Electronic Sound Issue 18 PDF Edition

18
50 Years of
Electronic Sounds
Five decades
of genre-defining
electronic
trailblazers.
The Originators
The Innovators
The Poppers
The Clubbers
The Millennials
The Beatles
Wendy Carlos
The Electric Flag
Beaver & Krause
The Monkees
Silver Apples
George Harrison
White Noise
Gershon Kingsley
Kraftwerk
Tubeway Army
Cabaret Voltaire
The Normal
Jean-Michel Jarre
Donna Summer
Tangerine Dream
John Foxx
Suicide
Brian Eno
Blondie
The Buggles
OMD
Depeche Mode
The Human League
Vangelis
Street Sounds
New Order
This Mortal Coil
Frankie Knuckles
Phuture
Juan Atkins
Front 242
Happy Mondays
Aphex Twin
Underworld
Goldie
Coldcut
Massive Attack
Radiohead
The Knife
LCD Soundsystem
Oneohtrix Point Never
Minimal Wave
Drive OST
Grimes
Jon Hopkins
Factory Floor
Rustie
HELLO
Editor: Push
Deputy Editor: Mark Roland
Art Editor: Mark Hall
Commissioning Editor: Neil Mason
Graphic Designer: Giuliana Tammaro
Sub Editor: Rosie Morgan
Sales & Marketing: Yvette Chivers
Contributors: Andrew Holmes, Anthony Thornton, Ben Willmott, Bethan Cole,
Carl Griffin, Chris Roberts, Cosmo Godfree, Danny Turner, David Stubbs,
Ed Walker, Emma R Garwood, Fat Roland, Finlay Milligan, Grace Lake,
Heidegger Smith, Jack Dangers, Jools Stone, Kieran Wyatt, Kris Needs,
Luke Sanger, Mark Baker, Martin James, Mat Smith, Neil Kulkarni, Ngaire Ruth,
Patrick Nicholson, Paul Thompson, Robin Bresnark, Simon Price, Stephen Bennett,
Stephen Dalton, Steve Appleton, Tom Violence, Velimir Ilic, Wedaeli Chibelushi
Published by PAM Communications Limited
© Electronic Sound 2016. No part of this magazine may be used or reproduced in any way without the prior
written consent of the publisher. We may occasionally use material we believe has been placed in the public
domain. Sometimes it is not possible to identify and contact the copyright holder. If you claim ownership of
something published by us, we will be happy to make the correct acknowledgement. All information is believed
to be correct at the time of publication and we cannot accept responsibility for any errors or inaccuracies there
may be in that information.
With thanks to our Patrons:
Mark Fordyce, Gino Olivieri, Darren Norton, Mat Knox
welcome TO
Electronic Sound 18
This issue has been a long time the making. As music journalists we
do like a list and over the last few months we’ve had them coming out
of our ears, we even found ourselves making lists of lists to arrive at
this month’s epic cover feature. The idea started because we felt there
wasn’t a proper history of electronic music or at least a history that we
recognise. In a moment of madness we decided we’d give it a crack.
How hard could it be, right?
We’ve long known that almost everything is connected in some way
or other, so seven degrees of separation with, say, Kraftwerk and
anyone who’s touched a synth is quite the piece of cake. We wanted
to go further than that. What we wanted to do was tell a story, but it
soon became pretty clear that there wasn’t just one story, there were
thousands. So whose story we did we tell? As we got more involved,
we realised we were telling our story, the story of Electronic Sound, of
the many, many reasons we came to exist.
So here we are with 50 Years of Electronic Sounds in 50 records.
There will, almost certainly, be a few cuts in the list that will make
you double take. There will be some you might think are screamingly
obvious. What we’ve tried to do with it all is bring something new
to the party, to tell a new tale, connect people, songs, albums, that
perhaps haven’t been connected before.
Think of our world of electronic music like a big dot-to-dot book. Grab
yourself a pencil, settle and down and let’s see where we can take you.
Electronically yours
Push & Mark
CONTENTS
FE ATUR E S
50 YEARS OF ELECTRONIC SOUNDS
The Originators
In a special issue, we trace a line through the 50 records that
have shaped electronic music over the last five decades
Those who blazed the original electronic trails from
THE BEATLES to WENDY CARLOS, THE MONKEES to
BEAVER & KRAUSE…
The Innovators
The Poppers
Caps doffed to those who picked up the gauntlet and ran
with it, including BRIAN ENO, THE NORMAL, KRAFTWERK,
DONNA SUMMER…
From the bodypoppers to the synthpoppers, starring
ORCHESTRAL MANOEUVRES IN THE DARK,
THE HUMAN LEAGUE, VANGELIS, NEW ORDER…
The Ravers
The Millennials
The acid house explosion and the rise and rise and rise of
the dancefloor. You know the score. PHUTURE, FRONT 242,
APHEX TWIN, UNDERWORLD and more!
Last but not least, those who were charged with
making sense of what went before while blazing new trails
all of their own… LCD SOUNDSYSTEM, MINIMAL WAVE,
GRIMES, FACTORY FLOOR…
UP THE FRONT
OPENING SHOT
TIME MACHINE
As a permanent exhibition to the late,
great DELIA DERBYSHIRE opens in her
hometown, we take a peek at what’s in
store at The Coventry Music Museum
We discover our time machine goes
forwards as well as backwards, so we
invite Fat Roland to peer in the murky
future, with apologies to Mr Brian Eno
PULSE
UNDER THE INFLUENCE
Dublin’s MMOTHS, acid house revivalist
THE CAULFIELD BEATS, the Icelandic
quirkpop of DJ FLUGUEL & GEIMSKIP
and acid funk of THE COMET IS COMING
Before we spoke to Erasure’s ANDY BELL
we had a friendly wager as to his formative
influences… how many did we get? None.
He is a man packed full of surprises
FAT ROLAND
BURIED TREASURE
Our revered columnist serves up a shot
across the electronic music bows fuelled
solely by bitterness and recrimination.
It’s just how we like him
This month, from New York City, it’s
Jesse Hartman’s LAPTOP alter ego and
his storming debut EP
JACK DANGERS
ANATOMY
Mr Dangers salutes the visual artists who
thought they’d have a dabble with sound,
EBERHARD DOSER, KAREL APPEL,
GÜNTER MAAS and JEAN DUBUFFET
You know how you’ve always looked at the
cover of DJ SHADOW’s ‘Endtroducing.....’
and pondered its deeper significance? You
haven’t? Do you know what you’re missing?
THE REMIX REVIEW
NEEDS MUST
Quirky Italian duo NIAGARA get remixers
to recast tracks from their 2014 album
‘Don’t Take It Personally’… We get the
skinny on the SON OF NORTH rerub
A bunch of cracking new tuneage lovingly
appraised in his own charming manner by
the very excellent Mr Kris Needs
RETRO SYNTH ADS
WOLFGANG REMIX COMP
They don’t make adverts like they used
to… we unearth a bunch of classic ads for
some of your favourite synths
How remixing a track by the former
Kraftwerker could see you enjoying
afternoon tea with the great man
SYNTHESISER DAVE
READERS’ SYNTHS
Our Dave isn’t just about fixing things.
Oh no. He mods things too. Oh yes.
For example, the rather interesting
GAKKEN SX-150
You know how it is when you spot a
ROLAND RS-09 MK 2 that hasn’t had beer
poured all over it, hasn’t had cigs stubbed
out on it, even the case is pristine
SEABOARD RISE
KORG APPS
The keyboard has been reinvented and
it’s all squishy and squashy. We give it a
runout and offer up our verdict
KORG have rejiggled their essential iPad
app for the iPhone? Any cop? We take a
long hard look at the KORG MODULE and
KORG iDS-10 music making app, too
TECH
ALBUM R E V I E WS
THE LEAF LABEL, TANGERINE DREAM, DEUX FILLES, THE
EVANGELIST, LARRY GUS, GO MARCH, THE ADVENT, THIS HEAT,
WOODLEIGH RESEARCH FACILITY, MUERAN HUMANOS, WILD
STYLE LION, HOWES, LITTLE VOODOO DOLLS and more…
THE OPENING SHOT
XXX
Delia Derbyshire Exhibition
Location: The Coventry Music Museum
Words: MARK ROLAND
Delia Derbyshire, probably the most well-known name of the
electronic music pioneers of the Radiophonic Workshop, is the
subject a new exhibition at the Coventry Museum of Music.
Clive Blackburn, who was Delia Derbyshire’s partner, spoke
at the opening of the permanent exhibition of her work and
artefacts at the museum in December. He loaned Delia’s own
tape recorder and her personal copy of the ‘Doctor Who’ theme
music to the exhibition which recreates her old control desk.
“It really does look exactly like it,” Blackburn said.
Clive Blackburn worked at the BBC between 1968 and 1970,
but he didn’t meet Delia until 1978. “I never went to the
Radiophonic Workshop,” he said. They lived together from 1980
in Northampton after she left London. “She was a bit of guru,
people used to come to her and really respected her opinion on
music,” he told the audience gathered for the official opening.
The exhibition was opened by the cutting of a length of audio
tape with a razor blade. “Delia would have spent about 15
minutes working where to make the cut,” Blackburn joked
before slicing the tape.
The museum has organised a campaign and a petition to have
a road in Coventry named after Delia Derbyshire. The museum
understands that her name has now been added to the council’s
list of names that might be used for future road names.
pulse
This month, we’re getting all hot under the collar about
the deep dark electronica of MMOTHS, the peculiar
squonk pop of DJ FLUGVÉL OG GEIMSKIP, spot-on
retro/future acid obsessives THE CAULFIELD BEATS and
apocalyptic space funkateers THE COMET IS COMING
XXX FRONT
THE
MMOTHS
Heartstring-tugging emotional electronica
WHO HE?
Jack Colleran, a 22-year-old Dublin-dwelling
producer and sensitive soul to boot. His debut
album ‘Luneworks’, due in the spring, is a total
heartbreaker. Born out of a messy break up, it’s a
dazzling piece of work by any standards, but when
you discover it’s his debut… Blimey.
WHY MMOTHS?
Previous outings, EPs ‘MMOTHS’ and ‘Diaries’,
hinted at what might be in store, but for what we
are about to receive may we be truly thankful. First
fruit from the album, ‘Deu’, is a swollen storm of a
song with its trace of haunting vocal as the track
builds and builds, layer upon layer, slowly cranking
up the distortion until the whole thing is soaked in
sound. It sets the scene perfectly for ‘Luneworks’,
which is at times dense and powerful, at others
delicate and gentle. Colleran claims he only listened
to My Bloody Valentine while he was writing. Does
it show? Oh, it does.
TELL US MORE…
As with all relationship breakdowns, a sharp exit
and a bit of distance is always best. Colleran headed
to LA when a pal offered him what he charmingly
describes as “the floor of some shitty small spare
bedroom”. Packing just a laptop and a change
of clothes, he spent a month raking through the
ashes of his wrecked love life and poured it all into
this glorious, emotionally-charged belter. Brace
yourselves because this is just the beginning for
MMOTHS.
NEIL MASON
‘Deu’ is out on out on Because Music/OYAE,
and the album follows in March
XXX FRONT
THE
DJ FLUGVÉL OG
GEIMSKIP
Spellbinding Icelandic quirkpop pioneer
WHO SHE?
TELL US MORE…
DJ Flugvél Og Geimskip (that’s DJ Plane & Spaceship
to you, mister) is Icelandic musician Steinunn
Eldflaug Harðardóttir whose singular sonic vision has
resulted in a beguiling junk shop of sounds; some
sampled, some dredged from the murky depths of
the sea, some probably found homeless and unloved,
living in a skip.
She does a song about an evil plot by cats, who
appear nice and friendly during the day, but who are
actually very evil. There’s another one about an evil
snake. That comes out at night-time. She’s basically
channeling her inner six-year-old, Icelandic style, all
imbued with stories about the dark and spooky evil
spirits. And that is nothing except a compliment.
Her charity shop sparkle and tea trolley gear set-up
belies the fact that she has a lovely voice and is a
story teller in the fine Icelandic tradition, while the
songs are so singular and peculiar that it’s difficult
to resist.
WHY DJ FLUGVÉL OG GEIMSKIP?
Her music is odd, scary and cute. It’s full of
unexpected twists, and unexpected beginnings.
And ends. And middle bits. It is not at all standardissue electronic DIY. You might think that this kind
of thing keeps the wolves from the door in those
long Icelandic winters, or perhaps is the inevitable
result of months of darkness and a lack of trees,
knee deep in snow, but its antecedents are in the
likes of Joe Meek’s naive space tunes and the
twisted output of The Residents’ more peculiar
entertainments. She calls herself an “electronic
horror musician”.
MARK ROLAND
‘Nótt á Hafsbotni’ (‘Night At The Bottom Of The
Sea’) is out now on Mengi
XXX FRONT
THE
THE CAULFIELD BEATS
Boat rocking beats from river-dwelling London duo
WHO THEY?
TELL US MORE…
Lawrence Northall and Molly Dixon, two London
creative types who are drawn to living aboard canal
boats and came up through the shady world of
hacked music software and bedroom – well, cabin –
electronics. Earlier this year, their debut EP ‘Mexican
Smoke’ was a hot mess of reference points, ranging
from sharp-as-blades minimal techno to laidback
indie vocals, hip hop and soul samples and a huge
dose of blistering dancefloor energy.
The duo describe their music as “garage electronics”,
fusing a warehouse party aesthetic with a raw,
homemade garage band approach usually associated
with rock bands, while the Caulfield in their name
comes from Holden Caulfield, star of JD Salinger’s
‘The Catcher In The Rye’. Try to imagine that this is
what young Holden would have been listening to if
the wayward, disenchanted kid was losing himself in
London’s underground club scene instead of 1940s
Manhattan.
WHY THE CAULFIELD BEATS?
One word: acid. Or, more precisely, aciiiieeeeed. Do
you want to party like it’s 1988? Do you want to
experience that crazy head rush that only comes
from hearing an elastic 303 riff squelching off into
crazy shapes like a menacing synth cyborg? Of
course you do. It’s always time for an acid house
renaissance and The Caulfield Beats’ new track,
‘Acid Pt I’, dives right into its twisted heart.
MAT SMITH
‘Acid Pt 1’ is out now on Straight Lines Are Fine
XXX FRONT
THE
THE COMET IS COMING
Sonic explosion that’s putting the “fun” into “space funk”
WHO THEY?
TELL US MORE
Self defined “apocalyptic space funk” band, The
Comet Is Coming is made up of three prophetic
members: Danalogue the Conqueror, Betamax Killer
and King Shabaka. With a unique, vibrant aesthetic
– think Space Invaders, 70s sci-fi, post-punk, 80s
electronica – this lot are exciting, loud and joyful
and they’re here to be your soundtrack to the end of
the world.
Working together since 2013, the trio have between
them played in a plethora of outfits including Leaf
lablemates Melt Yourself Down and Polar Bear.
Having already shared a bill with Squarepusher and
going down a (meteor) storm at the Transmusicale
festival in Rennes in December, never mind whether
the comet is coming, if they carry on like this,
they’re very welcome to stay.
WHY THE COMET IS COMING?
Their ‘Prophecy’ EP, a five-track asteroid that entered
Earth’s atmosphere late last year on Tony Morley’s
double-decade-celebrating Leaf Label, is packed full
of all manner of extra terrestrial noises, squelches,
keys, drums and a frantic saxophone that all join
together to create fiery, planet-breaking electrofunk… seriously, I can go further with these space
analogies if you like. Lead track, ‘Neon Baby’, waves
happily at the oncoming apocalypse – a raw, crazed
rhythm described by their people as being “as seismic
as an earthquake, as heady as a timeless ritual”.
FINLAY MILLIGAN
The ‘Prophecy’ EP is out now on The Leaf Label
XXX FRONT
THE
UN
DER
THE
INFLU
ENCE
“
There was us thinking the Erasure frontman would be
an open book when it came to his formative years.
Not a bit of it… country & western and steam engines!
Welcome to the wonderful world of ANDY BELL
Interview: MAT SMITH
“
CHARLIE RICH
FAIRGROUNDS
JUNIOR SCHOOL CHOIR
When I was a teenager we used to go
to a roller disco in Peterborough every
weekend. They used to play a song by
Charlie Rich called ‘The Most Beautiful
Girl’. I was convinced that I was in love
with this girl with long, blonde hair. I
just followed her round on the roller rink,
hoping that I might bump into her, or
we’d get talking. It never happened.
It was one of those unrequited crushes
and I just wasn’t brave enough to break
the ice.
This is also Peterborough, from when I
was maybe 16 or 17. I was a huge fan
of the fairground. I remember one time
I was there with all my sisters and we’d
been given my mum’s purse, which was
full of money from selling Avon. We went
on the House Of Fun, and when we came
off I realised I’d lost the purse. We were
crying, but we stayed there for another
couple of hours and when we got home,
we pretended to my mum that we’d had
a really good time, but that we’d lost her
purse on the way home.
My choirmaster in junior school was
called Mr Morris. He boosted my
confidence so much and was such a
kind gentleman. He’d given me a solo in
‘Once In Royal David’s City’ and mum had
come down to watch the choir perform.
I was so shy that all I could do was stare
at the clock on the wall at the back of
the assembly hall or otherwise I’d just be
looking down and fiddling with my shorts.
I was just so thankful for my teacher
for giving me that break. I was very,
very shy and I was picked on for being
like a girl, so I was really mistrustful of
people. He really restored my confidence
in myself. I remember I always ran out
of breath at the end of the solo. The
same thing happened to me in Erasure
when I first went into the studio with
Vince. I always used to run out breath
on the verses of ‘Oh L’Amour’, so I got
completely transported back to the choir.
The best fairground that I ever went
to was this thing called Expo Steam,
which they had at the East of England
Showground in Peterborough. You’d get
all these huge steam engines on display,
and at the same time they’d be working
the fairground rides. I can still remember
the size of the machines, the smell of the
engines mixed up with all the popcorn
and candy floss.
A few of them used the big cardboard
punched-out notes for the steam organ
pipes, and I said to Vince one time that
we should do an Erasure tour on a steam
roller. It would take forever, just driving
round the country really slowly, we could
set up in the middle of town and do a gig.
Vince could get all the synth lines punched
out onto these cardboard sheets and all I’d
have to do is go out and buy the coal.
“
For some reason that song just has a
resonance with me. I was a bit of a country
& western fan, because my parents had a
lot of those records, and this song seemed
to have a bit of a country tinge to it. I
took it as one of those songs that was very
truthful. It meant so much to me that on
this particular morning, I don’t know why,
I thought that this was the girl for me, and
this song was an indication of what was
going to happen. It gave me butterflies
and a complete yearning that I had to meet
this girl… but it never ever happened.
Andy Bell's new album, ‘Torsten,
The Beautiful Libertine’, is released
by Cherry Red on 4 March
XXX FRONT
THE
Our esteemed columnist wonders why it is he isn’t
more famous, musically speaking. We whistle, scuff the
dirt and look in the other direction
Words: FAT ROLAND
Illustration: STEVE APPLETON
Multiple choice question. Pay attention. One: am I an
internationally renowned songwriter who’s penned hits for Adele,
Autechre and Crazy Frog. Or two: am I a failed techno musician
who masks bitter self-loathing with “witty” egotistical columns
for leading electronic music magazines? Yeah, you guessed it.
I’m an unsuccessful knob-twiddler who writes diatribes about
more successful artists in the name of journalism. My jealousy is
so acidic, you could pour it on your chips.
I had piano lessons as a kid, fancied myself as the new Mozart.
There was something so human about an upright piano and
I loved the mathematics of musical notation. Then rave
happened. Rave taught me that all old things were rubbish, so
I tipped my stupid piano into a river. Even now, there’s a swan
somewhere downstream playing ‘Chopsticks’. I grabbed myself
a copy of Ableton and let the pixels do the work. Finding the
groove through incremental mouse clicks is in every way as
human and as mathematical as a piano score.
FAT
ROLAND
BANGS
ON
These days you can release music on a paper aeroplane and
still call it an album, so I signed up to Bandcamp and thought
of a name for myself. I wanted something that sounded a bit
mysterious, a bit Conan Doyle, so I plumped for Hounds of
Hulme. Hulme is home of the classic night Herbal Tea Party
where I used to dance like a tasered hippo.
You can have a listen to the music I farted out: it’s still there.
A bit 1990s dour, a few too many presets, but some interesting
samples and every beat constructed from scratch. In one year,
I blurted out 20 tracks including a passable ‘Call Me Maybe’
drum ’n’ bass cover.
Since then? The creative flow dried up. Turn on the tap now
and all you’ll get is dust. Paf. While that swan’s happily playing
‘The Entertainer’ to a simpering audience of quacking ducks,
all I have are a million failed attempts to be half-good again.
Everything I produce is yawnsome and crap. I wish I could
throw my Ableton program into a river.
And so it’s back to my egotistical columns and writing
about successful acts, something I’ve done for 25 years and
something that will never let me down. That Gary Numan, huh?
What a loser. Jeez. He’s literally worse than a piano-playing
swan. That’s “witty”, isn’t it. Really, really “witty”. Sigh.
ELECTRONIC
SOUND
MERCH
TEA TOWELS
BADGES
STICKERS
TOTE BAGS
GREETINGS CARDS
THE
PERFECT
GIFT
www.electronicsound.co.uk/shop
XXX FRONT
THE
BURIED
TREASURE
IN SEARCH OF ELECTRONIC GOLD
We all like a bit of 80s influenced shizz, right?
Listen and learn from New York’s LAPTOP whose
cool as cubes 90s debut EP ‘End Credits’ was quite
the ear-catcher
Words: NEIL MASON
Back in the 90s, before the previous decade had a
proper chance to be a fading memory, a first wave
of artists who grew up with the 1980s ringing in
their ears firsthand were offering up musical takes
on their own formative years.
There was Les Rhythmes Digitales, or uber
producer Stuart Price as he’s called these days,
whose ‘Darkdancer’ album was a rebooted electro
floorwiper, his Wall Of Sound labelmate Theo
Keating was serving up
old school hip hop as
The Wiseguys, there was
breakbeat collective The
Freestlyers, the funkfuelled disco of Skint’s
Freddy Fresh and there
was native New Yorker
Jesse Hartman, who
operated as Laptop.
Yeah, don’t try googling
him these days, right?
As a kid, Hartman had
an older brother who
filled his head with
NYC’s finest including
Richard Hell, Television,
Talking Heads, Velvet
Underground… he ended
up touring with Richard
Hell & The Voidoids when he was in his teens.
A story for another time, that. By his own
admission, Hartman was no fan of the electronic
music arriving on the airwaves during the 80s. But
The Human League, New Order, Depeche Mode,
Numan all seeped in because in the mid-90s,
much to his own amazement, he started making
music that sounded like stuff he didn’t much care
for when he was growing up.
The five-track EP ‘End Credits’ was Laptop’s debut
outing in December 1997. You can hear the 80s
loud and clear, with heavy doses of The Human
League and Gary Numan and dashes of Bowie
and Lou Reed too (see EP closer ‘Myth America’,
clearly a tribute to his brother’s record collection).
Best of all though is Hartman’s razor sharp wit and
sparkling lyrics. The EP’s title track is about the
indignity of being dumped by answerphone, or
rather trying to and getting the distinct impression
she got there first. His
thing was about making
sense of the shambolic
WTF-ness life tended to
throw at you in your 20s.
If he was releasing this
stuff now, we’d be falling
over ourselves. Back
then he deserved better.
Single ‘Gimme The Night’
followed in March 1998,
which compounded
interest and, as was
the case in the late 90s
when anyone caught
the attention, he was
snapped up by a major
label. Island released two
Laptop singles in 1999,
the deliciously sour ‘I’m
So Happy You Failed’ and
‘Nothing To Declare’ before palming him off when
the debut album didn’t appear as quickly as they
would’ve liked.
He reappeared in 2000 on Norwegian label Trust
Me Records with ‘Opening Credits’, a kind of
greatest hits collection, and followed it up in 2001
with ‘The Old Me vs The New You’, his debut
album proper, both of which sound as good now as
they did then are both well worth hunting down.
XXX FRONT
THE
JACK DANGERS’
SCHOOL OF
ELECTRONIC MUSIC
Our esteemed colleague takes us deeper into the maze of experimental
electronic music with a handful of visual artists, painters and the like,
who tried their hand at experimental music… Meet EBERHARD DOSER,
KAREL APPEL, GÜNTER MAAS and JEAN DUBUFFET
I can’t find anything online to prove that this record, ‘ElektMusik – Farbton-Werk’ by Eberhard Doser actually exists. I
found one reference to him working in the Cologne studio
in the late 1950s. I’m not sure if this record was something
given out at performances or at an exhibition, or whether it’s
a promo… or whether it was even ever released. There’s no
date on it, just a hand-written cover. I picked it up in a record
shop in Germany when I was on tour back in the 1990s. It
had “Electronic Music” written on it, so I bought it. Most of
the music is electronic, but there’s one piano piece on it. The
title, ‘Farbton-Werk’, is a colour scheme idea from his painting
that he was applying to music. The music is amazing, right up
there with the best of electronic music of this type. But this is
probably the rarest record I have.
Meanwhile, in Holland, Karel Appel was an artist who was in
the same mould as Jackson Pollock, with lots of movement
and action in the way he painted. He made this album in a
really good studio where [jazz/electronic music pioneer] Tom
Dissevelt was working in the 1960s. The cover is really nice,
great graphics and a big foldout insert with lots of pictures of
him in the studio with loads of tape decks. There’s one of him
covered in tape, and another of him holding a tube of paint
between his legs. He was quite a crazy character.
Günter Maas was a German artist and he worked with a system
in the Siemens studio in Munich. The Siemens Synthesizer was
built in 1959 and used punch cards to control it, but it also had
a tone generator based on photo-electric principles, similar to
the ANS Synthesiser, which was a Russian machine that used
glass plates painted black, onto which you could draw shapes,
or squiggles or waveforms, and the photo sensitive system
would translate those into audio. Daphne Oram’s Oramics
system was based on a similar idea, but she used film strips.
The Siemens machine’s system was called Bildabtaster and
enabled people to create sounds from photographic slides, so
Günter Maas could use his paintings to make sound. Günter
Maas made two records. The one I have is ‘Klangbilder’ (‘Sound
Pictures’), I’m still looking for the other one.
And finally, there’s Jean DuBuffet. He was a French painter
and he started experimenting with music in 1960. This album,
‘Musical Experiences’, uses tape techniques to mess with the
sounds made by traditional orchestral instruments, as well as a
hurdy and an old flute.
It’s all really interesting, because these guys can’t play
anything, they’re making noises with squiggles and using tape,
the machines are making the sound, but it’s the creative ideas
and the intent behind the sound that is created which gets
the results.
ANATOMY OF A
Revealing the hidden messages in your favourite album covers, FAT ROLAND, a man made entirely from
spare parts, takes a look at DJ SHADOW’s ‘Entroducing…..’, a record made entirely from samples
Posters of cool 90s pop
groups with names like
Boyzone, Guyspace and,
er, Lad… um, region
This pillar’s gross. Yuck.
Cover your eyes. I’m sorry
you had to see this pillar
Blurry-Face Geoff – best
mates with Red-Eye Joe
and Willy-Nose Clive
This pillar’s gross.
Yuck. Cover your eyes.
I’m sorry you had to
see this pillar
“Endtroducing…..” was
the third choice of
album title, the first two
being “BeginniFinish…..”
and “StartyStop…..”
Also released on CD,
VHS, DVD, DAT, MTV,
VH1, BHS and BSE
This man is sad because
it is the 1990s and he
hasn’t bought the Adele
album yet
This section:
Adamski’s ‘Greatest
Hits’. All single-sided,
play at 900rpm
According to legend, DJ
Shadow used to follow
DJ Person around, but
only on sunny days
These are called
“vinyls”, which are like
streaming but on big
pieces of plastic without
adverts or a shuffle
function
“DJ” stands for
“Delicious Jelly”,
Shadow’s third favourite
food after Damson Jam
and Diseased Jambalaya
The 2015 version of this
would be a headphoned
kid asking for a WiFi
password in Starbucks
If you can see two
blokes browsing in a
record shop, this magic
eye picture has really
worked
Contains unique code
to download 1996 (NB
– do not use phone
while internet is on)
A fly! Look! A fly! No,
wait, I’m having a bong
flashback. Carry on. As
you were
‘Entroducing…..’
contains sampling, a
production process
involving cutting out
other people’s music
with rusty scissors while
biting your tongue in
concentration
These records are in
order of ego: Mariah
Carey at the front,
White Town at the
back
This carpet
bought in an
endless DHS
sale in which
the sofas are
now priced in
negative pounds
The symmetrical
juxtaposition of
this record cover’s
protagonists
represents
the duality of
-- maaaaan this
weed is heavy
ICANTFEELMYLEGS
Famous hits off this
album include ‘Organ
Donor’, ‘Blood Donor’
and ‘A Bloke Stapling His
Kidneys To A Hospital
Door Then Running Away
Laughing’
This whole thing
is a stage set: it’s
actually painted
cardboard and
these guys are
entirely hollow.
