Dark Magus: "Arma Gideon" 

So: This afternoon, at my spacious, new, universe-controlling workPod, while unpacking the largeish box containing the detritus from my previous space, I unearthed an old CD-ROM filled with MP3s I'd previously considered lost. Included among them?  Dark Magus' "Arma Gideon".

Now, about Dark Magus: It's one of the many pseudonyms of Richard H Kirk, most famously one-half of Cabaret Voltaire.  For some reason or another — Copyright? Label meddling? Multiple Personality Disorder? Intellectual impishness? Drug-induced paranoia? — he recorded, during and after CV, a million different works under a million different names. Usually more stripped-down (and frequently more dub-based) than CV, all of these works are pretty damn groovy in the middle of the night while hunched over a keyboard. Dark Magus was the name through which — for me, at least — his most magical ("Dark Magus" = All-Star Crowley) and more jazzsperimental ("Dark Magus" = Miles Davis) stuff was unleashed.

Anyway, "Arma Gideon".  From the 1997 Night Watchmen album — itself chock-full of nutty, syncopating, trancey goodness — this song, with its omnipresent, "we are liberated, we are free" mantra is undeniably the fuel of dreams, if not multiple spinegasms.

Nothing bad can touch you while you listen to "Arma Gideon".

And don't get me started on how staggeringly spectacular the two versions of Boards of Canada's "Dayvan Cowboy" are (on the newly-released Trans Canada Highway).  I mean it, don't.