Oasis

Raw, pure, innocent. No tricks, no gimmicks.

Get It Try It

There's a little oasis you can go to when you need to. There may be several. This is one.

Commercial pop music today is a punishment from an ornery Demon of Karma. What humanity is paying for isn't known, but the crime must be egregious. The music moguls have reduced the concept of the 'hit' not to an art but to a cold science. They understand their demographic all too well: pods in ears, flipping quickly from one track to the next, consumers today gorge themselves on sticky pabulum.

Pop stars rack up hundreds of millions - billions - of views on YouTube. Spotify and other platforms deliver eminently forgettable - and grievously uninspired - tracks that have no meaning, no depth, that ultimately all sound the same, mostly because they're made by the same people specifically to sound the same, following an established formula. Composition devolves into the same trite chord patterns, with a bit of a twist here and there to delude about a modicum of originality. It isn't expected to fool the erudite listeners, only the casual and uneducated listeners who are actually thinking of something else as they consume, either walking down the street, pouring over a textbook, or shopping in their neighbourhood mall.

It stinks.

There's no soul in that music, and there doesn't have to be. The consumers don't have much soul either - and, if they once did, they lose it fast, listening to that trollop.

Popular music went through an historical renaissance in the 1960s, the 1970s, and, to some extent, the 1980s. After that, as Don McClean sang, 'the music died'.

But there are true practitioners out there. People who find nurture in true culture. People with a long history of making music and loving music and who enjoy sharing their talent with others.

Live harmonies, so say the experts, are hard to do. Just listen to your favourite act in a real live performance and you'll see. Of course there are electronic tricks today. It's possible to make almost anyone sound good with a clever mix. That's been done all along. Post-production is important.

There's probably no one who does live recording and post-production as good as Tim Purcell. His first clips were crude and primitive when compared to his later standards, yet the sound was always spot-on. At some point in time, no matter how good your electronics may be, you have to have talent on stage.

The wonder of it all is that we still know so little of Tim's most acclaimed group Foxes and Fossils.

The girls are certainly foxes: Maggie Adams and Tim's own daughter Sammie (Samantha). There are some 60 clips of this group online to this day.

And those clips keep getting views - even to this day.

Check out the comments at any of them, and you'll understand what type of people frequent Tim's collection, from aficionado to professional. The aficionados sense what's going on; the pros know. Something magical and completely extraordinary takes place when they perform.

It's raw, it's pure, it's innocent. There are no tricks, no gimmicks.

A Tim gig is where professional musicians would go after a concert. To unwind. To get back to the basics. To feel the earth beneath their feet again. And, everywhere you go in their musical world, there's that utterly gratifying feeling of dependability. You know the group will not let you down. You don't even give such things a consideration. It's pure joy. It's an antidote to all the crap you're inundated with all day long, coming at you from insensitive sadistic loudspeakers at the mall, in the lift, in your car radio, from online music sources. You don't want any more of it. You flee, and find yourself an oasis.

https://www.youtube.com/user/reallad1/videos

See Also
Oasis
Golden Moon
The Crafty Hog
'This one goes to 11'
Foxes & Fossils: 2 Million
It Was Eight Years Ago Today
Neon Moon by the Foxes and Fossils
Worry

About Rixstep

Stockholm/London-based Rixstep are a constellation of programmers and support staff from Radsoft Laboratories who tired of Windows vulnerabilities, Linux driver issues, and cursing x86 hardware all day long. Rixstep have many years of experience behind their efforts, with teaching and consulting credentials from the likes of British Aerospace, General Electric, Lockheed Martin, Lloyds TSB, SAAB Defence Systems, British Broadcasting Corporation, Barclays Bank, IBM, Microsoft, and Sony/Ericsson.

Rixstep and Radsoft products are or have been in use by Sweden's Royal Mail, Sony/Ericsson, the US Department of Defense, the offices of the US Supreme Court, the Government of Western Australia, the German Federal Police, Verizon Wireless, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Microsoft Corporation, the New York Times, Apple Inc, Oxford University, and hundreds of research institutes around the globe. See here.

All Content and Software Copyright © Rixstep. All Rights Reserved.