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THE ELECTRONIC MUSIC MAGAZINE
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The all-new analogue version of Electronic Sound has landed.
If this is the first time you’ve picked up Electronic Sound, it’s great
to have you on board. We’ve been around for three years and we’ve
put out 19 issues during that time, but up until now we’ve been a
digital-only magazine. With this edition, we’re making the transition
into the world of glorious print.
We’re a magazine mostly about music made with machines.
Although neither the music bit or the machines part is a deal
breaker, as you’ll come to discover. Electronic music has always
been associated with ideas and the people who are attracted to it
are often inquisitive, futurist types, interested in where things are
heading and how they’re going to build on what has come before. Electronic Sound tries to reflect that curiosity, charting the
best of what’s going on right now and what is about to happen. We
like a bit of time travel too, journeying back to the earliest days of
electronic music experiments and stopping off at significant points
along the way.
Inside Electronic Sound this time around, we talk to John Foxx,
Martyn Ware, Chris Carter, Andy McCluskey and others about
the late 1970s and early 1980s electronic scene in the UK, surely
one of the most inventive periods of British music. We take a trip
to Australia to see the monster synth collection of the Melbourne
Electronic Sound Studio, before heading to Japan to meet precision
engineered noiseniks Nisennenmondai. We also chat to former
Kraftwerker Karl Bartos about communication, the theme of his
“lost” 2003 solo album, to Beth Orton about her collaboration with a
Fuck Button, and to Air’s Jean-Benoît Dunckel about his Starwalker
project. We have a terrific interview with Alan Rankine and Michael
Dempsey from The Associates too.
The next edition of Electronic Sound will be out in July and will
be available in high street newsagents across the UK. We’ll be
celebrating by giving away a free CD with the July issue, with further
free CDs over our next few issues. To be sure of getting your copy,
check out our special trial subscription offer, which will give you
the next three print issues of Electronic Sound for a total payment
of just £4.99 (UK postage included). Go to electronicsound.co.uk/
subscribe for more information.
Now if you’ll excuse us, like Marty McFly, we’re going back to the
future. Who’s got the keys to that DeLorean? Electronically yours
Push & Mark
W I T H T H A N K S T O O U R PAT R O N S :
Mark Fordyce, Gino Olivieri,
Darren Norton, Mat Knox
3
HINTERLAND
St Peter’s Seminary
Cardross, Argyll and Bute
24 March 2016
Words: NEIL MASON
Picture: BRIAN SWEENEY
A few miles west of Glasgow, the crumbling
concrete ruins of St Peter’s Seminary have
been hidden in overgrowth for the last 30
years. But the impressive listed building was
recently brought back to life with Hinterland,
a light, projection and sound installation by
ever-inventive public arts company, NVA.
Over 10 nights, the sold-out event marked
the beginning of NVA’s multi-million pound
project to save the building, turning it into a
600-capacity venue due to open in 2018.
“It’s a long, long story,” says NVA creative
director Angus Farquhar, no stranger to vast
industrial spaces having been a founding
member of Test Dept. “I first visited the site
in 2007 and just made a decision there and
then that we were going to be the people to
save it.”
The Hinterland show set out the creative
possibilities that the revitalisation of the site
will bring as a dramatic setting for public art.
“I’ve spend my life working in large, brutal,
industrial locations, so it’s par for the course
for me really,” laughs Angus.
That the former Test Dept man ends up
restoring one such building seems fitting,
doesn’t it?
“Exactly,” he says. “Things seem to have
come full circle.”
4
THE OPENING SHOT
03Welcome
04
The Opening Shot
THE FRONT
08
Short Circuits
10
Jimmy Cauty, Bill Drummond
12
The (Hypothetical) Prophets
14
Matthew Herbert, Jean-Michel Jarre
17Devo
20
Let's Eat Grandma
21
Bob Moog
22Hawkwind
26
Synthesiser Dave
30
Klaus Dinger
32
Tim Gane
34
Jack Dangers
36
Fat Roland
38S'Express
THE FEATURES
40
Rise Of The Robots
48
Melbourne Electronic Sound Studio
54
Beth Orton
58Starwalker
62Nisennenmondai
66
Karl Bartos
70
The Associates
THE BACK
76
Brian Eno
78Shit Robot, Tim Hecker,
Highasakite, Amp Studio
79Matthew Bourne, Teleman, Niagara
80Dave Clarke, Win
81Oliver Coates, Wire, Olga Bell, Jameszoo
82LEO, Boys Noize, Jolly Mare
83Melt Yourself Down, Memotone
84Tuxedomoon, John Carpenter,
Wild Palms, Anohni, Parquet Courts,
Space Dimensional Controller
85Ladyhawke, Max Richter, Clark
86Belbury Poly, Xeno & Oaklander, Kowton,
Wrangler, Larry Levan, The Lines
87Susanna, Kenneth James Gibson,
Antwood
88Mira Un Lobo!, Kikagaku Moyo,
Luke Abbott
89
Mark Pritchard, The Field, Cluster
90onDeadWaves, The Comet Is Coming
91
Cate Le Bon, Commodo, Patterned Air
92Arbeit Schnickert Schneider,
Logan Takahashi, Polly Scattergood
93John Foxx, The Gasman,
Teho Teardo & Blixa Bargeld
94
Lakker, Mogwai, Gold Panda, Szun Waves
95
Pantha Du Prince, Peter Baumann
96
Kris Needs
CONTENTS
MELBOURNE EL EC T RONIC SOUND S T UDIO PAGE 4 8
7
SHORT CIRCUITS
PL AY
The world of
electronic
music isn’t
always a cheap
one, but fret not
because here’s
some pocketsized kit that’ll
get you more
blips and beeps
for less of your
earth units…
BBC micro:bit
This miniature green and black wonder chip is being
given to every 11-year-old in the UK. As well as having
a built-in compass, Bluetooth and motion detection,
young wannabe electronic stars can programme the
micro:bit to be their very own musical instrument. With
a jack cable and a pair of headphones/speakers to hand,
the device can create note frequencies by turning the
speakers on and off again in double swift time. We can’t
wait for the first micro:bit cover of ‘Computer World’.
Free (for all 11 year olds) | microbit.co.uk
8
DIY Synth Kit
The DIY collection from the excellent Technology Will
Save Us features a Gamer Kit, a Speaker Kit and even an
Electro Dough Kit, but their Synth Kit is what we really
want to be putting together. This no-soldering-required
device comes with full instructions and will no doubt
lead to an entire generation taking their first steps in
becoming synthpop legends. Completely customisable,
you’re able to reconfigure it to make different sounds
and it can even be connected to the BBC micro:bit. Great
for those who want to make music as well as learning
how. £25 | techwillsaveus.com
THE FRONT
Pocket Operator
From Swedish electronics company Teenage
Engineering comes a range of frankly gorgeous pocket
synthesisers, aptly named Pocket Operators. Stripped
back with PCBs on show and unique LCD displays, these
Game Boy-like devices are full of character and easy to
use. There are six in total (Rhythm, Sub, Factory, Arcade,
Office and Robot) and, if you collect them all, you can
sync them up via a 3.5mm jack to create your own Pocket
Operator band. Great fun, beautifully designed and the
perfect blend of affordability and functionality.
£39 | teenageengineering.com
Raspberry Pi 3
The most recent iteration of the game-changing micro
computer boasts a 10-fold increase in processing
power over the Pi 1, as well as full compatibility with
its predecessors. The Pi has been to the International
Space Station and they’re making strides in open
source programming but, more importantly, you can
turn them into synths. Knowledge of programming is
required, but environments such as Sonic Pi and Piana
enable the micro machines to become virtual analogue
synthesisers. £30 | raspberrypi.org
Korg littleBits
Developed in partnership with Korg to bring a powerful
modular synthesiser to the home, the littleBits is a bit
like LEGO and, similar to the DIY Synth Kit, includes
instructions on how to put everything together. You don’t
need vast amounts of tech know-how to complete it, and
with endorsements from Brian Eno and Hans Zimmer, it
seems that the littleBits kit is perfect for those who want
to take their synth tinkering to the next level.
£140 | littlebits.cc
9
SEE
New Model Army
Big tour for Jimmy Cauty's mini riot
One of the highlights of Banksy’s dystopian theme park ‘Dismaland’
in Weston-super-Mare last summer, the bewildering miniature world
crafted by former KLF troublemaker Jimmy Cauty has kicked off a UK
tour that runs until Christmas.
Set somewhere in Bedfordshire, ‘The Aftermath Dislocation
Principle’ is a 1:87-scale model of the scene after a rather
destructive night. To a suitably post-apocalyptic soundtrack of
crackling police radios and sweeping helicopter searchlights, the
only people left surveying what appears to be a mass riot are 3,000
or so yellow-jacketed coppers.
The installation, which covers 448 square feet and represents
approximately one square mile, has been rehoused in a specially
converted 40-foot shipping container with 123 holes drilled into the
sides, through which audiences can view the aftermath.
The tour, which began in April, will spend rest of the year visiting
the sites of historic riots in over 35 UK locations. jamescauty.com
INT RODUCING…
Mind Enterprises
Clambering aboard synthpop-infused
groovy train
WHO HE?
Mind Enterprises, otherwise known as Andrea Tirone,
moved from sunny Turin to less sunny Clapton, east
London, in order to broaden his musical horizons. His
plan worked well, as he was swiftly picked up by the
Double Denim label, who released his ‘Summer War’
single, a weird mix of jarring synths and crashing
percussion, in August 2012. WHY MIND ENTERPRISES?
He’s an emotional soul who pours everything into his
music. “I can spend 24 hours playing the same note
over and over, but I don’t get bored, because I am
slightly mad,” he offers helpfully. Experimental and
minimalist, his 2013 EP ‘My Girl’ came fuelled with
post-punk roots and afro-funk influences. Layered,
jittery and offbeat, it was a record you never tired of.
Since then, he’s refined his sound further, switched
labels and released his debut album, ‘Idealistic’.
TELL ME MORE
KLF Watch
They like to roam the land…
All this Jimmy Cauty talk made us think of Bill Drummond. What’s he
up to, you say? Well, he has also embarked on a travelling exhibition,
but what he’s doing makes his former bandmate’s Christmas deadline
look a little tardy. The 2014-2025 World Tour of his ‘The 25 Paintings’
show finds Drummond taking up a three-month residency in a
different location around the world every year until 2025.
Alongside the exhibition, which represents the climax of his
eclectic career, Drummond is also creating a series of new pieces.
‘The 25 Paintings’ began in Birmingham in 2014, where it will also
conclude in 2025. Last year, the show was in Sydney and it will
arrive in Calcutta this November. For more information, don’t visit his
penkilnburn.com website as it’s currently closed until further notice.
“I am having a rest from the internet,” Drummond explains.
10
‘Girlfriend,’ which appears on said album, was the first
song he wrote as Mind Enterprises and was recorded
after an epiphany in the dead of night. “I remember I
woke up singing the melody and recorded it straight
away,” he says. Sitting alongside the funk-infused
synthpop of ‘Idealistic’ and ‘Chapita’, it seems that
move to London was a good call after all. Never mind
the greyer skies, there’s nothing dull about what Mind
Enterprises is creating.
FINLAY MILLIGAN
‘Idealistic’ is out now on Because
THE FRONT
11
PL AY
Unwired For Sound
International Times
Is that a studio quality mic in your pocket?
They started out pretending to be dissident Soviet
musicians and ended up giving Daft Punk ideas. Three
decades on from their one and only album, is the world
finally ready for THE (HYPOTHETICAL) PROPHETS?
Anyone who needs to quickly and easily record sound
will understand why people are so pleased to see
this little box of tricks. Mikme is made by an Austrian
company who found themselves sailing through their
target when they crowdfunded to get this little bugger
off the ground last year.
So what is it? Mikme is a fully wireless, selfcontained recording microphone that works at the touch
of a button. Literally one button. Press it and you’ll be
recording studio quality audio (24-bit, up to 96 kHz) to
a built-in flash drive that will take up to 360 hours at
MP4. There’s an app too, of course there is, that does
all sorts of gubbins, and the whole shebang comes with
Bluetooth for transfering the noises.
The unit starts shipping in June and while the $299
price tag might seem a tad steep, if you used to record
on cassette dictaphones in the olden days, this is akin to
commuting to your new office on the moon via spacecar.
mikme.com
12
L IS TEN
Words: MAT SMITH
“It was both fun and an artistic statement,” says French electronic
pioneer Bernard Szajner. “We were reflecting how we felt the
world was going to turn out during the 1980s, but we were enjoying
ourselves all the time.”