Tap ’em. See?
The Electro-Trousers
section, a short-lived
1990s genre invented
when Trev & Simon
experimented with
Gordon the Gopher, a
kazoo and a Bunsen
burner
THE FRONT
XXX
THE
REMIX
REVIEW
In association with
Prism Sound
Eagerly awaiting new material from off-the-wall Italian duo NIAGARA?
To the rescue comes a host of remixers who’ve served up a cracking
reworking of their 2014 album ‘Don’t Take It Personally’…
Words: BEN WILLMOTT
Listen to The Remix Review radio show on the first and third
Thursday of each month at 3-5pm GMT at www.hoxton.fm
Internationally renowned manufacturer of high quality
analogue and digital studio products, PRISM SOUND is
supporting the B-SIDE PROJECT, which promotes new artists
and provides additional platforms for live electronic music
and remix productions. To get involved in the B-Side Project
network, visit www.b-sideproject.org
Prism Sound take their audio production experience and
knowledge on tour each year, along with industry partners and
guest speakers, with their Mic To Monitor series of events. After
successful tours of the UK and the USA this autumn, Mic To
Monitor will be going global in 2016. For more information and
to keep updated, please visit www.prismsound.com and join the
mailing list, and follow Prism Sound on Facebook and Twitter.
A shimmering, elegant slow motion jam, ‘John Barrett’ is one
of the highlights of Niagara’s sophomore album ‘Don’t Take
It Personally’, which the Turin-based duo of David Tomat and
Gabriele Ottino released in September 2014. Injecting elements
of electronic, psychedelic and Eastern influences into more
standard Western pop music structures, if you’re looking for a
sound bite description of this track, you could do worse than
a “synthpop Spiritualized”. In the build-up to completing their
third album (expected towards summer 2016), Niagara invited a
host of musical mavericks, including the likes of Liars, Fennesz,
Furtherset, Reigns and Silvio Franco, to come up with reworkings
of tunes taken from ‘Don’t Take It Personally’.
“I made some beats using Reason that I played with an MPC,”
he continues. “I recorded synth chords with a VST of a CS-80.
For the second half of the remix I just had an arpeggiator, again
from Reason — it’s an NN19, a raw, saw sound. For the end I
used a Rhodes, again from Reason, and threw in a reverb playing
different chords, the voices and the NN19 arpeggiator again.”
He’s keen to point out that there’s absolutely no hardware on
this remix, only a few VSTs, some Reason beats, a synth and the
original voices.
“I used Reason 5.0, Ableton Live 8.2 and Izotope’s Ozone 5 for
mixing,” he says, “I think the remix is like a true reinterpretation
Sun Of North is one Paco Del Rosso, a solo electronic musician
of the original track, maybe it’s more like a cover than a remix.
based in France, and our featured remix is his first proper release. I decided to recreate the song from the original, but with a
It’s a world away from the serene glide of the original, much
different inspiration, in a different mood. I really like the original,
sparser and boasting plenty of jagged, unexpected sonic glitches
but felt I couldn’t create a remix that was in the same universe. I
although it also has the song’s haunting refrain at its centre.
needed to make something new, to show my vision of this song.
I see this version like a drama, a melancholic song with a happy
“I first contacted Niagara on Soundcloud because I wanted
ending, something like a ‘happy death’!”
to remix ‘Galaxy Glacier’ from their first album ‘Otto’,” he
told us. “I really like everything they do, but this particular
“‘John Barrett’ was one of the first remixes from ‘Don’t Take
track is absolutely incredible. It’s rough and melodic, tragic
It Personally’, when making an entire remix album wasn’t
and powerful. They were just finishing a new album so they
even an idea,” explains Niagara’s Davide Tomat. “But we like
sent me a private link with the full record. I discovered some
spontaneous sparks that we can blow on to make them grow
impressive songs and preferred to try to remix something from
into a big fire. The remix album was something like that. I
the new album.”
really love the Sun Of North remix, what I like most is how
he managed to change the harmonisation around the voices.
The only stem from the original version he used is the vocal
It’s more like a reworking than a remix because it sounds like
performances. Starting with a simple arpeggiator that he
another song, creating other meanings and other visions.”
played with a VST of an ARP 2600, he then created a kind
of harmony with voices by copying them and building chords
Niagara’s ‘Don’t Take It Personally Remixes’
using just the vocal.
album is out now on Monotreme
XXX FRONT
THE
NEEDS
MUST
Our man on the inside serves up
another selection of weird and
wonderful reviews of weird and
wonderful records Words: KRIS NEEDS
TB ARTHUR
Live At Smart Bar, Chicago BANDCAMP | CASSETTE There’s nothing like a mystery artist
to pique the imagination. Anonymous
Chicago acid house assassin TB Arthur
has been amassing a formidable
reputation with his exceedingly limited
‘Test Pressing’ series and his ‘Dubs From
The DAT’ EP, which display a personalised
grasp of lethal weapon beats, old
school sensibilities and properly extraterrestrial excursions. Nobody knows if
TB Arthur is an old name having a laugh
(or in contractual straits) or a new blood
using this strategy to build a following.
Whoever he is, he has already displayed
a stellar grasp of compelling house music
expansion and now comes this recording
of his recently performed first-ever live
set, for which the suitably hooded Arthur
pumps out his trademark back-to-basics
manipulations of the original minimal
acid house style. The drum machine
percolates and stomps, hi-hats cleave the
foreskin off gnats at 50 paces and the
trusty 303 squelches like an irate duck
on downers. But there’s also something
eerily effective in his sound, charged
with subtleties that prove devastating.
In these increasingly sanitised times, we
need these dogged mavericks more than
ever. The set is available as a limited
edition cassette from the TB Arthur
Bandcamp page, purchase of which
opens up his mighty archive.
SCHOOLLY D PSK – What Does It Mean?
GET ON DOWN | 12-INCH Thirty years ago, Schoolly D was a bit
like the hip hop equivalent of TB Arthur,
sneaking out of Philadelphia on his
self-named label and appearing in the
import bins of Groove Records in Soho
with stripped-down takes on the new
electronic sound that had occupied his
music a couple of years earlier. The
session bands of Sugarhill and Profile had
now given way to booming, behemoth
TR-909 drum machine beats, in
Schoolly’s case adorned with little more
than the amplified scratching of DJ Code
Money. If Melle Mel’s ‘The Message’ had
introduced brutal urban realism into hip
hop, ‘PSK – What Does It Mean’ saw
Schoolly minting the first gangsta rap,
with ‘Gucci Time’ expanding on rap’s
bragging ethos on the B-side. Now these
seminal cuts are being honoured with
a limited and lavish anniversary release
from the Get On Down operation, and
on split clear and yellow vinyl too. Many
things started here, not all of them good,
but amidst the flaccid electropop and
lightweight posers littering that time, it
stood like a brutal bolt of reality and well
deserves this tribute. PHYSICAL THERAPY
Hit The Breaks
LIBERATION TECHNOLOGIES | 12-INCH
It appears that Liberation Technologies
has been started by Mute Records to get
back to its original ethos by encouraging
experimental foragers. Its 10th release
consists of six electronic drum outings
from US-born Berlin-based producer
Daniel Fisher, which take the 90s rhythm
sets into the 21st century with hardhitting relish. The beats range from
treated funky breaks to gonad-stomping
techno and somehow remind me of some
of the tackle uncorked on Freddy Fresh’s
Analog label – primitive but innovative
tracks sprinkled with the odd vocal
sample and some simple synth toppings.
Another commendable return
to basics.
TUXEDOMOON
& CULT WITH NO NAME DETROIT’S FILTHIEST
WUBWORLD
Detroit Vs Everybody The Chronicles Of Ruuun
Blue Velvet Revisited
MCEC | DOWNLOAD
WUBWORLD | 2XLP/CD
CRAMMED DISCS | CD/LP/DOWNLOAD
Killer ghetto grooves blossom once again
like radioactive black flowers in a tramp’s
pants on this latest from Detroit’s
Filthiest, who seems to be becoming a
regular name in this column. Released on
New Year’s Day, ‘Detroit Vs Everybody’
follows the series of reissues to launch
the Motor City Electro Company imprint
with another exercise in brutal percussion
programming, savage analogue riffage
and wired nagging stabs, all topped by a
snarling vocal war hook. This is Detroit
against the world flanked by Satanic
goats sporting enormous strap-ons.
There’s an electro-tinted ghetto tech
dub too.
Sub-titled ‘An Imagined Future’, electronic
maverick Glen Wiffen continues the
fiercely independent mission displayed
on his two previous albums with a wildly
ambitious concept double set, based on
the idea of the beleaguered human race
having to drag out their old rocket ships to
flee into deep space. The story may recall
Christian Vander’s original Kobaïan trilogy,
but Wiffen does a magnificent job of
dispensing with terrestrial reference points
and depicting these cataclysmic events
using sometimes impenetrable walls of
black hole static, heaving subterranean
drones, and raging elemental fury,
occasionally anchored by Godzilla bowel
drums or Dan Housego’s wriggling guitar.
The result is a mad electronic epic that
detonates the constraints of musical
conventions and gloriously releases the
bats out of sonic hell.
In 1985, while David Lynch was making
his psychological noir mystery ‘Blue
Velvet’, one of the greatest movies of the
1980s, he invited director Peter Braatz
to film the proceedings. The pricelessly
insightful footage has now surfaced as
‘Blue Velvet Revisited’, complete with
a joint soundtrack by US post-punk
outfit Tuxedomoon and UK electronic
landscapers Cult With No Name (plus a
guest appearance by John Foxx on the
haunting ‘Lincoln Street’). Evocatively
pastoral and late night smoky, the music
is suitably eerie and atmospheric and
decidedly Lynchian, but without ever
trying to replicate the mighty Angelo
Badalamenti’s original score.
MARK BROOM
VILLANOVA On The Loose (Larry Heard Mixes)
REBIRTH | 12-INCH
Among all the Chicago house pioneers,
Larry Heard carries the deepest sonic
template, initially as the mastermind
behind Mr Fingers and Fingers Inc, and
more latterly through some of the
most glacial solo albums released this
century. It’s beyond great to hear him
still sculpting multi-textured creations
lashed with twinkling melodies and
fathomless swells as he tackles a track
from Villanova’s ‘Monk’ EP. Heard’s
‘Trybalambient Mix’ sees him wrap Elbi’s
haunting female vocal over a scooting
undertow, on top of which he sprinkles
billowing jazzy keyboards and unearthly
sonic sparks, microscopically arranged so
every piano flourish counts. The midway
drop to percussive tones and piano icicles
is breathtaking, compounded when it
heads into the space-jazz unknown. The
‘Teknospheric Mix’ meanwhile beefs up
the drums and vocals, but its ethereal
ambience is still unmistakable Mr Fingers.
This has made my month.
Frontline EP
BEARD MAN | 12-INCH/DOWNLOAD
The UK’s most prolific pure techno
producer unveils his latest set with
meticulous attention to getting the
right degrees of glisten on the floaty
counter riffs, beef in the hippo testicle
beats, and snake-like twist in the acid
spikes. Returning the compliment
for giving Robert Hood’s M-Plant last
year’s ‘Stunned’, Hood then steams in
with a typically relentless exercise in
pressure cooker simplicity, while Ben
Long (from the Space DJz) and Oliver
Way (from the Detroit Grand Pubahs)
brandish an outstandingly hypnotic
mix boasting hi-hats constructed from
prehistoric elephant foreskins and a
latrine-demolishing determination to
get seriously tough. It’s followed by one
of Ben’s renowned ‘Late Night’ mixes,
which focuses on haunting strings and
a bassline to make a killer kick-less
build-up for those moments when the
melon is a distant memory. If I was still
playing having-it clubs, this would be an
essential electronic battle weapon.
LONNIE LISTON SMITH
& THE COSMIC ECHOES
Reflections Of A Golden Dream
BGP/ACE | CD
After stints with Pharoah and Gato
Barbieri (which later led him to join
Miles Davis), keyboard virtuoso Lonnie
Liston Smith signed a solo deal with
Bob Thiele’s esteemed Flying Dutchman
imprint in 1973, resulting in the funky
spiritual jazz of ‘Astral Travelling’ and
‘Cosmic Funk’ before defining a new,
electronic keyboards-based fusion
form with ‘Expansions’, followed
by ‘Visions Of A New World’ and,
lastly, 1976’s Reflections Of A Golden
Dream’. Produced by Lonnie and led
by his glittering keyboard textures, the
album gets increasingly transcendental,
traversing the twinkling vistas of ‘Quiet
Dawn’, ‘Sunbeams’ and the luminescent
‘Meditations’, before ending with the Sun
Ra-recalling drift of ‘Journey Into Space’.
Accept no substitutes.
XXX FRONT
THE
s
thing
When ’t how
aren were
they hen…
t
back
TIME
MACHINE
“… BUT A GROWSTAR BRIAN ENO,
THOUGH: YOU NEVER KNOW WHAT IT’S
GOING TO DO”
“I was a pariah.” The comment comes as no surprise. Brian Eno
is on his veranda, daiquiri in hand, his pod overlooking the
Sea of Tranquility. He is a picture of health considering his age,
and yet when you ask him about the past, he looks up with
an uneasy expression at the small, blue Earth suspended in
the sky. He talks about the empty seats at his 200th birthday
party. About the hate vid-mail he received. About the move to
relative isolation on the moon. His recollections are slow and
considered. “It really was a very difficult time, I can tell you,”
he says, in what you’re about to realise is the 22nd century’s
greatest understatement.
“In one sense, I saved the day. That’s what the e-papers said.
They went from ‘Eno-maniac’ to ‘Eno The Hero’, and all the
Anyone else wondered what’d happen if we set the dial websites wanted to speak to me, to get my take on things,” he
on the Electronic Sound time machine to the future? chuckles. “But the public hated me for what happened. They
Welcome to the 22nd century where BRIAN ENO has blamed me, even though it wasn’t me. It literally wasn’t me.
It was the GrowStar replicas of me. At the end of the day, my
some explaining to do… whole music career was based on synthesis of some kind:
who’s going to distinguish between a real Brian Eno and 20
Words: FAT ROLAND million rampant fake ones?”
He chuckles again, but this time his laughter sounds thinner.
It’s easy to forget but, the GrowStars were not an overnight
phenomenon. The idea was simple: develop sea monkeys – the
shrimp-like aquarium pets once popular with 20th century
children – into a steroid-accelerated celebrity range. The SyCo
Corporation took the lead, launching a pop star range to mark
the 125th series of ‘The X Factor’, but the formula wasn’t right.
The political versions were no better: a GrowStar of then-UKIP
PM Tristram Digby-Turret famously shrivelled into a grotesque
mess. Then, inspired by a string of Pet Shop Droids hit singles
in the early 2130s, Apple marked Ultravox’s 150th anniversary
by using ‘Vienna’ as the start-up music for their latest 3-D
tablet. Sales of a GrowStar Midge Ure went through the roof.
Almost literally according to one Amazon review at the time:
“I give this product five stars but it made a right mess. I unpack
it no problem. It started small so I added water and day by day
my little midge ure grew. They say to put it on mantelpiece
when full size, but we had a rain leak and the growstar midge
ure grew so big it make green mark on my ceiling. I use mop
but the stain still there. It put me right off midge ure. Now
I prefer system of romance era with the john foxx. Good
packaging. Arrive quick. Would buy again.”
Before long, every living room had a GrowStar. Each would
start as a small green blob, then with the application of water,
grow into swampy replicas of the act they were meant to be:
Devo for the cool kids, Duran Duran for the mainstreamers,
The Human League for the party monsters. And grow they did:
some GrowStars were big enough to help with chores such as
dusting, hoovering and basic DIY.
Brian Eno remembers: “My first thought was to not get
involved, to do a Gary Numan and block any use of my brand in
GrowStar technology. Of course, he learnt that from the cloning
disaster of 2047. But this was a new century, nobody was into
‘Another Green World’ anymore, and I thought if I could couple
GrowStar retail sales with download codes, I may raise enough
money to fix all my old synths.”
SyCo had bought the patent, so Brian had a brief vid-mail with
the artificial voicebox attached to Simon Cowell’s brain – the
only organ remaining of the 21st century pop mogul. “Pretty
amazing what they can do with diodes these days,” says Brian.
A limited run of Brian Eno GrowStars – branded EnoStar – hit
the shelves on 20 June 2140 to coincide with a krillstep remix
of ‘Music For Airports’. As it happened, krillstep was the biggest
thing since spasmwave and, as a result, the EnoStar sold its
millionth unit within three weeks.
“All those houses with gloopy, damp replicas of me,” says Eno,
refilling his drink. “I said to my friend Robot Tony Visconti
that I was uncomfortable with it all. I mean, what’s an Andy
McCluskey GrowStar going to do? A bit of ironing, put up a
shelf, maybe a bit of grouting? But a GrowStar Brian Eno,
though: you never know what it’s going to do.”
In October 2140, A Flock Of Cyborgs were at Number One,
Adele was still in the album chart and the first report of an
EnoStar massacre hit the news wires. Six Anglesey port workers
were devoured by a 20-foot Brian with accelerated growth
from falling into the dock. There was a similar incident at a
swimming pool in Boston. The carnage that followed has been
well documented, not least in ‘The Guinness Book Of Pop Star
Blunders’ (ed Thaddeus Gambuccini, 2048), which noted that at
the height of the EnoStar disaster, the average person was 50
times more likely to be chomped by an errant Eno than to get
injured in a car accident. “I wouldn’t want either, to be honest,”
Eno says with a wry smile.
“Sales dropped significantly,” he continues. “Not that it was
ever about the sales, of course, but no one’s going to buy a
GrowStar Brian Eno if it’s likely to eat your face in the middle
of the night. It’s fair to say my reputation suffered somewhat.
‘Another Day On Earth’ got mixed reviews, but this was another
level. By the end of the decade, I was public enemy number
one. I moved here because I was forced from Earth.”
It’s an elegant moon pod, all curves and white surfaces,
leased off the SyCo corporation in a deal Eno refuses to
discuss. It’s tempting to ask him about regrets, but there’s
one upside we haven’t discussed yet, and our allocated
interview time is drawing to a close. Eno finishes his daiquiri,
chews on a slice of lime and then reaches for a plate. On the
plate is a green, slimy hand. An EnoStar hand. He pauses for a
moment, then eats the thumb.
When did he know?
“It took six visits to a doctor,” he says, mouth full. “None
of that was cheap I can tell you. Turns out, eating EnoStars
slows the body’s cell deterioration by a significant degree. It’s
not eternal life, but I’m 204 years old and I can almost touch
my toes. They’re not easy to hunt, of course, but they’re rich
in omega-3 and they’re saving the NHS a fortune. It’s nice
something positive came from something so horrible. I may
release an album about it. Maybe. When things have calmed
down a little.”
The earth is setting and the purple lights of the moon pod cast
oval patterns across the Tranquility crater. All these years later,
it’s hard to think that krillstep or 1980s electronica droids will
be popular again – but even harder to think that the universe’s
longest surviving music producer won’t once again assume his
former title of Eno The Hero.
XXX
50 Years of
Electronic Sounds
The history of
electronic music
in 50 records
XXX
Plotting a course through the world of electronic music in 50
key releases seemed like a great idea when we came up with
it, but it quickly turned into an all-consuming monster. Even
if we had been able to include every record we had on our
long list (and it was seriously long), there would still be so
many missing. And even if we’d have included every record
that every writer on Electronic Sound has ever heard, we know
that our readers would be pointing out glaring omissions (“I
can’t believe you failed to mention K-2’s essential 1980 release
‘Why’, I suppose you just don’t care about the electronic music
of communist Yugoslavia” etc).
The hardest part was the countless records we left out which
could have told the story of electronic music just as effectively.
So these 50 records are the end result of a great deal of
list-making, head-scratching, eyebrow raising, bartering,
confrontation and more than a few late nights. It’s just one
way of understanding electronic music’s history, one which
doesn’t mention Ussachevsky, Raymond Scott or Berangere
Maximin or… well, you get the idea.
Drawing Our Line In The Sand
It all started somewhere… but where?
In the time before synthesiser companies and before the record
industry became the pop music behemoth of the 1960s and
beyond, when Robert Moog was still in nappies, electronic
music was the domain of isolated attempts by individuals to
turn the world on to new sounds.
As time went by, the story of electronic music became defined
by two parallel narratives; one of private enterprise, from
boffins in their garden sheds to huge corporations like RCA,
and the other of publicly supported studios, usually a nation’s
national broadcasting company; the BBC in the UK, RTF in
France, WDR in Germany, NHK in Japan and so on. There was
much movement between the two and quite often individual
inventors were keen to get any financial backing at all, and
would have taken it from private investors or government
departments.
The privateers are probably best understood as a patchwork of
individuals, mostly unconnected and working independently,
labouring away in sheds and backrooms and laboratories.
Electronic music’s development relied on visionaries who had
a peculiar blend of technical know-how and a strong creative
impulse. Some, like the Russian inventor Leon Theremin,
were sponsored by governments keen to invest in dazzling
new technologies. Theremin’s support came from Stalin,
possibly not the safest source of patronage in the 1930s, but
his instrument, the theremin, was taken up by RCA in America
and commercialised. It was RCA who later developed the first
machine to be called a synthesiser, in the 1950s, but didn’t
exploit it commercially.
Honorable mentions should go to people such as Maurice
Martenot, who invented the ondes Martenot in 1928, which
was similar to a theremin, but added more timbre controls and
effects to the concept, and Raymond Scott who cranked out
music for TV and film (and cartoons, Scott scored dozens of
‘Looney Tunes’ episodes in his time), made a stack of cash and
spent most of it on filling rooms with intimidating electronic
equipment to further their journeys into sound. These lone
wolves of electronic sound were often obsessive and eccentric
characters, like Louis and Bebe Barron, the married couple
who soundtracked the Hollywood sci-fi hit ‘Forbidden Planet’
with their roomful of wonky oscillators (and, as it happens, a
theremin) in 1956.
But while these early developments are critical, we’ve chosen
to stick our flag into 1966 as a not-entirely-arbitrary start point
for the modern age of electronic music…
The Originators
Taking technology into tomorrow
Words: MARK ROLAND
XXX ORIGINATORS
THE
August 1966
The Beatles
‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ (Parlophone)
Although the song was a Lennon composition,
it was McCartney whose musical antennae had
picked up the output of the Cologne Electronic
Music studio, where Stockhausen was using
electronic tones and tapes to create highbrow
experimental new music. While Lennon was
dropping acid in his Weybridge mansion,
exploring his own psyche and ruing the day he
got married and chose suburban life, McCartney
was at the epicentre of swinging London, mixing
with the likes of Barry Miles, co-owner of the
Indica Gallery and lightning rod for London’s
emerging counterculture scene.
Miles introduced Paul to the music of
Stockhausen (and, incidentally, hash brownies).
To close that particular electronic circuit, Miles
later was put in charge of the Apple Corp
subsidiary Zapple, which released George
Harrison’s ‘Electronic Sound’. McCartney, excited
by his discovery of electronic and tape music,
encouraged his fellow Beatles to create the tape
loops that would play such a powerful part in
‘Tomorrow Never Knows’. The loops, together
with the drones inspired by Indian raga and
reminiscent of LaMonte Young’s work, and other
studio tricks like the heavily compressed drums
and the Leslie cabinet effect on Lennon’s voice,
makes ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ a gear change
moment in pop history.
“When I made my first tape loops, man was
it a buzz!” McCartney told Wired magazine in
2011. “Bringing tape loops into the studio as I did,
finding out that John has got a really funky tune
called ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ that needed a
solo…. Well, what was better than the crazy stuff
I was doing?”
It was around this time that McCartney visited
Peter Zinovieff’s electronic music studio
in his back garden in Putney (Macca later
misremembered this as a visit to the Radiophonic
Workshop) where he was shown around the
stacks of austere-looking oscillators, filters and
tape machines by Delia Derbyshire, who was
then collaborating with Zinovieff and fellow
Radiophonic Workshop moonlighter Brian
Hodgson as part of Unit Delta Plus. Unit Delta
Plus went on to work with The Beatles (again
it was McCartney who drove the project) on a
couple of pieces of tape music for the Million Volt
Light and Sound Rave in early 1967. One piece,
‘Carnival Of Light’, is a legendary slice of Beatles
folklore, which remains unreleased to this day.
Zinovieff proceeded to start the synth company
EMS and give the world the VCS3 synthesiser,
destined to become loved by the likes of Pink
Floyd, Brian Eno and Conrad Schnitzler in
the early 1970s, while Paul and The Beatles
continued their adventures in sound.
September 1967
The Electric Flag
‘The Trip’ (Sidewalk)
One of the first recordings featuring the Moog
synthesiser, ‘The Trip’ was the soundtrack album
for a Roger Corman LSD-inspired movie of the
same name (“A Lovely Sort of Death” the poster
proclaimed). The Electric Flag were actually a
blues rock band who were hired to crank out
enough tunes of the required bluesy-rocky-trippy
stripe for Corman’s B-movie.
The band’s leader, Mike Bloomfield, hired Paul
Beaver to add some Moog textures to a couple
of tracks, and the soundtrack overshadowed the
film by some margin. Although only two tracks
featured Beaver’s work, the proto-krautrocker
‘Flash, Bam, Pow’ and ‘Fine Jung Thing’, the
album is a landmark of electronic music.
June 1967
The Beatles
Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (Parlophone)
With ‘Revolver’ at the top of the charts and August
1966 marking the end of The Beatles as a touring
band (their final gig was in San Francisco, August
29, 1966), the band started work immediately on
the next musical statement. The first recordings
were for a single, Paul’s ‘Penny Lane’ and John’s
‘Strawberry Fields Forever’. The single served as
a pretty solid indication as to what was to come
next. A Mellotron provided the wistful intro to
‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ and backwards tapes
were used to swell the rhythm track and introduce
a sense of psychedelic wooziness, and the whole
thing faded out, only to come back in with a loop
of flutes over Ringo’s pseudo military beat, a
disembodied voice intoning the words “cranberry
sauce!” (or “Paul is dead!” if you were a half-deaf
stoned conspiracy theorist).
It was released in February 1967, and softened
up the nation for what was to come next. ‘Sgt
Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’ took ‘Tomorrow
Never Knows’ as a starting point and flew off
into previously uncharted sonic territory with
spectacular results. The album took many
techniques of musique concrete and assimilated
them into an era-defining pop album. A clue was
posted on the cover art, one of the 60-odd heroes
and villains The Beatles gathered for their group
shot was Stockhausen, chosen by Paul, top row,
fifth from the left.
Taped sound effects are weaved into songs, like
the crowd on the opener ‘Sgt Pepper’s Lonely
Hearts Club Band’; loops of fairground organs
are used on ‘Being For The Benefit Of Mr Kite’;
there are more effects on ‘Good Morning, Good
Morning’ and stray sounds (is that a chicken just
before Paul’s count-in on ‘Sgt Pepper’s Lonely
Hearts Club (Reprise)’?). The sonic textures of a
decaying orchestral chord are given centre stage
at the end of the album’s crowning song, ‘A Day
In The Life’, and the whole shebang ends with a
locked groove of gibberish, introduced by what
sounds like grainy sine wave test tone.
In terms of its sheer reach, that locked groove
snippet is probably the most widely heard piece
of musique concrete ever made, more successful
and surprising than the eight-minute piece on
the next official Beatles album, 1968’s ’The
Beatles’ (more widely known as ‘The White
Album’), the often-skipped and much-maligned
tape music piece ‘Revolution 9’ which was put
together mostly by Lennon and Yoko Ono, with
some input from George Harrison. The Beatles
dominated the 1960s and beyond exploring
and defining the possibilities of pop music,
including electronic music, as they went along.
No one matched their capacity for making such
adventurous sounds so very popular.
November 1967
The Monkees
‘Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones Ltd’ (Colgems)
In which the pre-Fab Four out-innovated their
role models by slapping a Moog on a couple of
tracks a full two years before George Harrison’s
Moog modular made it on to the ‘Abbey Road’
album. Again, it was Paul Beaver who was called
in to help make ‘Daily Nightly’ and ‘Star Collector’
suitably synth-freaky. This album, almost solely
on the basis on the popularity of the band,
probably did more to introduce the synthesiser to
the general public than any other, until Wendy
Carlos showed up a few months later, especially
since the synth made an appearance on The
Monkees’ weekly TV show with huge worldwide
viewing figures.
THE ORIGINATORS
XXX
March 1968
Wendy Carlos
‘Switched-On Bach’ (Columbia)
In 1967, Robert Moog met Wendy Carlos, a
recording engineer at a New York recording studio
who was to become an early and enthusiastic
customer of Moog products and would provide
crucial feedback. It didn’t take long for Carlos to
produce a tour de force of synthesiser virtuosity
with Moog’s products.
