Sandstorm

Note: (Most of) this blog post was drafted ahead of time and has been released through pre-scheduling.
Edited only to add: I have now sent out pieces of short fiction and poetry 206 times this year. (My goal was to send things out 200 times.) I have 41 submissions pending at the moment. Will anything more be accepted for outside publication before the end of the year? I don’t know, but I am a bit tired of trying. In previous years, I would have expected to have three or four publications from those 200 attempts, but this year, as previously discussed, is officially awful for short literary endeavors.)

Anyway
Welcome back to my occasional series taking you through my Spotify playlist.

Today, “Sandstorm” by Darude.
I don’t have a whole lot to say about this track. I guess it’s a nostalgia-track for me. It was a chart topper here in Canada in 1999-2000. I don’t think I ever really clued into the fact that what was for me an introduction to trance music came from Finland back at the turn of the century, but it did.

I remember hearing this track a lot on the radio. Eventually, I also saw the official video, which was – and remains – a tad baffling, although rather charmingly lacking in glitz.
I never really got into dance/trance/techno/electronica, I find it becomes repetitive noise quite quickly for me, and this track remains essentially the only representative from that wide genre I know, although there may be a few more I’d recognize if I heard them again.

I say I don’t really electronica, but then I wonder, how much does something like Justin Hurwitz’s First Man score owe to that genre? Maybe a bit? Nothing at all? What do you think? I do also have this track on my playlist –

Perhaps a more important question here is – have you ever been in a sandstorm?
I have been in what I would term minor sandstorms a couple of times, including once while on the road somewhere in the American West (I think it may have been Nevada, but I am not clear on that) when not only was there some sand blowing around, but also tumbleweeds. But I’ve never been a sandstorm even remotely resembling something like this.
Something to look forward to with increasing drought severity, perhaps? Let me know if you’ve experienced any big sandstorms – and if that experience felt anything like a trance sound track!