(no subject)

[prog]

Today is hunt day! Soon I will leave. Before that, I will try to find to find my gloves. But I wanted to note something pleasantly random first. Insomaniacal last night, was reminded of Information Society's 1988 hit "What's on Your Mind" by someone else's blog, and made a beeline for the iTunes store because I wanted to spend a dollar on it. And, lo: I could, for that whole album is there. Then I felt wistful, as tends to happen easily with me, because: look at the happy people on the album's cover! Doesn't it make you wonder where they are now?

Then I felt wistful, because I remembered how I discovered this group: through a sampler disc packaged with the Sega CD system I bought 11 years ago. It included a couple of tracks from this album, in CD+G format, and I bet I'm one of only a relative handful of people who bothered to watch the video tracks. They were delightful: cartoony depictions of the band and their house, with running commentaries about their history, their musical techniques, and their favorite recipes. But because I was a broke undergrad (and also as lazy as I ever was) I didn't go buy the album, so didn't see the other "videos", and some years later sold the disc (with the rest of my Sega), and indeed have never encountered any CD+G anything since then. (You probably haven't, either.)

So after a few moments of Googling, I found this. It's not really the same experience -- the actual art was vaguely animated, and had the current audio track's lyrics scrolling along the bottom of the screen, in time. But I was pretty stoked to find it, nonetheless.

Also found references to http://www.insoc.org, allegedly housing a website maintained by Kurt (the vocalist with labcoat and Edward Scissorhands hair, at least back then), but it doesn't seem to be awake right now.

Comments

[cortezopossum.livejournal.com]

I remember when the CD format was first being agreed upon there was a big discussion about CD+G... the Japanese INSISTED on having room for this as part of the format (primarily for the purposes of karaoke) thus trimming the music time available on a CD by a few minutes for everybody.

A friend of mine started collecting CDs back when you could only find them in specialty CD shops. Now he has roughly 1000 CDs including this INSOC one ... I'm pretty sure this is the only one with CD+G. He never had a player that could support the CD+G format.