Szajner is talking about ‘Around The World With The
(Hypothetical) Prophets’, the solitary album he made as The
(Hypothetical) Prophets with British musician Karel Beer. A bizarre
stew of everything from found sound to quirky pop, the record has
gained cult status since its original release in 1982. And it’s now
getting a very welcome reissue on the InFiné Music label.
Bernard Szajner and Karel Beer first worked together a couple
of years before they recorded the album, with the latter producing
the former towards the end of the 70s. The initial concept for The
(Hypothetical) Prophets developed out of grave circumstances.
“Karel was touring in France and he stayed for a time in Paris,”
recalls Szajner. “The Three Mile Island nuclear accident happened
in the US on one of the days he and I met up. I remember we said,
‘Well, it’s lucky it didn’t happen in the Soviet Union, because the
poor guy who made the nuclear plant would have been immediately
sent to a gulag’.”
Working under the guise of a fake Soviet pop group called Proroky
(meaning Prophets), the pair conceived a darkly humorous single,
‘Back To The Burner’, with their friend Dimitri playing the role of a
scientist reading out a list of components in Russian. The B-side
featured Szajner reciting the names of the gulags between Moscow
and Siberia over an electronic rhythm designed to sound like a train.
Released on Beer’s own label, ‘Back To The Burner’ sold well
and attracted the unlikely attention of CBS Records. A second
single followed, ‘Wallenberg’, a coldwave track inspired by
Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who saved thousands
of Hungarian Jews from World War II death camps, and Szajner
and Beer came up with the idea of releasing a version in every
language of the world. Although CBS quickly quashed that idea, they
encouraged the pair to start work on an album.
Renaming themselves The (Hypothetical) Prophets, the new
recordings included sparse electronic tunes, artsy experiments
and leftfield pop. ‘Fast Food’ saw them singing about a man who is
addicted to hot dogs and burgers in a style that sounded a lot like
Devo, a band they weren’t even aware of at the time.
THE FRONT
INT RODUCING…
Innerspace Orchestra
Future psych served with added
out-there goodness
WHO THEY?
“We decided it would be an album of clichés, evoking what we
thought might become subjects of daily life in the immediate future
of 1982,” explains Szajner. “Karel said that kids in England were
getting high on petrol fumes, so we wrote a song about that. We
wrote another using personal ads from newspapers. It was a big
change for me because I had always played dark and sombre music
before this.
“We used a lot of recordings that Karel had made when he went
to different cities. He had a small cassette recorder and he used to
record all kinds of things. He recorded an announcement in New
York that said, ‘Don’t park in the white zone’, and that seemed an
incredibly mysterious phrase to us, like it was referring to Roswell.
It felt like the world was getting a bit crazy at that point.”
While the album was great fun to make, something a bit worrying
loomed large over the recording – a fear of the KGB.
“They didn’t like people making fun of the Soviet system,” says
Szajner. “So Karel decided to give us aliases. He was Norman D
Landing and I was Joseph Weill, as in Joe Weil, or ‘jovial’, which I
wasn’t at all!”
Asked how he feels about ‘Around The World With The
(Hypothetical) Prophets’ now, Szajner admits he has never actually
heard the album. The rediscovery of the original promo video for
’Wallenberg’, which Beer recently sent to him, is just about the only
time he’s listened back to the music he created back then.
When it’s time for Bernard Szajner to go, he concludes the
interview with an anecdote about the one and only time The
(Hypothetical) Prophets performed live, which may serve to
illustrate how far the influence of this curious duo has spread.
“CBS loved our crazy projects,” he says. “They had a convention
and they asked us to come and play live. When we played, our heads
were covered with masks of cut-up fabric, with holes for our eyes
and mouths. Years after, there is this famous French group called
Daft Punk, who hide their faces and who also came up with a record
called ‘Around The World’. It’s a funny coincidence.”
Well, they’re not an orchestra, that’s for sure. Formed
out of an impromptu recording session, their ‘One
Way Glass’ debut single suggests the trio of The
Horrors’ Tom Furse, Fanfarlo’s Cathy Lucas, and
Rose Elinor Dougall from The Pipettes (one of the last
projects esteemed producer Martin Rushent worked
on before his untimely death) clicked right away.
WHY INNERSPACE ORCHESTRA?
Goth synth rockers The Horrors might seem so dark
they make Aleister Crowley’s boot soles look like
box-fresh sneakers, but they know just how to bash
out infectious, melodic hooks. Without the gloomy
contingent around him, Furse’s synths are given free
rein to take flight, with just enough prog attitude
to get analogue fetishists rather too excited. Add
chunky beats and dreamy vocals and you have a wall
of sound that’ll inevitably cause goosebumps. Oh, and
there are guitars that are described as “shoegazery”,
but everyone’s got those these days.
TELL US MORE
Remember the myth that ‘The Magic Roundabout’
was perhaps a bit druggy? Not only does this band
have a member whose surname is reminiscent of
that TV show’s shaggy dog hero, but their music
is so incredibly out there it should be the onboard
soundtrack to a future intergalactic mission. The
Innerspace Orchestra would like to welcome you to
the new space(d) age.
MAT SMITH
‘One Way Glass’ is out now on Different Recordings ‘Around The World With The (Hypothetical Prophets)’ is out now on
InFiné Music
13
RE AD
Oh So Quiet
Matthew Herbert pens music-free new album
In the mists of time, The Justified Ancients Of Mu Mu, or The KLF
as they would be better known, got into hot water with their ‘1987’
album thanks in the main to the whole caboodle being stuffed with
uncleared samples. Rather than scuttle off, tails between their legs,
The JAMs released a 12-inch single featuring their original music
from the album along with instructions as to which samples went
where. Fast forward and we find the ever-creative Matthew Herbert
treading similar lines for his new album. So instead of actually
recording any music with instruments and machines and stuff, he’s
going to write about what it should sound like in a book, with each
chapter being a new track.
“Each chapter will describe in precise detail what sounds to use,
how they should be organised, and occasionally an approximation
of what the net result should sound like,” he explains. “Crucially,
it must be able to be recorded for real given enough time, access
and resources.”
Herbert promises that he will never make the record and that
his contribution will always just be a description of the music itself.
Nothing stopping someone else recording it, though. unbound.co.uk
INT RODUCING…
Virginia Wing
Purveyors of pop wanderlust with
experimental twist
WHO THEY?
Sam Pillay birthed the band in his Camberwell
bedroom in south London in 2012, naming the project
after Grace Slick’s mother. When Alice Merida
Richards and Sebastian Truskolaski clambered on
board the good ship Virginia Wing, they brought with
them a toolbox full of the stuff required to add weight
and mass to a new collective sound.
WHY VIRGINIA WING?
Their 2014 debut album, ‘Measures Of Joy’, is reason
enough. It’s a record to listen to with your eyes
closed. It conjures up all sorts of visuals and you’ll
hear something new every time. Keep your peepers
wide open just now though and take a look at their
new ‘Rhonda’ EP, three tracks spread across a
12-inch, with a lovely sleeve featuring artwork from
artist and long-time collaborator Flo Brooks.
L IS TEN
Unlikely Partnership?
Spot the odd one out on Jean-Michel Jarre album
Like last year’s first edition, Jean-Michel Jarre’s ‘Electronica Volume
2: The Heart Of Noise’ is wall-to-wall with cracking guests. But while
the likes of Gary Numan, Yello, the Pet Shop Boys, Jeff Mills and
Julia Holter all catch the eye, the name that causes a proper doubletake is whistleblower Edward Snowden.
Responsible for one of the biggest leaks of classified documents
in history, Snowden is currently holed up in Russia facing charges
of espionage and theft of government property if he returns to the
US. And while his contribution to the Jarre track ‘Exit’ may seem like
a curveball, the French electronic legend has been an enthusiastic
campaigner for the right to free speech for a number of years and is
currently UN Ambassador for UNESCO.
“I wrote a speedy techno track evoking the constant and hectic
production of data and the obsessive quest for more information,”
says Jarre. “I then linked the music with this mad hunt and chase in
order to get hold of people like Edward Snowden.”
14
TELL US MORE
‘Rhonda’ begins with a wander through a sparse
landscape, the musical elements unfurling around
and interacting with one another. A couple of minutes
in and BANG, the landscape is pulled from under your
feet and you’re suddenly suspended in the throbbing
centre of a rhythmic pop song. It’s often a similar
story with Virginia Wing, but it’s never a dull one. The
supporting cast – the meditative ‘Sisterly Love’ and
dark ‘Daughter Of The Mind’ – are further proof that
this trio are refining their sound and crafting exciting,
experimental pop. Roll on LP#2, due later in the year.
SOPHIE LITTLE
The ‘Rhonda’ EP is out now on Fire
THE FRONT
15
L IS TEN
RE AD
Bedroom Bedlam
Four-disc set captures UK electronica’s big bang moment
Cherry Red’s ‘Close To The Noise Floor’ compilation provides the fuel we needed
for our Rise Of The Robots feature (see page 40). Covering 1975 to 1984, the 60+
tracks are a fascinating insight into a world that emerged blinking from punk and
blazed a DIY trail with as much new-fangled electronics as it could muster.
Many of these artists were first written about by Sounds journalist Dave
Henderson in a feature called Wild Planet, an A to Z of “difficult music” listing
scores of homegrown outfits and their bedroom recordings. So we asked Dave to
pick out six of his favourite curious acts from ‘The Noise Floor’…
PORTION CONTROL
A hard electronic trio comprising of three computer
game-obsessed practical jokers who were chefs at the
House of Commons. They inspired Skinny Puppy and
Front 242 and recorded the magnificent ‘Psycho Bod’
album for my Dead Man’s Curve label.
GERRY AND THE HOLOGRAMS
Like their Absurd labelmates Blah Blah Blah, Bet Lynch’s
Legs and Cairo, they were mysterious and superbly
conceptual. Think The Residents if they’d been from
Cheadle Hulme. Their ultimate statement was their
second single, unplayable as it was glued into the sleeve.
ATTRITION
Attrition’s Martin Bowes was at the heart of Coventry's
post-punk scene, producing fanzines, cassette-only
releases and local comps from his bedroom/office, before
forming his own band and developing a sound that
placed them at the heart of the early 80s industrial scene.
RENALDO AND THE LOAF
Renaldo And The Loaf sounded like a nursery rhyme that
had gone wrong. A pathologist and an architect, they
were super-clever and their spare-time recordings, made
with whatever they could find, impressed The Residents,
who duly signed them to their Ralph label.
SCHLEIMER K
I saw Schleimer K at The Venue in Victoria in London
and they made a colossal humming noise that nodded to
krautrock, but had an ambient thrum to it too. They were
ahead of their time, some kind of twisted mix of Berlinera Bowie and Joy Division… with a side of PiL.
BOURBONESE QUALK
Bourbonese Qualk lived in an old ambulance station in
south London. Masters of tape loops and multi-layering
techniques, BQ were amazingly creative guys, adding
infectious rhythms to eclectic sounds that were stolen or
found to create a beautifully unhinged experience.
16
Head, Shoulders, Knees And Techno…
Photographic study of
Detroit’s finest
We like a quirky take on proceedings and
there’s some proper quirk on show in
‘313OneLove’, a book by Berlin photographer
Marie Staggat. The publication evocatively
captures the good and great of Detroit’s
techno massive in around Motor City and
includes Carl Craig, Kenny Larkin, Kevin
Saunderson, “Mad“ Mike Banks and Robert
Hood. Alongside the stories and quotes from
the city’s influential electronic music scene
are some pretty unusual close-ups of the
various DJs, musicians and producers. The
reason? “Their hands and ears represent
the fundamental ‘tools’ for all their creative
output,” explains Staggat. Our favourite?
Juan Atkins’ ear. He has a lovely ear, does
our Juan. ove.com
THE FRONT
PL AY
Teeny Volca Weeny
First look at Korg’s latest wee beastie
When Korg came up with the Volca range of tiny synths, Tatsuya
Takahashi, who designed them after nerding his way into the
organisation by showing off his DIY sequencer project, described
them as a “Frankenstein of different circuits”. The Volca FM
certainly lives up to that description, taking the brains of a DX7 (and
its signature green button hue) and sewing them up inside the body
of the now familiar Volca. FM synthesis is well and truly in fashion
again after a couple of decades in purgatory. Welcome back to those
glassy tones and Madonna basslines. korg.com
INT RODUCING…
Near Future
Atmospheric communications
from pop’s fringes
WHO THEY?
In a nutshell? Bernholz/Blancmange soundclash.