“CBS had no idea what they had in ‘Switched-On
Bach’,” Moog told Mark Vail, author of ‘Vintage
Synthesizers’. “When it came out, they lumped
it in at a studio press party for Terry Riley’s ‘In
C’ and an abysmal record called ‘Rock And Other
Four Letter Words’. Carlos was angered by this
and refused to come. So CBS, frantic to have
some representation, asked me to demonstrate
the synthesiser. I remember there was a nice big
bowl of joints on top of the mixing console and
Terry Riley was there in his white Jesus suit, up
on a pedestal, playing live on a Farfisa electronic
organ against a backup of tape delays. ‘Rock
And Other Four Letter Words’ went on to sell
a few thousand records. ‘In C’ sold a few tens
of thousands. ‘Switched-On Bach’ sold over a
million and just keeps going on and on.”
Carlos went on to produce a few more classicalon-synths albums, before serving up her
soundtrack to Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 film, ‘A
Clockwork Orange’, which signposted a new
darker future for popular electronic music. It was
this foray into strange and unsettling electronic
sounds for a cult film, including her composition
‘Timesteps’ and her update of Beethoven for the
‘Theme From A Clockwork Orange’. She also
reworked the fourth movement of Beethoven’s
9th symphony for the movie – which Kraftwerk
adopted as intro music on their ‘Computer World’
world tour – and in doing so sealed her place as
an inspiration to a generation of underground
electronic musicians.
April 1968
Beaver & Krause
‘The Nonesuch Guide To Electronic Music’ (Nonesuch)
Beaver and Krause were put together by Jac
Holzman of Elektra Records. Holzman was
interested in the developments in electronic
music and was following a hunch that something
big would come out of it. Their first album as
Beaver & Krause was essentially a technical
showcase for the Moog modular they were using.
It was a calling card for the duo, who would
go on to produce their own electronic music
albums (with actual songs, rather than technical
explorations), and become electronic consultants
to the superstars of the day. Although it was
released in 1968, the album had been a work in
progress from 1967, when the pair demonstrated
the Moog Modular III system at the Monterey Pop
Festival, which could be seen as the moment that
the synthesiser met the pop mainstream.
March 1968
The United States Of America
‘The United States of America’ (Columbia)
Joe Byrd’s stated intent with his experimental
rock band The United States of America was to
combine electronic sound, musical and political
radicalism and performance art. To the modern
ear, it seems quite like Syd-era Pink Floyd with
the special effects amped up to the max, and
gets especially interesting when the electronics
overwhelm the hippy song-smithery. The album
sank without leaving too much evidence of it
ever having existed, the band splitting up fairly
acrimoniously very shortly after its release.
But in its political radicalism and its electronics,
there was something of a blueprint for bands
that came a decade later in the UK. The racket
and confrontational noise pre-dated the likes of
Throbbing Gristle (TG’s Genesis P-Orridge had
some 1960s radicalism in his make up, being that
bit older than many electronic contemporaries),
signposting a more fractious future for electronic
music’s assimilation into pop.
June 1968
Silver Apples
‘Silver Apples’ (Kapp)
The duo of Simeon and Danny Taylor were an
almost wholly anomalous entity in the rock
scene of late 1960s. Simeon played a positively
dangerous Heath Robinson-esque collection of
oscillators and filters with his hands, feet and
elbows (it nearly killed him more than once with
electric shocks), while he sang in an unusual
keening voice about oscillations and vibrations
and the drums kept up a pace of jazz-inspired
rock beats.
It was hairy and weird enough for the freaky
vibes of the day and the pair landed a deal with
small label Kapp. It’s music that would fit in a
treat these days, and indeed Simeon, after a
pretty long hiatus, returned to playing live in the
1990s with a new Silver Apples line-up. Danny
and Simeon reunited for a few gigs in the 1990s
once Simeon tracked him down, but Danny died
in 2005.
The two albums Silver Apples made are an
important part of the electronic music canon,
languishing ignored for years until the group’s
trailblazing commitment to their art was
rediscovered and appreciated all over again, with
Simeon collaborating with Portishead and as
Silver-Qluster with Roedelius. Not to be confused
with the 1968 Morton Subotnick album ‘Silver
Apples Of The Moon’, another electronic music
milestone which, while coming from an academic
tradition, is quite accessible. “I got the name
Silver Apples from a poem of Yeats, ‘The Song
Of Wandering Aengus’,” Simeon said. He had
never heard of Morton Subotnick, who also was
referring to the Yeats poem when he named his
LP. So that clears that up, then.
THE ORIGINATORS
XXX
May 1969
George Harrison
‘Electronic Sound’ (Zapple)
America was leading the way in electronic music
in the 1960s. Bob Moog was building his modular
systems and, in 1969, the patent he had filed for
his low pass filter some years before was granted.
The word Moog was, like Hoover, synonymous
in most people’s mind with the very idea of
electronic music; electronic music was Moog
music, and thanks to the promotional efforts of
Beaver & Krause it was gaining traction.
Harrison, suitably impressed, bought a Moog III
for himself and had it shipped to the UK where
he toyed around with it, coming up with a piece
he called ‘Under The Mersey Wall’ by overdubbing
two Moog improvisations. Harrison bundled this
with the recording he’d made in LA of the Bernie
Krause demonstration (calling it ‘No Time Or
Space’) for what became the second (and final)
release on Apple’s experimental label, Zapple.
The ultimate endorsement could only come form
one source at this point in pop history: The
Beatles. George Harrison was in Los Angeles at
the end of 1968, producing the debut album for
new Apple signing Jackie Lomax, Bernie Krause
was brought in with his Moog III modular system.
Harrison asked Krause to stay on after the session
and show him around the complicated machine.
Harrison, without Krause’s knowledge, recorded
the session.
Krause wasn’t happy about his music being
appropriated, but lacking the funds or the will
to sue, he settled for having his name removed.
Unsurprisingly, the album tanked on release, but
Harrison’s Moog was used to much more melodic
effect during the recording of the ‘Abbey Road’
album. It’s all over ‘Because’, ‘Here Comes The
Sun’, and ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’ playing
melodies and it also produces the white noise
that engulfs ‘I Want You (She’s So Heavy)’. Moog
had arrived.
June 1969
White Noise
‘An Electric Storm’ (Island Records)
BBC Radiophonic Workshop employees Delia
Derbyshire and Brian Hodgson were often
attempting to moonlight their way into a better
payday then their BBC bosses were prepared to
endow: this time it was with American musician
David Vorhaus. They recorded an album of
tape manipulations and electronic songs under
the name White Noise, which became a cult
hit, but it didn’t make enough money to keep
Derbyshire and Hodgson on board. The album’s
reputation has grown with time and is a classic
in the development of the British electronic
music.
September 1969
Gershon Kingsley
‘Music To Moog By’ (Audio Fidelity)
Running to just 25 minutes across its two sides,
‘Music To Moog By’ is a synthesiser cash-in
cover versions album, including a couple of
Lennon and McCartney numbers (‘Nowhere Man’
and ‘Paperback Writer’), traditional songs and
originals by Kingsley, who had once worked with
John Cage. The rather pretty cover featured a
collage of a flower pot (cut from a photograph
of the Moog modular) with the colourful leaves
sprouting out of it made from photographs of
nipples. It was all very 1969.
Kingsley was already known as an electronic
composer, thanks to his work with Jean-Jacques
Perrey (1966’s ‘The In Sound From Way Out’)
and the Frenchman Perrey provided a connection
between the American electronic music scene
and the European tradition. Perrey was a friend of
George Jenny, inventor of the Ondioline in 1941,
and he had demonstrated this precursor of the
synthesiser across France and the USA. ‘Music
To Moog By’ was notable for the song ‘Pop Corn’,
which was re-recorded and released as a single
called ‘Popcorn’ by Hot Butter in 1972 when it
became a huge international hit and introduced
every Radio 2 listening suburban housewife to
the pleasures of electronic music.
Gershon Kingsley went on to form the First Moog
Quartet in 1970, intended to be a showcase for
the Moog synthesiser in a live environment.
They became the first group to perform electronic
music at the prestigious Carnegie Hall in New
York, and Kingsley has continued a career as a
classical composer, ably demonstrated in the
2006 compilation of his religious music, ‘God Is
A Moog’.
As an almost entirely irrelevant postscript, MP3s
were circulating the internet for some time
crediting ‘Popcorn’ to Kraftwerk. It just goes
to show how the Düsseldorf foursome were
synonymous with electronic music in many
people’s minds, no matter what kind of electronic
music it happened to be.
September 1970
Various Artists
‘Performance – Original Motion Picture Soundtrack’ (Warner Brothers)
The soundtrack album to Nicolas Roeg and
Donald Cammel’s psychedelic gangster film
was dominated by the film’s star, Mick Jagger,
with contributions from Randy Newman, Buffy
Sainte-Marie, Ry Cooder, The Last Poets and
the soundtrack’s composer Jack Nitzsche.
However, Bernie Krause’s Moog work on the track
‘Performance’ – an unsettling looming bass note
punctuated by slashes of white noise – is a crucial
moment in pop history.
‘Performance’ is a very hip film which remained
pretty underground after its release and as such
became de rigueur viewing for any self-respecting
pop culture magpie, many of who would latch
onto the Moog sequence and squirrel it away
for later reference. The powerful imagery and
themes of ‘Performance’, together with these
snippets of cold synthesised atmospheres, had an
impact beyond cinema. You can hear echoes of it
in the opening to Bowie’s ‘Station To Station’ and
in the fearful, mood altering sounds Throbbing
Gristle later unleashed, to name just a couple.
XXX
The Innovators
Inventing the future
Words: MARK ROLAND
February 1974
Tangerine Dream
‘Phaedra’ (Virgin)
As far as the UK music press of the early 1970s
was concerned, German synthesiser music,
actually all electronic music, was all about “the
Tangs”. Kraftwerk were yet to make much of an
impression outside of their domestic underground
post-beatnik crowd. ‘Phaedra’ was Tangerine
Dream’s fifth album and their first for Richard
Branson’s new Virgin label. Sales of the album
were so healthy in the UK that, along with Mike
Oldfield’s ‘Tubular Bells’, it actually kept Virgin
afloat.
Tangerine Dream’s popularity was built on the
kosmische stream of German electronic music;
lengthy synth jams that suggested the vastness
of space to their mind-blown listeners. But this
version of Tangerine Dream had developed over
four albums from less ordered experimental
beginnings when the band was Edgar Froese,
Klaus Schulze and Conrad Schnitzler. Schnitzler
helped found the Zodiak Free Arts Lab in West
Berlin with Hans-Joachim Roedelius. The Zodiak
was a hub for avant garde artists and musicians
and the early line-up of Tangerine Dream played
there frequently. This was the genesis of the
so-called “Berlin School” of electronic music;
ambient, far-out electronic music that would
evolve into new age, and ambient shapes, rather
than the more strident and beat-reliant approach
favoured in Düsseldorf.
Schnitzler left Tangerine Dream after one
album and formed Kluster with Dieter Moebius
and Roedelius, but soon set off to pursue a
fascinating and idiosyncratic solo career instead,
while Klaus Schultze went on to form Ash Ra
Tempel with Manuel Göttsching, but also only
managed one album before establishing himself
as a solo artist. His extensive output of long
atmospheric concept pieces is the Berlin School
writ large. Manuel Göttsching, meanwhile,
recorded the extraordinary album ‘E2-E4’ in
1984, an album whose anticipation of techno and
house music styles is uncanny. The Tangerine
Dream finally ended in 2015 when Edgar Froese
passed away, aged 70, leaving a legacy of hugely
important music.
December 1976
Jean-Michel Jarre
‘Oxygène’ (Disques Dreyfus/Polydor)
Jarre’s 1976 concept album (released in mid-1977
outside France) straddled the world of progressive
rock and electronic music, a bit like Tangerine
Dream. It was progressive in that it was a
sophisticated series of movements bound together
by a theme (intended as a ecological statement of
some sort) and shared a classical music pretension
with the likes of Yes, Emerson Lake & Palmer
and Genesis, all of whom were keen synthesiser
botherers.
However, Jarre had studied electronic music
at Pierre Schaeffer’s Groupe de Recherches
Musicales in Paris, an offshoot from the Groupe de
Recherche de Musique Concrète, which had been
established by Schaeffer, Pierre Henry and Jacques
Poullin and was effectively the home of musique
concrete. Like Kraftwerk and their umbilical
connection to the electro-acoustic pioneers
of mid-century avant garde composers like
Stockhausen, Jarre was similarly and more directly
schooled by the theories of composers who helped
shaped modern musical sound and even worked
for a while with Stockhausen himself in Cologne.
Despite its largely lukewarm critical reception
in the UK, ‘Oxygène’ eventually sold 15 million
copies and Jarre went on to stage ever more
lavish live productions of his electronic opuses in
unusual locations throughout the world, peddling a
kind of electronic music Las Vegas-style spectacle
to huge crowds, arriving as middle England’s
favourite electronic music Frenchman when the
Mail On Sunday gave away two million copies of
‘Oxygène’ as a cover mount in 2008. Recently, his
‘Electronica 1: The Time Machine’ album marked
a return to his electronic roots and spawned a set
of collaborations more interesting than most of his
other post-‘Oxygène’ output.
THE INNOVATORS
XXX
November 1974
Kraftwerk
‘Autobahn’ (Phillips)
Kraftwerk’s fourth album was the first to reach a wide audience.
It was partly thanks to the edit of the title track (down to three
minutes from 22 minutes), which enabled its acceptance as
a novelty pop single and therefore extensive radio play. But
the success was really down to the fact that ‘Autobahn’ had a
beautiful synthetic and melodic fluidity and a witty and easily
remembered “chorus”.
Despite being sung in German, it sounded enough like a Beach
Boys spoof to find receptive ears in the USA where it became a
hit. It’s difficult to overstate the importance of this moment, not
least because it led to another four peerless Kraftwerk albums,
at least two of which (‘Trans-Europe Express’ and ’Computer
World’) became holy books of entire genres. Not only that, but
behind Kraftwerk’s breakthrough moment is an entire rich seam
of German electronic music, from the grand figure of European
electronic high art music, Stockhausen, to Neu! and beyond.
Thanks to their transistor radios, Stockhausen’s broadcasts from
the Cologne Electronic Music Studio were part of the childhood
soundscape of Ralf and Florian (and Wolfgang Flür and Karl
Bartos) and his ideas were internalised and expressed in their
pre-‘Autobahn’ output, not least because their producer, Conny
Plank, had worked with Stockhausen quite extensively. Plank
was coldly ditched by the group after ‘Autobahn’, but their work
with him provides a further connection between Kraftwerk
and Neu!, whom he also produced – after all, both Neu!’s
Michael Rother and Klaus Dinger had been in an early line-up of
Kraftwerk.
When Eno went seeking out the fresh sounds of German
electronic music, he entered Plank’s world and it spawned
collaborations with Cluster’s Dieter Moebieus and Hans-Joachim
Roedelius and the sound canvas for Bowie’s ‘Low’ album,
which itself was a pivotal record in the development of British
electronic music. Plank was much in demand as time went on,
producing and nurturing talent like Ultravox, DAF, Eurythmics,
Echo & The Bunnymen, Einstürzende Neubauten and many
more.
Kraftwerk’s latest incarnation as a long-running musical art
gallery installation, selling thousands of tickets in record time
all over the world does rather obscure the fact that they haven’t
released any new material since 2001. The sole remaining
founding member, Ralf Hütter, is now on a slowly atrophying
mission of refinement and legacy management.
July 1977
Donna Summer
‘I Feel Love’ (Casablanca/GTO)
Donna Summer’s “I had no idea what it was
actually about” protests aside, ‘I Feel Love’ was a
glorious hymn to delirious sex aimed squarely at
the dancefloors of Europe and America. It dealt
disco a hefty slap on the buttocks, propelling it
into the thumping four-to-the-floor territory that
would come to dominate club music, predicting
the hard and dark edge of techno and house.
It’s a tune so huge and familiar, it’s easy to forget
just how beautifully produced it is; the machines
being teased into providing new textures every
few measures, repetitive but constantly shifting
timbres from the bassy depths of the Moog
modular system. It was a huge leap forward for
electronic music. It’s every bit as important as
any Kraftwerk from the same period. In fact, the
similarity between ‘I Feel Love’ and Kraftwerk’s
‘Spacelab’ from ‘The Man-Machine’ (released a
full year after ‘I Feel Love’) was certainly noted
at the time.
The whole approach of the pulsing machine
sequence is what any studio producer would
now call ‘Moroder-esque’. “Kraftwerk? Well, I
think they thought that they must start selling
more,” responded Moroder at the time in an NME
interview. “I guess they are making a simple
mistake. They still reckon that with an easy
melody and a synthesiser they can have a hit.”
Moroder’s work lacks the intellectual heft of
Kraftwerk, but he was later lionised by Daft
Punk on ‘Giorgio By Moroder’ on the 2013 album
‘Random Access Memories’, a documentary song
created to celebrate his contribution to the
dancefloor.
December 1977
Suicide
‘Suicide’ (Red Star)
Suicide were an essential component of the
New York post-punk scene, the scuzzy punk
partnership of vocalist Alan Vega and Martin Rev
whose raw electronic backing music was the
result of grabbing the cheapest, crappiest gear
that was almost being given away in small ads;
poverty was the driving necessity behind their
aesthetic.
They were regulars at CBGB and Max’s Kansas
City, cohorts of Blondie, Devo, Talking Heads,
Television, The Ramones, and had been gigging
for five years before the stars aligned and the
world was ready for their brand of intense
machine music on vinyl. It was part edgy rock ’n’
roll, part krautrock, part psychedelia and wholly
punk rock, thanks to its clear identification
with society’s underdogs and the atmosphere
of tension and confrontation, even on the more
tuneful tracks like ‘Cheree’.
The album’s standout is ‘Frankie Teardrop’, a
partly improvised story of desperation, murder
and suicide inspired by a newspaper story Vega
had read, set to Rev’s droning one-key backing,
laced with echo explosions, screams and found
sound. ‘Frankie Teardrop’ has the unusual
distinction of having directly influenced both
Bruce Springsteen and Spacemen 3. The album
was better received in the UK than in America at
the time (Rolling Stone’s hostility to new music
that was light on guitar solos was causing a real
blockage in American music criticism) and is now
firmly ensconced in the top-albums-of-all-time
firmament.
THE INNOVATORS
XXX
March 1978
Brian Eno
‘Ambient 1: Music For Airports’ (EG)
From attending a talk at art school in the 1960s
given by The Who’s Pete Townshend on the
use of tape machines for non-musicians which
inspired him to start making music, and then
crashing into British living rooms in 1972 when he
was seen manipulating an EMS VCS3 on ‘Top Of
The Pops’ as a member of Roxy Music, performing
their hit ‘Virginia Plain’, Eno’s contribution to
the shape of contemporary music is almost
immeasurable.
Like David Bowie, Eno’s antennae were finely
tuned to pick up what was essential in the new
music being produced in Europe and America.
His fulsome praise of Michael Rother’s postNeu! band Harmonia and their January 1974
debut album ‘Musik Von Harmonia’ (“the world’s
most important rock band”) helped propel it to
the UK’s record buying public who might have
otherwise missed it. The statement was the start
of his lengthy flirtation with Germany’s un-rock
aristocracy and led to his 1976 recordings with
Harmonia (though the results weren’t released
until the 1990s as ‘Tracks And Traces’) and a
fruitful love affair with Moebius and Roedelius,
the immediate progeny of which (‘Cluster &
Eno’ in 1977 and ‘After The Heat’ in 1978) were
almost as influential as the electronic work he
contributed to Bowie’s ‘Low’ album.
In 1977, Bowie and Iggy Pop “discovered” Devo
(a demo tape was pressed into their hands
during Iggy’s ‘The Idiot’ tour when it pulled
into Cleveland, Ohio), and when Bowie couldn’t
fulfil his promise to them to produce their debut
album in Tokyo due to the 800 other things he
was committed to, Eno took over and produced
it at Conny Plank’s studio outside Cologne.
Devo’s ‘Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo!’
and the ‘No New York’ compilation album of
noise bands were released in 1978, along with
the first of three Eno-produced Talking Heads
albums. In 1979, Eno and Talking Heads frontman
David Byrne started recording what became
the masterpiece of commercial experimental
electronic music, ‘My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts’
(although it wasn’t released until 1981).
If you throw a pebble into a pile of all the
interesting albums released in the 1970s, there’s
a very good chance it will hit one with Eno’s
name on it. ‘Ambient 1: Music For Airports’ is
particularly interesting because it gave birth
(and a name) to a genre which would, for better
or worse, be with us from that moment on, and
splinter into various sub-genres like illbient and
chillout. But it stands as a marker for Eno’s place
as the primary producer/collaborator of the age.
January 1980
John Foxx
‘Metamatic’ (Virgin)
Postponed from 1979, John Foxx’s first solo
outing after his many productive but ultimately
frustrating years with Ultravox remains a highwater mark of minimal wave synthesiser work. As
the first synth album of the 80s, its tone wasn’t
the one that would carry forward to define its
epoch – that job was done by the Human League’s
‘Dare’ and Depeche Mode’s upbeat bounciness –
but ‘Metamatic’ nonetheless caught a mood that
continued as a constant undercurrent for decades
to come.
Its standout moment is ‘Underpass’, but the
album is filled with magical moments of dark
strangeness. The opening, ‘Plaza’, sets out the
stall: “On the plaza / We’re dancing slowly lit like
photographs”. It’s a masterclass of hallucinatory
dystopian images weaved into fleeting and sparse
musical pieces; they come and go like shadowy
figures leaving the scene via brutalist architectural
walkways. In plucking this series of vignettes from
the concrete gloom of London’s edges, ‘Metamatic’
created a blueprint for decades of plunder by
generations of electronic dismalists.
November 1978
The Normal
‘TVOD’/‘Warm Leatherette’ (Mute)
In which a label is born, helmed by an electronic
music freak, Daniel Miller, whose early exposure
to Kraftwerk while on a gap year driving around
Germany in 1974 flourished into perhaps the most
successful and important record label in British,
arguably worldwide, electronica.
This is the label that gave the world Depeche
Mode, probably the best-selling electronic band
in the world, and introduced huge swathes
of important electronic music to the listening
public. Fad Gadget, Einstürzende Neubauten,
Nitzer Ebb, Laibach, Renegade Soundwave, Die
Krupps, Moby, Add N To (X), Goldfrapp, Luke
Slater, Polly Scattergood: all Mute artists. Even
Can and Kraftwerk were released on the label,
with Mute sub-label The Grey Area re-releasing
Can’s back catalogue in the 1990s along with
those of Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire and
the Radiophonic Workshop… and the Kraftwerk
remasters on Mute itself in 2009.
The Normal seven-inch, catalogue number Mute 1,
with its austere black and white imagery of crash
test dummies and neo-modern computer display
Letraset type, the band name bookmarked
by oddly positioned quote marks, gave the
release a mysterious and European feel. ‘Warm
Leatherette’ was famously influenced by JG
Ballard’s novel ‘Crash’ and nudged the synth/scifi axis into a more literary and intellectual orbit,
away from Mozart in space and more towards ‘A
Clockwork Orange’. ‘TVOD’, meanwhile, presaged
the modern age of mainlining media via our
iDevices (“I don’t need no / TV screen / I just
plug the aerial / into my skin’) and was released
a full five years before David Cronenberg’s film
‘Videodrome’, which dealt with similar themes of
queasiness around the impact modern media was
having on humanity.
In an unexpected turn of events for an
underground and forbidding synth-punk seveninch, ‘Warm Leatherette’ was covered by Grace
Jones two years later and turned into a stripped
funk workout. Jones’ taste for electronic
landmarks was rehearsed again a year later when
she covered ‘Nightclubbing’ from Iggy Pop’s ‘The
Idiot’, which had already been tackled by The
Human League on their ‘Holiday 80’ EP.
April 1979
Cabaret Voltaire
‘Nag Nag Nag’ (Rough Trade)
For Sheffield’s Cabaret Voltaire, the
confrontational four-odd minutes of distortion,
white noise and angry vocals that sounded like the
amplified thoughts of a raging pyschopath building
up to a violent meltdown, aka ‘Nag Nag Nag’, was
a pop song. It opens with a tail of a tape echo that
fades into an impossibly thin and distorted guitar
riff accompanied by a teeth-gratingly intense
rushing synth tone (it might be a guitar, it might
be a manipulated tape recording of white noise
off the telly, anything was possible in the Cabs’
soundworld) which pretty much runs throughout
the entire song.
It’s an electronic music classic that was as
influenced by garage punk of the 1960s as it was
by the likes of Can and Kraftwerk. “‘Nag Nag
Nag’ was a one-off,” Stephen Mallinder (Mal) told
Electronic Sound. “We just sort of twisted that 60s
psych rock thing into a northern electro version of
it. It was our homage to that period.”
It was also the first time they’d recorded outside
their Western Works studio in Sheffield, with
Mayo Thompson of Red Krayola producing. “It was,
‘Oh wow, we’re actually making that connection
with that 60s psychedelic garage thing’,” Mal
remembers. The Cabs had been making music
since 1973, dense experimental pieces of tape
loops, cut-ups, samples and filtering, and
continued in that vein until 1982 when they
entered a new dancefloor-friendly phase. They
managed to pull off modest commercial success
without losing their reputation as an experimental
and confrontational band and remain one of the
UK’s most influential.
THE INNOVATORS
XXX
May 1979
Tubeway Army
‘Are “Friends” Electric?’ (Beggars Banquet)
The title is a riot of grammatical tics, what with the question mark and the quote
marks, perhaps referencing ‘Heroes’ a bit too cheekily for some who would dismiss
Numan as a Bowie copyist. The artwork was murky and foreboding, it was on
a label associated with second tier punk like The Lurkers and eccentric outsider
Johnny G, and the music… five and a half minutes of a beefy Moog bassline
augmented with a bass guitar and very simple drums, a series of hollow synthesiser
movements rather than a song as such. And then there’s the singing, Numan’s
nasal whine, his sneer almost audible.
And what was it about? His “friend” has broken down? Oh, now we see why it’s
in quote marks. Numan’s fuck machine has clapped out. And this is the single
the British public sent to the top of the charts for four weeks. At one point it was
selling 40,000 copies a day and spectacularly outperformed Bowie’s single of the
time, ‘Boys Keep Swinging’. “I’ve seen some of his videos,” Bowie told Record
Mirror in 1979. “To be honest, I never meant for cloning to be a part of the 80s.
He’s not only copied me, he’s clever and he’s got all my influences too. I guess it’s
the best of luck to him.”
The success of ‘Are “Friends” Electric?’ took everyone involved by surprise and
would have long-lasting ramifications. Numan would outdo himself within the
year with ‘Cars’ (Top 10 in the USA and another UK Number One) and its parent
album, ‘The Pleasure Principle’, knocked Led Zeppelin’s swansong (sorry) album ‘In
Through The Out Door’ off the top spot.
On 16 February 1980, his American success saw him appear on ‘Saturday Night
Live’ and his sound was beamed into millions of American homes, and landed
particularly heavily in New York and Detroit. Along with the output of Kraftwerk,
‘Cars’ became one of the founding cuts of hip hop. “Everyone was aware of him,”
Afrika Bambaataa has said. ‘Cars’ was appropriated in 1989 by the Marley Marlproduced Kool G Rap & DJ Polo who gleefully altered the original intention of
Numan’s lyrics with the car as the barrier against his paranoia and fear, by rapping
“I drive a dope car!” and singing its praises as a girl magnet. You can hear a similar
air and space that you find in Numan’s powerful synth work in Marl’s later bassheavy hip hop productions with the likes of Lords Of The Underground; dark and
empty, unsettlingly melancholy. Wu Tang Clan’s GZA filched ‘Films’ for a track
from his 2008 album ‘Pro Tools’, and Numan has been namechecked by Juan
Atkins and others as an important influence in the development of techno.
‘Telekon’ (another UK Number One LP) provided Trent Reznor with his daily dose
of inspiration while recording his own genre-defining album, ‘Pretty Hate Machine’,
closing a loop on Bowie who cited Nine Inch Nails as one his favourite bands in the
early 1990s and had them as tour support. Numan divides opinion still, but there’s
no doubt about it, he was the first electronic music superstar and his early success
remains one of the most remarkable spectacles of the age.
May 1980
Devo
‘Freedom Of Choice’ (Warner Brothers/Virgin)
America’s relationship with the synthesiser was more
problematic than in Europe. The monolithic nature of
American pop media (spearheaded by Rolling Stone who
had already described Devo as “fascist clowns”) meant that
resistance to the synthesiser usurping the guitar was fierce.
This was the country that gave the world the “Disco Sucks”
campaign after all.
And it was into this milieu that Devo released their third
album, ‘Freedom Of Choice’. Having found a considerable
cult following with their 1978 debut, ‘Q: Are We Not Men?
A: We Are Devo!’ thanks in no small part to the patronage
of Bowie and Eno, the second album had been a bit of flop
and Devo were in the last chance saloon when they went to
make ‘Freedom Of Choice’. They all but ditched the guitars
and the punkishness of their earlier records and let the
synthesisers do the talking.
