But a magic moment came in the CD shop in Seoul's COEX maze. I fell in love with an electronica tune that drifted over the in-store system like kisses and roses over a waterfall, smartly sweet like a shampoo commercial but one of an entire innocence, there for you to swoon over rather than sell! sell! sell! as a woman orgasms through her follicles. It drifted in innocently then began to stomp with its stabs of violet sugar in a basketball court. It was an indoor UFO, the spaceship in the room, pachyderm in size and character.
As this wonderful tundra of the strange and the beautiful progressed I couldn't believe when it got odder as the sounds became wrung with a Mouse on Mars grip, a wonky drench knotted with quirks and chirrupy sonics. Oh my oh my, I felt like John Peel discovering, like a boy again listening to his show, hearing MOM in the dark. I fell out of the store into a gaping beauty, a guy and girl in blissful hum, Asian Amelie, cross-legged floating over the poppy fields, under the gushing lagoon.
Detective work at the till pointed me to a screen at the back of the shop that announced each track's name being played -
When We Kiss, by Taxic.
It was on a compilation CD, 2004's Salon de Eastronika. Did anyone who worked in the shop know which rack I could find it? No.
After a good 20 minutes, it caught the corner of my eye, the cover having luckily been onscreen with the CD title.
It's a Korean compilation of dance stuff as opposed to any actual electronika, the remit covering downtempo cuts, instrumentals, trip-pop and...well I can't tell what the exact criteria is really, seeing as there's a song called Funky DJ on there by Zoara which sounds like 90s Italian pop. Ok it's groovy and for a few seconds the main vocal is looped up but I feel the CD's mixmastermind Midaas Jay simply chose anything Asian that didn't chart properly. Many songs are actually on Italian labels as well, which is odd as the CD came out on its namesake indie, Korea's Eastronika, yet very few songs were actually released by them (Taxic being one of their releases).
There's the very very good Saida by Czerkinsky which pomp stomps with the brass of Pulp's This Is Hardcore/Portishead's All Mine all staggered up into a brash big beat rush as a female aria repeats, Philippine over a dinosaur scene, Ray Harryhausen and the pre-millennium turntable, her vocal a wordless diet echo of the end theme to Stingray.
Falo Amen by Pat C is an Hawaiian thing, yet has that Japanese loungey style of 90s coffee table tinged pop like Paris Match or Pizzicato Five (or the song below by Korean vets 015B).
Taxic remains the only essential listening on the CD though, fittingly the final track. My investigations into this mysterious group/performer have hit a dead end though - unanswered emails, nonplussed DJs in small Bundang bars. When We Kiss is credited in the sleeve as being taken from a single released exclusively on Eastronika, as opposed to mentioning the name of an LP as done for the other 13 artists. But does the website hold further info? Does it fuck. Its discography is partial, missing out even the comp CD despite it's recent enough release. The artist section doesn't mention the group at all. But c'mon, they released it, no-one else!
Main avenue down, but my search will go on - I want to hear anything else, if there was anything else.
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