When musician, artist and filmmaker Jez Bernholz
met the all-new, stripped-down sound of Neil Arthur,
it was murder. Oh, hang on.
RE AD
D-E-V-O B-O-O-K
Illustrated history = Christmas sorted
In the face of the ongoing delay of the authorised Devo documentary
(approaching four years and counting), fans might be mollified by
the announcement of the first official illustrated history of the band.
Mark Mothersbaugh describes the book, which draws on Devo’s
own extensive archives of previously unseen images, as “akin to a
post-plane crash autopsy”. The title is scheduled for publication in
December by the respected Rocket 88 imprint and you can register
your interest at devobook.net, where you can snap up the book up
at a discounted pre-order price and get your name printed in the
credits to boot. devobook.net
WHY NEAR FUTURE?
Jez Bernholz, who also happens to be a fully paidup member of Gazelle Twin, does a delicious line
in leftfield electropop. Hook him up with the dark,
minimalist warmth of the rebooted Blancmange and
it’s a case of where do you sign up, right? First fruit
is a super-mellow textured two-tracker containing
the delicate yet insistent ‘Ideal Home’ and swollenstringed shuddering lullaby ‘Overwhelmed’. Near
Future are firmly from the school of less is more, and
while their debut clocks in under seven minutes, what
a way to spend your time.
TELL US MORE
The project kicked off with the pair exchanging files
at a specific time, down to the minute, one Friday last
year. “I don't know why,” laughs Neil Arthur. “It just
seemed really exciting. It didn't have to be structured
music, it could just be sounds or words. So we each
sent the other some information and we were both
really pleasantly surprised at what we got.” They
went on exchanging files until they’d got a couple of
tracks together. “We seemed to be reading the same
book and were more or less on the same page, so it
just went from there,” adds Arthur, who says there’s
already lots more ideas floating around. Expect an
album in 2017.
NEIL MASON
‘Ideal Home’ is out now on Blanc Check
17
PL AY
The 64
BLASTERS FROM THE PAST
Epic retro hardware
reborn
We’ve got all-singing, all-dancing consoles at our
fingertips and yet do we tire of getting old school
gaming giddy? Nope
Breathing new life into the
classic Commodore home
computer of the same number,
The 64 comes in desktop and
handheld console versions. The
desktop, which emulates the
original OS to the letter, looks
just like it did 25 years ago, but
thankfully boasts a brand new
interface. North Yorkshire’s
Retro Games Ltd, the company
behind this wizard scheme, are
also in talks to license many of
the epic old games, as well as a
raft of classic C64 programming
books. Oh, and they’re also
working on converters to allow
original C64 carts to work with
the new machine. “We want to
create the perfect experience
for old and new fans alike,” they
say. The desktop is expected by
Christmas, the handheld in April
2017. the64.computer
ZX Vega+
The Way We Played
Teenage Riot
Spectrum goes handheld
Olden days gaming book
Imagine it’s 1982 and someone has just told you that in the future
you’ll be able to play ZX Spectrum games… on the go. Hilarious,
right? Following on from the ZX Vega TV console last year, comes
the handheld ZX Vega+ pre-loaded with over 1,000 ZX Spectrum
games. Yup, that’s pre-loaded. You don’t even have to sit up half
the night programming a blocky plane dropping blocks on blocky
buildings. The first run is due off the production line in September.
This colourful encyclopedia
of video gaming from 1985 to
1993 by Kevin Hoy is currently
chasing pledges on booky
crowdfunder Unbound. A
celebration of the golden era
of gaming, it promises reviews,
fact files and comparisons of
games. If that’s not enough to
see hands in pockets, it will also
profile the five major consoles of
the period (ZX Spectrum, Atari
ST, Commodore 64, Commodore
Amiga and Amstrad CPC), as
well as looking at how gaming
grew from a bedroom hobby to
a multi-million pound business.
Marvel at classic Atari
artwork
retro-computers.co.uk
unbound.co.uk
18
Anyone with even a passing
interest in video games will
know all about Atari, be it the
arcade consoles that unleashed
a million hours idled away on
stone-cold classics such as
Asteroids, Missile Command
and Defender or, if you were
very lucky/rich enough, the
gobsmacking Atari 2600
console, home to the stupidly
addictive Tank Command. Due
for publication in October, ‘The
Art Of Atari’ collects together
the original artwork that was
specially commissioned to
entice us to this new era of
electronic entertainment. It’s
the first official collection of
such artwork and spans over 40
years of the company’s unique
illustrations. artofatari.com
a revolutionary
new way
to make
perfect coffee
every time
www.aeropress.co.uk
19
L IS TEN
Teenage Rampage
With their wibbly pop and their
imaginations firing on all cylinders,
LET’S EAT GRANDMA aren’t just
rewriting the rulebook. They’ve
stamped on it, ripped it to pieces,
and chucked what’s left out the
nearest window
Words: WENDY ROBY
Picture: FRANCESCA ALLEN
Popular culture rarely captures the sheer
lunacy of girlhood. If it considers tight-knit
female friendship at all (Paweł Pawlikowski’s
‘My Summer Of Love’, say, or Peter Jackson’s
‘Heavenly Creatures’), there’s usually a
sinister Salem stink or some tiresome
lezzing about.
This is a huge omission if you were once
a girl and revelled in it. Because before
sex, before exams, there’s a period of
gloriously unhinged and unselfconscious
creativity that rarely gets seen. Mine took in:
prize-winning whips (no, for riding pretend
horses); fluency in a secret language (to slag
off anyone disgusting – e.g. boys – when
they were present); feeding dog food to my
best friend (unforgivable); racist biscuits (a
delicacy with an unrepeatable name from
the parish cookbook); eye-opening hardcore
pornography (we made a den in the woods,
it was the 80s), and shouting at Ford Capri
drivers.
So despite the crashing freshness of
their otherworldly debut album, ‘I, Gemini’,
I’m not surprised Let’s Eat Grandma exist.
Like most girls, the Norwich duo of Rosa and
Jenny prefer to spend more time making stuff
than they do Snapchatting their vag. And
because they’ve been best friends since
they were five, they’ve got really, really good
at it; instinctive and unembarrassed in the
best way.
Although we live in a time where
any young women making progressive,
imaginative music are compared to either a)
a kooky-ooky weirdo (Björk) or b) Kate Bush,
and even though some people still believe
womens’ periods sync up, here are Rosa and
Jenny writing songs about their world and
it’s like hearing it through a portrait peephole
– private, funny and jammed with crazy
storytelling.
Songs about building an elaborate
two-storey treehouse or unwilling fairytale
heroines who “want their mummy”. Songs
with busted bass, upper sixth rapping, tinny
cowbells, bewitchingly off-kilter organs,
and vocals so sweet you know they’re up to
20
THE FRONT
something. They play live in this loose, slow,
messy way that makes you absolutely sure
they could not give a fuck. They’re playing
in spite of you. That any of rock criticism’s
literally-minded, female-kook touchpoints
would be invoked by those discovering Let’s
Eat Grandma is not their problem. They find it
hilarious that people have mentioned the twins
from ‘The Shining’ or Lorde.
“We’ve been pegged as the creepy girls who
make slow, sad music,” says Rosa.
“But it’s fun to be one step ahead of the
game,” says Jenny. “If you can tell how
people are going to respond, you can use it
against them.”
And then they laugh, in a way that reminds
you how girls, when they are together, are
titanium.
Making things was a way of sidestepping
the bullshit of growing up. They made films
and climbed into their neighbours’ garden
(“to write down what they were doing in
notebooks”). Though smart, they were
frustrated by school and how it only helps
you “further your own knowledge, rather than
adding to the world’s,” as Jenny puts it. Rosa
got the lowest mark in her class once, in a test
designed to find out if they understood how
to be successful. Sick of school assembly
sermonising, she wrote “passive aggressive
letters” for the teachers, to show them where
they’d gone wrong.
“I would hand deliver them,” she explains. “I
was giving my counter arguments to the things
they were saying. I think schools are just out
there to put you down. They brainwash you.”
They wrote the songs on ‘I, Gemini’ while
hanging out in Rosa’s loft, mainly to amuse one
another and channel their frustrations.
“When you’re a child, if you’re having a bad
day, you can create something in your head
and it makes you feel better,” says Jenny.
“When you’re older, it’s harder to do that.”
But they didn’t know how songs were
supposed to sound or be played out live
because, as Jenny points out, “we have no
knowledge of the rules.”
“We’ve had to make them up ourselves,”
adds Rosa.
There isn’t a single love song on ‘I, Gemini’.
There also isn’t a song about the day they
decided to wee in Jenny’s hair washing jug
while sat on the thin glass roof of her parents’
conservatory. They were seven, aching for
“a day of adventures”, until weeing in a hair
washing jug made a strange sort of sense.
“We just… dared each other to do it,”
says Jenny.
They don’t know why. What matters is that,
like all the best rebellious or creative acts, they
just got on with it.
‘I, Gemini’ is released by Transgressive on 17 June
SEE
Moog At The Movies
Film set to lift lid on life of synth king
Bob Moog’s daughter Michelle Moog-Koussa has hooked up with the team
responsible for the excellent ‘I Dream Of Wires’ modular synth documentary
to make a new feature film about her late father. ‘Electronic Voyager’ promises
to be a very personal story exploring Moog’s life as an electronic music
pioneer through the eyes of his daughter as she visits and travels with many
of the people whose lives have been touched by her father’s work.
“We are in an unique position to tell Bob Moog’s story in a new and profound
way,” explains director Jason Amm. “Michelle obviously has a deep personal
connection to Bob, but she also has a firm dedication to his work and legacy.
Bob’s friends, associates and admirers open up when they speak to Michelle
about her father, leading to uniquely candid, revealing and joyous stories and
insights about this important figure.”
‘Electronic Voyager’ is in pre-production at the moment, but the list of
confirmed participants reads like a who’s who of the history of the synthesiser
and electronic music. These include Herb Deutsch (the co-inventor of the
Minimoog), Gershon Kingsley (First Moog Quartet, ‘Popcorn’), Larry Fast
(Synergy, Peter Gabriel), Malcolm Cecil and Robert Margouleff (Tonto’s
Expanding Head Band, Stevie Wonder), Bernie Krause (who worked with
George Harrison and The Doors among others), Morton Subotnick (‘Silver
Apples Of The Moon’), Dave Smith (Sequential Circuits), Tom Oberheim and
Roger Linn, with many more to come.
Whether they manage to get invited to the new Kling Klang studio for Ralf
Hütter’s take on Kraftwerk’s use of the Minimoog remains to be seen.
Profits from the venture will be shared with the Bob Moog Foundation.
electronicvoyager.com
21
L IS TEN
When The Machine Breaks Down
Hawkwind release concept album based on early classic sci-fi story
“I’ve been messing about with electronics since the early 1960s,” says Dave
Brock, who has fronted Hawkwind for almost half a century. “I used to make long
tape loops and put them through echo units and all sorts. I’ve still got a decent
collection of old synths and a big box of oscillators. I’ve still got my trusty EMS. I
like things you can fiddle about with. I’m not interested in tapping stuff out on a
bloody computer.” There’s always been a heavy electronic element to Hawkwind’s space rocking.
They started transmitting kosmische vibes around the same time as Can and
Faust. They’ve often explored sci-fi themes in their lyrics and their imagery too.
See ‘Silver Machine’, ‘Sonic Attack’, ‘Spiral Galaxy 28948’, ‘Damnation Alley’ and
dozens more. Dave Brock has been a sci-fi fan longer than he cares to recall, so
the band’s latest release, ‘The Machine Stops’, a concept album based on EM
Forster’s dystopian short story of the same title, is following a strong tradition. “Forster wrote ‘The Machine Stops’ in 1909 and the world he talks about is
very close to the one we live in today,” says Brock. “It’s basically about people
sitting alone in their little underground rooms using these machines with screens.
They’re not going out, they’re not socialising, they’re talking to their friends and
listening to music and watching lectures through the screens. They’re living their
whole lives through their screens. It’s incredible to think how this story is more
than 100 years old. I mean, it basically predicts things like Facebook and YouTube.
The guys who were writing this sort of stuff at this point in time, guys like Forster
and HG Wells, had truly amazing imaginations.” And when things start to break down? “Ahh, well, the story turns sinister when the big machine that supplies energy
and ventilation to everybody starts to fall apart because the people who used
to be the engineers have all died off,” explains Brock. “They haven't passed the
knowledge on, so nobody knows how to repair it. Which is also a bit like how it is
now. Let’s face it, none of us has a bloody clue what to do when a computer stops
working.” ‘The Machine Stops’ is out now on Cherry Red
SEE
Radio Stars
Stage play based on exploits of electronica trailblazers
“London. 1968. Two pioneering electronic musicians discover a set of
unusual recordings which leads to a revelation about their employer.