To produce, they hired Robert Margouleff, the man
responsible for synth programming on Stevie Wonder’s
‘Innervisions’ and ‘Talking Book’, as well as Lothar And The
Hand People’s ‘Presenting…’ in 1968, which was a curious
hybrid of psychedelic rock and synthesiser. Margouleff
had been one half of Tonto’s Expanding Head Band, who
had built a legendary synth monster called the TONTO
Synthesizer, put together from Moog modules and various
bits and pieces from EMS, Oberheim, Yamaha, Serge, ARP,
Roland and others.
“The release of Tonto’s Expanding Head Band was an
inspirational indicator for starving Spudboys who had grown
tired of the soup du jour,” wrote Devo frontman Mark
Mothersbaugh in the liner notes to a 1996 re-packaging of
Tonto’s Expanding Head Band’s material. ‘Freedom Of Choice’
is one of the very first synthpop albums of the 1980s, a
tight collection of catchy and upbeat songs which somehow
managed to simultaneously celebrate and satirise American
culture. It gave Devo their first (and only) big hit, ‘Whip It’,
etched their “upside-down flowerpot” headgear (it’s called
an energy dome) into the popular culture consciousness of
America and arguably overturned the nation’s resistance to
synthpop in one fell swoop.
XXX
The Poppers
Electro meets pop, love at first sight
Words: NEIL MASON
September 1979
The Buggles
‘Video Killed The Radio Star’ (Island)
“They took the credit for your second symphony
/ Rewritten by machines with new technology,”
sang Trevor Horn, chief Buggle and one of the
UK’s most influential producers, in his own 1979
Number One hit. His SARM studios, East and
West – one off Brick Lane that closed recently,
the other in a former church in Notting Hill –
were stuffed with said new technology.
Horn and his late wife Jill Sinclair bought SARM
West from Island’s Chris Blackwell and it’s
something of a house of the holy. Bob Marley,
Nick Drake, Roxy, Eno, Sparks, The Clash, The
Stones, Zeppelin, Genesis, Yes and Pet Shop Boys
among others all recorded there. The building
was also home to the ZTT label, which Horn
set up with his wife and NME hack Paul Morley.
While the label had other acts – among them
Propaganda, Hoodlum Priest, Art Of Noise and
808 State – they were steamrollered by Frankie
Goes To Hollywood, who were pretty awful on
first sighting. The evidence was laid bare when
an unsigned Frankie appeared on Channel 4’s
music show ‘The Tube’ in February 1983 with a
sort of jazz funk version of ‘Relax’. Called ‘Relax
(In Heaven Everything Is Fine)’, it was remarkable
only for the amount of leather, hand guns, whips
and handcuffs on display at teatime on a Friday.
They did catch the attention though.
By May, Horn had signed them to ZTT and work
began on their debut single. The first version of
‘Relax’ was recorded live, a la ‘The Tube’, which
Horn later described as “pretty awful”. By version
two, Frankie were a different band. Literally.
They were Ian Dury’s band The Blockheads whose
version was also discarded for being too tame.
By version three, Horn and keyboard player Andy
Richards had hit the Nepalese dope and they
stumbled on the now familiar pumping rhythm
while mucking around with the Fairlight.
Costing £18,000, a heart-stopping half a fortune
at the time, the Fairlight arrived just in time for
use on Malcolm McLaren’s ‘Duck Rock’. Released
in 1983, ‘Duck Rock’ served up ‘Buffalo Gals’,
one of the very first records to feature singing,
rapping and scratching on one tune. Horn offers
up ‘The Adventures Of Grandmaster Flash On
The Wheels Of Steel’ as the only other record at
the time to feature scratching. McLaren, ever the
magpie, tapped right into the mainline with ‘Duck
Rock’, which oozed New York cool, enlisting the
likes of the Ebonettes for ‘Double Dutch’ and
shipping in The World’s Famous Supreme Team
hip hop crew to provide scratching on ‘Buffalo
Gals’. “I showed them the Fairlight,” Horn told
Sound On Sound magazine. “I thought their
heads would explode, but instead their eyes went
blank and they just wanted decks.”
As the kit got progressively better, Horn became
increasingly interested in sampling, which came
to the fore with his Art Of Noise side-project and
their 1984 ‘Close (To The Edit)’ single, containing
the first ever sampled and sequenced bassline.
But it was the sampling of quirky founds sounds
and building entire songs from them that caught
the attention. In late 1987, the house engineer at
Sheffield’s FON Studios, one Robert Gordon who
went on to co-found Warp Records, was slipping
an Art Of Noise sample into Age Of Chance’s
white label ‘Kiss’ mash-up, ‘Kisspower’.
FON had an early sampler, an Akai S900, in the
studio and ‘Kisspower’, which features slices of
everyone from Springsteen to The Supremes,
gave it a thorough run-out. Age Of Chance
subsequently ordered a trio of the £3,000
machines and began planning how they could be
used live, the band’s bass dominator Geoff Taylor
telling us recently that they were huge fans of
Sweden’s The Young Gods who took a similar
groundbreaking approach when it came to using
samplers live. The Akai’s built-in hard drive could
hold 63 seconds at a sorry 7.5kHz or you could
swap samples in and out from floppy discs on the
fly, which anyone who played live with one these
machine will tell you, was stone-cold terrifying.
XXX POPPERS
THE
January 1979
Blondie
‘Heart Of Glass’ (A&M)
Despite popular belief, and putting the kibosh
on nice piece of symmetry, the video for ‘Heart
Of Glass’ wasn’t shot in New York’s legendary
Studio 54 nightclub. Even so, you hardly need
any encouragement to acknowledge the influence
of Blondie.
Debbie Harry had been talking about Moroder a
fair bit in the 70s, telling the NME in February
1978 that it was “the kind of stuff that I want to
do”. By May, her band had covered ‘I Feel Love’
during a CBGB’s benefit for Johnny Blitz, the
drummer with Cleveland punk outfit The Dead
Boys, who was recuperating after an altercation
which left him with multiple stab wounds. The
Dead Boys also performed at the show… with
John Belushi on drums.
If it was ‘Heart Of Glass’ that hooked us in, the
sucker punch came a year later in the shape of
‘Rapture’. The repetitive beat, the disco overtones
and the funny talking bit, which we didn’t know
was called “rapping” yet. Crucially, the song
introduced us to a whole new world of Fab Five
Freddy and Grandmaster Flash, whose 1981 DJ
journey ‘The Adventures Of Grandmaster Flash On
The Wheels Of Steel’ returned Blondie’s favour by
using a slice of ‘Rapture’. Freddy meanwhile was
the spark behind the seminal hip hop movie ‘Wild
Style’ and his 1982 ‘Change The Beat’ track is a
well sampled hip hop cut, with magpies including
Herbie Hancock who used it on ‘Rockit’.
September 1981
Depeche Mode
‘Just Can’t Get Enough’ (Mute)
The third single to be taken from their debut
‘Speak & Spell’ album, ‘Just Can’t Get Enough’,
was to prove both the beginning and the end. It
was the third and final single to be written by
Vince Clarke before his departure to pure pop
world. Yazoo with Alison Moyet and Erasure with
Andy Bell followed and, if indeed he was proving
his point, he proved it pretty well.
Seems Depeche Mode had another songwriter up
their sleeve and with Martin Gore on duty they
went intergalactic. Their first six albums came in
just as many years serving up a couple of dozen
hits during the 80s alone. Popular then, prolific
for sure, but it paled beside what happened next.
They went from the Essex proto boy band
who put Daniel Miller’s Mute label in the shop
window to black-clad demigods ready to make
the US their own in the blink of an eye. A dark
melancholy found its way into 1986’s ‘Black
Celebration’ and they built on it with 1987’s
‘Music for the Masses’, an album that saw them
own the States. Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor
heavily name checks the Mode as does Detroit
techno legend Derrick May, which says a lot. The
‘101’ tour doco, which chronicles the final leg of
their 1988 world tour and its 101st show at the
Pasadena Rose Bowl in front of 60,000 delirious
fans, shows just how off the scale the US went
for the Mode. And ‘Violator’ was yet to come.
February 1980
Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark
‘Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark’ (Dindisc)
11 September 1975. The Liverpool Empire. Seat Q36. It
was the sixth show in Kraftwerk’s UK tour supporting the
imminent release of ‘Radio-Activity’. It was also when the
world shifted on its axis for 16-year-old George Andrew
McCluskey. “It was the height of long hair, flared denim and
lead guitar solos,” he said of the first night of the rest of his
life, “and they came out looking like four bank clerks with
electronic knitting needles and tea trays. It was like an alien
spaceship had landed.”
In the subsequent years, you will have heard McCluskey
waxing lyrical about Kraftwerk. His assertion that they are
as important as The Beatles is often met with hoots, but
he’s not wrong.
“‘Radio-Activity’ was the bible,” he told The Quietus in
2013. “We were listening to ‘Radio-Activity’ going, ‘Well,
they got Geiger counters, and chopped up voices and
tuning radios and we can do that!’. Completely inspirational
because we had fuck all – I had a left handed bass guitar
and Paul [Humphreys] had bits of circuit boards taken out
of radios that he had welded together to make weird noises
with, so ‘Radio-Activity’ was the be all and end all, and we
listened to it incessantly.”
Roxy Music, ‘Heroes’, Neu!, La Düsseldorf and Kraftwerk was
quite the path of musical discovery for the 1970s teen. What
Orchestral Manoeuvres did with that knowledge saw them
serving up one of the very first electropop albums in the
shape of their eponymous debut album. Which is remarkable
in itself. More remarkable is that the precursor, their debut
1979 debut single ‘Electricity’, was released on Factory
Records. Which, looking back, is akin to Ghostbusters
crossing the streams. The worlds of Kraftwerk and Factory
colliding thanks to OMD.
Factory’s in-house design team, Peter Saville and Ben Kelly,
further added to the fuddle by turning in sleeve artwork for
Dindisc, a Virgin subsidiary set up by Carol Wilson. Their
work included the sleeve for the OMD’s debut album, who
came to Dindisc via… “Tony Wilson gave me the band
because he felt they needed a label with a more commercial
approach,” says Carol, explaining how her first signing
arrived on a plate. *marvel as writer’s head explodes*
XXX POPPERS
THE
October 1981
The Human League
‘Dare’ (Virgin)
The story of ‘Dare’ we know. What’s often overlooked is the impact those Human League
recording sessions had on popular music as a whole and the effect it had on the entire city
of Sheffield. The epicentre was the late Martin Rushent’s Genetic Studios, halfway up a hill
over looking the Thames Valley in leafy Berkshire.
In 1978, Rushent, who’d earned his chops producing The Stranglers and Buzzcocks, moved
from Henley to Wood Cottage on Aldworth Road in the picture postcard village of Streatley.
In the back garden of the new family home was a dilapidated bungalow in which he set up
shop. The plan was for a custom-built studio on the plot, but for now, the bungalow took
the strain.
Rushent’s pal Rusty Egan was the first arrival in 1979. Egan, along with London scenester
Steve Strange, ran a Bowie/Roxy night in Soho. Wanting some new sounds to play, Egan
roped in his Rich Kids bandmate Midge Ure and they headed to Berkshire at the invitation
of Rushent. Every now and again, he’d stick his head round the door to see what Visage
were up to and ended up lending a hand… not to mention getting to grips with some new
fangled kit that wasn’t familiar weaponry to a producer of punk bands.
How The Human League came his way depends on who you talk to. Rushent had spotted
an advert for a Roland MC-4 MicroComposer, thought it looked pretty good and bought
one along with a Roland Jupiter to mess about with. The bungalow had a bedroom out
the back, occupied from February 1981 by former Buzzcocks frontman Pete Shelley who
Rushent was helping with some demos. Virgin MD Simon Draper heard the demos and,
while he didn’t sign Shelley, he was looking for a producer to add punch to his new signing,
The Human League. The League arrived in Streatly in March 1981 with a multi-track tape of
‘The Sound Of The Crowd’. Draper told the band Rushent was going to mix it. He chucked it
in the bin and started again.
Genetic became home to ‘Dare’ by day and Pete Shelley’s ‘Homosapien’ at night. Recorded
in the same studio, at the same time, using the same production team and the same
kit, ‘Homosapien’ and ‘Dare’ are very close relatives, with Rushent and his engineer Dave
Allen working out how the heck their mountain of new machines (including a Synclaivier,
a Fairlight and one of the first Linn drum machines in the UK) worked on the fly as they
simultaneously put together both records.
The thundering success of ‘Dare’, released in October 1981, and the chart avalanche of
‘Don’t You Want Me’ in December was a coming of age for Sheffield. Following The Human
League’s success, major label money wasn’t in short supply for Steel City acts. Chakk
got picked up by MCA Records and sank their sizable advance into their own recording
facility, FON Studios, which opened in 1985. Their record shop, FON Records on Division
Street, morphed into Warp Records – a shop, a genre-defining label and a film production
company. More remarkable perhaps was the council-run Red Tape Studios, a bold initiative
that housed recording and rehearsal spaces as well as offering training courses for the
unemployed, which opened in 1986. Heaven 17, Clock DVA, ABC, Cabaret Voltaire, Ashley &
Jackson, Forgemasters, Krush, LFO, Moloko… ‘Dare’ was just the beginning and its success
gave the city the confidence to stand alongside the northern musical powerhouses of
Liverpool and Manchester.
June 1982
Vangelis
‘Blade Runner’ (EMI)
First it was Aphrodite’s Child with Demis Roussos,
then he was considered (unsuccessfully) as Rick
Wakeman’s replacement in Yes, meeting singer
Jon Anderson in the process and landing a few
hits as Jon & Vangelis in the early 1980s. But
for Evangelos Odysseas Papathanassiou all that
mucking about with prog was but a distraction.
Throughout the 1970s he’d scored a number of
commercials and documentaries and had met
director, Hugh Hudson, who invited him to work
on his 1981 film ‘Chariots Of Fire’. His uplifting
soundtrack, which is always rolled out whenever
there’s footage of anyone running, bagged
Vangelis an Oscar. More curious though is the
story of his 1982 ‘Blade Runner’ soundtrack. Set
in a dank, neon-lit future Los Angeles (2019!),
Vangelis turned in a work that is as much a part
of the film as the story itself and built on the
idea evident with ‘Chariots Of Fire’ that machines
weren’t capable of creating an emotional
response in the same way orchestras could. But
the groundbreaking soundtrack would remain
unreleased until 1994, which only added to its
status.
At the time, fans had to settle for an “orchestral
adaptation of music composed for the motion
picture by Vangelis” by the New American
Orchestra. The official line simply claims a
dispute prevented the OST’s release. According
to sleevenotes from one of the many bootlegs
that appeared over the years, Ridley Scott
had a number of composers lined up in case
Vangelis didn’t work out, which couldn’t have
engendered a healthy working environment.
Indeed, Scott went on to include additional
music not composed by Vangelis, which sparked
a contractual dispute resulting in the composer’s
subsequent refusal to allow the release of his
soundtrack. All rumour and speculation, but
what it did do was imbue the work with mythical
status. Oh, and in a neat piece of symmetry,
Demis Roussos appears on the soundtrack: it’s his
dulcet tones you hear on ‘Tales Of The Future’.
October 1983
Various Artists
‘Street Sounds Electro 1’ (Street Sounds)
Greg Wilson, legendary soul DJ, Haçienda
resident, Revox wizard and the first UK DJ to mix
live on the telly, is always a man worth listening
to. “It’s a major flaw on the part of UK dance
historians that the impact and influence of these
albums has been largely underplayed and, more
often than not, completely omitted,” he says
of Morgan Khan’s London-based ‘Street Sounds
Electro’ compilations, which pumped out big US
imports and in the process introduced the idea of
the mixtape to the UK.
much here. Just listen to ‘Electro 1’. Opening
track – The Packman’s ‘I’m The Packman’ – fades
up (yes, fades up) and it’s basically ‘Confusion’.
New Order were, as we know, influenced by
electro, on this collection of early imports
that influence is laid bare. Newcleus’ ‘Jam On
Revenge’ is a total banger and yet sample-wise
it’s relatively untouched. Nightmares On Wax’s
‘(Man) Tha Journey’ from ‘Smokers Delight’ is
pretty much a cover though. It’s why you have to
love NOW so much. They know what we know.
Mixed by Herbie Laidley’s Mastermind collective,
featuring Max LX and Dave VJ who went on to
join Kiss FM, the influence of the ‘Street Sounds
Electro’ series, all 22 volumes, is beyond doubt.
These albums sold by the barrow-load, mainly to
breakdancing crews on cassette. The blueprint for
the whole of British dance music culture is pretty
Electro was by no means an underground
sensation. In the UK it took hold of the charts
with the likes of Rock Steady Crew landing
sensationally large hits in 1984, with records
packed to the gills with 808s, 909s and 303s,
scratching and videos stuffed with breaking
dancing and body popping.
XXX POPPERS
THE
March 1983
New Order
‘Blue Monday’ (Factory)
Yeah. It’s difficult, impossible even, to trace an
electronic music timeline without touching on
‘Blue Monday’. Up to that point, New Order were
between two stools, caught in the Joy Division
headlights yet trying desperately to move
forwards. Their first single, ‘Ceremony’, was a
Joy Division song and sounded like it. By May
1982, they were beginning to loosen the shackles
with the rippling sequencer riff of ‘Temptation’,
but nothing could prepare the world for ‘Blue
Monday’, the non-album single released upfront
of their second album, ‘Power, Corruption & Lies’.
If you were a record buying oik at the time
and you rushed out to snap up the album on
the back of being blown to pieces by ‘Blue
Monday’, you will know the disappointment. The
music press queued up to proclaim that with
‘Power, Corruption & Lies’ New Order had finally
stepped out of the Joy Division shadows. They
hadn’t. The consolation prize was ‘Blue Monday’
prototype ‘5 8 6’, which at the time wasn’t really
enough. Sounds ridiculous some three decades
on as it’s clearly a great New Order album, but
alongside the game changing ‘Blue Monday’ it
sounded less than impressive. There was a
familiar calling card on ‘Blue Monday’ too – the
haunting Vako Orchestron choral wash as heard
on ‘Uranium’ from Kraftwerk’s ‘Radio-Activity’
album was worn bold as brass. Where were this
lot going with references like that? ‘Technique’.
We had ‘Technique’ to look forward to.
October 1984
This Mortal Coil
‘It’ll End In Tears’ (4AD)
While I had no idea who Tim Buckley was, his
‘Song To The Siren’ cover by 4AD house band This
Mortal Coil was a revelation. I loved the Cocteau
Twins, whose sound – a sonic pushing forwards –
was like little else. Yet here, on a “proper” song,
Liz Frazer was singing real words, in the right order
and somehow that marked ‘It’ll End In Tears’ out
as the beginning of a love affair that would end up
by being blown away by a guitar band.
4AD had emerged some years earlier the brainchild
of Ivo Watts-Russell and Peter Kent, who worked
for Beggars Banquet and set up the label as an
incubator imprint for the mothership. Didn’t work
out that way and the only band to tread that path
were Bauhaus before Watts-Russell and Kent
bought the label off Beggars and set sail as an
indie. Kent left in 1981 to set up Situation Two,
releasing the likes of The Associates, Bauhaus
side-project Tones On Tail, Gene Loves Jezebel as
well as The Charlatans and Buffalo Tom.
Much like Factory, 4AD also had a strong visual
identity thanks to graphic designer Vaughan Oliver
and photographer Nigel Grierson. Fortunately, the
musical output matched the bold 23 Envelope
artwork. They released the debut The The single,
‘Controversial Subject’, while Rema-Rema, Modern
English, Xmal Deutschland, Clan Of Xymox and
The Wolfgang Press were early highlights. Things
got really interesting when in 1985 Colourbox
arrived with their debut album. They went on
to join forces with AR Kane, who with DJs CJ
Mackintosh and Dave Dorrell, formed MARRS and
landed 4AD with Number One hit ‘Pump Up The
Volume’ in August 1987.
4AD were never afraid to mix things up. From goth
to electro, whatever angle you came in at, you
went away with something else. A proliferation
of US guitar bands dominated the label in the
late 80s, bringing on board the likes of Throwing
Muses, The Breeders, Belly and, hands down the
greatest guitar band of the last 30 years, Pixies,
who didn’t pen a duff song across their quartet of
4AD albums. It’s hard to think of a label as diverse
who wowed so utterly.
The Ravers
We call it acieed
Words: PUSH, ANDREW HOLMES, NEIL MASON
XXX RAVERS
THE
May 1987
Frankie Knuckles ‘Baby Wants To Ride’ b/w ‘Your Love’ (Trax)
It wasn’t the first. The first is a matter of debate,
but we’re going for Jesse Saunders’ ‘On And On’
from 1984, a primitive blend of disco loops and
spiky 808 drums typical of the early Chicago
house sound. It might not have been the best
either. Let’s face it, if we’re trying to pick one
record to represent 1980s Chicago house music,
we’re spoilt for choice. So we could just as easily
be talking about Marshall Jefferson’s ‘Move
Your Body’, which somehow managed to appear
simultaneously on both the main Windy City
record labels, Trax and DJ International, or Farley
“Jackmaster” Funk’s ‘Love Can’t Turn Around’,
featuring the incredible vocals of Darryl Pandy. Or
maybe JM Silk or Fingers Inc or Adonis. But we’re
talking about Frankie Knuckles because Frankie
Knuckles, who died in 2014 at the age of 59,
wasn’t called the Godfather of House for nothing.
Knuckles’ status largely comes from his role as
the DJ at The Warehouse, the Chicago club from
which house music takes its name. Knuckles
started at The Warehouse in 1977, playing disco
and soul and a growing number of European
synth records to what was initially a black, gay
crowd. Ironically, he’d left The Warehouse to
start his own club, The Power Plant, before the
earliest jack records appeared. Not long after
Jesse Saunders’ ‘On And On’ came out, Knuckles
was given a tape of ‘Your Love’, a track based
around a cascading synth sequence by a young
man named Jamie Principle, whose vocals
sounded like Smokey Robinson channelling Marc
Almond. Knuckles played ‘Your Love’ at The
Power Plant for a year before taking Principle into
the studio to produce a more polished version of
the track along with a second cut, the eerie and
provocative ‘Baby Wants To Ride’.
The cuts appeared back-to-back as a Trax 12-inch
in 1987. The record was attributed to Frankie
Knuckles and Frankie Knuckles alone. Principle
was given a writing credit, but that was it. Which
is perhaps why, when the singer later re-recorded
‘Baby Wants To Ride’ with Steve “Silk” Hurley
for FFRR in the UK, there was no mention of
Knuckles. Touche. It wasn’t a patch on Knuckles’
original, mind. (P)
October 1988
Front 242
‘Headhunter’ (Wax Trax!)
Front 242 were veterans by the time of the
‘Headhunter’ single – from their fourth album,
‘Front By Front’ – but it was the song they were
born to make: a rough bastard of a tune that spat
its influences onto the dancefloor, opening ears
for the Year Zero of rave that was just around the
corner. But for the time being EBM had arrived…
A slowly percolating offshoot of industrial music,
EBM was spearheaded by Belgian mainstays such
as Front 242 and The Neon Judgement, and roped
in the likes of Chris & Cosey.
‘Headhunter’ was the genre’s defining statement.
It had the lyrical bite of Foetus, the wit of Fad
Gadget. It had the propulsive dance mechanics
of Cabaret Voltaire’s ‘Sensoria’, the sleaze of Big
Black’s ‘Songs About Fucking’ and the stentorian
death march of DAF – all of it filtered through
the knowledge that while Front 242 were the
godfathers of the EBM scene they had serious
competition in the shape of Canada’s Skinny
Puppy and the UK’s own Nitzer Ebb.
In one of the great “why on earth was that a
B-side?” decisions, Front 242 decided to back
‘Headhunter’ with a track that was arguably just as
strong: ‘Welcome To Paradise’. Unsurprisingly both
sides were caned everywhere, with DJs finding the
tracks dovetailed neatly with the emerging genre
of new beat.
Shortly after, new beat producers inspired by the
UK rave scene placed Belgium at the vanguard of
techno. Ghent-based label R&S moved seamlessly
from Belgian new beat to house and techno and
in time would give us Second Phase’s ‘Mentasm’,
birthplace of the legendary hoover sound, not to
mention Aphex Twin’s ‘Digeridoo’ and ‘Selected
Ambient Works 85-92’. But that, of course, is
another story… (AH)
September 1987 Phuture ‘Acid Tracks’ (Trax) After Frankie Knuckles had left The Warehouse, the owner opened
up a new Chicago club called the Muzic Box and recruited Ron Hardy
as the resident DJ. Hardy was a completely different character to
Knuckles and, thanks to his often feverish approach to EQing and
pitch control, the records he played were generally brasher and
faster. He had a fondness for Frankie Goes To Hollywood, but he
was quick to play all the emerging local house artists too. The night
he got hold of a tape of Phuture’s first offering, a 12-minute mashup of hypnotic pulses and oddball squelches (the latter courtesy of
a Roland 303 bass synth), he played it four times. It didn’t have a
title, so the Muzic Box crowd dubbed it ‘Ron Hardy’s Acid Track’. By
the time it came out on Trax Records, with Marshall Jefferson on
production duties, it was called ‘Acid Tracks’.
‘Acid Tracks’ is a monster of a record. But if it was big in Chicago,
it was super-sized-massive-with-bloody-great-bells-on in London,
where it was one the first cogs of the acid house revolution. In
many ways, it was strange that London took to acid so readily, with
Danny and Jenny Rampling’s Shoom club and Paul Oakenfold’s
Spectrum exploding in popularity as the summer of 1988 rolled on
and dozens of other acid nights started up to cater for the growing
hordes of kids in bandanas and smiley T-shirts. Up until then, only a
handful of London DJs had been playing house music, most notably
Noel and Maurice Watson, Colin Faver and Mark Moore. By contrast,
the north and the Midlands had been jacking to house for a good
couple of years thanks to the likes of Mike Pickering in Manchester
and Graeme Park in Nottingham.
A night of acid house didn’t mean hours of squelchy noises though.
To begin with, there weren’t actually too many records like ‘Acid
Tracks’ around and one of the most amazing things about the early
acid clubs was the variety of music you’d hear. There were lots of
US house tracks, of course, with some of the most thrilling sounds
of 1988 coming from New York producer Todd Terry, as well as
cuts by early UK adopters like 808 State, A Guy Called Gerald
and Baby Ford. But there were also records such as Finitribe’s ‘De
Testimony’, Gipsy Kings’ ‘Bamboléo’, The Woodentops’ ‘Why Why
Why’, Nitzer Ebb’s ‘Join In The Chant’ and even The Rolling Stones’
‘Satisfaction’. And as for the night that Paul Oakenfold dropped a bit
of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture into the mix at Spectrum…
“How you gonna get ridda the acid, man?” said Marshall Jefferson
in an interview with Melody Maker during a trip to London that
summer. “Everybody’s on it, everywhere you go the acid is pumping.
You can’t match the energy level. Until a DJ gets bold enough to
pioneer a new music, you’re gonna hear it wherever you go.” (P)
XXX RAVERS
THE
June 1988 Various Artists ‘Techno! The New Dance Sound Of Detroit’ (10)
Much has been written about the role of the
so-called Belleville Three – Juan Atkins, Derrick
May and Kevin Saunderson, three schoolmates
from the Detroit satellite town of Belleville – in
the birth of techno. They grew up messing
around with the electronic gear in the back room
of Grinnell’s music store. They listened to The
Electrifying Mojo’s local radio show, where they
heard Kraftwerk and Numan alongside Parliament
and Prince. They danced to Ken Collier’s postdisco DJ sets wherever he was playing around
Detroit.
It was Atkins who started it all off, warp factoring
the electro blueprint into another dimension on
‘Techno City’, issued in 1984 under the name
Cybotron, and ‘No UFOs’, his 1985 debut as
Model 500. It was May who upped the ante with
Rhythim Is Rhythim’s ‘Nude Photo’, complete
with its sample of Alison Moyet laughing lifted
from Yazoo’s ‘Situation’, and the colossal ‘Strings
Of Life’. And it was Saunderson who put it into
pop charts via Inner City’s ‘Big Fun’ and ‘Good
Life’.
The Belleville boys were by no means alone
in this story, though, as the ‘Techno! The New
Dance Sound Of Detroit’ double album proves.
Kind of. For a lot of people outside of Detroit, the
first they knew of the music coming out of the
Motor City in the second half of the 80s was this
UK compilation. It was released by 10 Records,
a Virgin offshoot based in a mews off London’s
Portobello Road, where the cobbles and flower
boxes were about as far removed from Detroit’s
industrial landscape as you could get, and put
together by Derrick May and 10 A&R man Neil
Rushton, who later started the Network imprint.
While it’s true that Atkins, May and Saunderson
are all over these tracks, co-writing, co-mixing,
co-producing much of what’s here, it also
includes early material from a number of other
key techno pioneers, including Eddie “Flashin’”
Fowlkes, Blake Baxter and Anthony Shakir.
