How can you say no to a product whose name is a full sentence? Well, a one-word exclamation followed by a sentence fragment. They’d been churning these babies out for years in the UK, but we in the US weren’t treated to their compilation glory until 1998. Especially before we held the power to create our our own CDs, we relied heavily on these As Seen on TV products for mix tape-style musical entertainment. For the allegedly low low price of just $19.99 plus shipping and handling, we could be the proud owner of a compilation CD guaranteed to satisfy our urge for a varied playlist within a set theme. In the time set squarely between the age of the Mix tape and the era of burnable CDs, the music industry offered us an attractive option. If you were lucky enough to own a dual cassette player, you could sometimes record from one to another, but the whole process was a bit of an ordeal. To create your dream compilation required a great deal of finger dexterity to press the record and stop buttons at just the right time as they came on the radio. We did have the positively prehistoric predecessor of the mixtape, but it was a far more complex affair. 99 cents a song with the goal assembling the ultimate playlist. With these selections sandwiched in between the aforementioned straight-up New Age cuts and slices of soft-sax fromage from folks like Kenny G and Candy Duffer, Pure Moods less resembles a transportative trip through a world of sound and more someone impatiently changing the channel on TV every few minutes.Once upon a time, in a primitively technological world lightyears from today, we couldn’t just pick and choose the songs on our albums as we pleased. There's high drama presented in the form of Michael Nyman's piano-driven theme for Jane Campion's passionate masterpiece The Piano, multiple strains of romantic scoring from compositional master Ennio Morricone, and-most strangely-Angelo Badalamenti's shuffling haunt of a theme for David Lynch's terrifying classic Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. (If you're going to promise to take your listeners on a journey, why chart a course that's all over the map?) On the other end of the spectrum-where the New Age sound pushes deep swirls of tone and layered vocals into total plushy oblivion-there's connecting fibers between the aforementioned "Orinoco Flow" and "Return to Innocence," as well as the piping, exoticized chillout of French duo Deep Forest's "Sweet Lullaby." Otherwise, Pure Moods is largely dotted with odd film soundtrack selections that, while staying true to the plurality of the compilation's title itself, present no unified sonic front or, at the very least, the thoughtful sequencing that any variety-driven playlist would demand in the modern age. ![]() ![]() 4" and Jan Hammer's indelible Miami Vice-soundracking "Crockett's Theme." Granted, there are a few tracks that carry similar strands of sonic DNA in that vein the gauzy, weightless drift of the title track to musical mastermind Brian Eno's 1975 classic "Another Green World" makes for solid bedfellows with British ambient-techno pioneers the Orb's saucer-eyed "Little Fluffy Clouds," as well as the pinwheel synths of French electronic producer Jean-Michel Jarre's "Oxygène Pt. Of course, truth in advertising is more often than not relative, as the music of Pure Moods possesses little in calm-inducing uniformity when it comes to vibe curation.
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