Fascinated by the seemingly occult nature of the tapes, they conduct
a ritual that will alter their lives forever.”
Ooh… According to its creator, Alan Gubby, ‘The Delaware
Road’ is a stage play and ”audio-visual treat for fans of archived
electronica” loosely based on the lives of Radiophonic Workshop
pioneers Delia Derbyshire and John Baker.
“The story came from research I conducted producing ‘The John
Baker Tapes’ album for Trunk Records in 2008 and John Baker‘s
‘The Vendetta Tapes’ on my own Buried Treasure label last year,”
says Alan Gubby. He met various relatives and former Radiophonic
Workshop employees and “began to piece together an unusual and
alternative picture of Delia and John’s private lives”.
‘The Delaware Road’ by the Occult Radiophonic Theatre is
currently booking shows in the UK for the summer. For those who
can’t wait, the soundtrack, issued on Buried Treasure, is a corker.
buriedtreasure.bandcamp.com
22
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25
SYNTHESISER
DAVE'S
WORKSHOP
Synth not making noises
like it should? Under the
weather electronics buzzing
when they should be fizzing?
Pressing buttons and nothing
happening? Synthesiser Dave
is the name, resident fixer of
all things broken is the game
First off, a good
clean, inside and out
(honestly, there are
mouse droppings
inside). Check the
power supply and
power up.
26
Basic sound is produced by a
master oscillator, split 12 ways
to give you the top octave, then
there’s a series of seven stage
divider chips, which is standard
string synth/Italian organ layout.
One of the divider chips is dead,
so no E-flats (stick to the white
notes, then).
IN FOR REPAIR
On my workbench at the moment is a
1970s MULTIMAN-S. Aaah, the swirl
of a cheesy string machine and the
craziness of old Italian synths... two
of my favourite things. Unleashed in
1977, the Multiman-S has cello, violin,
brass, clavichord and worst-piano-ever
voices that can be mixed at will, with
a keyboard split in the middle. The left
hand side also has bass, which can be
used via a pedalboard. This particular
machine has been in a damp shed for
five years and was previously in a
different, even damper shed. It appears
to be in an absolutely shocking state,
but all is not as it seems. These guys
are tough.
Being Italian, all
the chips are in
sockets. Original
chips cost an arm
and several legs,
but you should be
able to find cheaper
replacements for
around six quid.
Next, the crunchy
switches and
sliders. Believe it
or not, these can
all be dismantled,
cleaned out and
put back together. I
love Italian synth
engineering.
SYNTHESISER DAVE
E XCUSE ME, I FEEL A TANGERINE DRE A M MOMENT COMING ON
The keyboard is pure
piano accordion
technology that
feels very uneven.
It’s caused by the
keytops coming
unglued from the
aluminium bars that
form the actual keys.
I decide to re-stick
them all. Two bottles
of superglue later,
job done.
The contacts are
made by little
springs pushing
against a bar, one
of which is actually
a Biro spring. Clean
springs, look up cost
of replacement…
decide to keep the
Biro spring as it
does the job.
Last major task,
mending the
Moog-style ladder
filter that makes
the “unlikely brass”
sound like “totally
unlike brass”.
Remove the spider
corpses causing the
short circuit and the
machine works!
A quick reassemble
and polish, and then
see how long I can
put off telling the
customer it’s done.
27
SYNTHESISER DAVE'S WORKSHOP
SPARES & REPAIRS
Ever wondered what all the bits and bobs in a
synth do? This issue, Dave is talking RESISTORS
1st Digit
Black
Generally speaking, the larger
little blue
the resistor
more powerThese
it
Usually
littlethe
stripy
can handle.
exceptionones
is are very high
chappies,
the The
job of
quality. Their value
components.
a'surface
resistor mount'
is simply
is accurate to one
Here, sure
resistors
to make
the are just tiny
per cent, but usually
silver
on of
the circuit board,
rightblobs
amount
resistors are only
and
in some gets
cases actually part
electricity
accurate to five, 10,
of the
the right
boardplace
itself, essentially
to
or even 20 per cent.
making
youra shiny
by taking
large new mini MSAs you probably
20 a in
disposable
item.
amount stuck
one
already know, a lot
end and letting a
of electronics is less
smaller amount out
like rocket science
the other.
and more like
building a shed.
28
Generally speaking,
the larger the
resistor the more
power it can handle.
The exception is
“surface mount”
components. With
these, resistors
are just tiny silver
blobs on the circuit
board, and in some
cases actually part
of the board itself,
essentially making
your shiny new mini
MS-20 pretty much
a disposable item.
2 nd Digit
Multiplier
0
×1
Tolerance
Brown
1
1
×10
±1%
Red
2
2
×100
±2%
Orange
3
3
×1k
±3%
Yellow
4
4
×10 k
±4%
Green
5
5
×100 k
±0.5%
±0.25%
Blue
6
6
×1m
Violet
7
7
×10 m
±0.10%
Grey
8
8
×100 m
±0.05%
White
9
9
×1g
Gold
÷10
±5%
Silver
÷100
±10%
Proper resistors
hardly ever go
wrong, and if they
do they tend to turn
brown and crispy,
making them easy
to spot.
The amount they
“resist” is measured
in ohms and the
stripes are a code
to tell you how many
ohms resistance
they have. No one
ever remembers
this code and even
the most expert
engineers have to
look it up sometimes.
analogue synths
music electronics for
electronic musicians
www.analogue.solutions
29
TIME MACHINE
The 21st century version of Kraftwerk present a package of
themselves to the world suggesting that they trundled fully formed
off their own conveyor belt in 1974 with ‘Autobahn’, that this was
the moment of their ignition. They prefer not to dwell on the pre‘Autobahn’ period, which encompasses their original conception
as hippy-ish collective Organisation. It was a fascinating, messy
period during which the band went through a variety of line-ups as
they developed fitfully and organically. It’s also a period of which
they have been dismissive – Florian Schneider once described it
as “archeology” – but which, thanks to YouTube, is available for
investigation at the touch of a keyboard button.
The most remarkable but fatally combustible line-up of those
earliest days didn’t even include Ralf Hütter. He left the group in 1971
to pursue his academic studies, perhaps in temporary acquiescence
to his family, whose expectations for their son did not include
hanging around Düsseldorf art galleries playing with beatnik drone
outfits. The sole constant at this time in Kraftwerk was the red and
white traffic cone they were wont to display prominently during
concerts to denote their identity. Otherwise, the barely electronic
line-up consisted of Florian Schneider (playing organ and flute),
Michael Rother (guitar) and Klaus Dinger (drums), the latter pair
making a short stop in the group before venturing on to form Neu!.
In terms of temperament and disposition, Klaus Dinger was
certainly the most improbable of all Kraftwerk members. Born
in 1946, the same year as Ralf Hütter, he was one of a generation
of musicians who cut their teeth aping Anglo-American beat
music in the mid-1960s, before the international, psychedelic and
revolutionary flowering of the latter part of the decade expanded
their horizons. He travelled still further down the road of discovery,
leaving the overbearing structural influence of Anglo-American
pop and rock behind altogether and seeking out innovations that
were West German in origin, providers of a new sense of national
cultural identity.
Dinger might have had all this in common with Kraftwerk,
but he was so antithetical to them in other key respects that
it’s amazing they worked together the few months they did. He
always considered himself a “working class hero”, having learned
carpentry from his father and developed a precise sense of
30
calibration that would set him in good musical stead later on. He
studied architecture for a while, but gave it up to become a full-time
drummer, and it wasn’t long after this that he received a call from
Hütter asking him to join his fledgling Düsseldorf combo Kraftwerk.
Being a leap on from the covers band he was playing in, Dinger
accepted, playing the drum part on ‘Vom Himmel Hoch’ on the
group’s debut album, which was recorded by Conny Plank.
Dinger later tartly remarked that everyone liked his drums on
‘Vom Himmel Hoch’ except Schneider. The story goes that Schneider
changed his mind when Dinger recorded the part again, playing it
exactly the same way he’d done it the first time round. Despite this
hint of future animosity, the drummer subsequently moved into the
house of Schneider’s parents (Schneider’s father, Paul SchneiderEsleben, was a prominent architect). It was here that he met his
soon-to-be love Hanni (the subject of yet-to-be-written Neu! songs),
although the couple would become estranged, further fuelling his
innate sense of rage at the world.
There’s footage of Dinger playing with Kraftwerk at a 1970
‘Rockpalast’ event alongside Can, who were much more advanced in
terms of their self-realisation at that point. It’s Dinger who brings a
bored-looking audience to life with the raw, tribal primitivism of his
drumming, a precursor to the motorik style. He is a large presence
musically and was often centrally positioned onstage, as at the
‘Rockpalast’ gig. However, when Kraftwerk were reduced to the
touring trio of Schneider, Rother and Dinger, arguments erupted
between the drummer and Schneider, who was beginning to feel
like a gooseberry in his own group. He was perhaps relieved when
Rother and Dinger eloped to form Neu! in the summer of 1971 and,
after a brief spell as a one-man band, he welcomed Hütter back from
his academic leave.
Klaus Dinger, who died in 2008, would later talk disparagingly
of Hütter and Schneider as the “millionaire’s sons” and expressed
bitter reservations at their early adoption of drum machines. It felt
like class resentment; an old fashioned artisan like himself sidelined
by technology at the behest of a new bourgeoisie. In developing
the motorik style – disciplined, regular, tireless – Dinger wished
to demonstrate that, when it came to music, man was the most
effective man machine of all.
TIME MACHINE
BACK WHEN
THINGS
WEREN'T
HOW THEY
ARE NOW
KRAFTWERK weren’t always the
sleek man machine we know and
love today. This issue, we’re looking
back to a rare live TV appearance
by the band in 1970 and catching a
glimpse of Neu!’s KLAUS DINGER
on drums
Words: DAVID STUBBS
31
UNDER
THE
INFLU
ENCE
Krautrock aficionado and one-time
Stereolab man TIM GANE takes
time off from his Cavern Of AntiMatter project to tell us what makes
his creative juices bubble
Interview: COSMO GODFREE
32
UNDER THE INFLUENCE
Childhood wardrobe
Film titles
"I grew up in Manor Park in east London and I used to have this old
wardrobe in my bedroom. It was the first thing I saw when I woke
up and I would stare at it for what seemed like years. It was very
chaotic, but you could see lots of faces and creatures in the wood
grain. Some of them would change and some would always be
there. I remember being fascinated by this wardrobe all through
my childhood. Even now, I could just lie on my back and look at the
clouds for an hour, seeing shapes form and filling the rest in with
my mind.
"When I do music, I think I’m doing the same thing without
consciously realising it – looking for patterns, looking for shapes.
I’m very locked into hearing hidden little melodies or rhythmic ideas
that I home in on and use as a springboard. I’ve always looked at
music like that – not composing a structured song, more just having
these little ideas going on and seeing where I can take them.
I think it counts as a kind of influence, even though it’s a subliminal
one. Maybe it teaches you a way of looking at things, a way of
working. I think most people do it... it’s just whether they’ve had the
opportunity to wake up and look at an old wardrobe!"
"I've always been obsessed with film titles. When I was 11, we had
a television with a DIN socket, a little connection where you could
plug in a cassette recorder. I’d sit there and tape the titles of lots of
films – just the music, because there was no video then. I remember
particularly loving Sergio Leone's 'Dollars' trilogy, which had music
by Ennio Morricone. Every time they came on, I had to watch them,
and those crazy explosions of colour and movement always blew
my mind. I also remember having ‘Get Carter’ and ‘Journey To The
Centre Of The Earth’. And ‘The Sweeney’, which had upbeat music at
the beginning and then a sad version of the same music at the end.
I never knew why that was. This was before I was interested in
music in a wider sense. It all exploded when I was about 13, but
before that I wasn’t buying records or following the charts.
"Later on, when the first video machines appeared, I remember
you could do really weird things. We used to tape our own music on
top of the titles and make soundtracks to films. I’ve always loved
the way music goes with images, but also just letters moving from
the bottom of the screen to the top. So, yeah, film titles instilled a
certain idea in me about music and what it can do, because you can
understand abstract things when it’s associated with images."
Throbbing Gristle
Fostex X-15
"I originally left school at 16, but went back to sixth form because I
didn’t want to get a job. Then for one of my courses, I had to write
to different employers, so I wrote to four record labels. One was
Industrial Records, Throbbing Gristle's label. Thinking back, I
suppose they might have thought it was hilarious, but they answered
it seriously and sent me lots of stuff. When I read the Industrial
newsletter, I got really into the idea of what they were doing.