There isn’t a duff cut on it, but perhaps the single
most important thing about this record is the
title. It was originally going to be called ‘The
House Sound Of Detroit’, but the artists insisted
changing it to include “techno”, the word they
were using to describe their music, rightly setting
the Motor City apart from what was going on
in Chicago and establishing its credentials as
a crucible of innovative electronic music. Step
forward Carl Craig, Jeff Mills, Richie Hawtin, Mike
Banks, Robert Hood, Kenny Larkin, Stacey Pullen
and Drexciya, to name but a few. (P)
November 1989
Happy Mondays
‘Hallelujah’ (Factory)
Happy Monday’s quirky funk rock debut album, ‘Squirrel and
G-Man Twenty Four Hour Party People Plastic Face Carnt
Smile (White Out)’, released in April 1987, was produced
by John Cale, Velvet Underground John Cale. Which sounds
increasingly bonkers the more you think about it. The nowfamous title track, ‘24 Hour Party People’ was only included
after a track called ‘Desmond’ made way due to a copyright
dust-up with The Beatles’ ‘Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da’. Not for
the last time would the Mondays borrow from The Beatles.
‘Lazyitis’, the closing track on their ‘Bummed’ album, was
pretty much ‘Ticket To Ride’. Other influences, while less
obvious, were more telling. For example, the louche beats
and infectious groove of ‘Halleluhwah’, from Can’s 1971
album ‘Tago Mago’, after which the Monday’s own track was
named, is a dead giveaway.
While the late Martin Hannett should take credit for
reinventing the Monday’s sound on their sophomore album,
1988’s ‘Bummed’, it was when they got the remixers in
that things shifted up a gear. It was ‘WFL’ – Vince Clarke’s
reworking of ‘Wrote For Luck’ – that first pricked up the
ears. There was also ‘WFL (Think About The Future Mix)’,
which marked the arrival of Paul Oakenfold who created a
number of defining mixes for Ryder and co, not to mention
co-produce the ‘Pills ’n’ Thrills And Bellyaches’ album along
with Steve Osborne.
The choice of remixer on ‘Hallelujah’ was inspired with
Oakey calling on Andrew “Andy” Weatherall and Terry Farley
to help out and so introducing the pair to a whole new
crowd. Literally. You can’t understate the importance of the
Haçienda in all this. That place opened the ears and changed
the lives of so many people. Oh, and if there was a clubber
who didn’t know Shaun Ryder’s middle name after hearing
‘Hallelujah’, well, they weren’t paying attention. Or they
were off their face on a new fangled drug that seemed to
have swamped the Hac. Now there’s a good story… (NM)
XXX RAVERS
THE
February 1992
Aphex Twin
‘Selected Ambient Works 85-92’ (R&S)
When, in 2014, it was announced that Richard D James was to release his first album
of new Aphex Twin material for 13 years, there weren’t many who hoped for another
‘Drukqs’. Thankfully, ‘Syro’ turned out to have less in common with the scaffolding
accidents of ‘Drukqs’ and was more along the lines of the record that made his name:
‘Selected Ambient Works 85-92’.
His debut long-player wasn’t particularly “ambient”. Then again, nor was The Orb’s
‘U.F.Orb’, released the same year. But both came at a time when, having been informed
by house and techno, energised by hardcore’s breakbeats and given a cerebral edge
by the progressive nature of Boy’s Own and Guerrilla, the UK dance scene was at its
most exciting. Of the two, ‘SAW’ was the more startling record, eschewing the dubwise
leanings of the prog and ambient house scenes for a more insular fragile beauty. Like
Hemingway’s literary maxim of “it reads easy, it worked hard” set to music, simple
melodies masked complex arrangements and structural intricacies.
As a result it reached places dance music hadn’t yet penetrated: the offices of national
music papers, sixth form common rooms, bedrooms… UK techno already had Orbital and
James’ own ‘Digeridoo’ to its name, but these spoke to a constituency centered on the
communal rave experience. The analogue synths and otherworldly beats of ‘SAW’ made
sense to those without cars and mates and contacts – the sort who spent their free time
slaving over a hot VHS recorder, vibing to the horror film soundtracks of John Carpenter
and Tangerine Dream. Less than a year on from ‘Screamadelica’, the portal was again
open for huge swathes of non-dance listeners to come inside and feel the beats.
Like his music, James’ appeal was at once rarefied and universal. Like his music, he
made it seem so effortless. And he did it all from his bedroom. While his peers projected
a “creature-of-the-studio” image, Cornwall-based James came on like the geeky kid in
‘Dressed To Kill’, his living space crammed with gizmos, working odd hours, buzzing off
caffeine and creativity. Though a dyed-in-the-wool raver, he appealed to the nerd in us
all.
Which brings us to IDM. While the early Aphex EPs appeared on Belgian rave imprint
R&S, it turned out that Sheffield’s Warp was the better fit. In the slipstream of ‘SAW’,
Warp collected the likes of B12, The Black Dog, Autechre, Speedy J and James himself
for the first ‘Artificial Intelligence’ compilation in July that year. Thus was born
“intelligent dance music”. A lamentable label – as if B12 were really more intelligent
than, say, Jeff Mills – but at the very least it freed a generation of like-minded bedroom
tinkerers from the constraints of the dancefloor. Four Tet, The Streets, Burial, the glitchy
minimalists of Cologne, Raster-Noton, Pole, Mille Plateaux… all those and more are
indebted to the bedroom boffin template minted by Richard D James.
All that and we haven’t even mentioned the pranksterism, the tank, DJing with
sandpaper, ‘Windowlicker’, ‘Caustic Window’, his legendary remixes, his revelatory
DJ sets, the fact that he was barely out of his teens… By then it was only the likes of
Kraftwerk and Giorgio Moroder who could lay claim to opening more doors. Come to
daddy, indeed. (AH)
January 1994
Underworld
‘Dubnobasswithmyheadman’ (Junior Boys Own)
Long story short. 1988’s ‘Jack The Tab – Acid Tablets Volume
One’ was a compilation of a fictitious genre where the
aliases – Vernon Castle, Thee Loaded Angels, Alligator Shear
– were collaborations between Genesis P-Orridge of Psychic
TV, Richard Norris from the psychedelic label Bam Caruso,
and Gen’s pal Dave Ball of Soft Cell fame. Norris and Ball
went on to further bother the charts as The Grid.
While ‘Jack The Tab’ wasn’t a dance record, or come to
that even particularly electronic, its title didn’t half fire the
imagination at a time when acid house was taking off across
the UK. It felt like an actual album rather just a collection
of tracks, because it was made by people with a rock
sensibility. It had a tradition that dance music was yet to
discover. All of this wasn’t lost on a generation who’d grown
up inhaling the music press, titles like NME, Melody Maker
and Sounds, and filling up on what they’d read about by
listening to John Peel’s late-night slot on BBC Radio One.
Karl Hyde and Rick Smith met while studying in Cardiff
and had a couple of false starts, first as new wave outfit
Freur (more accurately, they were a squiggly shape they
claimed was pronounced “freur”) and then as Underworld
Mk1 whose guitar-led electropop-ish sound couldn’t get
busted at a punch up in cop shop. What they needed was
a new twist and a fresh pair of ears duly arrived in 1990 in
the shape of a 19-year-old Essex DJ Darren Emerson. 1994’s
‘dubnobasswithmyheadman’ was the result and it proved
groundbreaking on a number of levels, not least that it was
the first, proper dance music album.
Around the same time, fledgling director Danny Boyle was
making his feature film debut, ‘Shallow Grave’. Appearing in
cinemas in 1994, the opening sequence was a blast through
the streets of Edinburgh soundtracked by Leftfield, whose
turn of the decade singles ‘Not Forgotten’ and ‘More Than I
Know’ on Jay Strongman’s West London Rhythm King label
had lit the blue touchpaper on UK house music. While the
frenetic opening scene to Boyle’s follow-up, ‘Trainspotting’,
was soundtracked by Iggy Pop’s ‘Lust For Life’, the film was
to be defined by not one but two Underworld tracks. From
‘dubnobass…’, the trancey ‘Dark and Long (Dark Train)’ and
a new version of ‘Born Slippy’, their 1995 single that sank
without trace. Now with added lyrics. The rest of this story
you know, right? (NM)
XXX RAVERS
THE
November 1995
Goldie
‘Inner City Life’ (Metalheadz)
The man known on his birth certificate as Clifford Joseph Price spent the early
part of 1995 prepping his debut album, ‘Timeless’. Expectations were high. Not
just because this was Goldie, the Metalheadz boss with a slew of classic releases
such as ‘Terminator’ under his belt, but also because a taste of ‘Timeless’ had
been released as a single the previous year. And ‘Inner City Life’ was, quite simply,
magnificent.
The track is a ruminative lament, an epic of shifting textures bolstered by emotive
strings. Factor in a truly great vocal courtesy of Diane Charlemagne, who died of
cancer in October of last year, and it became an instant classic, often employed
as the opener on compilations as if to say, “This is where it all began”. Which,
arguably, it did. Or at the very least it marked the point at which drum ’n’ bass
came of age. The genre had been enjoying an exciting if somewhat conflicted
adolescence, wrestling with identity issues as well as a struggle between its
boisterous, ruffneck underground roots and the growing demands of a marketplace
bored of the 4/4 gridlock of house and techno. It even had a name change,
morphing from jungle into the rather more genteel-sounding drum ’n’ bass’.
And then came ‘Inner City Life’. As a single it grazed the Top 50 – lofty heights
– but it had the qualities of beauty and maturity absent from most breakbeatbased music of the time. All of a sudden we were a long way from the likes of The
Prodigy, The Hypnotist and the hardcore scene that had birthed jungle, and closer
to the quote-unquote sophistication of LTJ Bukem or Roni Size & Reprazent’s ‘New
Forms’ – the latter going on to scoop that bastion of broadsheet acceptance, the
Mercury Music Prize, in 1997.
‘Inner City Life’ paved the way, but commercial and critical success came at a
price for drum ’n’ bass. A tasteful musicianship crept in – diva vocals, flutes and
sax solos were de rigueur. A musical form often touted as a new jazz was in
danger of sounding more like a Harvester lunchtime quartet than Coltrane or Miles.
Resistance came via the No U-Turn and Virus labels, where the likes of DJ Trace,
Nico and Ed Rush & Optical kicked against the coffee table drum ’n’ bass clogging
HMV. Employing the apocalyptic sounds of the Reese bassline, not to mention
frightening amounts of skunk psychosis, they created the techstep sound, the apex
of which was Ed Rush & Optical’s ‘Wormhole’ in 1998. Skip forward to the present
day and techstep, having since mutated into neurofunk, is one of the two major
styles dominating the genre.
And the other? That would be liquid funk, a style characterised by – wait for it –
emotive strings and female vocals. At the vanguard of liquid funk is High Contrast,
who has collaborated with Underworld and contributed to the music for the 2012
Olympics opening ceremony. His most celebrated album and a key liquid funk text
is 2007’s ‘Tough Guys Don’t Dance’. Its highlight? ‘If We Ever’, featuring vocals by
Diane Charlemagne. (AH)
December 1996
Coldcut
‘Journeys By DJ’ (JDJ)
Depends on who you talk to, but let’s assume our baseline is 1981’s ‘The
Adventures Of Grandmaster Flash On The Wheels Of Steel’. It could just as easily
be Steinski’s ‘Lesson 1 – The Payoff Mix’, which in 1983 bagged first prize in a
Tommy Boy remix competition judged by Africka Bambaataa, Shep Pettibone and
Jellybean Benitez… or did I dream that?
It’s hard to know who heard what first and who was inspired by what, but Age Of
Chance recorded their ‘Kisspower’ cut and paste mash-up in November 1986 and it
surfaced on white label around January 1987, the same time a couple of part-time
rare groove DJs were making the ‘Say Kids What Time Is It’ white label featuring
all manner of spoken word snippets alongside ‘The Jungle Book’, ‘Chitty Chitty
Bang Bang’, James Brown, Trouble Funk, Kool And The Gang, ‘Apache’, ‘Planet
Rock’…
Matt Black and Jonathan More adopted the name Coldcut in October 1987 for their
second cut up ‘Beats + Pieces’, released on their new Ahead Of Our Time label.
Using tape edits, it was a more ambitious outing than ‘Say Kids…’ and would prove
popular on their fledgling radio show, ‘Solid Steel’, on London pirate station Kiss
FM. Island Records were paying attention and hired Black and More to remix Eric
B & Rakim’s ‘Paid In Full’. The resulting ‘Seven Minutes Of Madness – The Coldcut
Remix’ played fast and loose with the original, a distinctive Ofra Haza sample
setting it apart as the Coldcut mix, which many assumed was the Eric B & Rakim
version.
A track on a compilation of their various pseudonyms, ‘Out To Lunch With Ahead
Of Our Time’, pointed to something of a change of pace. ‘Doctorin’ The Trak’ by
Coldcut Featuring Yazz And The Plastic Population became ‘Doctorin’ The House’
and landed Coldcut their biggest hit in February 1988. While they continued to
plough a rich chart-bound groove as Coldcut, the pair were growing tired of major
label creative control and set up the Ninja Tune label in 1990, which allowed them
the freedom to do what they wanted under a variety of pseudonyms, including its
debut release, Bogus Order’s ‘Zen Brakes’.
Ninja Tune joined a bunch of adventurous, forward-looking UK indie labels who
propelled a raft of groundbreaking records into the wild. James Lavelle’s Mo’Wax
served up DJ Shadow’s dazzling ‘Endtroducing.....’; in Sheffield, FON had morphed
into Warp and was leading the charge with bleep; on the south coast, Brighton’s
Skint Records had Norman Cook up their sleeve… oh, hang on. Coldcut’s ‘Journeys
By DJ’ outing. Clean forgot. It truly was ‘70 Minutes of Madness’ as billed and
upped the ante 10 times from that ‘Paid In Full’ mix while setting a new highwater mark for the mixtape. It was zeitgeist-y for sure, packed as it was with fresh
drum ’n’ bass licks, but they lost none of their humour or flair as they weaved
though 35 tracks including Newcleus’ ‘Jam On Revenge’, Mantronix, the ‘Doctor
Who’ theme, The Sabres Of Paradise, Jello Biafra, Pressure Drop, BDP, Masters At
Work, Harold Budd, DJ Food, Jedi Knights… They had rhythms they hadn’t used
yet, for sure, but not many after this breathtaking journey into sound. (NM)
XXX RAVERS
THE
February 1997
Laurent Garnier
‘Crispy Bacon’ (F Communications)
Live electronica albums are few and far between,
but in 2007 French electro house producer
Vitalic released ‘V Live’, a document of his gig
in Brussels. What was notable about it was
the crowd singing the riffs. Not the lyrics. The
riffs. And what a joyful noise it made. Vitalic’s
nationality is no coincidence. France has always
specialised in making dance music that sounds
thrilling and alive. Its most famous exponents
are Daft Punk, and you could add Bob Sinclar,
Motorbass, Cassius and Phoenix to the list
too. At its heart, however, is Laurent Garnier,
and perhaps the most classic example of his
prodigious talent for life-affirming techno, the
original “riff you can sing”, ‘Crispy Bacon’.
Crowning years of brilliant, envelope-pushing
releases (‘Acid Eiffel’, ‘Pigalle’, ‘Astral Dreams’)
from Garnier, ‘Crispy Bacon’ welded a phat
electro riff to a bruising kick drum. A stone-cold
classic from day one, it sounded both euphoric
and malevolent. It was almost guaranteed to
make you lose your shit on the dancefloor.
Such lean and effective dynamics did not go
unnoticed, and the track would inform the work
of the electro house and electroclash movements
that came to prominence around the turn of
the century. Fischerspooner. Remember them?
The International Deejay Gigolos label, Trevor
Jackson’s Output Recordings and a thousand
more. It’s no coincidence that Vitalic became
great friends with fellow traveller The Hacker
on the dancefloor at one of Garnier’s Wake Up
parties held at the Rex Club in Paris.
Puzzlingly, Garnier would play no part in the
scene he had helped create. Shortly after
the success of ‘Crispy Bacon’ and its parent
album, ‘30’, he pursued a somewhat anodyne
but critically acclaimed jazz direction with
‘Unreasonable Behaviour’ in 2000. For that
moment in 1997, however, he claimed the
dancefloor as his own. (AH)
April 1998
Massive Attack
‘Mezzanine’ (Virgin)
There was no such thing as a cutting edge in
1998 when we were enjoying the fag-end of
Britpop, Embrace and Gomez, but even if there
were, Massive Attack wouldn’t have been there.
Once game-changers, commercial success had
relegated them to the status of coffee table
music – soundtracks for dinner parties. It was all
their own fault, of course. What do you expect
when you back your tales of urban alienation
with liberal ransackings from the Isaac Hayes
sample library? Still, they’d done exactly that for
two rapturously received albums and for their
third would have been forgiven for pursuing a
policy of “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it”.
To their credit, they changed up. ‘Mezzanine’
wasn’t a revolutionary switch – and doubtless
remained the dinner-party soundtrack du
jour – but it did mark a progression. Though
present, the hummable samples were in shorter
supply, usurped by dry, spare beats that riffed
on the urban angst of Portishead, Tricky and
Adrian Sherwood’s On-U Sound. Into a dance
mainstream that had arguably become a little
too refined and pleased with itself came a new
darkness and insecurity.
With it also came a renewed interest in the low
end. The dub stylings of ‘Mezzanine’ differed
from the bear hugs of The Orb or the fastidious
lines of The Thievery Corporation. The album
employed a mode of dub that was closer in spirit
to the fried circuitry of Lee Perry’s Black Ark
than King Tubby’s gleaming consoles. As a result
‘Mezzanine’ had more in common with the illbient
seeping out of New York, where the likes of DJ
Spooky and Spectre had twisted the trip hop
model into new shapes. If anything it was the
most overground manifestation of a beats scene
moving away from the soul and jazz influences
of trip hop and into darker territory, eventually
going into the pot that would become dubstep.
Sure enough, when Burial collaborated with
Massive Attack in 2010, the fit was perfect. (AH)
The Millennials
21st century digital mavericks
Words: COSMO GODFREE, MARK ROLAND
XXX MILLENNIALS
THE
September 2000
Radiohead
‘Kid A’ (Parlaphone)
Anticipation for Radiohead’s fourth studio album
was sky high. But where do you go after ‘OK
Computer’? Ten months after Y2K, they broke
free of their alt-rock origins – no longer one of
those radio bands “buzzing like a fridge”. They
didn’t transcend their roots altogether as some
were quick to suggest – there are plenty of
guitars on the record, and in a sense they were
still working within the context of a rock band.
But that’s what made it all so thrilling.
Plenty of groups in the late 90s had an illadvised electronica phase that usually amounted
to little more than dabbling, but Thom Yorke
was so committed to the new direction that it
almost broke up the band. Inspired by electronic
artists from Björk to Eno, Autechre to Can,
Radiohead bought a bunch of synthesisers and a
strange old instrument called the ondes Martenot,
heard most prominently on ‘How To Disappear
Completely’. Early reviews were decidedly mixed,
but ‘Kid A’ quickly became a storming artistic and
commercial success, surely one of the strangest
albums ever to hit Number One on both sides of
the Atlantic and win a Grammy.
For many, this isn’t just the band’s peak, but the
decade’s. In retrospect – similarly to ‘Never Mind
The Bollocks…’ – it was the last of the old guard
rather than the first of a new wave, a capital-A
“album” designed as a front-to-back listen and
without an eye to iTunes downloads. But then
again it also broke impressive new ground and
will be remembered among many things as the
album that ushered in prerelease streaming.
Over the years there have been many, many
albums that have proven the depths of emotion
that supposedly “soulless” electronic music can
provide. ‘Kid A’ is one of the finest. (CG)
December 2002
The Knife
‘Heartbeats’ (Rabid/V2)
So many of this century’s best synth pop singles
have come from Scandinavian artists. Icona
Pop, Röyksopp, Lykke Li, Air France, The Tough
Alliance, Little Dragon, Korallreven… to be honest,
I’d have no problem using this whole entry just to
namecheck people. Robyn had a fantastic song
called ‘With Every Heartbeat’. Annie had an even
better hit with ‘Heartbeat’. But if you drew up a
list, right at the top you would find ‘Heartbeats’
by The Knife, aka Swedish siblings Karin Dreijer
Andersson and Olof Dreijer.
Guess the Scandis just have a thing about
romance. Then again, The Knife are a very
different proposition to the acts listed above.
Even their more obviously “pop” moments
throb with an undercurrent of tension and
unease that might be familiar to viewers of The
Killing. Andersson’s voice is crucial to this, an
otherworldly entity that still feels injected with
a very worldly sensuality. But that blocky synth
melody is a thing of pure joy. Everyone knows
the track now, but ‘Heartbeats’ didn’t actually
get a US release until 2006, after folk artist José
Gonzáles’ cover version was made famous by a
Sony ad.
Many of the songs we’ve chosen tell wider stories
about music, about society. The Knife would go
on to make music like that – the claustrophobic
‘Silent Shout’, and particularly the challenging
mess of ‘Shaking The Habitual’ – but ‘Heartbeats’
is above all else an incredible single. It’s hardly
innovative, nor even particularly original, but
somehow it still manages to sound like little else.
(CG)
January 2005
LCD Soundsystem
‘LCD Soundsystem’ (DFA)
James Murphy was 35 when he made this record.
He’d been in and out of rock bands throughout
his 20s, before he became the guy playing Daft
Punk to the rock kids. Some of the best material
on LCD’s debut betrays those early starts – the
hardcore thrash of ‘Movement’, the post-punk
balladeering of ‘Never As Tired As When I’m
Waking Up’. The electronic tracks were just
as good – the wonky exhortations of ‘Disco
Infiltrator’, the dancefloor-ready ‘Tribulations’.
The second disc collected all the material
that had been released in the couple of years
preceding, and it’s home to some of the best
tracks, particularly the genre exercises of ‘Yeah’
and ‘Beat Connection’.
Never forget that ‘Losing My Edge’, which came
out in 2002, was a debut single. It’s so fully
formed and nakedly autobiographical even when
no one had a clue who Murphy was. ‘Losing My
Edge’ was the third release on DFA, the label
co-run by Murphy, that dealt in every shade of
electro and post-punk under the sun. They’d
already put out at least one epochal 12-inch in
the form of The Rapture’s ‘House Of Jealous
Lovers’. Every indie band that heard it went out
and bought a cowbell and forced their drummer
to start listening to disco. But I digress.
LCD Soundsystem drew shamelessly from the
greats – Bowie, Eno, The Fall – but nobody cared
that they were recycling. So much of the decade
was about looking back, as we all succumbed to
retromania. Murphy’s encyclopaedic knowledge of
music history was the sound of the 2000s. And
so what if ‘LCD Soundsystem’ didn’t quite cohere
as an album? Murphy would nail that next time
round, but he was never this direct again. (CG)
September 2007
Oneohtrix Point Never
‘Betrayed In The Octagon’ (Deception Island)
It seems harder to tie the millennial picks to
wider scenes or movements. They often stand on
their own, moulding the sounds of the past into
something new rather than striking out brave
new territory. ‘Betrayed In The Octagon’, Daniel
Lopatin’s debut album as Oneohtrix Point Never,
harks back to a number of different eras, among
them the early kosmiche synth explorations of
Tangerine Dream, Vangelis’ 1980s soundtracks,
8-bit video game music, and the equally nostalgic
IDM of Boards Of Canada.
Lopatin came up in the noise/drone underground,
and ‘Betrayed In The Octagon’ was originally
released as a limited cassette run before later
being included on the now seminal ‘Rifts’
compilation. Lopatin has always raged against
“timbral fascism”, and his sincere embrace of
certain ‘uncool’ strains of music history has been
hugely influential – see the hypnagogic pop of
Ariel Pink and James Ferraro, or how acts such
as Animal Collective have drawn from New Age
music. Warp saw a visionary artist, and Lopatin
has gone on to release some incredible albums
with them, including the surprisingly affecting
‘R Plus Seven’, and last year’s abrasive and
hugely ambitious ‘Garden Of Delete’. And then
there are bizarre curios like the chopped and
screwed lounge jazz of ‘Chuck Person’s Eccojams
Volume 1’, which damn near invented an entire
genre – vaporwave – all on its own. ‘Betrayed
In The Octagon’ is as good as any place to
start: not concerned with making some sort of
grand statement, just totally in love with the
possibilities of sound. (CG)
XXX MILLENNIALS
THE
January 2010
Various Artists
‘The Minimal Wave Tapes, Vol. 1’ (Minimal Wave/Stones Throw)
New York resident Veronica Vasicka got into
electronic music when she was just 12, obsessing
over the likes of Soft Cell, The Human League
and John Foxx thanks to an alternative radio
station she listened to. “I had no idea it wasn’t
the mainstream,” she told Electronic Sound in
July 2012. “I thought everyone was listening to
the same music.”
When she was 14 she took a job in a record shop
and caught the bug for the harder stuff: SPK,
Cabaret Voltaire, Nitzer Ebb, Fad Gadget, DAF and,
most importantly, Throbbing Gristle. Gateway drug
led to gateway drug, each revealing more obscure
underground material that had passed unnoticed by
most in the heyday of early DIY synth music. She
started to collect flexi discs from forgotten Dutch
pop magazine Vinyl and tracking down self-released
cassettes and obscure one-offs from DIY labels.
When Vasicka began DJing on a Brooklyn radio
station, she became a magnet for more material
and started the Minimal Wave label in 2005.
A sub-genre of electronic music was defined and
packaged beautifully with heavy vinyl remasters
and high quality artwork. After a few singles
pressed in limited quantities, the first album, ‘The
Lost Tapes’ was released. In 2010, Peanut Butter
Wolf, DJ and owner of Stones Throw Records, got
in touch. He loved the Minimal Wave sound and
proposed a collaborative release, ‘The Minimal
Wave Tapes Volume 1’, a compilation culled from
the label’s first five years, including tracks by Das
Ding, Linear Movement, Deux and Oppenheimer
Analysis. Veronica Vasicka’s curation of lost
electronic music is remarkable not just for the
quality of a lot of the material she unearths, but
as part of a wider cultural reappraisal of a whole
raft of electronic music that had been consigned
to the dustbin of musical history and is part of a
21st century revival of interest in electronic music
that isn’t just tooled for the dancefloor. (MR)
September 2011
Various Artists
‘Drive - Original Motion Picture Soundtrack’ (Sony Classical)
One of the best films of recent years also had one
of the best soundtracks – a heady mix of hyperromantic synth pop and ambient electronica.
Director Nicolas Winding Refn originally wanted a
score by Italians Do It Better man Johnny Jewel
(best known for masterminding Chromatics and
Glass Candy), but the studio made him go with
Cliff Martinez, a known quantity. We’re not
forced to imagine what might have been, as
Jewel later released his (excellent) unused work
as Symmetry’s ‘Themes For An Imaginary Film’.
Still, Martinez’ score is just as impressive, and
absolutely integral to ‘Drive’: music becomes
speech, filling in for the purposefully bare
dialogue and guiding the film’s emotional
register. Really though, if we’re being honest,
we remember ‘Drive’ for the songs rather than
the score. The glorious opening credits with
Kavinsky’s ‘Nightcall’. The unforgettably romantic
use of College & Electric Youth’s ‘A Real Hero’
as Ryan Gosling’s unnamed driver takes Carey
Mulligan and her son on a day trip. Jewel got on
the soundtrack as well, with ‘Under Your Spell’
and the ominous ‘Tick Of The Clock’.
It’s impossible for me to hear these songs now
without images from the film rushing through
my brain. In 2014 the BBC decided it would be a
good idea to broadcast the film re-scored with a
soundtrack curated by Zane Lowe, ranging from
the alright (Chvrches) to the truly awful (Bastille,
The 1975). In fairness, the idea was destined
to fail even before the music was written. The
original is just too perfect. (CG)
March 2012
Grimes
‘Oblivion’ (4AD)
It’s easy to lose count of the number of
publications that voted ‘Oblivion’ as the best
song of the year, or even of the decade so far.
It still feels preternaturally fresh, an injection
of meaning and creativity into the indie scene.
Look back to the weirdness of ‘Halfaxa’ or ‘Geidi
Primes’. You can see the seeds of ‘Oblivion’ just
with little of the focus. Now, with her newest
album ‘Art Angels’, Grimes – aka Claire Boucher
– is (almost) a bona fide pop star. I’m not sure
she’d agree with that, but rather than bowing to
compromise, it’s the mainstream that’s changing
to fit her.
Boucher is actually shifting the idea of what it
means, or could mean, to be a pop star. The story
goes that she created the ‘Visions’ album on
GarageBand during three weeks of amphetamine
and insomnia-induced hallucinations, having
locked herself in her bedroom and blacked out
the windows. It’s a nice story, but of course the
music stands up on its own.
4AD is the perfect label for a song like ‘Oblivion’.
