with Tony Pompeii
The year is 1504 BC as you stride along a bustling street market in ancient Luxor. Your robes ripple through dry air, thick with Egyptian spice. Your ears fill with the long-forgotten strains of lute, tambourine, and a harp fashioned from the bent femur of an ass… At the foot of a steep stone stairway, in the shadow of a statue of the wolf god Anubis, a 12-fingered witch squats at a potter’s wheel spinning a lump of wet clay. When she touches her rusty Kukri knife to the side of the vase to carve decorative lines into it, she can not know that vibrations from the street instruments and voices are imparting a jagged groove upon it, creating the first analog Alternative Rock recording. It is mono, and scratchy, but somehow you sense the pot’s value. You must have it! What will she accept as trade? Must you part with your bulging pouch of cardamoms? Only that hag knows for sure.
Now it is 2015 A.D. And although we’ve developed far more advanced recording systems, such as the wax cylinder, the 8-track tape, and the robot-implanted brain chip, the quest remains the same: To possess the “calming strains of the lute.” Alternative Planet brings you music from the most important Alternative Rock decades, the 80s, 90s, and Twenty-Hundreds. Every song is an instant classic, every song perfectly suited to very fast driving. So close your eyes, lie all the way back, and enjoy.
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