"Throbbing Gristle were interested in all these strange subjects
and they lived their lives 100 per cent. It turned me against the idea
of dressing up to become a persona on stage and then going back
to being normal. I liked the thought that you could be exactly like
that all the time, being and living what you’re doing totally. There’s
an intensity to that which fascinated me. I also liked that Throbbing
Gristle were down to earth in the way they conducted themselves,
not revelling in high art. That’s really stayed with me. I’ve always
thought that every record you make is one part of the whole thing
and the process you go through to arrive there is just as important.
A record is only a document of your current activities."
"It’s a four-track cassette recorder. I got one in around 1983. You put
cassettes in and it’s got four tracks using both sides of the cassette.
It was black and orange, built like a tank, really heavy and solid.
I began to do music on it with the first group I had. It was all electronic
stuff and I really enjoyed the layering. The way it worked meant you
had to change how you thought about music. It was electronic music
but I did everything with a guitar... no drum machines and hardly any
keyboards, apart from maybe a little bit of Casio every 40 pieces or
something.
"Gradually, the way that I played the guitar evolved and changed
because of using the machine. It accentuated a certain frequency
near the bottom and you could clearly hear all the lower strings in a
different kind of inversion. You’d sit in a little room with your guitar
and your headphones, really close up, recording and stopping and
listening. That really close intimacy with the device, combined with
the limitations of the four-track, having to bounce stuff down all
the time… it influenced the way that I wrote music. This was true
throughout my time in McCarthy and in Stereolab as well. In fact, I
used my Fostex right up until around 2003, when eventually it broke.
It didn’t have very good sound quality, but what it did really focused
my mind to hear the tiny details in sound."
Cavern Of Anti-Matter’s ‘Void Beats/Invocation Trex’ album is out now
on Duophonic. The group play the Brecon Beacons Green Man Festival in
August and the Liverpool International Festival of Psychedelia in September
33
JACK DANGERS
THE
SCHOOL
OF
ELECTRONIC
MUSIC
Our resident archivist Jack
Dangers delves into his extensive
vaults and shines a light on the
avant garde electronic pioneers
of the 20th century. This time, he
turns his attention to New York’s
LOVELY MUSIC LTD label
34
Lovely Music Ltd was started in New York in 1978 by
Mimi Johnson. Her husband was Robert Ashley, an avant
garde electronic musician and performer who began
composing and releasing music in the 1960s. The label
was associated with Performing Artservices Inc, a nonprofit organisation dedicated to the management and
administration of American experimental artists which
Mimi Johnson had set up a few years earlier. Performing
Artservices managed John Cage and the Philip Glass
Ensemble, as well as Robert Ashley and others.
The sort of material these people were recording,
often for live performance, was difficult to find a home
for with mainstream record companies, so Lovely Music
was created to spread the word. The label released a lot
of Ashley’s music, but it also put out plenty of records
by other avant garde composers, especially Alvin Lucier.
The first album released on Lovely Music was Jon
Hassell’s ‘Vernal Equinox’.
Robert Ashley and Alvin Lucier had worked together
since the 1960s. They formed a collective called the
Sonic Arts Union in 1966 and often performed at arts
festivals. David Behrman and Gordon Mumma were
also part of the Sonic Arts Union. The collective put
out an album called ‘Electronic Sound’ in 1972 on the
Mainstream label. Lucier later released ‘I Am Sitting In
A Room’ on Lovely Music in 1981, which is something of
a classic. It runs over two sides, ‘I Am Sitting In A Room’
parts one and two, each about 25 minutes long. It starts
with Lucier reading a statement about sitting in a room
“different from the one you are in”, then talking about
him recording his voice and how he is going to “play it
back into the room again and again, until the resonant
frequencies of the room reinforce themselves”. He then
plays the recording of his voice over and over, putting it
through filters and frequency analysers until it gradually
becomes pure electronic sound.
Other artists released by Lovely Music include Roger
Reynolds, whose ‘Voicespace’ album in 1982 played
around with quadrophonic sound and used readings of
works by Coleridge and Borges, cutting them up and
processing them. There were also records by Nicolas
Collins, who had studied under Alvin Lucier and was one
of the first people to use computers in a live setting, and
Joel Chadabe, who recorded at the Electronic Music
Studio at the State University of New York at Albany.
Lovely Music Ltd still exists today and most of the
records I’ve mentioned here have been reissued on CD.
The original vinyl is extremely hard to find, though, and
they fetch a big price whenever they crop up on eBay
or Discogs.
THE SCHOOL OF ELECTRONIC MUSIC
DETAILS FROM THE COVER ART
ROGER REYNOLDS
RON KUIVILA & NICOLAS COLLINS
ALVIN LUCIER
DAVID BEHRMAN
ALVIN LUCIER
JOEL CHADABE
NICOLAS COLLINS
JOEL CHADABE
35
36
BANGING ON
FAT ROLAND
I’ve met loads of famous people. Timmy Mallett, Tony
the Tiger, Jesus, loads. It makes sense because I look
like a sculpture made from the fatty tears of burger-Elvis.
I’ve seen enough telly biopics to know that fame is
a curse, so I feign cool nonchalance when I do meet
a star. I tut and shuffle my feet. When they namedrop
their summer blockbuster, I just mutter, “Well, I was in a
school play once, so shut up Keanu”.
Until Tribal Gathering. This was a crusty swamp of
muddied ravers in which, to survive, you had to hoover
as much stuff up your nose as possible: drugs, sherbet,
absinthe, soil, farm animals, the lot. I was with a friend
I shall call Pappy O’Flopwomble. Her name has been
changed to protect her identity.
Pappy and I talked, danced with strangers, laughed
into the night. But on the way from the line dancing tent
to the Macarena tent, I spotted Thingy Hartnoll from
Orbital. You know, the one with the headlamps. No, not
that one, I mean the other one. I loved Orbital more than
reheated quarter pounders. The fanboy in me exploded.
He was walking towards us! Thingy from Orbital!
Maybe I should say something as he passed? I prepared
my approach. I would either go for the legs, hoofing him
like a horny piglet, or I would pretend to stumble into him
like a bad romantic comedy. “Sorry, I’ve got 7-Up all over
your tabard, let me just… take it off… mmmm, tabard.”
Was he wearing a tabard? I don’t know.
Anyway, the point is, while I was planning an
awkward fanboy introduction, Thingy said, “Hi Pappy”
and Pappy said, “Hi Thingy”. Turns out Thingy Orbital
knew my friend Pappy O’Flopwomble. I was suddenly in
a three-way conversation with my hero.
Naturally, I tutted and shuffled my feet and played
it all cool, like. Nonchalant, yeah? It was then that I
discovered there are consequences to hoovering up
drugs, sherbet, absinthe, soil and farm animals for
24 hours straight. The comedown. A chemical crash
stomped on my brain like a neural Godzilla and I was
reduced to a series of grunts and dribbles. Whatever
was said, whatever chats and laughs Pappy and Thingy
enjoyed, all I could perceive was a world melting into a
mess of mental lard.
I’ve met loads of famous people. But meeting that
hero will forever remain lost in a crusted swamp.
BANGING
ON
Our resident columnist Fat Roland
remembers the time he met one of
the guys from ORBITAL, his all-time
favourite band. Except he doesn't actually
remember it because his brain was full of
drugs, absinthe and, er, farm animals
Illustration: STEVE APPLETON
37
LANDMARKS
S’EXPRESS
'THEME FROM S’EXPRESS'
If you love music, making a record is always something you want
to have a go at. Even if it’s just some background clapping on your
mate’s band’s record, just so you can be involved somehow. While I
love music, I’m not really that musical. I studied it at school, I knew
how to read music and I tried to play the piano and the guitar, but to
be honest I was rubbish at both.
The story of ‘Theme From S’Express’ started when I was DJing at
the Mud Club in London. Me and Tasty Tim used to be an alternative
to Jay Strongman, who was the main DJ. We’d play all the stuff you
shouldn’t play – a bit of glam rock, a bit of electronic hi-NRG, but
mostly disco – and something I really loved was the long intro on
Rose Royce’s ‘Is It Love You’re After’. I just wanted to loop it over
and over, like a lot of the new hip hop stuff we were hearing then.
Guys like Double Dee & Steinski were making whole tracks out of
repeated loops and they sounded totally coherent, even though they
were snippets of other people’s tracks edited together. So I started
thinking I could do the same thing, but instead of using James Brown
and slow funky beats, I could do it with a disco track.
Around the same time as this, Rhythm King Records opened their
office across the road from where I was living on the Harrow Road.
It was started by Martin Heath, James Horrocks and Jay Strongman,
who I knew from the Mud, so I’d hang out in their office, have a chat,
grab some records. After a while, I started taking records to them
and saying, “Why don’t you put this out?”. The first one was Taffy’s
‘I Love My Radio’, a really catchy hi-NRG record. They signed it and
it became the label’s first Top 10 hit. Then Tim Westwood told me
about The Beatmasters and this great track they’d done with The
Cookie Crew. He sent me an acetate of ‘Rock Da House’, which I
thought was amazing. I told Rhythm King about it and they signed
that too. I got them to sign a few others as well, like Baby Ford and
Renegade Soundwave.
I was happy if Rhythm King gave me some imports in exchange,
it saved me a few fivers in Groove Records, but one day they said,
“Look, we’ve made money out of the records you’ve brought us and
we want you to have this”, and they gave me a cheque for a grand
and said to let them know if there was anything else they could do
for me. I told them I had all these ideas for a track of my own and
I wanted to go into a studio myself, so they put me in touch with
Pascal Gabriel, who’d just done ‘Beat Dis’ with Bomb The Bass.
Rhythm King said I should put my ideas down on cassette, so I
literally recorded all the samples I wanted, little snippets of tracks,
one after the other. I kept thinking to myself, “It will make sense
when I put everything together”.
38
The studio we went to felt like it was out in the middle of nowhere,
which back then was probably east London. Or was it Peckham? I
remember it was really cheap. The track took two or three days and
I think the total bill for our time was about £250. We were just farting
around mostly, you know, “What does this do?” and “Let’s see what
this sounds like”. There were lots of brilliant house records coming
out then and they all had this crisp tsk-tsk-tsk hi-hat sound.
I thought it sounded like a can of hairspray, so we decided to get
some hairspray and give it a try. The first few times, the microphone
got covered in hairspray and it made this terrible noise. You had to
point it away from the mic to make it sound good. Of all the samples we used, my favourite is definitely Karen Finley.
What a voice. It’s the “You drop that ghetto blaster” line. She’s an
American performance artist, famous for sticking yams up her nether
regions, but she made this fantastic electro music with Mark Kamins,
who launched Madonna’s career. It’s from a track called ‘Tales Of
Taboo’ and the full sample is “You drop that ghetto blaster / Suck
me off / Suck me off / Suck me off”… which we didn’t use on the
seven-inch version. ‘Theme’ wasn’t all samples, though. We wrote
a bassline for it and I got my girls in to do the “S’Express” vocal
parts. They were all good friends of mine from the Mud Club. A lot of
the sounds were sampled so we could play a tune with them on the
keyboard. We did that with the vocals too. We cleared all the samples on the record. People didn’t know
what sampling was in those days, so it was a lot easier. They would
say, “We don’t really know what you mean but, sure, have it for 50
quid”. To do it now would be a nightmare, of course. So everything
was worked out properly, with artists like Rose Royce getting a cut
of the publishing, which I was pleased about. To be honest, I didn’t think ‘Theme’ was going to be a hit. Disco
was still a dirty word and I remember thinking, “They’re going to
love it in the clubs, but everyone else will be horrified”. When it was
released, Radio One wouldn’t touch it because it sounded so alien.
But it went Top 30 and the following week it shot up to Number Three,
which was when Radio One realised they were going to look dumb if
they didn’t play it. The week after that it went to Number One.