Boucher is casting dream pop in a contemporary
internet age mould, one where Cocteau Twins
and Mariah Carey are both valid influences. The
music video – directed by Emily Kai Bock –
explores the idea of throwing female creativity
and power into a world of sports arenas and
masculine stereotypes. It’s easy to get lifted
away by Grimes’ ethereal voice and the song’s
seemingly breezy demeanour, which actually
masks dark lyrics about a sexual assault.
Matching important content with intelligent,
poptimist music is the real success of ‘Oblivion’.
We should start to see its influence coming
through soon, after everyone’s finished playing
catch-up. (CG)
June 2013
Jon Hopkins
‘Immunity’ (Domino)
There’s nothing from 2014-15 on this list. Maybe
it’s just a coincidence, or maybe we don’t feel
comfortable anointing works that haven’t had
so long to live in the memory. There’s no such
problem with ‘Immunity’, a record that’s been
hugely important over the last couple of years.
The album itself actually feels lived in, the result
of tremendous dedication and studio craft. The
sound design is phenomenal throughout, right
from the opening recording of Hopkins unlocking
the door to his East London studio.
This level of detail betrays his background in film
scoring, and indeed he goes on to demonstrate
a keen understanding of narrative and structure,
both within individual tracks and the album as a
whole. Speaking very broadly, the album is said
to be structured like a night out, and falls into
two halves – intense techno and tender ambient
– although of course it’s nowhere near that
simple. ‘Open Eye Signal’ and ‘Collider’ are the
two monsters that keep you coming back time
after time, but the quieter pieces like ‘Abandon
Window’ are just as rewarding.
Eno hangs heavy, Hopkins having previously
collaborated with the master of atmosphere.
Having also worked with Coldplay, King Creosote
and Massive Attack, Hopkins’ reach was never
in doubt, but up until this point his solo albums
had been merely solid. ‘Immunity’ is exceptional,
and thankfully reached a wider audience after a
deserved Mercury nod. Hopkins has continued
to play with the album, both in his stellar live
shows (his dextrous Boiler Room set is a must if
you haven’t seen it) and its peaceful re-imagining
as ‘Asleep Versions’. I can’t wait to see where his
explorations lead him next. (CG)
XXX MILLENNIALS
THE
September 2013
Factory Floor
‘Factory Floor’ (DFA)
Factory Floor started to make waves in London
thanks to their performances in spaces where
audiences could mingle with the band. They
played a year-long residency at the ICA and
turned up the volume on their minimal
improvisations, mixing electronics, drums,
guitar and vocals into a dizzying experience for
audiences. What with the immersive lights, the
shows were somehow more reminiscent of 1960s
be-ins as well as Cabaret Voltaire and Throbbing
Gristle shows of 1970s, which demanded total
attention from audiences rather than slickly
produced entertainment offered by many of their
contemporaries.
They soon caught the ear of New Order’s Stephen
Morris, who saw something of his own band’s
early intuitive and ramshackle electronic noise
explorations in Factory Floor’s approach, and
offered to remix and produce them. Chris Carter,
formerly of Throbbing Gristle, liked them so much
he performed live with them several times and
started a new spin-off project Carter Tutti Void,
with the band’s Nik Colk Void and Cosey Fanni
Tutti.
Factory Floor became the 21st century modular
unit, connected by patch cord to the noisy racket
of the 1970s/80s London/Sheffield/Manchester
underground via the dance music decade of the
1990s. ‘Factory Floor’ has an arid intensity, and
is a great album, but Factory Floor are best
understood as a live act; great blocks of almost
visual sound, the guitar being hit, vocals sliced
and messed with live, a process of manipulation
unfolding in real time, involving and instinctive,
exciting and risky because its not worked out in
advance. (MR)
October 2011
Rustie
‘Glass Swords’ (Warp)
Two months after ‘Glass Swords’ was released,
Simon Reynolds wrote a Pitchfork article where
he coined the phrase “digital maximalism” to
capture what he believed was the dominant
current in electronic music. ‘Glass Swords’ is
at the heart of the discussion, with Reynolds
identifying Hudson Mohawke, Flying Lotus, Joker,
Jam City, Skrillex and Grimes as contemporaries,
and Daft Punk as important forebears.
Glasgow producer Russell “Rustie” Whyte had
been releasing wonky dubstep for years, but
‘Glass Swords’ was his debut album. The artwork
is so fitting, the perfect split between 70s prog
excess and day-glo futurism. In reviews, no
adjective was used more than “glossy”. Much of
the coverage was concerned with how difficult
the album was to categorise. Rustie uses his own
reworking of contemporary UK bass music as the
chassis, but then draws from so much else: funk,
Southern hip hop, trance, video games. One of
his talents is combining such seemingly disparate
elements into a confident, multifaceted whole.
Rustie doesn’t make simple music; he’s got
melodies zigzagging all over the shop, absurdly
complex drum patterns, and little sonic details
to savour over multiple listens. Yet his aim is
a simple one – to make people feel good. He’s
carrying the torch for rave culture in the 2010s,
and not in the sense of the jungle revival. This
is rave rendered in stunning HD, cool kids and
tastemakers be damned. He’s certainly never
been precious about the music he creates. In the
end, the album is just so much fun, both at home
and in the club, at a time when blunted dubstep
and dour greyscale techno had ruled the roost for
years.
In 2012, Rustie delivered a defining Radio 1
Essential Mix. This was his moment, and boy,
did he take it. Working in US trap and hip
hop alongside UK bass and a glut of his own
productions, the two-hour mix captured the
zeitgeist like no other. Featured artists like
Lunice, Cashmere Cat and Bauuer would go on to
great success. Everything felt possible. (CG)
That’s our journey through the history of electronic music,
what would be yours? Surprise choices... or gaping omissions?
Have your say over at our Facebook page now
www.facebook.com/electronicmagazine
XXX
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TECH
XXX
MAD
MEN
Ah, the far off days of tempting magazine adverts selling new-fangled
synthesisers. We take a trip through some of the very best. They don’t
make ’em like this anymore… which is probably just as well
Words: DICK MARTINI
Moog Minimoog
“You know what this is” (1979)
By the late 1970s, Moog advertisements were commonplace
in Contemporary Keyboard and other magazines, but they
often were very corporate in their approach. Like the other big
synthesiser companies of the time, Moog’s ads would fall into
a few standard categories – from straight up “title/features of
synth/photo of synth” ads to musician endorsements featuring
Chick Corea and Herbie Hancock.
Then in July 1979, it seemed that Moog realised just how
special the Minimoog had become to musicians. The ad
department got to work and the result was this iconic
advertisement that broke all the rules. There was no logo,
musicians instinctively recognised the unique shape of the
Minimoog (and if you didn’t, you were left in no doubt that
you should) and no contact information, musicians knew
where to get it. They had probably drooled over it in their
favourite keyboard shop many times by now. There was no
over-the-top marketing speak, musicians knew exactly what
this machine could do, it didn’t require any hype.
This Minimoog ad is as rare as it is unique, running only once
or twice before being replaced with only a slightly less cryptic
colour version that actually showed the face of the synthesiser.
Overkill in my opinion.
Roland SH-5
“Groupies aren’t everything” (1978)
Okay, technically this isn’t just a “synthesiser” ad. But Roland
was, and still is, one of the kings when it comes to synths. And
this ad does prominently feature an SH-5. It also prominently
features a shiny high-waisted fashion sense one can find
almost 40 years later draped on a 14-year-old walking out of
an American Apparel.
The advertisement was actually created by Roland’s European
distributor, Brodr Jorgensen (BJ). Within two years of placing
the ad in International Musician and Recording World Magazine,
BJ went bankrupt and Roland lost the supplier for one third
of their business worldwide. Liquidators had quickly swooped
in and taken control of over a million pounds of Roland gear.
Ouch. Not only did Roland have to scramble to find a bank
willing to give them a line of credit before they tanked, but
they also feared that the liquidators would flood the market
with cheap Roland gear before they could buy it back and
undercut their own sales.
But, as we all know, Roland survived and went on to produce
some of the most iconic synthesisers and drum machines in
the business. Close call. For the first time ever I hope a bank
president got a bonus at Christmas.
TECH
XXX
Dataton 3301 Polyphonic Computer
“Here it is housewives...” (1979)
The Dataton 3301 Polyphonic Computer was part of a larger system
that included the 3000 modular synthesiser and light/projector
control system. There were a number of other pieces planned as well,
including controllers, dissolvers and printer units. But alas, it seems
Dataton went in a different direction as a company.
Now, before we get to the obvious, I’d like to point out that this
Swedish company is still alive today, and has been since 1973.
Dataton may not have made it as a synth/music company, but they
must be doing something right. With that in mind, what would make
a marketing department create such an ad? Good question, and, well,
it turns out there was no marketing department. No surprise there.
According to then-Dataton president Bjorn Sandlund, he worked on
the ad with a chap by the name of Patrick Fitzpatrick who apparently
knew “exactly the style [musicians] expect from an ad”. Fitzpatrick
must have been a good talker because not only did he convince
Bjorn to go with the “housewife” concept, but he convinced his own
girlfriend to play the role.
E-mu Emulator
“Any sufficiently advanced technology…” (1982)
This was one gorgeous advertisement that first appeared in Keyboard
Magazine at the beginning of 1982. And, like the E-mu sampler itself,
it is pure beauty.
I can’t help but think that many synthesiser and tech geeks from
the early 1980s were also heavy science fiction readers. And sci-fi
nuts would instantly recognise these words first written by Arthur
C. Clarke in 1973, the third of Clarke’s three laws of prediction, and
E-mu hit the nail on the head when they decided to use those exact
words to headline this advertisement for their Emulator sampler.
Clarke has several links to the world of synthesisers. One of his
good friends and fellow science fiction authors, John Pierce, was
a big wig in the world of computer music research. It was Clarke’s
visit to Piece’s lab during a demonstration of a vocoder synthesiser
in the early 60s that led to its use in the climactic scene of ‘2001:
A Space Odyssey’. Also, during an Arthur C. Clarke lecture series
speech in 1982 – the same year this advertisement came out - Piece
mentioned co-worker John Chowning, then director of the Stanford
University’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics.
You might recognise Chowning as the electronic musician who is
credited with INVENTING FM synthesis. Yes, that FM synthesis.
Unfortunately all that history didn’t come into play when
E-mu marketing manager Marco Alpert used the quote - without
permission I should add. He was just a fan. And it fitted. Perfectly.
Sequential Circuits Inc. Prophet-5
“Beware of false prophets” (1979)
What’s better than a full-page synth advertisement? A twopage centrefold of course. Sequential Circuits Inc. (SCI) had
been running sporadic ads for the Prophet-5 in magazines like
Contemporary Keyboard for about a year when this unique
centrefold advertisement suddenly popped up in November 1979.
Synthesiser competition was heating up and with a grand
play on words, SCI declare all those other keyboards “false
prophets”. And in many ways they were. Nothing sounded like
a Prophet. But even more importantly to me, this was also the
first SCI ad to feature the artistic work of John Mattos. SCI’s
relationship with Mattos would continue for a number of years,
working together to produce the legendary SCI ad art that
includes the Ear-Force series of air plane ads used to promote
the Prophet-10, Prophet-5 and Pro-1, ad art that was so popular
that musicians were willing to buy poster versions.
Even today you will find John’s artwork hanging on the wall
behind SCI founder Dave Smith in promotional material for the
company. In fact, the artwork for this very ad can be seen in
the background of Dave Smith’s Prophet-6 demonstration video
posted on YouTube in January 2015, the first synth to feature the
Sequential name since Yamaha returned it to Dave with the help
of Roland’s founder, Kakehashi.
XXX
TECH
SYNTH
ESISER
DAVE
This month our resident synth wizard gets creative
and adds some extra bells and whistles to the GAKKEN SX-150
Our very own synth doctor isn’t just a merciful bringer of life
and health to unwell kit, his Hippocratic Oath also allows
him to get a little bit ‘Six Million Dollar Man’ on their ass and
actually improve them. So this month he thought he would
show us how to “Mod The Gakken”.
The Gakken SX-150 is a synth originally given away in kit form
on the cover of a Japanese magazine (published by Gakken). It
was so popular that they produced a Mark II and sold it. Dave
found it online and bought one for £25 and we bought one too.
The limitation of the Gakken SX-150 is that it can only be
controlled by the stylus, making it a turbo-charged Stylophone
(but with much better sounds and parameter control, so not
really like a Stylophone at all).
Dave discovered if you open it up, drill a hole and add a couple
of inputs, you can hook it up to a sequencer, like the relatively
inexpensive Korg SQ-1. Once modded, this little plasticky
machine really starts to get interesting. What’s more, you can
shout loudly the new catchphrase: “MOD THE GAKKEN!”
watch the video
https://www.youtube.com/embed/3jUAC2-3ya0
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XXX
REMIX
WOLFGANG FLÜR
AND WIN!
Your chance to remix a track by former Kraftwerk
member Wolfgang Flür… and win big to boot
Words: MARK ROLAND
Amazingly, last year’s ‘Eloquence’ long-player is
Wolfgang Flür’s first solo album. A collection of
slick internationalist electronic pop with some more
experimental work too, it had a warm reception
securing a haul of positive reviews across the board
and made our Top 20 albums of the year list.
We’ve teamed up with Herr Flür for a really special
competition to remix the track ‘Pleasure Lane’ from
the album. It’s his favourite track from the album,
and possibly the most personal. The winning remixer
will bag a signed copy of Wolfgang’s album and the
opportunity to meet the great man for a coffee and a
chat prior to one of his UK shows in 2016.
“Between 1986 and 1992, I had depressing periods
in my life,” he explains. “I’d made the decision to
split from Kraftwerk and lost a wonderful wife after
10 years of togetherness; all my happiness was
gone. It took a long time to reinvent myself. This
came about by starting to write songs with my first
melodies developing in the simplest way imaginable.
The more I wrote and developed my own music, the
more my self-confidence came back and I started
a new life apart from Kraftwerk and with different
tunes and themes. I wanted to go my own way,
departing the robot and machine themes, melodies
and coldness.
“In ‘Pleasure Lane’ I tell of my experience of life
being the navigation of a narrow ridge between
responsibility and shallowness (”seduction bridge”)
and how one must ultimately decide what is most
important. Personally, I love nature most of all. It
has sharpened my senses. I learned to educate
myself into a sensibility of my own (”I myself can
teach me how”) without the support of a big family,
a band or any other organisation behind me. This
has made me strong and independent. For all of this
positivity, ‘Pleasure Lane’ is a synonym in song. God,
am I happy that we had Miriam in the boat to sing
my story, I love her voice a million times.”
You can download all the stems and pop them into
your DAW of choice and get busy. Just head to
electronicsound.co.uk/blog/remix, pop your email
address in, and you’ll receive the link to download
the stems and further instructions.
The closing date for entires is the end of February.
Good luck!
TERMS:
• The winner will have to pay for their own travel and accommodation
(if needed) for the coffee and chat with Wolfgang. The date will have to be arranged around Wolfgang Flür’s schedule
•B
y entering the competition you give permission to Electronic Sound and Wolfgang Flür to share your remix via social media and
websites etc
XXX
TECH
READERS’
SYNTHS
Got a machine you’ve fallen hard for? Sent your tales of synthy love and
machine romance to [email protected] with “Readers’ Synths”
as the subject line
ROLAND RS-09 MK 2
Owner: Ross Carter
Where: London, UK
Year purchased: 2001
Amount paid: £150
“I’ve had a love affair with this little synth since I was in my first band
many moons ago. On stage we used a Jen SX1000, Roland JX3P and
this little baby, the Roland RS-09. The synths didn’t belong to me (I was
bassist and vocalist then), but I absolutely loved the simple, pure sounds
of the RS-09. At the time, we couldn’t dream of buying the likes of a
Jupiter-8 or even a Juno-6. So while the RS-09 didn’t have a fraction of
the features or the versatility of a rich man’s Roland, it was the closest
we boys could get. And it had the same colour switches, so we really
liked that.
I was particularly attracted to the string sounds and the chorus
ensemble that could be added. Lightly blending in one or two organ
sounds created some amazingly ethereal sound washes. Its build
quality was great, the metal casing was like a tank, and the switches
were solid and robust. It just looked and felt well made, like it would
last for more than one human lifetime. When the band eventually split
I found myself, years later, missing the uniqueness of the RS-09 so I
went in search of one.
I picked up a Mk 2 version (similar to the one we had before) in pristine
condition, in London, in 2001. It hadn’t been gigged or had beer or any
other liquid poured into it, and there were no cigarette marks on the
whiter than white keys either. It really was near brand-new and it came
with its original Roland hardcase. Price? £150. I couldn’t believe it. The
cash ran out of my wallet without even asking.
After 15 years I still have it among many other synths. It has been
tucked away like a museum piece while I’ve sung in other bands. I’m
now about to record tracks with my current band, Passion Flower
Storm, and I’ve pledged an oath that at least one of the songs is going
to feature some strange sounds from the RS-09 as a homage to the
memory of one of my very first loves.
TECH
XXX
SE
BOA
RIS
EA
ARD
SE
This amazing reinvention of the keyboard
squeezes more expression out of your playing
than we thought possible
Words: MARK ROLAND
TECH
XXX
If the BBC’s tech show for under-12s ‘Technobabble’
are talking about it, you know it’s news. The
Seaboard Rise is a stealth bomber of a MIDI controller;
black and sinister looking, weighing a ton and loaded
with very clever hidden features.
In a nutshell, it’s a two-octave keyboard (25 keys),
and the keys are made of a jelly-like silicon, with
white lines indicating the black keys. There are a few
more black rubbery pads and strips to the left of the
keyboard, the large square one is an assignable x/y
controller and there are three strips, all of which can
be set to control different parameters - introducing
effects or altering the five-dimensional touch control.
That’s the Rise USP - 5-D touch control.
What does that mean? Well, you can really dig into
those oh-so tactile silicon keys (they call them
“keywaves”) and every movement your fingers make
can control the sound.
You can slide the notes around, up and down, from
side to side, aftertouch and lift. You can slide notes
across the entire range using the space above or below
the keyboard. Many of the sounds will allow notes to
rise or fall in pitch by fewer than 100 cents, more like
a violin. This makes the sound all the more human
and the feel of introducing an element of inaccuracy,
or between tones, to your playing is thrilling.
The full functionality of the Seaboard Rise relies on it
being partnered up with the software synth, Equator,
which is a free download and is also now available
for the iPhone 6. It sort of works as a MIDI keyboard
with other synths, but it feels a little pointless. Once
Equator is fired up, the Seaboard Rise becomes an
extraordinary beast. Any residual intimidation you
might feel about its austere Stealth Bomber looks
soon melt away as you plunge your fingers into its
tactile keywaves and start squashing and stretching
sounds with a series of what soon become intuitive
movements.
Like the keyboard itself, the synth’s interface is also
nicely designed; elegant, flatly modern and minimal
with a limited colour palette. It’s based on samples
and a synth engine. You can mix two samples and
there are three oscillators - plus a noise generator and
a ring modulator - and up to five envelopes whose
views can be switched between graph or knob view.
There are also two LFOs. The effects panel adds a
bitcrusher, distortion, EQ, chorus, delay and reverb.
The real pleasure, aside from the playing itself, is
the ease with which you can assign any parameter
to be altered by the way you hit the keywave… or
push it… or stroke it… or wobble it, as well as the
three modulation slider and the x/y pad. Samples or
oscillators can be programmed to overlay on top of
each other and effects can be altered in the same
way, all in a dynamic constantly shifting way if you
fancy. The scope for sound design is staggering, as
it is for creating truly awful sounds that will swamp
anything living within a five-mile radius if you’re not
given to being subtle.
The Seaboard Rise is a serious and deep instrument
that will be adored by soundtrack composers for its
ability to deliver nuanced human feel to sound. My
fingers did ache after a while of playing it, and my
Apple keyboard feels strangely clunky afterwards too,
but I think that’s because the Seaboard Rise requires
you to learn a new way of playing and to work with
the instrument to create rich performance-based
sounds. It gives keyboard players control over the
sound that we’ve never had. The physical relationship
between, say, a guitar fretboard, the strings and
the appropriate fingers of the player has long been
what makes the instrument more satisfying for many
musicians than synthesisers. The Seaboard Rise
changes that and brings similar levels of physicality
into electronic music production.
If you want to bosh out some banging bass lines, this
probably isn’t the way to go, but if you’re after a level
of subtlety and to be inspired to use synths in a new
way, then this could well revolutionise the way you
play, compose and record.
Seaboard Rise RRP £599.99
For more information, visit roli.com
TECH
KORG
APPS
KORG shizz rejigged for the iPhone? Don’t mind if we do. We take a look
at the pocket rocket version of the acclaimed KORG MODULE iPad app and
give the fun-fun-fun KORG iDS-10 music making app a run-out too
Words: MARK ROLAND
TECH
XXX
KORG MODULE
The big deal with Module for the iPad when Korg launched it
last year was that it brought huge and authentic sounds from
the real world into the tablet world. The app was praised for
the quality of sound it delivered, particularly the pianos and
organs. The Set List option, which allowed users to arrange
their presets into a queue, which resulted in playing live with
the iPad Module a doddle, made the Module’s raison d’etre –
that it is designed as a live instrument – pretty explicit.
Now Korg have ported the app to the iPhone and my first
thought when playing it - using the ultra-slender and
lightweight CME XKey 37 MIDI keyboard - was that I could play
gigs with a rig that weighs next to nothing, half of which (the
iPhone) is in my pocket as a matter of course.
The sounds on Module are pianos, organs, clavinets, strings,
brass and synths, with a pretty nice effects section you can
apply to any of the sounds, which includes a load of Polysix
effects and an Orange Phaser. An interesting function of
Module is Set List, which acts as a convenient launch pad
for the presets you know you’re going to use during a live
performance. It also can play back sound files and you can
adjust the speed they play at, making Module a handy tool for
learning new pieces. Unlike the iPad version, you can’t display
a PDF, so no lyrics or a score. Or a picture of your cat. You can
set the velocity curve to suit your playing though and the app
displays a little bar to indicate the strength of your strike.
It’s not the most thrilling of apps if you’re looking for flashing
lights and synthesis options a-go-go (check out the iDS-10, see
below, for that), but if you need high quality sound sets to play
convincingly without having to think about a flightcase again,
this may well be of considerable interest.
Korg Module, £22.99, iTunes Appstore
KORG iDS - 10
Korg’s iDS-10 is a quick and fun music making package
featuring a couple of synths, a drum machine, a vocoder and
a sequencer. It was originally designed for the Nintendo DS,
where it was very popular and now it’s been ported to the
iPhone.
face-melting sequence of intensity, which is all easily achieved
wearing earbuds on the bus. Watch out for making yourself
laugh though. The interface is well designed, with the emphasis
on simplicity and ease of use. And the synths each have an
oscilloscope and Kaoss pads.
The synths are simple two-oscillator mono jobs (based on the
iMS-20), with a stripped down patch bay (easily missed, you
have to scroll to the right to reveal it) that provide the required
analoguey blippyness, and you have enough onboard to make
basslines and melody lines, or fill the whole pattern with
techno blips. Sounds can be saved and there some ready for
loading. They can all be edited and parameter changes can be
recorded.
This app is a lot of fun, but it’s getting some heat in the
reviews for its lack of output options and ability to integrate
it into other packages. It does seem a little odd, but when
you go to the Menu button, it opens a pop-up where you can
load, save and mail sessions. The Mail option seems hobbled,
without any further option, but there’s also a “Mystery” option,
which offers a grid of 25 icons, 23 of which are greyed out,
but is this where Korg are intending to introduce sharing and
output options in future updates? Maybe… they call it “Mystery”
bingo: “as you continue enjoying the iDS-10, the full picture
will become clearer”. Given its past as a DS app, this might be
about the “gameification” of music production, or it might be
something else entirely. We’ll keep you posted.
The sequencer makes it very simple to build patterns and then
build those into songs. Each sound on the drum machine is
editable, and again very simple, but it’s easy to get some of
your own juice into proceeding. The vocoder uses the phone’s
microphone for its input, but it can also generate sound if
you type in a phrase. You haven’t lived until you’ve made an
iPhone app vocoder says ‘bollocks’ over your quickly assembled
KORG iDS-10, £14.99, iTunes Appstore
ALBUM
REVIEWS
2000, which showcases electronic music
with a gorgeous slowly-unfurling clarity
to it. As gently entrancing as ripples
on a lotus pond, it’s a great testament
to Yokota’s talents. And then there’s
Murcof’s standout 2002 release ‘Martes’,
which, while being incredibly poised
and minimalist, veers towards classical
music with its eloquent use of piano and
strings. The accompanying notes call it
a “masterpiece” and while I wouldn’t go
quite so far, it is very, very good indeed
fusing electronica and classical with
incredible poignancy and profundity.
VARIOUS ARTISTS
Leaf20
THE LEAF LABEL
Best-kept secret label
celebrates two decades with
tempting anniversary box set
Harvesting talent on the margins, the
edges and the fringes with a beguilingly
low-key and modest profile, The Leaf
Label really is a hidden gem. Founded 20
years ago by former music journalist Tony
Morley, the imprint is celebrating their
relative longevity in this increasingly
ephemeral world by releasing a 10-album
box set, ‘Leaf20’, the contents of which
were partly selected via an online poll of
label enthusiasts’ favourite long-players.
Two of Leaf’s great discoveries are
Caribou and Efterklang and both have
landmark albums included. Caribou’s
‘Up In Flames’, one of the first examples
of Dan Snaith’s prodigious talent, was
originally released under his Manitoba
moniker in 2003 and reissued as
Caribou a couple of years ago. These
shapeshifting pieces of Mercury Rev /
Flaming Lips post-everything eclectica
are not only supremely optimistic and
dreamlike, they’re often danceable too.
Copenhagen’s Efterklang are represented
here by ‘Parades’, their final studio
offering for Leaf before departing for
4AD. With a sound somewhere between
indie rock and electronica with full
orchestration and a chorale, it is joyously
eclectic with shades of Sigur Rós, Arcade
Fire and Spiritualized. Yet another
highlight of this incredibly rewarding
collection is Polar Bear’s contemporary
jazz odyssey ‘Peepers’, which kicks off
with the lovely, loose-limbed and jubilant
of spirit ‘Happy For You’ and continues
in an innovative style through 11 further
tracks that take jazz to the edges of
post-rock and back again.
These five aforementioned standouts
form the core of a great collection,
in addition and notably, there is the
haunting modern choral works of
Swedish outfit Wildbirds & Peacedrums’
‘Rivers’, the primal tribalisms of Melt
Yourself Down’s ‘Melt Yourself Down’ and
the contemporary take on traditional
European folk music that is A Hawk And
A Hacksaw’s ‘The Way The Wind Blows’.
Put simply there is plenty to keep even
the most quixotic and capricious of
listeners happy for many hours, as well
as being a rather covetous bundle from a
delightful little label.
BETHAN COLE
“You will find Leaf in those places where
electronic music, classical, jazz, pop, folk
and rock meet,” declares the label and
indeed the carefully selected 10 discs
only cohere via their diversity. And it’s
not all strictly electronic, but that’s
part of the pleasure of this deliberately
maverick little label that revels in
the idea that there are no rules, no
boundaries, no generic demarcations
and much of their output flouts easy
definitions.
First up, there are two divergent
ambient sets: the late Susumu Yokota’s
meditative and mindful ‘Sakura’ from
EFTERKLANG
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ALBUM
REVIEWS
Lavelle’s cinematic genre-splicing
UNKLE project, who take the moniker
of ToyDrum, for a concept album about
a wayward preacher seeking redemption.
Griffiths and Clements were determined
to see the album through to completion
after the singer’s untimely death last
February, aged just 46. And praise be
they persevered to serve up a record
that is equal parts campfire requiem and
peyote-fuelled desert drive-by.
GAVIN CLARK
& TOYDRUM
Evangelist
UNDERSCORE COLLECTIVE
Songsmith’s posthumous release
is an atmospheric clarion call for
recognition
On the Hold Steady’s track ‘We Can Get
Together’ there’s a tribute to Mathew
Fletcher, the drummer in largely forgotten
90s indie band Heavenly, who took his
own life in 1996. “He wasn’t just the
drummer / He was someone’s little
brother” Craig Finn sings. It’s a sucker
punch of a lyric that never fails to well
me up, making the point that for every
feted Cobain, Winehouse or Hendrix,
there’s a dozen equally talented, if lesser
appreciated musical talents who checked
out way too early.
This year we sadly added Gavin Clark
to that list. The Nottingham songwriter
battled the demons of depression, anxiety
and alcoholism for many years while
ploughing a lonely furrow since the late
90s in bands like Sunhouse and Clayhill,
garnering the odd sparks of recognition for
appearances on the soundtracks of films
by his friend Shane Meadows.
