Songs that became famous because of a system glitch

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/a4/Bowi.jpg

god damn that still cracks me up

Not really a system glitch, I guess this is more a case of algorithms working how they're supposed to I guess, but still mostly by accident:

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/11/how-old-ambient-japanese-music-became-a-smash-hit-on-youtube/

Just came here to post that. Which came as a suggested article on my phone!

it's now on spotify

https://garbageday.substack.com/p/grieving-on-my-peloton

https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/music/story/2021-07-19/surf-curse-freaks-tik-tok

“Harness Your Hopes” appears on Spotify’s “Classic Punk” playlist; all the other tunes are decades older (needless to say, it doesn’t fit the theme). Pavement’s official Instagram posted a meme recently about the track’s ubiquity. It really is a weird thing.

this thread is amazing, btw

i have noticed recently that "never too much" by luther vandross pops up on a lot of the spotify playlists i like and i always play them on shuffle (NOT repeat all). it will always play "never too much" multiple times. especially if i need to pause — and then it almost always plays "never too much" next. it's his most played song on spotify by quite a lot. it was a top forty hit when it was released, so i'm not sure how much it factors into this discussion. i just thought it was weird.

The music has been sequenced for CD release in accordance with how the songs were recorded. So don't get your drawers crooked in your butt because songs are in a different order.

shit meant that for liner notes post.

this is a great thread either way. read it.

your drawers crooked in your butt

Pavement went ahead and made a "Harness Your Hopes" video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2Ww_O3ceKU

Hey guys, I'm starting a Soulseek-proof band called 'My Documents and the MP3s'. Who's in?

not sure if this is going to lead to anything

this is what comes up rn if you google animal collective😭😭 not a joke. try it yourself pic.twitter.com/RRb60zYqnS

— jet’s key🪩✨ (@jetskitosway) June 3, 2023

boy i really dislike anco, but that is quite unfortunate.

(btw i was curious, so checked around and this seems to be exclusive to google)

Yes, you can see it in Google’s auto-suggestion when you just start typing the band name. Somehow the fact they’re both abbreviated as “AC” must have created a mucked-up mismatch.

who am i to argue with google

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-08-06/hiroshi-yoshimura-from-internet-obscurity-to-youtube-sensation/11366386

found a new one yesterday-
https://i.imgur.com/TAIsDoI.jpeg

(hope that image works. here's the direct link in case.)

band is mid-90s emo group
everyone asked about you + the song is "sometimes memory fails me sometimes" + i find its female vox + flute coda quite delightful. i don't do tiktok, so not sure what the context of the song's use was/is. very solid jam imo.

idk where this fits. i was recommended x-cetra in the similar artists section on the spotify profile for some modern bay area twee bands. here they are on discogs. i genuinely don't know what to make of this one. the backstory is pretty nebulous, too. seems like it's been "known" for a while but also has gotten numero's attention as of late. it's on spotify.

sorry for the redundancy. just kinda wild what shows up on there sometimes.

oh yeah, sorry i didn't say anything about the actual music--

ermmm... proto-vaporwave shaggs?

They appear to be children (or preteens at most) in that cover art…

they are.

(or were, at the time of recording)

i'm very confused by the whole thing. it's getting rym hype too.

the bio claims they all loved (among other things) fiona apple-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFeTGwi5Iow
x-cetra - 'wonderland' (2000)

That’s actually kinda cool & sophisticated, I can see why ppl are into it (I listened to a few more tracks). Dunno about the Shaggs comparison; seems like they can sing pretty well…

yeah some of the songs are... ehhhmm, kinda good? but like- was this meant to be heard? idk, just weird vibes. whoever did the music was into something else entirely.

Looks like his blog includes his radio show playlists (so you can see exactly what he’s into): http://kunstlertreu.blogspot.com/

(tantalizingly, it goes all the way back to 2002… which doesn’t quite get there)

oh weird, i was listening to this X-Cetra earlier and it was reminding me of something i couldn't put my finger on... i thought maybe some of the synth patches were presets i knew but i think it was because i used to have this Künstler Treu 12" from 2001:

https://www.discogs.com/release/178993-K%C3%BCnstler-Treu-Humuhumunukunuku-apuaa

it's kind of lightly-glitchy, woozy early-Mouse on Mars/Global Goon-ish electronic music with sampled easy-listening/hawaiian elements

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFymlAwuKXc

i wonder what the connection was...

kind of an angular way to take the thread's premise, but this thread always reminds me of the Monotones's "The Book of Love". Simply because that big percussive "thud" between "ba-doooooo" and "who wrote the book of love?" was itself an accident. it wasn't part of the song, but some kid was outside the garage they were practicing in, kicking a ball, and he managed to smack the ball into the garage at that exact moment of the song, and they heard it and loved it and decided to add it.

idk that the song becomes popular without that.

I've listened to the X-cetra a few times now (here's the full album)... I'm typically skeptical of this kind of thing, but I gotta admit this is the "real deal."

Someone should email the producer guy and ask how it came together, etc.

yeah, couple more listens+i really like a few songs. album is short, but gets better as it goes along. fascinating!