An updated version of ’Theme From S’Express’ appears on
‘Enjoy This Trip’, a collection of S’Express remixes and covers
out now on Mark Moore’s Needle Boss label
LANDMARKS
“SHE’S AN
AMERICAN
PERFORMANCE
ARTIST,
FAMOUS FOR
STICKING YAMS
UP HER NETHER
REGIONS"
THE INSIDE
STORY OF AN
ELECTRONIC
CLASSIC
MARK MOORE takes us on a trip –
and it is a trip – through the making
of the S’EXPRESS 1988 Number
One smash hit. Uno, dos, tres,
cuatro…
Interview: NEIL MASON
Picture: KATE GARNER
39
RISE
OF THE
ROBOTS
40
FACEME PL S, JA KOB MONT R ASIO, BL A KE PAT TERSON, BEL IE VEKE VIN, SHINYA SUZUKI, AL E X ANDER BA X E VANIS AND PRIVAT A RCHIVE
RISE
‘CLOSE TO THE NOISE FLOOR – FORMATIVE UK ELECTRONICA
1975-1984’ is a four-CD box set bringing together over 60
tracks from a raft of artists who were at the forefront of
the synth explosion. Many of the musicians who blazed
these fresh electronic trails were first written about in
the long-lost weekly music paper Sounds, which in May
1983 published a feature called Wild Planet, an A to Z of
the new underground that came humming and buzzing
out of backrooms and bedrooms on cassettes and
seven-inch singles. Wild Planet writer DAVE HENDERSON
revisits the beginnings of what became a regular item
in Sounds and charts the orgins of a fledgling DIY scene
that would go on to dominate the charts and beyond...
OF THE
ROBOTS
Illustration: JOACHIM SPERL
In the late 1970s, I moved to a flat just off Kentish Town Road in north
London. I was screen-printing record sleeves (The Adicts, Disco
Zombies, The Plague) and slowly inhaling poisonous toxins. With a
gaggle of friends, some of whom were in fancifully named groups
(23 Skidoo, The Insex, The Mysterons), we hung out in Honky Tonk
Records, an indie haven that gave away 50p vouchers for The Music
Machine, later to become Camden Palace, to see the likes of The
Cure, The Buzzcocks, The Only Ones, The Psychedelic Furs, The
B-52s and The Vibrators. Life was cheap.
Three chords had been our staple diet, so imagine our surprise
when we encountered The Human League. It was 1978 and they
were supporting The Rezillos. In less than half an hour, I witnessed
the end of punk as an “anything goes” concept. The Human League’s
analogue rasp and Phil Oakey’s partial haircut were met with mass
derision. Pint glasses pirouetted about their synths, which were
encased in what looked like knock-off industrial scaffolding. It was
an incredibly uncomfortable atmosphere, a supremely tense 23
minutes before the band retreated.
After that, The Rezillos’ twee jangle pop sounded like twee jangle
pop. And nothing was ever the same again.
Eventually I moved in above Honky Tonk Records and heard just
about every new indie single, as well as the extremes of the shop’s
stock; from the Sky label’s cyclical drones to dub reggae and endless
12-inch disco tunes. It was like an all-day John Peel show, which
satisfied my voracious appetite to hear everything, even if I was
regularly flummoxed by 45s from obscure parts of America. And
Sheffield.
By 1980, The Human League had signed to Virgin and were being
asked to cover glam anthems to gain commercial success, but they
had opened the doors and an austere bunch of vaguely related lost
souls had emerged with even less regard for tradition. Back then, an
outfit called Final Solution were promoting the coolest shows around
London and in early August they took over the YMCA in Tottenham
Court Road for four nights, the first two of which were nothing short
of life changing.
42
On the Thursday, Essential Logic, led by ex-X-Ray Spexer Laura
Logic, headlined over Joy Division. Joy Division were the band of the
moment – dark, minimal and totally wired. Supporting them were two
acts from Liverpool who had been briefly aired by John Peel; The
Teardrop Explodes and Echo And The Bunnymen. They were both
drummer-less, playing some kind of catchy, offbeat psychedelic pop.
It was a completely uplifting sound that was somehow new but at
the same time absolutely familiar.
By contrast, the next night any hint of the good times were gone.
A sense of menace descended as Rema-Rema opened with their
thudding drone. After them was a band Peel had also lauded and who
would fast become my favourites in this new resistance: Cabaret
Voltaire. The Cabs were like watching the news and listening to
records with someone upstairs playing an echoey guitar. What was
not to love?
The evening closed with Throbbing Gristle and, as with all TG
shows, the performance seemed to hang by an invisible thread that
would drag it from the jaws of tuneful reverie to the depths of some
scary comatose nightmare. Emerging from the YMCA, I remember
feeling a whole section of my musical brainload had been erased.
I followed TG from then on and it was like being in some strange
version of the Scouts. They had a mailing list and sometimes
they’d just telephone you to tell you about the next gig. They were
incredibly friendly and always witty, which made you feel like
you wanted to help in some way. It was as though we were all on
some kind of Outward Bound trek and no one was quite sure if the
compass actually worked. It was pure ‘Outer Limits’ and anything
really could happen.
Outside the YMCA gig, some of 23 Skidoo were talking to an old
school mate who turned out to be a “TG helper”, Stan Bingo, aka
Dan Landin, a man with a tape collection that was mind-blowing.
He had unreleased Cabaret Voltaire material and he also had the
beginnings of the legendary ‘24 Hours Of TG’ live series. In the early
days, TG’s Industrial label didn’t have the means to duplicate tapes,
so if you ordered one of their cassette releases, Clock DVA or The
Leather Nun or Monte Cazazza, it would be Dan copying each one
FORMATIVE UK ELECTRONICA 1975-1984
individually. He was also about to form a band, Last Few Days,
whose sound would inspire 23 Skidoo to morph from R&B outcasts
to elegant noise terrorists.
As well as the Industrial tape releases, several fanzines
emerged with cassettes attached to their covers and it wasn’t
long before tape-only labels became the place for anyone lo-fi
enough to not warrant a limited edition vinyl run. It was a subscene a million miles away from the major labels. These short-run
items were flippantly listed in NME and Sounds with mirthful
nods at their amateur status. I particularly remember reading
of the wonderfully titled ‘A Classic Slice Of Teenage Angst’,
which promised “beat music, poetry, noise, talk, monosodium
glutamate”. A simple postal order secured a copy and the delights
of The Manchester Mekon, Coventry ZZZ, From Chorley and
Anthrax For The People became household names. Well, in my
house anyway.
Every week, there’d be another inkie slight at some odd band
or solo madman, but I’d be desperate to hear what The Door And
The Window, The 012 or The Sell Outs were all about. The NME’s
derision made these “hopeless” artists all the more attractive.
Anyway, I needed something to listen to on my bulky Walkman as I
travelled to my first proper job as art editor of Sound International,
a studio magazine that had the likes of Phil Collins on the cover,
while inside it enthused about Burns’ new Bison bass.
My muddy tapes were far removed from the hi-tech content of
Sound International, but that didn’t stop me pestering the editor
about my unlikely heroes in the pub every lunchtime. Eventually,
he got bored of listening and let me interview new acts as long as
they were in a studio – Il Y A Volkswagens at Blackwing and The
Rhine River Three at Pathway (where Nick Lowe had produced
The Damned). He also let me put together a piece on the DIY
cassette scene that meant I could ask people to send me stuff
without having to pay for it. Through that single page article, I
began to meet a host of one-man operations, the kind of artists
who formed the backbone of the Wild Planet features I would
later write for Sounds.
On a cold and miserable day in the spring of 1981, I arrived in
Sheffield and made my way to Western Works, a warehouse
building that had seen better days. I climbed the stairs above the
noise of sewing machines, up to the top floor where the kettle
was on. Cabaret Voltaire had no airs and graces. They were a
democratic trio who enthused about the then-banned ‘A Clockwork
Orange’, Tamla Motown (which they claimed they had attempted
to play initially), TG, sleeve artwork, reportage footage, northern
soul, tribal drums, Dave Godin (who ran the local film club), and the
prospects of Sheffield’s two football teams.
The Cabs played me work in progress for ‘Red Mecca’ and
answered every one of my gushing questions before we retired to
the pub. Whittled down to two pages, the feature ran just before
Sound International folded. I’d like to think that my challenging of
the magazine’s considered editorial policy didn’t lead to its demise,
but who knows?
I moved on to work for Event, Richard Branson’s short-lived rival
to Time Out, before ending up as art editor on Noise!, an offshoot
of Sounds that featured alternative music alongside the emerging
new romantics. Psychic TV and Duran Duran were certainly odd
bedfellows. When that also folded, I was given a free transfer to
Sounds itself, where I sat between TG fan Sandy Robertson and
Edwin Pouncey, aka cartoonish Savage Pencil. My miseducation
continued as my network of home tapers and serial bedroom
performers bombarded me with new music.
Something was happening out there. Boxes of incredibly strange
music, much of it electronic, covered my desk. To his credit, the
editor of Sounds, Geoff Barton, realised that the sheer volume of
material meant someone had to write about it. I guess as I was
the only one listening, it had to be me. Over Christmas 1982, I
unravelled any preconceptions and soaked up DDAA, 400 Blows,
Trax, SPK, Portion Control, The Legendary Pink Dots, Nocturnal
Emissions, O Yuki Conjugate and many more. Wild Planet was
created and things would never be the same again.
43
THE
ROBOTS
SPEAK
JOHN FOXX
Ultravox!
There was no single unifying event for the
formative UK electronica scene, no point
when something suddenly clicked, no precise
year zero moment. But there was a bunch
of like-minded souls beavering away in
what they thought was their own little void,
unaware there were others just like them
all over the country. We talk to seven of the
artists featured on the ’Close To The Noise
Floor’ box set and get their big bang stories
Interviews: PUSH and NEIL MASON
44
“The first piece of kit that I used to create an electronic noise was a
theremin. It was made from an adapted transistor radio by a friend of
mine in Chorley, Lancashire, when we were still at school. This was
1963 or 1964. It really howled and you didn’t even need to touch it. I
was truly impressed. The future was right there.
“While Ultravox! were seen as a post-punk band, our records
were always full of synths. Even when we were experimenting with
feedback and extreme amp sounds, the synths were there along with
the guitars. ‘My Sex’, on our debut album in 1976, was the very first
synth ballad.
“For us, Neu! were certainly an early inspiration. ‘Hiroshima Mon
Amour’ on ‘Ha! Ha! Ha!’ was our first use of a drum machine and it
created a new template for bands: synths and drum machines with
heavily treated guitars. I’d decided electronics was the future just
before that point. That’s when I began writing ‘Systems Of Romance’,
followed by ‘Metamatic’. We worked with Conny Plank on ‘Systems
Of Romance’. He was about 10 years ahead of anything else at that
time. Conny was future central, all roads to anywhere interesting ran
right through his studio. What a man.
“I’d met Brian Eno just after he’d left Roxy Music and he worked
with Ultravox! on ‘Ha! Ha! Ha!’, supplying encouragement and
ideas, as well as synths and an early drum machine. There was a
lot of common ground, from ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ and German
electronica, to finding some sort of future language for music
and throwing all the old rock clichés overboard. For most British
musicians, there was only rock, pop, jazz and classical during this
period. If you didn’t fit any of those rigid categories, then you were
dead. But we were determined to devise some sort of music away
from ‘Top Of The Pops’, something that was a real sonic adventure.
“Eno turned out to be a great galvaniser and an enthusiastic
reinforcer of ideas. He was just right for us then. I don’t think anyone
in Britain was doing anything remotely similar to us, this was 1976
after all, but from around 1978 onwards, there was a succession
of new names being talked about – The Human League, Cabaret
Voltaire, Daniel Miller and Thomas Leer. Mercifully, everyone
seemed to be different enough to create their own territories
without a tussle.
“After years of feeling completely isolated and not sure if we were
perhaps nuts, it seemed there was something in the air. It felt like
some sort of tide was building. And then in 1979, Gary Numan came
out with that great record and the entire thing went overground in
a rush. It was one of those moments when everyone recognises a
new thing and we suddenly felt confirmed in all that blind, isolated
chance-taking.
“And with that, the music world changed overnight. After Numan,
we were all suddenly in and everything else was out.“
FORMATIVE UK ELECTRONICA 1975-1984
MARTYN WARE
CHRIS CARTER
The Human League / BEF
/ Heaven 17
Throbbing Gristle / Chris &
Cosey / Carter Tutti
“I first met Ian [Craig-Marsh] at a council-run arts project in Sheffield “When I was quite young, about 11 or 12, my father bought me a
called Meatwhistle. It was run by two actors, Chris and Veronica
small, portable tape recorder. I also had a transistor radio, so I used
Wilkinson, in a building round the back of the City Hall. It wasn’t just
to record off the radio and cut the tape up. My parents then got me
drama, they had an early video camera and some musical equipment
those little electronics kits you used to be able to buy kids, and I
too, and they encouraged us to be creative. It’s also where I met
would build crystal radios and oscillators. It all started from there. I
Glenn [Gregory] and Ian Reddington, my actor friend who was in
used to buy Practical Electronics magazine and I built my first synth
‘Coronation Street’. I’m eternally grateful to Chris and Veronica
in around 1975.
because that place changed my life.
