Stef Animal Top Gear

Stef Animal (The Golden Awesome) presents her debut solo release Top Gear, a concept album offering fifteen writing exercises, each conceived and recorded in a single session. Each track was made using a different piece of obsolete or unfashionable music equipment, and the result is a collection of lo-fi epic miniatures. Even if you didn't grow up with Atari video games and have no idea either what Acorn and Commodore computers are or what acronyms like PCM and MIDI stand for, you ll still appreciate Top Gear's intricate universe of sound, full of adventure, wonder, human emotion and melancholic heft. Yet there's playfulness here too, and not just in the title. An electronic duck caller is hacked to produce one track and elsewhere children's Casio keyboards and entry-level MIDI synth modules deliver darkly sophisticated, progressively experimental dream-pop mini-symphonies. The technology used on Top Gear dates from a time when elite rock musicians were hailing Compact Disc technology as the audio format of the future, finally allowing audiophile listeners to hear their true genius which'd so long been obscured by the sonic limitations of vinyl. So, with those eighties CD advocates now busy reissuing LP box sets, here's Stef Animal's Top Gear to reclaim the future they imagined 30 years ago 1.Loading(Casio CA-100) 2. In The Pines (Casio SK-1) 3. Ducks (Cass Creek Electronic NZ Waterfowl Call) 4. You Have Powers! (Casio Casiotone MT-800) 5. Cave Story (Acorn BBC Micro) 6. The TGV (Roland U-220) 7. The Ghost (Jaycar Waveform Generator) 8. Adventure (Yamaha VSS-200) 9. The Golden Condor (Commodore Amiga 500) 10. Dragon Swirl (Ploytec PL2) 11. Owl (Roland MT-32) 12. The City (Yamaha TX81Z) 13. Running Music (Atari 2600) 14. End Credits (Letron MC-38) 15. Our Spanish Dream (Roland U-110)