Artist Martin Backes, creator of the pixel camouflage mask Pixelhead, has created a new machine that incessantly belts out greatest hits power ballads from one of the greatest decades in music: the incomparable, the transcendent, the superlative 90s.
Instead it keeps nudging poor Nazaret on from one place to the next, ticking off the locations he visits like some endless country and western ballad.
As they had done for centuries, in Shakespeare's day ordinary people used folk ballads to pass stories from one generation to the next, often mixing legend and myth with historical fact.
It's a theme that has preoccupied Blegvad throughout his career; "Gold," a country-folk ballad from "King Strut" that remains one of his career highlights, is a breathtakingly lyrical speculation on financial and romantic value.
As for carrying her voice, there appeared to be pre-recorded vocals running for all but one song, a ballad from "In The Zone" called "Everytime" that Spears performed live while sitting on an umbrella that floated above the stage.
From there, the song pares back into a soft ballad, one that relies on little more than a two-note bass line of the original.
And think, too, of the confusion that appears whenever an artist moves from one category to another – Kylie Minogue, for example, singing murder ballads with Nick Cave.
One of them, a mellifluous 20-bar ballad called "One December," could almost have passed as a Hollywood theme from the 40's.
7. Bonnie Raitt "The Ones We Couldn't Be" (Redwing) Ms. Raitt, who knows her way around a lovesick piano ballad, wrote this one from a place of grown-up disillusionment: cleareyed in her sadness, sharing the blame as well as the pain.
During a few nights of wandering from one club to another, I was able to hear blues, reggae and even soft ballads from the 1940's.