On this posthumous release, Clark
paired up with James Griffiths and
Pablo Clements, the remnants of James
On the latter tip, there’s the droney,
psychedelic groove of ‘Same Hands’,
with its grasping falsetto, incantations
and rattling desert bells, and ‘I Wanna
Lift You Up’, which stomps through
a dusty Black Rebel Motorcycle Club
meeting led by Clark’s strung-out
shamanic vocal and undercut with dirty,
buzzsaw synth lines. Clark’s voice is
frequently overdubbed with his own
claustrophobic halftones, suggesting
the searing urgency of the turmoil he’s
marinating in. The pleading ‘No One
Will Ever Know’ is a lo-fi riff on The
Beatles’ ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ with
its drum loops and fuzzy basslines, while
‘Son Of Mine’ features Clark’s own son
on backing vocals.
Ultimately, ‘Evangelist’ works best when
the sparse atmospherics are pared back to
leave breathing room for Clark’s affecting
vocal - a cracked, weather-beaten rasp
that owes something to Joe Cocker and
Springsteen at their most earthy, and even
‘Pornography’-era Robert Smith at its most
agonised. The spellbinding ‘Whirlwind Of
Rubbish’ is the album’s high watermark, a
spaghetti western torchsong of whispered
prophecies, Shakespearean emotions and
desolate perfection. A touch of macabre
hindsight can be a seductive thing, and it
seems almost too easy to reflect that the
album sounds like a final testament, such
is its funereal, religious atmosphere. “I’ll
never feel this young,” proclaims Clark
with alarming clarity on the track of the
same name, and it’s hard not to flinch at
the grim irony.
On the stark ‘I’m In Love Tonight’, Clarke
breathes, “I am forgotten here,” over
Morricone-ish violins. After this swansong,
there can surely be little danger of that.
These songs are an evocative memorial
to a powerfully desperate voice, who may
just reach his biggest congregation yet.
JOOLS STONE
Lightning Bolt or Japan’s Boris, but once
they’d plugged in, tuned up and got
down to business, things didn’t quite
pan out that way. “The moments when
we just improvised were simply far more
interesting,” reflects Weies. They played
the demos to a friend who compared
the sounds they conjured up to a cross
between Trans-Am and a Maserati… to
which the guitarist replied, “Wow, we
need to check them out!”.
GO MARCH
Go March
UNDAY
Belgian trio serve up electrifying
debut packed full of motorik
math-rock jams
So yes, nobody’s taking themselves
too seriously here. Yet in conspiring
to create the musical equivalent of a
hybrid super-deluxe, six-litre, four-star,
swagger-charged dream ride, they’ve also
veered into uncharted musical territory.
The results are hugely satisfying: here
sophisticated and intricate; there
powerful and grandiose. But at the same
time they are soaringly, unpredictably
crackpot: Battles meet Neu! in a
soundclash bossed by Eno.
Barring the off-target southern rawk
geetar of ‘Earthbound’, every track is a
winner. The propulsive digital motorik of
debut single ‘Rise’ recalls the electrified
glam of Finnish rave-stompers K-X-P,
and though early Kraftwerk or Neu! are
channelled perhaps more literally on
the equally brilliant ‘Like A Record’, it
feels like it’s being done with a knowing
glint. But it’s not all foot-to-the-floor.
Passages of reiterated polyrhythmic
loops are near trance inducing on the
reflectively atmospheric closer ‘The
White Lodge’, and on ‘Slow Horse’, the
downtempo pace set by an imperious,
pristine synth hum could stop a shire
horse in its tracks.
An out-of-nowhere, instantly gratifying
screamer, this is the future sound of
Antwerp.
CARL GRIFFIN
Think of all those albums you’ve read
about that never saw the light of day;
the painfully delayed releases or the
“we just didn’t like the end results” type
quotes from musicians attempting to
justify their stultifying post-studio selfdoubt. Don’t expect any of that sort of
nonsense from the Go March fellas.
Bursting with carefree, exploratory energy,
on the evidence of this promisingly
complete debut they are about as prone
to introspection as wolves on ecstasy. The
Belgian trio that comprises guitarist Philipp
Weies, keyboard man Hans De Prins and
drummer Antono Foscez have collaborated
here to create a long-player that thrums
with an unshackled intuitive ebullience
seldom heard in these digitally precise
times. Their reference points – krautrock,
melancholic synthpop and post-rock to
name but a few – are broad, but the
confident verve with which they pull them
all together bodes extremely well.
On entering the studio their initial aim
was to base the compositions on the
controlled chaos of avant-rockers like
Pic: Tim Lebacq
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ALBUM
REVIEWS
THE ADVENT/
VARIOUS ARTISTS
Collection 100
KOMBINATION RESEARCH
Cisco Ferreira and heavyweight
friends celebrate 20 years of defiant
techno bangers
As the 1990s progressed, techno rose
from the rave to become a new kind of
beast that took no prisoners after Robert
Hood’s ‘Minimal Nation’ defined and
named a genre which, in underground
clubs such as Pure, Tresor and Atomic
Jam, was devoured by sweaty, saucereyed blokes metaphysically bellowing
“harder, faster” to gods such as Jeff Mills,
Joey Beltram and CJ Bolland.
Leading the charge for the UK were The
Advent who, until the end of that decade,
consisted of Portuguese techno hound
Cisco Ferreira and DJ Colin McBean. The
former started his career as an assistant
sound engineer, sessions for the Jack
Trax label bringing him into contact with
legends such as Derrick May, Fingers Inc,
Marshall Jefferson and Adonis. He started
recording in 1988 with Bolland as Space
Opera, releasing four singles on R&S, and
was responsible for the first 12-inch on
Carl Craig’s fabled Fragile imprint in 1989
under his own name.
The Advent were born after Cisco met
Bang The Party DJ McBean, signing to
the London Records-affiliated Internal
Records (home of Orbital). There
followed a sizzling barrage of banging
12s, 1995’s ‘Elements Of Life’ album
and 1997’s ‘New Beginning’, after which
McBean departed to assume his Mr G
alias, leaving Cisco forging a fresh path
under The Advent banner. He released
granite helmet shredders on Tresor and
started his own Kombination Research
label, also appearing on imprints
including Drumcode, Synewave, Rotation,
International DJ Gigolos, Kanzleramt,
Elektrix and Pure Plastic.
the blueprint redefined in the 90s by
names such as Drexciya. Nodding at
old school acid, ‘Inn Range’ snarfs a
bassline from Chicago’s immortal Master
C&J while ‘Missing’ deploys startling
use of accelerated old school piano and
mutated Detroit strings.
‘Collection 100’ celebrates Kombination
Research’s 100th release by gathering
22 tracks dating back to the label’s
earliest missiles, many appearing
digitally for the first time. Hold on
to your turbo-keks as the set careers
through pounding vole-on-the-bowl
groove missives including ‘P. Tek’,
‘Inn Search’, ‘Mononix’ and ‘Bad Boy’.
While these define that genre and will
forever conjure memories of having-it
early hours oblivion, electro-bolstered
outings such as ‘Elektra Fix’, ‘Bass High’
and ‘Visualize’ stand as prime slabs of
One thought that hit me when
confronted with this set was the never
mentioned problem many studio
geniuses had thinking up titles for their
instrumental masterworks. Of course,
most just slapped the first future-related
thought that came into their head on
a track but, with this kind of merciless
onslaught, who needs to give a shit.
This music was built for a time and
place. That the memories it stokes can
still grip is testament to its quality.
While the whip-cracking electro-slap
of ‘Mind, Body & Soul’ is captured live
at MOTOR in Detroit, Cisco has also
included three previously unreleased
tracks, including the breezy acid of ‘B
Blast’ and belting ‘Backlash’, plus guest
slots from Joey Beltram, Murat and
Davide Squillace.
KRIS NEEDS
on display elsewhere on ‘Basar’. Far
better are cuts like the title track which
manages to compress late 80s dance
gestures, solid layers of tribal percussion
and squiggly little ‘Artificial Intelligence’
sounds into one dense and captivating
piece; ‘Rhythm Is All You Can Dance’
slows the pace down into a half-speed
rave monster and adds atmospheric
chants as it ascends out of a murky
beatless breakdown.
AFRICAINE 808
Basar
GOLF CHANNEL
Berlin duo sample their way around
the world and serve up joyous
mish-mash of an LP
Dirk and his graffiti tagging pal Nomad
might be a product of the club scene of
the German capital, but Africaine 808
has its roots somewhere else entirely.
Yes, this is ostensibly electronic music
— whether that be in stalking, ominous
sub-bass, classic acid-y hooks or a
palette of robotic electro beats — but
this is also much more than electronic
music. Here you’ll also find African funk,
tribal rhythmic intensity, dubby warmth,
jazzy vibes, gospel and Caribbean
gestures sitting alongside those
electronic components without any sense
of self-consciousness whatsoever.
It’s almost as if this stew of supposedly
incompatible elements was always
designed to be cooked up together. That
being said, it’s not always as successful
as that sounds, but usually only when the
duo dispense with the fusion dimension
that makes this album so intriguing.
‘Ready For Something New’ manages to
get itself confused, starting off with a
dubby groove but ending up as a languid,
soulful track that doesn’t sound that new
at all compared to the sound clashes
These tracks feel like Dirk and Nomad
are throwing everything they’ve got,
every single sample from every obscure
record they’ve ceaselessly crate-dug for,
at any available wall and seeing what
sticks. As with so many experiments,
or albums built up from seemingly
incompatible inputs, it shouldn’t work,
but somehow two pairs of keen ears
and a good sense of how rhythms
and sounds can mesh together fluidly
make this gumbo approach work. Don’t
ask why, it just does. And speaking
of gumbo, the Louisiana craziness of
‘Crawfish Got Soul’ is guaranteed to lift
the spirits of the most cynical listener.
Those of us with long memories will
recall the likes of Loop Guru and even
some of Richard H Kirk’s solo work for
Warp dabbling in what we then somewhat
dubiously called ‘world music’. Where
those artists looked to different cultures
to add a diverse input into their electronic
structures, Africaine 808
seem to be reflecting back a much
more globally-connected world than those
units could have imagined back then.
If Rough Guide ever served up a
contemporary cultural diversity
edition, this would undoubtedly be the
soundtrack. Either that or we’ll chalk
it up to ludicrous experimentation and
forget about it until someone else
decides to busily go about sampling their
way around the world all over again.
MAT SMITH
XXX
ALBUM
REVIEWS
RADIOLAND
Radio-Activity Revisited
THE LEAF LABEL
Klassic Kraftwerk album gets a
pop arty reworking in its entirety
There are certainly plenty of prior
examples of cover versions of entire
albums. Among the most audacious,
Laibach’s 1988 frankly terrifying take
on The Beatles’ ‘Let It Be’ springs to
mind. For their offering the Slovenian
art collective recast the final document
of the Fab Four as a collection of
stirring military anthems for their
fictional state. Radioland’s reworking of Kraftwerk’s
1975 album isn’t quite in that order of
sacred cow slaughtering, and is harder
to pin down. More in line with this
high art interpretation of Kraftwerk’s
difficult post-‘Autobahn’ album is
Bang On A Can’s 1998 dissection of
Eno’s ‘Music For Airports’, or the 2013
Joy Division Reworked tour that saw
Scanner and Heritage Orchestra giving
‘Transmission’ a going over. This is
the arena where the contemporary
avant garde dabbles in pop art,
where the more cerebral end of pop
music becomes inspiration for the
commercially aware and arts funding
is rewarded with new audiences and
mainstream coverage.
Radioland is a duo of well-established
composers and a visual artist who came
together for this project. Mathew Bourne
is a composer whose previous work – like
his ‘Songs For A Lost Piano’ that used
abandoned pianos to create new pieces
based on the instruments’ stories –
reveals a taste for larks. Franck Vigroux,
the other half of the musical equation
here, is an electro-acoustic composer,
one foot in the Stockhausen camp
with his Revox experiments and live
performances of noise and manipulations,
the other planted in contemporary beat
mongering that is almost danceable, in
an industrial kind of way, like DAF and
Throbbing Gristle getting into a ruck on
some bad crank. The third contributor is
Antoine Schmitt, an artist who provided
the impressive visuals when the album
was performed live in 2015. What have they done with the album?
Unlike Laibach vs The Beatles, it’s a
relatively subtle reworking. It’s organic
and warm, alive with the hisses and
pops and crackles of its subject matter
and it remains largely faithful to the
original. However, Kraftwerk’s standout
pop moments, like ‘Airwaves’, tend to
be mined for their texture, rather than
their explosive pop grooves. Perhaps
they sensibly decided to leave katchy
Kraftwerk at the studio door and focus
on the album’s sound design and mood dark and ironic.
The obvious questions are why do it
in the first place and why pick this
album? Well, the choice of ‘RadioActivity’ makes sense. Kraftwerk are
the bridge between the mid-century
electronic avant garde and the electronic
pop that underpins so much of today’s
more interesting music. This album
represented a conceptual leap forward
for Kraftwerk, their first album to be
tightly bound together by an idea, from
the artwork to the songs themselves, and
the sounds they used. As raw material
for this kind of project, it’s probably the
most appropriate from the Kraftwerk
catalogue.
Why do it in the first place? It was
originally a live project, presented as
part of a festival of events in London in
2015. As a document of an interesting
live experience, complete with Schmitt’s
visuals, it makes sense, but taken in
isolation it’s more problematic. It made
for an interesting night out, but the
original is all we need, and Ralph Hütter
himself is busy enough reimagining
‘Radio-Activity’ on his endless world
tour. That’ll do for me thanks.
MARK ROLAND
before holing up in a former meat pie
factory in Brixton’s Acme complex,
which they had turned into their Cold
Storage studios. Here they sculpted their
cinematic mood and noise experiments
with much use of the dub techniques
that must have floated in through the
window on hot days, emerging with their
debut album in September 1978.
THIS HEAT
This Heat/Health
And Efficiency/Deceit
MODERN CLASSICS
Post-punk experimentalists
mark 40th anniversary with
deluxe reissues
When I was editing Zigzag around 1978, I
heard about this band tucked away in the
depths of Brixton bent on making music
through experiments and noise, with no
regard for the sometimes irritating trends
then creeping into punk’s aftermath.
Unlike the bands who saw post-punk’s
open field as a place in which to create
a tinny little racket, This Heat didn’t
appear to give a shit about anything
except the untamed aural micro-surgery
they were performing in their lab, so I
gave them a spread in the mag.
Then that distinctive blue and yellow
sleeved first album turned up. One blast
of the heaving locomotive of ‘Horizontal
Hold’, which bore traces of then littleacknowledged Can in its engine room,
was all it took to realise something
special was being forged here. This
Heat lined up as Charles Bullen (guitar,
clarinet, viola, vocals, tapes), Charles
Hayward (drums, keyboards, vocals,
tapes) and Gareth Williams (keyboard,
guitar, bass, vocals, tapes). They had
started recording together in early 1976
The Morse code signals of ‘Testcard’ start
the album as This Heat meant to go
on. Most startling is the exploration of
dissonant textures and tape manipulation
on ‘24 Track Loop’, ‘Diet Of Worms’
and ‘Fall Of Saigon’ while ‘Music Like
Escaping Gas’ betrays their interest in
musique concrete and bison flatulence.
The chiming ‘Water’ is entirely
improvised and sometimes there are
disembodied vocals.
The follow-up was 1980’s 20-minute
maxi-single ‘Health And Efficiency’,
which featured a track on each side.
The title cut is improvised over a loose
motorik groove and was recorded on
a mobile studio unit they found in the
Melody Maker small ads. The b-side’s
‘Graphic/Vari-Speed’ is built on a varispeeded drone sound from ‘24 Track
Loop’, designed to be playable at 33,
45 or 78.
Before Williams departed to India,
This Heat recorded 1981’s ‘Deceit’,
long considered an obscure post-punk
classic. Here the trio presented their
take on songs, with vocals, melodies and
even hooks, albeit through their own
infinite looking glass where nothing is
at it seems, addressing worrying current
issues such as US defence policies and
global paranoia. The lyrics of ‘Sleep’
were swiped from TV commercials while
‘Triumph’ foresaw the surveillance which
now rules everyday life. ‘Makeshift
Swahili’ saw Hayward letting fly with a
voice he never knew he had. This Heat
wouldn’t think twice of recycling their
own drum loops so presaged sampling
too.
Remastered on coloured wax, the
individual records have already sold
out, although a bargain bundle is still
available, but probably not for long. I’m
reviewing off a poncy download, but they
still sound uniquely disquieting and out
on their own. Hopefully these historic
documents from another time will get a
full release in the near future.
KRIS NEEDS
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THE WOODLEIGH
RESEARCH
FACILITY
The Phoenix Suburb
ROTTERS GOLF CLUB
Sabres/Sabrettes dream team
gang up again for a right old romp
As you may or may not know, there’s a
new Andrew Weatherall album out in
February. ‘Convenanza’ is the first outing
his own name since 2009’s ‘A Pox on
the Pioneers’ and his first long-player
since 2013’s excellent collaborative
offering with Timothy J Fairplay as The
Asphodells. So it is for reasons best
known to his very own Rotters label that
they’re serving up this Weatherall/Nina
Walsh joint effort a month or so before
the main attraction.
Landing in such close proximity to an
eagerly awaited Weatherall album would
seem like folly indeed, but when music
needs making, music needs making.
Walsh should require only a little
introduction. A composer, performer
and producer, she first hooked up with
Weatherall providing vocals on Primal
Scream’s ‘Original Sin’ before teaming up
to form and run the Sabres of Paradise
and Sabrettes labels and working
together on and off ever since. You get
the feeling the pair probably just fancied
doing this, dusted down some old kit,
set up shop and embarked on plenty of
mucking about.
Youth pop up as a guest. Can’t argue
with that really… except opinion in the
office was divided over ‘The Phoenix
Suburb’.
Hence the eight tracks here sound more
like a jam than anything else. Slow and
low that is the tempo, each time locking
down a groove over which they run amok
with a menagerie of sounds. The whole
shebang is a deliciously squelchy and
delightfully playful as you’d probably
expect. It has a lovely analogue feel
and in places you can hear the ghosts
of electronic pop music past, nowhere
more so than on ‘Aeronauts The Next
Phase’ which thanks to a distinctive
drum sound comes on like ‘Enola Gay’ (a
sound that’s reprised later on the dubby,
string-soaked ‘Emancipation Garage’)
or on ‘The Question Oak’, which is an
insistent coattail tugger with its hypnotic
melodic almost Depeche Mode synth
line. The record is most fully formed on
the last two tracks - the down and dirty
‘Dumonts Assistant’ with its distinctly
Sabres nighttime vibe and ‘Taqiya’, a
60s-flecked upbeat thumper, which sees
Of course, if it was a blinding
masterpiece it’s unlikely that it would
have seen the light this close to the new
Weatherall solo album, but Rotters isn’t
the usual sort of label and they should be
saluted for having the nads to stick this
out. What you appreciate increasingly in
this world of instant gratification is that
not everything needs to be held up as
the gold standard, nor does everything
that gets released need to be an instant
classic. And maybe that’s the thinking
here - give the people what they want
and they’ll perhaps discover something
they didn’t know they needed. ‘The
Phoenix Suburb’ is deeply satisfying
record and one that’ll be increasingly
be getting an airing as people cotton
on. And cotton on they undoubtedly will
once the new Weatherall album lands.
NEIL MASON
like alchemy in reverse – reducing
electronic sound to its basest elements,
a considered, almost scientific approach
to sound. His contribution takes pure
waveform synthesis and manipulates
that into shapes ranging from passive,
pleasant, ethereal tones, bass-y drones
and onward to screeching, violent,
eardrum-bothering noise. The result
is somewhere between the test tone
recordings engineers used to employ to
test hi-fis and the thrillingly nostalgic
sound of a ZX Spectrum loading up
a program. It’s possibly the closest
electronics can ever come to a raw,
primal energy.
KLAUS FILIP &
LEONEL KAPLAN
Tocando Fondo
ANOTHER TIMBRE
Brace yourselves as improv duo
go surfing on sinewaves…
with a trumpet
Simon Reynell’s Another Timbre imprint
has developed a reputation as a go-to
source for improvised recordings, and
releases on the label often find musicians
utilising electronics alongside other
instruments as a core part of their improv
process.
‘Tocando Fondo’ finds trumpeter Leonel
Kaplan performing with programmer
and electronic musician Klaus Filip at
a session in Kaplan’s adopted home of
Buenos Aires in January 2014. Although
entirely improvised, an element
of “composition” went into the final
two tracks in the sense that some
consideration was given to how certain
passages sat alongside others as they
were carefully edited down to a CDlength duration. Apart from that, what
you hear is precisely what the duo played
one sticky evening at Kaplan’s pad.
Filip specialises in an extremely niche
area of electronics, namely the use
of pure sinewaves. What he plays is
Against this backdrop, Kaplan’s trumpet
is a powerful and complimentary
counterweight. Like Filip’s sinewaves,
his playing is mostly pared back to base
form, whether that be scratchy, semirhythmic sounds, hissing, sibilant noises
or gravelly held tones that remind you
the core input to a trumpet’s distinctive
brass rasp is human breath. It’s only
on the second piece included here that
Kaplan’s instrument, briefly, actually
sounds like a trumpet. By that point
it’s hard to tell it apart from a droning
sinewave from Filip’s arsenal, which
perhaps best illustrates how wellmatched these two players are.
Acting with such extreme technical
restraint might suggest a session that’s
devoid of interesting colour, but ‘Tocando
Fondo’ is anything but. The two pieces
here shift from subtle, discreet ambient
soundscapes full of intricate detail, right
through to heavy, intense blocks of
sound that would test the mettle and
resolve of most heavy metal fans. In
between are moments of eerie, queasy
calm and unsettling, horror soundtrackesque moments of tension, particularly
when Filip’s sinewaves approach
Theremin frequencies.
As music reviewers, we’re often reminded
of the old adage that writing about music
is like dancing to architecture. On that
measure, think of ‘Tocando Fondo’ as
a little like shuffling your feet to stone
before it’s been quarried, or iron ore
before it’s been converted to structural
steel, a periodic table of sonic elements.
MAT SMITH
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ALBUM
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barbarian Bacchae – had other forms
of music, primarily chant-based, which
were both terrifying and awe-inspiring to
the Apolline Greeks. Put simply, in the
Apolline state, man controls sound to
make music. In the Dionysiac, the music
overwhelms and compels the man.
MUERAN
HUMANOS
Miseress
ATP
Buenos Aires to Berlin via
Barcelona, the international duo
incorporate Bacchic themes into
their second offering
When Friedrich Nietzsche wrote ‘The
Birth Of Tragedy Out Of The Spirit Of
Music’ in 1872, he noted a distinction in
tragic drama between the Apolline and
the Dionysiac, a dichotomy based on
the opposing yet overlapping characters
of the two Greek gods of art. In the
Apolline, the individual can feel their
edges and be aware of themselves as
totally separate from others. In the
Dionysiac, the lines blur, the self is
forgotten, and there is almost a unity of
consciousness between people having
this experience. The Greek tragedians
became masters of balancing the
two elements, and they learned to
create in their drama an ebb and flow
between both states, evoking an intense
emotional response in their audience.
Music, says Nietzsche, traditionally
belongs to Apollo, which is why the
Greeks composed with carefully defined
rhythms regulating their work. The
original worshippers of Dionysus – the
So what has this rather crude definition
of complex philosophical ideas got to do
with electronic music in 2015? Well, I’ll
tell you: Tomás Nochteff and Carmen
Burguess – otherwise known as Mueran
Humanos – are back with their second
album, and ‘Miseress’ is a fine example
of those principles at work. Upping the
ante on the industrial front and bringing
Einstürzende Neubauten guitarist
Jochen Arbeit into the mix have left the
duo with a record that appears to stand
on the threshold between the Apolline
and Dionysiac, incorporating both to
form a musical experience as powerful
as the original Attic tragedies Nietzsche
wrote about.
Both Nochteff and Burguess take on
vocal duties in ‘Miseress’, which gives
the album a kind of “chorus” effect (in
the Greek sense of the word); they also
tend to chant rather than actually sing
a melody. These incantation-like lyrics
are especially important to songs like
‘Mi Auto’ and ‘El Circulo’: the recursive
reverberations of this seven minute epic
are sure to tease you into a Bacchic
frenzy – Dionysus, here we come.
Let’s not forget the Apolline though: the
music here is tight and perfectly under
the pair’s control, and the regularity of
these rhythms sits in constant dialogue
with the chaotic synths. ‘Un Lugar
Ideal’, for example, is a clear descendent
of Can’s 1976 single, ’I Want More’,
with its expertly maintained heartbeat
crushing up against the wild abandon
of the vocals and guitars. ‘Guererro de
la Gloria Negativa’ has a regimented,
almost gothic, metal vibe to contrast its
turbulence – think Rammstein, but in
some bizarre alternate universe where
they’re being produced by John Foxx.
So is the music actually any good? The
short answer is yes. The long answer is
oh my god yes. Nochteff and Burguess
have made in ‘Miseress’ an album which
combines delicacy and power, strength
and uncertainty, delirium and dream.
ROSIE MORGAN
feels similar to the Disclosure album
model (albeit with considerably less
star power). However, the vibe is more
nuanced than that, the vocals folded into
the music like another instrument. ‘Point’
actually reminds me more of Katy B’s ‘On
A Mission’, another nighttime emotional
pop record informed by the rhythms and
textures of underground dance music.
CHARLES
MURDOCH
Point
FUTURE CLASSIC
Hotly-tipped Australian dance
producer turns in short, sweet
curio of a debut outing
Of the singles, the wobbling ‘Frogs’ is
infused with a bit of personality courtesy
of a duet between Wafia and fellow
beatmaker Ta-ku, and guest eight-bar
from Hak of New York rap crew Ratking.
Elsewhere, the best cuts are the pair
of songs handled by Chloe Kaul. ‘Open’
starts gently, before kicking into gear
halfway through, while ‘Fray’ is a dreamy
affair that also hits harder then anything
else on the record. Tender and fragile,
Kaul’s voice carries a lot of emotion and
elevates these two above the rest of the
pack. ‘Wash’ is also worth highlighting,
a rumbling slow-build instrumental that
loses little of its fizz after being uncorked.
Brisbane producer Charles Murdoch
signed to Aussie imprint Future Classic –
most closely associated with the careers
of Flume and Chet Faker – off the back
of a Beatport competition where, despite
missing the submission deadline, he
caught the ears with his remix of Flume’s
‘Sleepless’. Since then Murdoch has
played some pretty high-profile shows
with the likes of Nicolas Jaar, Totally
Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs, Lapalux and
Cashmere Cat. His ‘Weathered Straight’
EP arrived in 2013, followed by a twoyear hiatus working on new album ‘Point’.
‘Point’ could do with being a bit sharper,
a bit less polite. Murdoch’s skill as a
producer is never in doubt, but he’s made
an unflashy record and that works to its
disadvantage. On the whole, the vocalists
don’t manage to make up for this – it’s
like neither side wants to take centre
stage. I’m not asking for a cynical pop
grab or an about-turn deeper into the
underground, just something that makes
me want to listen to ‘Point’ over the
legion of producers doing something very
similar.
At eight tracks and just 35 minutes, it
is a struggle to see where all that time
went. ‘Nothing For You’ gets the album
off to a great start. Starting out as a
peaceful rock garden constructed from
processed vocals and splashing percussion,
it then turns into a light, airy pop song.
It’s probably the best thing here, and
unfortunately somewhat of an outlier.
‘Point’ is home to an array of Australian
guest vocalists, and on a surface level
So what saves it from the purgatory of
tasteful Soundcloud background music?
Murdoch’s considerable production chops,
as already mentioned, but also a sense
of patience and coherence. He nails a
particular reflective, slightly late night
vibe, and that gives the record an identity.
I only wish that extended to the songs
themselves.
COSMO GODFREE
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ALBUM
REVIEWS
textural grit to melodic sources.
Blues and garage rock reference points
abound across ‘Wild Style Lion’, but
there’s a conscious push into psych
and krautrock territory. ‘Kingdom Cum’
possesses a blistering lysergic intensity,
a jumble of disjointed lyrical themes
occasionally touching on religious fervour
while the squealing, mechanical whine of
‘Lovewasinme’ (featuring Sonic Youth’s
Kim Gordon on vocals) occupies that
astral field so favoured by German groups
in the 1970s.
WILD STYLE LION
Wild Style Lion
I’M SINGLE
Filthy, heavy synth rock outing
with resounding endorsements from
Dinosaur Jr and Sonic Youth
Consisting of vocalist Khan Of Finland,
guitarist Philipp Virus and Boris
Bergmann on drums and synths, Wild
Style Lion are one of those adventurous
collaborative efforts that draws heavily
upon members’ experience in other
fields: Khan is a producer and has
worked with Julee Cruise, Diamanda
Galás and Kid Congo Powers, Virus has
directed videos for Atari Teenage Riot,
and Bergmann is a classically-trained
musician who has scored films as well as
playing in punk and death metal units.
