sign of unparalleled genius or madness or both. And that’s kind of what I like the most about it, but as an oddball listening choice and as a song for Astrid’s soundtrack. I can easily imagine a situation where this version of “Mellow My Mind” would randomly start playing on Astrid’s radio, causing some insufferable music snob to start ranting about how inappropriate a cover it is… thus causing Astrid to play it on a loop the rest of the night, and permanently keep it on her personal playlist, just as a petty power play. You are NOT allowed to complain about anything without Astrid’s permission, GOT THAT?

Of course, that’s the whole thing about these character soundtracks. As much as I enjoy using them as excuses to be a music geek for a bit, they’re SUPPOSED to serve as a window into the finer details of the characters personalities. With Astrid, I think she’s one of those people who really doesn’t think too hard about what music she listens to, at least in terms of where it comes from or what she likes about it. Really, Astrid just wants some audio accessories for the room, something that goes along with the mood lighting and exorbitantly expensive furniture. And in one way or another, be it at the bar of an exclusive resort or the soundtrack of a sketchy direct to cable movie, this is all music designed to set a tone without drawing TOO much attention to itself. Astrid wouldn’t have it any other way; after all, the attention is all supposed to be directed at HER.

(This was a bit of a weird blog to write, after just doing Aunt Domino’s soundtrack. As I’ve alluded to before, these playlists sort of come in waves. The main characters got their soundtracks worked out years and years ago, followed by a second batch for secondary characters like Astrid. Aunt Domino’s soundtrack is actually from a THIRD batch of soundtracks where, as an experiment, I put together a short playlist based on a certain stylistic theme, then created a new character to fit the music. Most of those characters haven’t even been glimpsed yet; they won’t appear until regular updates resume. But with all those playlists built around music I already like still fresh in my memory, it was weird to go back and revisit one of the ones that was designed to fit the CHARACTER’S interests instead of my own. Well, at least the YouTube playlist was a breeze to put together. It’s fitting that a bunch of subgenres designed to be background noise seems to have largely slipped past the copyright bots’ notice. To the surprise of no one, the only tricky song here was “You” by Pizzacatto Five, the lone Japanese song. And even that wasn’t really hard to find a post of AT ALL, there just wasn’t a GOOD one. The only one I could find was a potato-sounding 240p video, which I wouldn’t normally subject others to but there really wasn’t another option I could find. Otherwise, I found a multitude of decent, good quality post quite quickly… though I did encounter a bit of a new problem. A lot of these songs had the ol’ Windows Media Player Photo Slideshow visual accompaniment to the songs instead of the more boring Static Shot Of The Album Cover. Thing is, most of these songs are designed to accompany one of two things: lounging on a beach, or getting really intimate with somebody. As a result, there were several times where I had to not use a perfectly fine-sounding post because the pictures were a bit… risqué. I’ve had to cautiously avoid videos with raunchy album covers a few times before, but never multiple times on the same playlist. Even now, I’m a bit nervous that I JUUUUUST MIIIIGHT have missed something embarrassing in one of them, but reeeaaally don’t wanna spend an hour re-re-checking every second of every single video. You gotta admit, though, if any Far Out There character would have a soundtrack that runs the risk of indecent exposure, it WOULD have to be Astrid, right?)

Astrid's YouTube Playlist