This week’s musical selection is one of those acts that most people think peaked and went away within a few short years back in the ’80s. While the case could be made that they’re not as commercially successful in the “hit records” sense nowadays, they’re still packing ’em in on the dance floors, not to mention collaborating with musical stars both new and old.

Coming up with an approach to the Pet Shop Boys mix stymied me for days. This evening I had almost settled on starting with the single version of “Left To My Own Devices” from 1988 when I realized that the song is twenty years old and counts among their early material. That’s when I decided to look at what albums came out when, and the solution finally presented itself as I noticed that Please, Bilingual and Fundamental are spaced at a ten year interval. (What? Bilingual is twelve years old now? That can’t be right…)

Please enjoy, in chronological order, the songs “Tonight Is Forever,” “Up Against It” and “Integral.”

That last track is a bit sociopolitical in lyrical tone, which leads rather neatly into our next musical selection. Join us for a trip Down Under next week…

This isn’t part of anything, nor is it meant to have meaning, nor does it flow very well in a musical fashion. I’m inflicting it upon the world anyway, at least the part of the world curious enough to give it a listen.

I was walking to the MAX station after work and The Church’s “Much Too Much” came on, followed by Genesis’ “Feeding the Fire,” which includes the lyrics, “Well I have seen you stung by poisonous flies / And you suffer much too much from their bites.” I realized that not only was that a nifty coincidence born of random song selections, but I happen to have a string of songs with a similar, connectable title scheme.

I give you, therefore, a mix which could be titled “Much Too Much Too Many Too Many Too Many Too Many People.” (I tacked the Pet Shop Boys track on because… well, the Genesis track is painfully ’70s. Trust me. I’d rather end on a high note than leave the title theme unbroken.)

Don’t worry. The Project entry is in the works even as I take a break to type this up…

Jon Crosby seems to be a guy who just likes noodling around musically. I’m not too sure about the direction he’s going lately, but I like a lot of the material he released under the guise of VAST. Please enjoy a song with the name “Song Without A Name,” a song I sort of panned in my review back when Nude came out named “Don’t Take Your Love Away,” and the song which got me hooked on VAST back when I was experimenting with MP3 downloading way back in the day named “Touched.”

We’re about one third of the way through the project, my friends. Our next outing will once again send us back to the UK for a date with one of the most successful pop duos around.

Week number four introduces the truly foreign material. (Four, foreign, oh look how clever I am.)

Let’s be clear on something: I’m not a Japanophile, really. I happen to like some of their animators and some of their musical acts, and that’s the bulk of my cultural fascination. To better enjoy the animated stories, I do want to know enough background material. Beyond that it’s a matter of taking in whatever happens to catch my magpie dilettante attention. I am, of course, a curious fellow.

But you came here for the music.

I’ve tried to explain before that what works for me isn’t the meaning of the words but rather their sound as part of the whole musical experience. I can’t illustrate the concept any more clearly than with three KOTOKO tracks. Enjoy the mellow “Hitorigoto,” the metallic “Suppuration -core-,” and the merry “Swift Love.”

If you find yourself hankering for words sung in English once again, you may find next week to be a vast improvement…

This one practically assembled itself, folks. Let’s see: It’s the 4th of July, and I happen to have a song which includes the lyrics, “I just flipped off President George.” Never mind that the song is from 1992 and is about George The First, Dada’s “Dizz Knee Land” fits the modern time very well, thank you.

Let’s go back to the early ’90s for a moment, though. If it wasn’t for the format switch at KGON then I might not be a Dada fan at all today. When Loren Steveson and I threw out all of the “non-classic” discs during the great purge, I snagged a copy Dada’s Puzzle album on general principle (I liked the single well enough but wasn’t sure if the band had blown their creativity on the one track), took it home, and fell in like. No, it wasn’t love, but there’s something about their jangly, trippy California rock sound that works for me when I’m in the right mood.

Picking from the other two Dada albums in my collection, American Highway Flower and their self-titled 1998 release, I follow up their original big hit with “All I Am” and “Spinning My Wheels.”

Enjoy, and we’ll meet again in a week for something a bit more… foreign.

I only ask fifteen minutes of your time, this go-around. The music is modern, innovative and toe-tappingly good. As a bonus, there’s a whole lot less of my aimless yammering to suffer through. What more could you ask?

By next week I’ll probably have the A/C unit in the window. That’s probably going to put a halt to the voice work for the duration of the project, I’m afraid. I had a hard enough time eliminating the outside noise with all of my windows shut, and the air conditioner is altogether too good at letting the outside world into my bedroom. How’s that for planning, eh?

That’s okay, though. I spent half of my time tonight just trying to hunt down the worst of the clicks and pops. Future weeks will be orders of magnitude easier to assemble if all I have to do is mix tracks and write up some color commentary…