“I was a prog rocker at the time, into Tangerine Dream, Genesis,
“This was 1975-ish and you couldn't imagine being a musician for a The Nice, all the usual stuff. I used to go to lots of gigs but no one
living. What did I want to be? Not a bloody clue. Ian and I got jobs as
seemed to be making the kind of sounds I had in my head. I liked
computer operators for different companies. Back then, a computer
the idea of being on stage and giving people a different experience,
had the same processing power as a digital watch from a pound
so I developed this sort of one-man show with my custom-made
shop has now. They were in giant rooms doing things like payroll. I
instruments. It was basically me doing this droney ambient music
used to be a trainee manager at the Co-op so it was preferable to
with some friends projecting visuals for me. We used to travel all
boning bacon, believe me. I liked the idea of working with computers
over the country doing stuff.
and at least it meant I was facing the future.
“There was a really interesting DIY thing going on during the
“Ian and I started messing around, making up groups. We had a
mid-70s, which was partly born from Practical Electronics. They
small audience within Meatwhistle, but our imaginary world was a
used to publish synth circuits, quite a lot of them, and I knew at
bit like Andy Warhol’s Factory. We’d hire rehearsal rooms, dirt cheap least half a dozen people who were building homemade synths and
former engineering shops in the city centre, and we thought it was
modifying these published designs. A good friend of mine was [visual
so cool because they were post-industrial buildings. We’d have big
artist] Bruce Lacey, who sadly passed away recently. We got into
parties in these horrible, filthy places and it all seemed kind of edgy
swapping circuits and he showed me how to build my first filter.
and fun.
There were lots of little groups of people swapping circuits and ideas
“The first thing I bought was a dual stylus Stylophone. That was
and building all this stuff. I can think of at least three or four friends
me thinking I was Eno. After that, Ian bought a Maplin kit to build a
who built fully fledged modular synthesisers and some of us were
synthesiser, but all it could do was kind of motorbike sounds. It had
performing with them.
a matrix of about 120 switches on it, of which only five worked. You
“Throbbing Gristle played at the YMCA on Tottenham Court Road
couldn't play any melodies with it, but it looked great. When Korg
in London in 1980. I remember it well. It was quite a big thing, quite
and Roland started producing entry level synthesisers, it coincided
an unusual event. In fact, it took place over a couple of nights and
with us being old enough to get some financial credit, so we clubbed
there was some really oddball stuff on the bill. It was a real mix of
together and bought a Korg 700. It was £350 if I remember rightly. It
different bands – Joy Division, Echo And The Bunnymen, This Heat
was either that or get a second-hand car.
– and no one had heard of most of them. You could feel something
“The Korg led to us experimenting more, but it was just mucking
exciting was happening, though. It wasn’t rock ’n’ roll, that’s for sure.
about really. A bit later on, I read an article about Eno saying all
“There was a crossover period in around 1981, where Cosey
you needed to have for your own recording studio was a two-track
and I were doing Throbbing Gristle and just starting Chris & Cosey.
machine you could bounce from track to track on, sound on sound.
Our sound changed pretty radically at that time and we adopted
So we bought this Sony machine and that's how we recorded ’Being
the house style that we’ve still got now. It’s funny because we
Boiled’. The next thing we know, we're signed to Fast Records in
were offered a big worldwide tour with Grace Jones in 1981, but
Edinburgh and John Peel is playing it. Then we got signed by Virgin
we had to turn it down because Cosey was pregnant. They gave
and the rest is history.
it to Blancmange instead. If we had taken that Grace Jones tour,
“So ’Being Boiled’ was recorded in a disused factory on a
our career path might have gone on a different trajectory. But we
domestic tape recorder for £2.50, the cost of the tape. We didn't
were very happy, Cosey was pregnant, we were going to move out
have a mixing desk, we didn't have any EQ. We had nothing. It
of London and settle down in the country, and we thought, ‘No, we
was literally bouncing from track to track and stopping when the
don’t really need all that right now, let’s do it to our own timetable,
degradation got too bad. Everybody says, ’Oh, we love the minimalist not someone else’s’. So in a parallel universe, we could be like
simplicity’. We couldn’t do anything else really.“
Depeche Mode.“
45
MARTIN BOWES
ANDY MCCLUSKEY
Attrition
OMD
“I make music because of punk. That was the initial spark for me.
The first thing I did was a fanzine called Alternative Sounds, which
I started because there wasn’t one in Coventry at the time. It
lasted for two years, 18 issues, during which time the 2-Tone scene
exploded in the city. I got to meet lots of musicians and after a while I
decided to bite the bullet and start a band of my own. So I hooked up
with Julia Niblock [later of The Legendary Pink Dots] and we formed
Attrition, which is still going today. “A big turning point for me was seeing The Human League
supporting Siouxsie And The Banshees. It was one of the best gigs
I’ve ever been to. I’d never seen an electronic band before and it
was brilliant. They totally blew my mind. I’d bought Kraftwerk’s
‘Autobahn’ single a few years earlier, but only because it was a hit in
the UK. I didn’t really know much about them or that whole German
electronic scene. I didn‘t really know Neu! and Tangerine Dream
were just hippies as far as I was concerned. But then one night John
Peel played ‘Showroom Dummies’ in the middle of a load of punk
stuff and I thought, ‘Bloody hell, this is great’. Then when I saw The
Human League, it all started to connect up. “Attrition were originally a guitar-bass-drums band – I used to
shout a lot and scrape the guitar with a brick and stick it through
delays – but we got a synth after a few gigs, a little Wasp, and that
was it. We sacked the drummer and got a drum machine too. We’d
mess around with other bits of kit as well. I remember taking a tape
machine and extending the tape round a chair to get a really long
loop and recording some American preacher onto it with little clicks
every time it went round. Nobody told us what to do, there weren’t
any YouTube tutorials to watch, so we just tried whatever daft ideas
came into our heads. “The Attrition track on the ‘Close To The Noise Floor’ compilation
is an extract from our first album, ‘Death House’. I shared a house
with a guy who ran a cassette label, Adventures In Reality, so he
put the album out. There were only two tracks on it. The first was an
improvisation inspired by ‘The Night Of The Living Dead’, which we
did one afternoon. We did another improvisation the next afternoon
so we could put something on the other side of the tape. This was in
1982. I think we sold around 500 copies. “Later on, I started working any job I could find so I could save up
money to buy more gear and better gear. In the end, I was able to put
together my own studio, The Cage, which I’ve run since 1993. I’ve
worked on everything from Nine Inch Nails to Coil to Merzbow here,
but it’s all very different to how it used to be. I just wish I could still
do an album in two afternoons. It takes bloody ages these days.“
46
“The reason Paul [Humphreys] and I started listening to records
together was I had a mono Dansette record player and he’d built
himself a stereo. So we’d been on this musical journey before we’d
even started making music. I was buying records on a Saturday
morning and going round to Paul’s house to listen to them on a
Saturday afternoon.
“As soon as I heard Kraftwerk, that was the key, but we were two
kids who a) couldn’t afford expensive synthesisers and b) could
barely play anyway. But when Eno started doing his solo albums, the
fact that he was getting weird noises out of conventional instruments
made us think, ’We can do that’. To start with, we just had a bass
guitar and a load of stuff we made ourselves. We did very weird
ambient music, because that was all we could do. We didn’t even
have a keyboard we could play a tune on.
“Our first step up from completely ambient music was ‘Almost’
[‘Electricity’ B-side], which is a really simple song. Paul made the
drum unit himself. He took the circuit diagrams from a drum machine
and made a bass drum, a snare drum, white noise and a hi-hat, and
connected them with metal rods onto copper pads. You know the long
red and black connectors you get on electronic voltage test meters?
That’s what we were using as our drum sticks.
“The synth melody on ‘Almost’ is a Korg Micro Preset we bought
from my mother’s mail order catalogue. It was incredible, £7.36 a
week, so it was like, ’Hang on a minute, we can actually afford one of
these’. Admittedly, it wasn‘t much better than a Stylophone because
every preset – Trumpet1, Trumpet2, Violin1, whatever – just went
’eer’. It was an entry-level electronic keyboard with a really primitive
sound module, but at least we had a synthesiser, and we pushed it to
its extremes to get something interesting out of it.
“At the time, artists like ourselves, The Human League, Daniel
Miller and a few others, were all working in our little vacuums. We
were taking influences from similar things, but none of us knew the
others were there. I remember Paul and I were standing in Eric’s Club
in Liverpool in the summer of 1978 when the DJ played this piece of
music and I went, ‘What the hell is that?‘. So I asked the DJ what it
was and he said, ‘It’s “Warm Leatherette“ by somebody called The
Normal ‘. I went back to Paul and said, ‘OK, we need to stop writing
songs in your mother’s back room and actually get on stage‘.
“ The first gig we did was at Eric’s that October, supporting a
band we had never heard of. They were called Joy Division. The
second one we did, we went to The Factory Club in Manchester and
supported Cabaret Voltaire. So, you know, an interesting couple of
first gigs.“
FORMATIVE UK ELECTRONICA 1975-1984
NEIL ARTHUR
ANDREW LAGOWSKI Blancmange
Nagamatzu “I was at art college in Harrow when I met Stephen [Luscombe]. He
“For me, it was always the machinery first. I was a drummer in a
had a mate in the graphics department. I was in this kind of postband when I was at school, which was brilliant, but things changed
punk art rock band called The Viewfinders at the time. None of us
when my father bought a reel-to-reel tape machine from the local
could play, but we made a lot of noise. We did covers of Shirley
hi-fi shop. It was a professional job, a Ferrograph Logic 7, and I got
Bassey, Roxy Music and Frank Zappa, plus a few of our own songs,
the bug for recording anything and everything I could with it. The
although none of them sounded like songs to be honest.
first thing I recorded was a regression, a guy being hypnotised and
“Stephen was in band called Niru and the first time I saw them
regressing back through his past lives, which I did for Radio Orwell,
he was playing a saxophone connected to a Hoover on reverse
our local radio station in Ipswich. thrust. Or it might have been a washing machine. Punk inspired lots
“I’d read about John Cage and his table full of electronics and I
of people, not just musicians, to express themselves in different
loved what Chris Watson was doing in Cabaret Voltaire, so I started
and often unconventional ways, so Stephen and I got talking about
chopping up bits of tape and experimenting with microphones and a
making noises and we said, ‘Why don’t we get together and see
kid’s keyboard. But then I remember thinking, ‘I want to be Richard
what happens?‘.
Kirk, I need to get a guitar’, so I bought a second-hand guitar and this
“Stephen had this old four-track recorder that he’d borrowed and
horrible old fuzz box. The guitar cost £30. I never managed to play it
we got some Tupperware and an empty tin of Smash, that powdered
properly. I had to re-tune it so it was easier for me. mashed potato. We put foil on the top of the tin and hit it with
“A lot of what Nagamatzu did was just experimenting and seeing
little paint brushes. We slowed the machine down when we were
what noises we could come up with. I was really into Whitehouse
recording, but then played it back at normal speed and it sounded
and Throbbing Gristle and Nurse With Wound. I used to write to
really nice. So we just started making these soundscapes. Stephen
William Bennett from Whitehouse. We had a long correspondence.
would sometimes talk over the top of the recordings, passages
Stephen Jarvis [the other half of Nagamatzu] was more into stuff like
we found in books or lyrics written by friends, and it all started to
Joy Division and Bauhaus, but he’d never been in a band before, so
develop from there.
it was very new for both of us. I think we latched onto the misery of
“All the synths on ‘Happy Families’, our first album, were borrowed. the early goth thing and we had the raincoats and the floppy fringes.
We didn’t own a synth until we did ‘Mange Tout’, the second album.