Owing a debt to Dinosaur Jr frontman
J Mascis, who invited them to take the
support slot for the European leg of
the US grunge legends’ tour, the band’s
debut album is a dark, occasionally
harrowing body of work built up from
sludgy guitars, restrained beats and
synths that would typically belong to
darkwave. The trick here is density –
instrumental tracks like ‘Godwasinme’
rely on intense layers to deliver their
emotional impact, while the heavy
processing of the instruments add
The highlight is ‘Grey Sedan’, a dirgelike blues number with guitar and synth
interplay that sounds like the group are
making shapes out of pure electricity,
while vaguely glam, stomping processed
drums add an unswerving weightiness
to the track. The album includes two
versions of ‘Grey Sedan’ – one where
Khan does his best insectoid impression
of Suicide’s Alan Vega, and another
where Kim Gordon steps in and sounds
trapped somewhere between detached
seductress and the doomed first victim
of a teen slasher movie. In addition,
‘No President’, featuring proud sponsor
Mascis on guitar, finds the trio all but
dispensing with the drums in favour of
a thrilling mesh-work of dirty, distorted
synths and equally ground-out axe lines.
It makes for a cloying, claustrophobic,
panic-inducing thrill-ride of a song.
A clue to the inspiration for this curious
musical collaboration may lie in the solid,
brutally austere ‘Charlie Charlie’, which
drops in lyrical sections from The Velvet
Underground’s S&M hymn ‘Venus In Furs’
over its chunky beat. Doing so feels like
an attempt to bookend 50-odd years
of experimentation in music, from the
Velvets’ 1960s artsy gestures through
sky-scouring prog and krautrock and on
into electronic music, finally arriving at
a point where it’s possible to make an
album like this, where guitars and synths
can be blended together so inseparably
that they sound entirely indistinguishable
from one another.
MAT SMITH
why, even on the first listen, conveying
as they do the apt cavernousness of
the venues and high recording quality.
You’ll wish you could’ve been there,
cross-legged and suitably fortified for the
occasions.
TANGERINE
DREAM
The Official Bootleg Series
Volume Two
REACTIVE / CHERRY RED
Definitive live high watermarks
from the kosmiche big time
Though possibly not the place to
introduce the unacquainted, this striking
collection shouldn’t be dismissed as one
of those “for die-hards only” releases
such is the depth of wondrous cosmic
immersion on offer. It follows last year’s
equally fine first volume, which features
a recording of the band’s much-lauded
1974 Reims Cathedral performance, and
this offering is just as impressive, which,
for bootlegs especially, seems incredible.
Crucially, there’s an abundance of the
kind of extemporised unexpectedness
that only the best live experiences can
serve, which is reason in itself to indulge
in this amply proportioned four-CD,
booklet and essay-embellished set.
Taken from a couple of live appearances
- Paris, March 1978 at the Palais des
Congres and January 1980’s East Berlin
performance at the Palast der Republik
- these are two concert recordings
considered to be among the finest
bootlegs around. And it’s easy to see
Unfairly dismissed by some as too
proggy, possibly because of the huge
international success they enjoyed
from the mid-70s onwards, and their
vague associations with the kind of
self-indulgent keyboard symphonies of
lesser bands that hastened the welcome
onset of punk, Tangerine Dream are
perhaps less readily namechecked as
contemporaries like Kraftwerk, Can and
Neu!, but they have been as equally
extraordinary in their influence. Just
consider the line-up for a start, Edgar
Froese, Chris Franke and Peter Baumann
aside, in an early incarnation it included
Zodiak Arts Lab co-founder Conrad
Schnitzler as well as the great Klaus
Schulze.
The opening salvo from Paris showcases
much of what makes Tangerine Dream
and their renowned live performances so
special. Deep, slow-forming electronic
experiments drift hither and thither
in the cathedral-like space, but then
coalesce into solid, astonishingly
contemporary-sounding, brilliantly
percussion-led structures. But then
these sonic visions dissipate dream-like
into thin air, like weightless ambient
abstractions of true beauty.
The Paris appearance is also noteworthy
for its short-lived line-up, which as well
as the ever-present Froese and longtime member and ex-Agitation Free
drummer Chris Franke, featured English
multi-instrumentalist Steve Jolliffe
and exceptional Berlin percussionist
Klaus Krieger. Live recordings of
this incarnation are rare and there’s
a palpable distinctiveness to the
performance too; more propulsive
perhaps, but also at times astonishingly,
multifacetedly proto. An early sequence
even calls to mind both Fuck Buttons and
The Prodigy within just a few startling
minutes.
The behind-the-iron-curtain East Berlin
outing, where Froese and Franke were
joined by classical organist and gifted
sound engineer Johannes Schmoelling,
is a full and un-edited transcendental
delight. Sections of it formed the basis
of the 1986 Virgin release ‘Pergamon’; as
bright and nebulous a star in the vast TG
cosmos as any.
CARL GRIFFIN
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REVIEWS
work of Luke Abbot, another modular
operator. The delays on the delicate
opening of ‘Concagnis’ recalls some of
Kraftwerk’s early processing of tones,
when Ralf would find a pretty organ
phrase and have it tumble over and over
itself, creating pleasant moods from piles
of musical jumble. You can hear the
influence of other German innovators,
especially on the more mechanical
‘Zeroset’, which recalls some of the
machine pulse aesthetic of the album
of the same name by Moebius, Plank
and Neumeier, with its mathematical
reference, but Howes’ output remains
pleasingly softer edged and calm.
HOWES
3.5 Degrees
MELODIC
When it comes to modular,
what comes first, man or machine?
Or is it somewhere inbetween?
What is it about modular? It has some
strange power, that’s for sure. Whether
it’s the simple act of building a modular
set-up or whether it’s the peculiar effect
a modular set-up has on its owner
once built, sitting there, expensively
blinking at you until you invest hours of
you life in order to tease unpredictable
sounds from it, modular exerts an
almost psychological grip on many of its
practitioners.
Salford’s John Howes is one of those for
whom modular seems to require special
working practice. He spent sleepless
weekends recording much of this album,
capturing the modular outputs straight to
cassette, which is another indication of
a peculiar workflow rooted somewhere
between nostalgia for superannuated
technology and a mild modernist
obsessive compulsive disorder.
Apparently, the whole album was
recorded without any overdubs or
editing, and that’s surprising given the
evident organisation of the sound. It sits
in similar territory to the woozy organic
So is “modular” becoming a music
genre in itself? And if it is, how do
we feel about it? Are Lloyd Cole’s
recent excursions into modular really
so different from what we have here?
Electronic music has a long and rich
history of the sound of the machines
themselves having a significant impact
on the music made with them, and it’s
long been the stick used by synth-hating
rock types to beat it with. Of course,
the same argument can be levelled at a
lot of music made with more traditional
instrumentation, that it sounds repetitive
and derivative.
This is an album that certainly sits within
a wider phenomenon of artists moving
away from the convenience and ease
of digital music production and seeking
an interaction with electronic music
that requires more effort, and includes
serendipity and mistakes as part of the
composition process, as encouraged by
the overlord of this music, Sir Brian of
Eno. And the evidence is, based on the
personality of this release and others like
it, that it’s the individual’s interaction
with the machines that counts, not the
machine itself.
MARK ROLAND
In the film, Melidis, who hails from a
small town in northern Greece, comes
across as curious character. The cock
gags, getting his arse out, stupid dances
and irritating his long-suffering girlfriend
are all totally at odds with his music.
He’s clearly one of life’s thinkers and to
be fair the film shows a good deal of him
angsting over ‘Years Not Living’, which
is indeed a complex, multi-layered ride
through a quite brilliant musical mind. It
is sophisticated stuff, while being funky
as hell. You completely get why DFA had
someone’s arm off for Larry Gus.
LARRY GUS
I Need New Eyes
DFA
Oddbod composer from
rural northern Greece serves up
must-hear album
Quite where to start with this? The story
goes that in 2006 our hero, Panagiotis
Melidis, decided he wanted to do
something good. So he started the Larry
Gus thing. On his wishlist was releasing
an album on Stones Throw Records. He
wrote to the label and they sent him a
hard disk full of samples for reasons that
aren’t exactly clear. He became obsessed
with the samples, sorting and arranging
them into themes and trying to find ways
of making them work together, using
as his guide the complex plan of writing
constraints used by George Perec for ‘Life
A User’s Manual’. Like you do.
When he finished, Melidis sent the
tracks, all 85 of them, to Stones Throw
who said the music was too complex,
too heavy, too psychedelic. In short, a
big, fat no thanks. The whole tale and
how the record, 2013’s ‘Years Not Living’,
ended up being released by always-onthe-money DFA Records is charted in
a pretty extraordinary film, ‘My Friend
Larry Gus’, a fruitcake of a documentary
made by Vasilis Katsoupis.
Which brings us to ‘I Need New Eyes’,
his second outing for the label. The
new record comes with a fresh set of
challenges. He lives and works in Athens
where he moved with his now-wife and
their son, after living in Milan for five
years. So he’s a dad these days, which,
it seems, has thrown up a new set of
personal and professional anxieties. The
album’s title comes from Proust who
claimed “the real voyage of discovery
consists not in seeking new landscapes,
but in having new eyes”. Not that any of
this especially shows on the record.
There’s a delightful skip in the step
of ‘I Need New Eyes’, it feels more
songwriterly than the debut, but no
less accomplished. The sophisticated
arrangements, inbuilt funk and nuclearpowered rhythms are all intact and, in
places, it reminds you of the sort of thrill
you get from early Talking Heads. ‘A Set
Of Replies’ and ‘Taking The Personal
Away’ could both be lost ‘Speaking In
Tongues’ cuts, while the lovely slow
dance duet of ‘Belong To Love’ is a hit
all day long. Many of the eight tracks do
that delightful thing of winding up the
song early and wigging out for several
minutes as they spin towards their
conclusion. Take the charming church
bell peel of ‘All Graphs Explored’ or
closer ‘Nazgonya (Paper Spike)’, which
is an almighty seven-minute romp that
culminates in such a dramatic kitchen
sink drum-off finale that’ll it’ll have you
off your seat and honking like a seal.
While the sleeve keeps up the joker
image, this is a delicious record featuring
some very high quality tunage indeed.
Where Larry Gus could find himself if he
keeps up this sort of quality gubbins is
anyone’s guess. One thing’s for sure, he’s
in the right hands with DFA.
NEIL MASON
XXX
ALBUM
REVIEWS
heavily inspired by movie soundtracks,
drawing on influences such as John
Carpenter, Vangelis and Tangerine
Dream. So it seems apt that they dabble
in a bit of producing and create their
own film soundtrack this time around.
‘Chronicles Of The Wasteland’ / ‘Turbo
Kid Original Motion Picture Soundtrack’
as you might have gathered, is a double
album, a mammoth 50-song adventure
— the first part a supplemental remixed
version of the soundtrack, while part two
is the complete movie score.
LE MATOS
Chronicles Of The Wasteland
/ Turbo Kid Original Motion
Picture Soundtrack
FANTÔME
The future is bleak, dangerous
and full of retro 80s madness
There’s a lot going on in ‘Chronicles Of
The Wasteland’. Le Matos have taken
care in reworking the more atmospheric
tracks from the ‘Turbo Kid’ soundtrack
so they function as songs in their own
right, and by offsetting bleakness with
hints of hope, it’s an incredibly enjoyable
listen. Standout ‘Playtime Is Over’ is a
dark, brooding track that builds to a fistpumping crescendo, while in contrast, the
more emotional ‘No Tomorrow’ works as
a sing-along, featuring the soothing tones
of London-based vocalist Pawws.
The ‘Turbo Kid Original Motion Picture
Soundtrack’ is a slightly different animal.
Quintessentially 80s in its production, it
drifts from dreamy and slow to dark and
doom-ridden before jumping into a fastpaced bolt of analogue synths and drum
machines. Because it’s a film score, the
majority of the tracks are only a couple
of minutes long (the shortest is just 16
seconds), nevertheless, the album flows
seamlessly and rarely would you realise
you’re listening to a soundtrack. It even
features some OST versions of songs from
‘Chronicles Of The Wasteland’, shortened
to match the rest of the tracks.
Across both sets, Le Matos have succeeded
in every way to tell their aural story,
weaving heart and romance into their dark,
apocalyptic songs. If there’s to be more
films that try and recapture the magic of
the likes of ‘Terminator 2’ let’s hope they
hire Le Matos to perfect the score.
FINLAY MILLIGAN
It’s safe to say there has been quite
a resurgence and fascination with the
1980s. Or rather, a fascination if you were
looking back across the decades wearing
your biggest, rosiest, neon-tinted glasses.
From films like ‘Wolfcop’ and ‘Kung Fury’
to bands such as Carpenter Brut and
Lost Years, the retro synthwave scene is
receiving a lot of attention. Auteurs of
all varieties are attempting to recreate
heart pounding, fast-paced flavours not
seen since the likes of ‘Terminator 2’ and
‘Escape From New York’.
‘Turbo Kid’ is one of those recreations.
Romantic, colourful, post-apocalyptic
and terrifically gory, it would best
be described as ‘Mad Max’ on BMXs.
It’s drenched in 80s aesthetic while
maintaining a modern twist. And its
soundtrack had to represent that, which
is where synthwave artists Le Matos
arrive on the scene.
Since forming in 2007, the FrenchCanadian duo have been creating music
Pic: Simon Duhamel
phase with ‘Little Voodoo Dolls’, a longoverdue second outing.
With its broad strokes, from minimal but
melodically bright techno to dark-hued
filmic atmospherics with the feel of an
experimental horror flick soundtrack,
‘Little Voodoo Dolls’ manages to retain
a straightforward dance-ability that
cleverly takes it beyond the realm of
the headphone. Herpe cites Plastikman
as among his influences and on tracks
like ‘Libera Me Domine’ you can also
clearly hear the influence of Detroit and
Philadelphia. They’ll have you rocking to
the beat, make no mistake.
FROM KARAOKE
TO STARDOM
Little Voodoo Dolls
FENOU
Berlin-dwelling Parisian serves up
colourful tech-house outing
Associated as it is with the thriving
European techno scene that revolves
around superclubs like Paris’ Rex,
Moscow’s Propaganda and its principle
focal point, Berlin’s cavernous Tresor,
to the uninitiated the tech-house
nomenclature can conjure up an offputting functional soullessness. With
exotic textures that recall the adventures
of early pioneers like Marshall Jefferson
as well as latter-day ambient innovators
Walls, tech-house is a brilliant example
of a sub-genre that can undersell itself.
The best examples are, of course, to
be celebrated, as this warm-blooded,
painterly release demonstrates.
From Karaoke To Stardom is the
recording alias of Parisian Jeremy Herpe,
who established a name for himself
with 2007’s ‘Undo Redo Weirdo’ longplayer and his remix work for the likes
of labelmates Dapayk & Padberg, Marek
Bois and RawTec. At the beginning
of 2015, he relocated to the German
capital for a new start, both personally
and musically, and he begins his Berlin
There’s also an abundance of that
soundtrack-to-the-city-at-night vibe
that lends a driving, excited vitality,
particularly on standout ‘Secretly We Are
Ghosts’, which builds into gratifying peaks
of pulsating, effervescent synth chords.
Elsewhere, swirling washes of shimmering
celestial silver mix unexpectedly with an
unsettling sample of Charles Bukowski’s
voice on ‘Roll The Dice’, a clever twist
which makes the more straightforward 4/4
dancefloor futurism of tracks like ‘Loops
Des Steps’ and ‘Rue Des Bullets’ work even
better. The latter is a play on the name of
Parisian metro station, Rue Des Boulets,
which makes you shudder in the light of
recent events in city. “Somehow you try
to put your pain into the songs, for me the
album represents some kind of a voodoo
doll,” reflected Herpe after completing
‘Little Voodoo Dolls’, but before the Paris
attacks last November lending a certain
poignancy to proceedings.
As the album reaches its close, a dark
European sang-froid comes to the fore,
which is underlined with the spoken voice
sample of a detachedly cool Frenchaccented female. Though it maintains a
propulsiveness consistently throughout the
whole piece, it also conveys a conclusive
sense of release that neatly brings your
journey to an end.
CARL GRIFFIN
XXX
ALBUM
REVIEWS
HQ, Deux Filles was a beautifully odd
proposition. As Gemini Forque (LloydTucker) and Claudine Coule (Turner),
the pair developed a whole narrative
around these “characters”, one involving
disappearances and suspenseful intrigue,
while also allowing them to don dresses
and confuse audiences without ever
once revealing who was really behind
the project.
DEUX FILLES
Space & Time
LTM / LES DISQUES DU CRÉPUSCULE
Picking up where they left off
for a third outing, two guys pretend
to be two girls all over again
The transformation of Simon Fisher
Turner from youthful pop star to an
award-winning soundtrack composer,
via a stint as Derek Jarman’s goto composer, is one of music’s most
intriguing stories, full of chance
encounters and collaborations. Turner’s
work with electronics dates back to the
tail end of his nascent pop career, when
he began fiddling around with a Revox
tape machine, arriving more or less
at the same time as he began playing
around with his own identity, adopting
names like the King Of Luxembourg to
separate himself from his earlier path.
In a career filled with all sorts of
partnerships, from Terre Thaemlitz to
Factory Floor, one of the most enduring
Turner projects was Deux Filles, a band
that saw Turner and former The The
member and esteemed producer Colin
Lloyd-Tucker create a whole storyline
and mythology and assuming female
identities. The product of a opportunistic
meeting in a watering hole while both
were visiting the Cherry Red label
Deux Filles released two albums at the
start of the 1980s, ‘Silence & Wisdom’
(1982) and ‘Double Happiness’ (1983) and
the pair would eventually come clean
about who they really were. It’s therefore
perhaps of some surprise that, despite
the cheeky fraud of their backstory being
exposed as a deception, they would need
to use the moniker for ‘Space & Time’, a
long-awaited third album.
Very much picking up where they left
off, ‘Space & Time’ is an expansive and
frequently arresting collection of 24
discrete and varied pieces taking in all
sorts of sounds from around the globe.
Aside from audience manipulation, one
of the most interesting things about Deux
Filles was the sheer breadth of LloydTucker and Turner’s musical scope, from
experimental pop to soundscapes, both
collaborators being capable of picking up
more or less any instrument and making
it work in a brave and unexpected
context.
That same spirit of unbridled
experimentation runs through the short
segments of ‘Space & Time’, with tracks
ranging from ambient texture (‘Horsebox
Parade’), distorted saw-wave buzz
(‘Mouth Popsicle Explosion’), maudlin
Latin guitar-laced with subtle electronic
sequences (‘Soft Crushed Love’) to
gospel reverence (‘Happy Clappy’) to
menacing pseudo-classical structures
forced into new, almost Cageian
shapes by aggressive processing and
manipulation (‘Twinblade Sofa Cull’).
Though occasionally playful, somewhat
like the metaphorical journey taken by
Messrs Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty
on KLF’s ‘Chill Out’, there is a vaguely
sombre tone to many of the pieces
here, with tracks like ‘Treasure Trove Of
Memories’, with its pretty synth filigrees,
carrying a delicate, fragile and mournful
quality that is sweetly evocative.
Projects covering so much musicological
ground can often appear peripatetic
and elusive, and ‘Space & Time’ is most
definitely both of those. It’s almost as if,
after sloughing off the mask of assumed
identity, Lloyd-Tucker and Turner went
all-out and loaded these vignettes with
even greater levels of musical intrigue
and impenetrable mystique. In doing so,
‘Space & Time’ acts as a wonderfully
quirky next chapter in the weird story of
Claudine and Gemini.
MAT SMITH
VARIOUS
ARTISTS
Still in a Dream:
A Story of Shoegaze 1988-1995
CHERRY RED
Gotta spare seven hours? Boxset
propels you back to the genre that
fashion forsook
Of all the strains of vintage indie,
shoegaze rarely finds itself basking in the
warm glow of reappraisal, but the recent
return of both Ride and Lush makes this
bumper five-disc set seem rather timely.
Budding shoegazers must’ve found it
hard to shake the feeling that the odds
were always stacked against them, being
named after their propensity of staring
awkwardly at their own Doc Martens on
stage. Alternative monikers were equally
damning: The Scene that Celebrates Itself
is a tag that could easily be levelled at
most (anyone remember Romo?) and
Dream Pop feels woefully inaccurate,
since little of the genre’s output has the
shiny, accessible veneer we associate
with the word “pop”. Even shoegaze’s
champions did little to help to cause, with
their talk of “sonic cathedrals” and the
rampant over-use of the word “ethereal”.
And so it falls to Cherry Red to exhume
shoegaze’s chequered cadaver with this
exhaustive 87-track collection, complete
with a 12,000-word booklet. Not all the
usual suspects are present and correct:
My Bloody Valentine are conspicuously
absent, but Moose, Pale Saints, Jesus
& Mary Chain, Slowdive and of course
the Cocteau Twins are all on board. The
4AD contingent is surprisingly light here,
but the real joy is suddenly alighting
on names you’d long consigned to your
mental recycle bin: Catherine Wheel, Dr
Phibes And The House of Wax Equations,
The Honey Smugglers… it’s like brushing
the cobwebs off a copy of NME circa
1991 or tuning into a lost episode of
Gary Crowley’s GLR radio show. Many of
these prove their inherent forgetability
on a fresh listen, but lost gems include
Kitchens Of Distinction and Ultra Vivid
Scene.
Cherry Red deploys a fairly loose
definition of the term, meaning there’s
a good number of American bands
represented too. Heartening to see the
likes of Boston’s Galaxie 500 alongside
Mercury Rev and Flaming Lips, which
brings home the point that, contrary to
the oft-trotted out Britpop rubric, the
cultural gap between the oceans was
narrower in certain quarters. By the
start of the 90s, the barriers between
“traditional indie” and the dance/
electronic genres were already being
broken down. shoegaze was a key part
of this revolution. Plenty of noiseniks
were donning the Joe Bloggs’ paisley-
bottomed jeans of the indie dance scene,
turning to the likes of Andrew “Andy”
Weatherall to give them a snare shuffle
and funky wah-wah-flavoured rebirth.
Bands grew up incredibly quickly at
the time. Consider the cavernous
gap between Primal Scream’s 1987
‘Sonic Flower Groove’ and 1991’s
‘Screamadelica’ or the Shamen’s 1988
‘Jesus Loves Amerika’ and ‘Progen’
in 1990). And in certain cases artists
evolved from the protean shoegaze
sound of guitar distortion and muddy
vocals, towards something more melodic,
as you can hear with the Boo Radleys’
‘Kaleidoscope’ on the album. In a sense,
shoegaze encapsulates everything
you might love and hate about the
preciousness of “indie” simultaneously.
It was sonically challenging and
uncompromising as well as being
unashamedly arty. But it was also elitist,
blinkered and overly reverent towards a
bygone era of late-60s psych and garage.
They were the worst of times, they
were the best of times. But you can’t
deny they had some blisteringly blissful
tunes. For ardent proof that we’re not
just looking back at it all through cider
‘n’ black-tinted spectacles, just drench
yourself in Spacemen 3’s ‘Hypnotise’
or Curve’s ‘Ten Little Girls’ and let the
dreams snap you out of your wakeful fog.
JOOLS STONE
CURVE
ALBUM REVIEWS
XXX
best known for his depiction of a sadistic
car park attendant in the notorious video
nasty ‘The Human Centipede 2’.
DUKE ST
WORKSHOP
WITH LAURENCE
R HARVEY
Tales of HP Lovecraft
STATIC CARAVAN
Cosmic horror author’s tales get
terrifying soundtrack treatment
Howard Phillips Lovecraft wrote avidly
during his brief lifetime, developing a
style that was appreciated by a select
few, criticised by a further few, and
ignored by the vast majority. He died
young, having spent all but the last
cents of an inheritance without ever
achieving the literary success that might
have been expected of someone who is
now regarded as a godfather of modern
fantasy and horror writing.
Lovecraft was heralded – somewhat too
late – for a style of writing that found
his principal characters compelled into
following certain actions, unable or
unwilling to deviate from a path that
leads to certain danger. That perspective
of mounting, pulse-quickening terror is
captured on the latest Duke St Workshop
album, which finds the Workshop’s Lee
Cullen providing tense musical backdrops
to two Lovecraft stories, each read by
British actor Laurence R Harvey, perhaps
Harvey’s readings of ‘From Beyond’
and ‘The Hound’ are delivered in a
richly expressive style which perfectly
displays that compulsion to observe,
moving swiftly from quiet wonderment
to tremulous, rising fear. Cullen’s task
is to sculpt the tension via a palette
of electronic sounds, fixing Lovecraft’s
antiquated horror into entirely modern
dimensions. When Howard describes
the enthralling sight of the menacing
machine in ‘From Beyond’, it lends itself
perfectly to a rigid, expressive track
augmented by grids of beats and tones
redolent of John Carpenter’s soundtracks.
When the narrative shifts from
wonderment to fear, Cullen’s soundtrack
is a grinding, ebbing and flowing drone,
the listener’s pulse quickening as it
becomes clear – even though you knew
it was always going to be this way – that
this machine is a source of devastation.
It’s so intensely terrifying that it should
come with a ‘Crimewatch’ warning
telling us not to have nightmares, and
even when the sounds shift to a Satieesque stately piano refrain, the echo
of that earlier fear remains. The pitiful,
thwarted Lovecraft would no doubt have
appreciated the way Cullen is able to
manipulate the listener’s adrenalin from
intrigue to headphone-tugging fear in
what is a thoroughly compelling response
to his texts.
This is, it should be said, what horror
soundtracks are all about and musicians
and composers have been causing
abject panic in theatres, with radio
plays and movies since a market for
being scared out of our wits became
apparent. Creating, or recreating, horror
soundtracks with electronic scores is
also nothing new – in fact exotica artist
Les Baxter produced a synth-heavy
accompaniment to an adaptation of a
Lovecraft story, ‘The Dunwich Horror’,
which was considerably more successful
than the film itself.
What Cullen seems to achieve that
perhaps others haven’t is something
utterly entwined with the mood of
Harvey’s spellbinding reading through
texture, melody, hypnotic synth tones
and heavy atmosphere, without ever
resorting to the temptation of using
hokey sound effects or episodic claptrap,
even when Howard ventures into
frightened histrionics.
MAT SMITH
Main men Peter Steer and Geoff
Pinckney have been doing the do for nigh
on 10 years now, sharing stages with
such luminaries as The Human League,
Heaven 17 and Blancmange along the
way. ‘Smoke And Mirrors’ is the group’s
third album and sees them expanding
their line-up to incorporate drummer
Steve Clark. It also features a guest
appearance from one-time T’Pau bassist
Paul Jackson. TENEK Smoke And Mirrors
ALIEN SIX PRODUCTIONS
Riding the crest of the
new wave of British synthpop
In the last decade or so, there’s been a
splurge of UK bands influenced by the
sounds of the early 1980s and, it would
seem, pretty much nothing but the
sounds of the early 1980s. A lot of them
are old enough to have experienced this
period first-hand for themselves. Some
are so shamelessly derivative, they could
pretty much be tribute acts. They make for what is a curious and
intriguing scene, existing in a little
retro bubble on the far fringes of the
electronic music spectrum. It’s almost a
kind of new wave of British synthpop, or
NWOBSP as we call it round our house,
a tag inspired by the so-called NWOBHM
(new wave of British heavy metal), the
movement that saw a resurgence of hairy
headbangers in the aftermath of punk.
Remember The Tygers Of Pan Tang? No?
Well, why would you? I don’t suppose Tenek have been
compared to Iron Maiden too many
times, but there is a correlation in
the sense that, just as Iron Maiden
were NWOBHM kingpins, Tenek are
behemoths of the NWOBSP scene.
The T’Pau reference is an important
clue to where Tenek are coming
from. Because although the principal
touchstones of the NWOBSP are the
first generation synth outfits, Steer and
Pinckney are clearly into lots of the later
80s pop stuff too. What’s more, they’re
keen on guitars as well as synths, which
sets them apart from the rest of the
scene. So while ‘Sunlight’ and ‘Soloman’
are fine examples of solid electronic
goodness, it’s when they get the slapbass runs and the live drums going that
they fly. At various points, I’m reminded
of King, China Crisis, Re-Flex and the
always awesome Fashion, who could
easily have recorded the funky pop strut
that is ‘Fear For Nothing’, my favourite
track here.
‘Everything Lost’ ploughs another funk
furrow, ‘Headlights’ is a slick stadium
rocker, and ‘Blue Man’ is a slowly
unfolding windswept drama. The most
involved track is probably ‘Imitation Of
Life’, which piles the waves of synths
so high that the whole thing seems in
danger of toppling over. The production
is super precise throughout, with every
element polished to the max, but don’t
mistake the shine for superficiality.
There’s plenty of depth and weight too. Let’s not pretend that ‘Smoke And
Mirrors’ is anything revolutionary or even
evolutionary. It’s neither. It’s a record
that largely sounds like acid house never
happened, but there’s much to admire
all the same. It’s big and hearty and full
of great hooks. It’s also a very assured
record. “Yeah, you really like this, don’t
you, don’t you?” sings Peter Steer on
‘Imitation Of Life’. And actually, yeah, I
do really like it. Good work fellas.
PUSH
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