So, if I write a song called "how swift was my Taylor?" and become pka "the 1989”, well...

xxp

looks like Achim Treu submitted some of it for the WFMU 365 Days project way back in 2003...

https://wfmu.org/365/2003/233.shtml

X-Cetra - Conversation/Idiotic/Wasn't There

X-Cetra is a group of sparkely-eyed young girls (very young - aged 10 to 12 at the time of this recording) from Northern California. Actually they had dreamed of becoming a girl group. Unfortunately the music they were given to work with was supplied from the archives of their avantgarde-music-loving hippy papa Don Campau. They tried their best to make catchy pop tunes out of this material, but the end results remain rather bizarre nonetheless. Dark, strange passages made oddly endearing by the sweetness of the girls' voices and the youth of their lyrics. I'm afraid they're never going to hit the Top 40, but maybe the Top 40 of musical oddities.

- Achim Treu"

That's interesting; I wonder what "backing tracks by Achim Treu" means, if he didn't "supply" the music...

Here's Don's site, someone should shoot him an email:https://doncampau.com/

https://rateyourmusic.com/release/album/x-cetra/stardust/

slioganach Jun 24 2020

i think the response that most of have upon learning about the existence of this album is generally something like "what in god's name is this and why does it sound like that?" i tend to fall into these kinds of rabbit holes pretty often, but they don't usually lead anywhere. this time, to my surprise, things turned out a bit differently.

the archive.org page which GenevieveGilliam links to unfortunately yields no answers about the strangeness of this title apart from one credit: the production responsibilities were apparently handled by someone named robin o'brien. i took it upon myself to trawl the web for musicians who went by this name and, after a bit of digging, was able to find someone whose profile fit the bill: lived in the right area, was around the appropriate age, had a background in music and was at least somewhat prominent in the local music scene. So I sent her an email.

to my surprise (and delight), she responded almost immediately and confirmed that she was in fact the person who produced the record! i explained that it's developed a bit of a cult following online and that people in certain pockets of the internet were simultaneously charmed and a little confused by it. i'm not going to provide any personal details as i feel that would be inappropriate, but here's what happened:

in 2000, ms. o'brien's daughters (ages nine and eleven) and two of their friends had begun to write songs and were interested in recording some of them. ms. o'brien is an experienced producer and, as such, decided to fulfill their wishes on her personal 4 track reel to reel. a friend of hers had coincidentally sent her a series of what she describes as trip-hop tracks, fully mixed, that she was free to do whatever she wanted with, and elected to use them as instrumentals. she said that she played with the tonality a bit and added some guitar work, but apart from that didn't put a ton of work into the project. the only quote from the email that i'll share word-for-word is her conclusion: "The girls gave their hearts to this guileless work. It was a joy to make."

so if you were listening to this thinking that it would have some kind of traumatic backstory, that some greedy man threw money at his children to make himself richer a la philosophy of the world, you were (thankfully!) wrong: in fact, the opposite seems to be the case. it's music written by children and realized by way of a particularly loving, creative parent.

That's a nice find, thx (funny how everyone keeps talking about the album sounding strange or bizarre... it really doesn't, to me at least)

yeah the shaggs is a bit of a misnomer, it's more like dam funk's "adolescent funk" or something like that. it's pretty sophisticated for some children with just a few flat notes and some shaggy dog melodies (the best bit imo).

i just think it's quite sweet and charming really. a bit like if the protagonists from PEN15 made an album for a school project (with their idm german exchange teacher)

i kind of want "matthew"-era kool keith to come do a guest verse on "idiotic" (panned hard-right)

xp Exactly - it's kind of remarkable they were so young; the lyrics & vox are fairly "accomplished."

(The 2000 date, and that CD-R cover, obv imbue it with a certain Y2K-nostalgia haze that makes for a great hook)

yeah that and especially the charlie's angels pose on their spotify artist photo is pretty period pitch-perfect

linee i was thinking, but didn't wanna say it out loud, "this sounds like dr dooom" on a couple of the beats!! that's where the confusion lies for me: one doesn't normally expect to hear earnestly harmonizing young girls accompanied by, at times, such menacing music.

and i mean, the polyrhythmic textures on the song i posted above are, like... uhh also not what i'd expect to hear on, well, most pop records tbh.

kudos for the info. i'll say it again: all music is folk music.

+re:shaggs comparison-
meant more like a descriptir of context, rather than sound: "obscure lofi girl group" and whatnot.

*descriptor

especially the charlie's angels pose on their spotify

Haha, I didn’t realize they had a Spotify profile (with pics and full bio)… after all this scouring of Discogs / YouTube comments, etc. The link to the Numero Group IG acct is promising

last week i got a paypal receipt for a payment to apple - i think for my monthly apple tv+ subscription - that contains this line:

Seller
Apple Services
http://itunes.com/bill

that url goes to a band from eastern europe called “bill” in the iTunes store, which i didn’t even think existed anymore

funny, i downloaded this from the 365 project back in 2004– hadn’t thought about it for years.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6FVlmWaoQI

Katya Lel - Мой Мармеладный (Я Не Права)