Jansky Noise - Past Present & Future Star Music

We all dream of summer stretching on forever, but even the sweetest season has its limits. There’s only so much heat, so much haze, before the soul starts to long for shade. Steve Hiett understood that balance perfectly—his music carries the shimmer of light but also the quiet ache of its fading.  No wonder Sony’s AOR City 1000 imprint chose to reissue Down On The Road By The Beach (1983) in late August 2017, as if to remind us that summer’s closing chapters are as vital as its beginning. On this record, the radiant pulse of Chuck Berry, The Beach Boys, and Booker T. & the MG’s filters through Hiett’s lens, refracted into something wholly his own. In its meditative corners, you catch echoes of The Everly Brothers, The Ventures, and Roy Orbison—spectral voices drifting like heat mirages.  In its broader strokes, it’s a meeting ground where Japanese, American, and English mellow music converge: City Pop, AOR, jazz-fusion, even the minimalism of The Durutti Column, all wove...

The end of summer comes not with silence, but with the clatter of return. Today, the road home weighed heavy— the car loaded beyond reason, unloaded of tents and stoves, gas and food, utensils, stories, laughter, and two giant trees rescued from indoors to carry with me like green guardians. From Green Gathering to the Battle trail of 1066, I gave and gave—performing, dancing, listening, holding space for young and old, pouring energy into love, into life itself. And yet—on arrival— my car swallowed its keys in one final trick. The hill climb of fatigue turned steeper: front door broken down, spare keys sought in weary hands, concern rising with the tick of the parking clock. Still, I sat. Tea in hand. Three weeks’ worth of unopened life. And the first envelope, a fine— for resting too long at a service stop, because even a traveler must breathe. The tests pile high: plants lost to thirst in my absence, rooms that demand reset, soil to replant, walls to clean...