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Music has always played a large part in my life - both creating it and playing it - and although any hopes of finding success as a creative musician faded away along with my hair, I still tinker with my own musical projects and keep an ear out for new sounds.
When I was in my late teens/early twenties I was absolutely obsessed with music - I'd gone beyond just listening because I liked it and moved into the assimilating to add to my own palette mode of appreciation.
I'd become a musical magpie, convinced that I could even 're-appropriate' melodies and riffs from music I wouldn't touch with a barge pole into my own demos.
This meant that whilst listening to the radio on my modest hi-fi stack, a TDK C90 cassette was always primed and loaded with my muscles twitching ready to hit the play and record buttons to capture something not heard before and unknown. Often I'd catch something as I turned the radio on or walked into the room and have to live with the disappointment of the DJ not identifying it afterwards.
The end result was a clutch of tapes with hundreds of radio fragments, mostly unidentified and referenced on folds of inserted notepaper as "choral noise" or "cold synth" - tags I'd hopefully be able to interpret at a later date. Some were tagged with actual artist names or song titles but in pre-internet days the chances of hunting them down was slim.
Then disaster struck. I'd been hauling my sizable collection of vinyl, CDs and tapes through house move to house move over the years but in 2006, in a blazing fury of Zen minimalism I got rid of everything choosing to embrace my iTunes library as an act of downsizing and convenience.
That meant my tapes of sonic shrapnel gleaned from many years of devotion to the John Peel show were no more...all those unidentified morcels of essential music would just fade from memory as would the few titles I managed to write down.
And here's where I return to the title of this post. There's a few of those taped moments I'd still dearly love to identify - the problem is the titles have gone and the music is absolutely on the threshold of perception, not even enough to reproduce a melody of - like a distant radio playing in the far off distance.
Then the magic of memory occurred - from nowhere, the words of John Peel echoed in my brain, "and that was Johnny Spunky.." - within seconds a Google search had taken me straight back to 1989 to hear the afore mentioned artist delivering "Zonked On Your Zazzle."
The overwhelming feeling of this sensory connection feels like time travel come true!
Ditto a few months later, a track that haunted me and had me buying a few Progressive House compilation LPs back in the day hoping that against extreme odds it would somehow be included (but never was.)
But Peel's words came back to me, "Rabbit on the moon.." - again enough to track it down within minutes.
My third example which I'll throw in isn't a testimony to the persistence of memory but a paean to the magic of Youtube (controversial I know not relegating it to being one of the four digital horsemen of the apocalypse...)
This snippet I'd tagged as "choral noise" - something in the vein of My Bloody Valentine but more beautiful and almost devotional.
I wasn't aimlessly looking for it on Youtube but instead listening to the back catalogue of a band I'd previously had just one 10" single of, The Ecstasy Of Saint Theresa and then it came up, last track on their Pigment EP - all this time it was them! The clue should've been in the name...
Johnny Spunky - Zonked on your Zazzle
Rabbit In The Moon - Out Of Body Experience