Everyone in Ipswich seemed to be into heavy metal, so going out
In the early days, we borrowed an ARP Odyssey from Cliff Fox, a
was often quite tense. We’d get called all sorts when we walked
mate of ours who was in a band called The Models [who spawned
down the street. Rema-Rema and The Wolfgang Press]. He was on the foundation
“Most of the equipment we used was borrowed from other people
course when I was doing my degree. We just used the ARP to make
– synths, pedals, whatever we could get. We were straight out of
sounds for textural backgrounds. We didn’t think there was much
school, so we couldn’t afford to buy gear of our own. When we did
point in us doing anything else with it because it wasn’t ours.
our first album, ’Shatter Days’, which came out as a cassette in
“Another mate of mine, Mark Cox, who was in Rema-Rema, was
1983, a lot of the equipment belonged to John Bowers, who’s now in
always really encouraging. He lent us his rhythm unit, and it was one Tonesucker. We did it on John’s four-track, which he brought round
of those with rock, slow rock, rock1, rock2. That’s when we started
to my house. I did try to build a few effects pedals along the way, but
doing things like the early versions of ‘Sad Day’. And then Stephen
nothing like Chris Carter. I'm not that clever. I had a Meccano set as
got this organ. He didn’t buy a synth, he bought an organ with preset
a kid and I was very good at building things that looked interesting
sounds and a rhythm unit. This was when we did ‘Holiday Camp’,
but didn't work. which is on the ‘Close To The Noise Floor‘ album. It‘s from our first
“I’ve done a lot of solo records since Nagamatzu stopped in the
release, the ‘Irene & Mavis’ EP.
early 90s [working mainly as Lagowski, Legion and SETI] and they
“For me, punk was like a perfect storm. One reason it came along
don't really sit into a particular genre, but there’s often a slight
was as a reaction to prog rock and I was never a fan of prog. The
quirkiness about them. I’m working on an eight-hour album called
synths those groups used were never on my radar, but the synths
‘Sleep Environments For Interplanetary Travel’ at the moment, which
used by Eno, Bowie, Kraftwerk and Sparks most definitely were. We
I want to release on a micro SD card so you can listen to it all the
thought, ‘If we can make our instruments sound a bit like anything
way through in one go. Just as well we don’t have to release stuff on
from “Another Green World“ or “The Man-Machine“ or the first two
C-60s now.“
Roxy albums, then we’re moving in the right direction‘.“
‘Close To The Noise Floor – Formative UK Electronica 1975-1984’
is out now on Cherry Red
DANCE THIS MESS AROUND
Welcome to the MELBOURNE ELECTRONIC SOUND STUDIO,
a gobsmacking collection of synths that is plugging Australia’s
electronic music scene into the grid. Don't touch that dial!
Words: MARK ROLAND
Pictures: SCULLIN FOX
48
MELBOURNE ELECTRONIC SOUND STUDIO
49
Tucked away down an unprepossessing alley in the
fine city of Melbourne, Australia, is a collection of
synthesisers so impressive that it makes you wonder
if they’ve not switched on some kind of devilish gear
magnet and gathered up every significant synth on the
continent. Just reading the kit list is enough to make you
dizzy. There’s a Russian Soviet-era Stylophone knockoff in there, not to mention pretty much every insectrelated product the Electronic Dream Plant ever made,
several iterations of the EMS VCS3, and the shocking
Yamaha DX1. They only made 140 of those.
Imagine being given free reign with it all, to
experiment to your heart’s content. Because that’s the
idea behind the Melbourne Electronic Sound Studio, or
MESS for short. It was brought into existence by local
audio-visual artists Byron J Scullin and Robin Fox. One
of Robin’s pieces was a giant theremin public sculpture
that stood seven metres.
“What we have here is made up from several
Melbourne musicians’ private collections,” says Byron.
“We have two musicians in particular who have massive
amounts of equipment and a penchant for vintage
machines. Once we embarked on the project to create
MESS, news started to spread out and we were able to
make contact with these major collectors.”
You might wonder why somebody who has parted
with serious dollar to build up his or her own electronic
horde would be happy to hand any of it over to anyone
else. But there is a very practical reason for their
apparent generosity.
“The synths need to be used regularly to keep them
working,” explains Byron. “If you leave old cars garaged
for too long, things start to rust up or dry out, and the
car will stop working. It’s less obvious, but this is also
the case with electronics. Faders needs to be slid.
Knobs, dials and buttons need to be twisted, turned and
pressed. Corrosion can creep in and next thing you know
you’ve got a volume or filter fader that's crunchy.”
50
MELBOURNE ELECTRONIC SOUND STUDIO
51
Loaning the synths to MESS means that they get fixed
up, looked after and, crucially, used. MESS, then, is a bit
like a high-class health spa for elderly synths, staffed by
legions of devoted experts who will adore them and keep
them all in the best possible condition. But it goes further
than that.
“Sometimes it’s nothing more than an owner’s pure
enthusiasm for electronic sound,” says Byron. “These
machines are all inspirational in their own way. Each
one speaks to ideas about music, sound, design, form
and function. Each embodies the personalities of the
people who made them and they carry this spirit in their
construction. We can trace electronic sound back to the
beginning of the 20th century, but the fact is that the real
boom in electronics only came after the Second World
War and transistorisation.
“So electronic sound as we know it today has a history
of around 75 years or so. That’s only three generations
of humanity that have had access to these instruments.
When we compare that to how many generations have
had access to the violin or the piano, it becomes clear
how new electronic sound is in terms of cultural growth.
Even so, there is a growing feeling that many of these
instruments are museum pieces and therefore they
should be preserved.”
MESS is not a museum, however. The project’s most
exciting aspect lies in its commitment to the creation of
new work using the equipment.
“We feel that the machines have a ton of great new
sounds and ideas just waiting to emerge, but we need
to put people in front of them for this to happen,” says
Byron. “This is the opposite of the museum approach.
A machine that still has the potential to create sound
sitting under glass or sequestered away in a personal
collection is something we want to avoid. Our supporting
collectors agree with us about this and they believe
in the notion that we can advocate for new electronic
music with these old machines.”
The MESS collection is still growing. They’ve just
taken delivery of a Yamaha CS-80 and are in discussions
about an ARP 2500. There’s an extensive installation of
Eurorack modular pieces too. The fact that musicians
will be able to access and experiment with gear that, as
John Foxx has said, was junked before anyone had really
explored it thoroughly is why MESS is such a great idea.
When is something like this going to happen in the
UK? Watch this space…
The Melbourne Electronic Sound Studio is at
15 Dowling Place, North Melbourne, VIC 3051, Australia.
For more information visit www.mess.foundation
52
MELBOURNE ELECTRONIC SOUND STUDIO
53
54
BETH ORTON
ROOTS
AND
BRANCHES
The original folktronica trailblazer
has really cranked up the ’tronica for
her excellent new album, ‘Kidsticks’.
Will the real BETH ORTON
please stand up?
Words: BETHAN COLE
55
Despite having been predominantly recorded in Los Angeles, where
“I find the word ‘folky’ really offensive,” says Beth Orton, with more
than a touch of capriciousness. “I think it’s just so derogatory. What Beth Orton and her young family moved while making ‘Kidsticks’, the
album has its roots in her formative years in Norwich in the late 70s
is ‘folky’? What does it actually mean? I don’t know if it exists in
and early 80s. It was at this time that she was first exposed to her
my records…”
older brothers’ record collections.
It was a somewhat innocent, uncalculated remark on my
The opening track, ‘Snow’, with its angular chords and staccato
part, which happened to include the offending word “folky”. It
funk, is reminiscent of the arty electro of Japan. ‘1973’ has such a
did confirm that Ms Orton is not quite the gentle, introspective
powerful Blondie bent that it could have come straight from early
singer-songwriter I had anticipated, though. She is opinionated
80s New York. It’s ebullient and bouncy with electronic flourishes
and she peppers her responses with swearing. She is not afraid
and Orton’s breathy, Debbie Harry-esque vocals. ‘Falling’, on the
to be downright contrary, prickly even, particularly when asked a
other hand, is a glacial, slightly mournful ambient techno paean.
question she feels is obvious.
“Music was the great ruler in our house,” she notes. “One of my
Witness her response when I ask her whether she likes the
music of Andrew Hung from Fuck Buttons, her co-conspirator on her brothers was into punk and another was into Japan, so this album
leads all the way back to the beginnings of my musical education.
new album, ‘Kidsticks’.
The only education I had in music was listening to The Slits and The
“I don’t particularly,” she says, matter-of-factly. “I’m not that
Clash and Japan and Depeche Mode. For me, the music of that whole
bothered. He was someone who did a remix of a song off my last
period was just so fucking exciting.”
album [2012’s ‘Sugaring Season’]. He was keen to work with me, I
Orton talks fondly about the Norwich scene, the clubs and venues
liked him and liked what he did for me on that record, and it was
she frequented from the age of 12, intimate leftfield hangouts such
really just a thing of me going, ‘Oh, yeah, come out’. He said, ‘OK,
as The Jacquard and The Gala, as well as the popular soul and
might as well’, then he flew to LA.”
After years of making the aforementioned introspective acoustic reggae nights at The Jolly Butchers. So who did she want to be when
she was growing up? Who did she model herself on? Who were her
music, Beth Orton has served up a truly impressive, state of the art,
pop stars?
poppy electronic album, with influences along the lines of Japan
“In terms of female role models, there were so many incredible
and Blondie. Her collaboration with Andrew Hung, despite the
people to look up to,” she says. “Blondie, The Slits, Siouxsie Sioux,
seemingly inauspicious beginnings, has proved to be very fruitful
Kate Bush, Tina Weymouth from Talking Heads. Thinking about it, I
indeed. In fact, for anyone vaguely acquainted with Orton’s musical
suppose I got quite bogged down in the woody history of folk and
trajectory, ‘Kidsticks’ sees her going back to her roots, to the days
couldn’t hold it on my shoulders any longer. Until I started making
of working with William Orbit on ambient and techno productions
this new record, I didn’t realise how important it was to shake that
during the early 1990s.
off, to be able to become myself more and access those other parts
“Folk music is important to me and always has been,” she says.
of my life.”
“I adore Joni Mitchell, Nick Drake and people like that, and my heart
With its reinvention of the music of her past, ‘Kidsticks’ is as
goes out to them, but to some degree I think that making acoustic
much an expression of Orton’s personality as the acoustic guitar
music was kind of strangling me. This record was a complete
missives for which she is renowned. I mention that the song titles
liberation for me and allowed me to go back to many other parts of
– ‘Petals’, ‘Snow’, ‘Moon’, ‘Dawnstar’ – seem to have pastoral,
my world. It’s easy to say, ‘Oh, it’s LA’, or it’s this or it’s that, but it
romantic or nostalgic leanings.
was just the music and it sort of took on its own life.”
56
BETH ORTON
“ I FIND T HE W ORD ‘FOLK Y ’
RE A LLY OFFENSI V E”
“A lot of the titles are very throwaway,” she declares. “I’ve never
been good at song titles so I don’t even try. I give them names and
descriptions, it’s like, ‘This one’s the one with petals in it’, and
that’s what sticks. I kind of like that. There’s a bit of cut and paste
to this record, there’s a lot of holes in it. But I enjoy that. I enjoy the
unfinishedness of it.”
I want to ask Orton about the influence of her parents. She lost
her father when she was 11 years old, shortly after he had left her
mother. Her mother died of cancer just before Orton turned 20.
While preparing for this interview, the Beth Orton that I
imagined, the person I envisaged, had arty, bohemian parents and
wasn’t much of a rebel because she didn’t need to be. She was
someone who was quite mellow and rather hippy-ish. And yet it
seems the opposite is the case.
“I was in a very bohemian world, but I wouldn’t say that my mum
and dad were arty or bohemian at all,” she says. “My dad was
pretty straight, but obviously he wasn’t around for long. Mum was
a writer, but she was a very grounded person. She worked for The
Guardian and was in the social work field.”
Losing her parents when she was so young must have been
devastating and it would have forced her to confront some difficult
questions very early in her life. Most people are in late middle age
when their parents die and it is often the catalyst for a period of
soul searching and thinking deeply about mortality. It might even
make some people bitter.
“It’s like having kids, it’s very hard to pin down how it affects
you,” says Orton. “On one level, I suppose I found losing my
parents to be quite liberating. It span me out and I got a little bit
wild. It was quite a heady experience to be young and completely
alone in the world. Grief morphs and it doesn’t necessarily make
you sober. It made me pretty drunk. For me, the sobriety came from
having kids.”
And that’s the latest chapter in her personal life. A spell of
single motherhood followed the birth of her daughter Nancy in
2006. Five years later, she had a son, Arthur, with her husband, the
American folk musician Sam Amidon. Laudably, Orton has managed
to combine a busy career with having children and, if ‘Kidsticks’
is anything to go by, her creativity hasn’t suffered. I ask if being a
parent has changed her.
“Yeah, of course, and it’s influenced everything,” she says,
without hesitating. “It grounded me and helped me to reconnect
with my family. I didn’t realise how important that was for me until
it happened, to have a sense of family and a sense of belonging.
It really freaked me out, but it’s opened my mind a lot. That idea
of the pram in the hallway inhibiting creativity? It was kind of the
opposite for me, because it’s completely altered everything I do
and given me a much wider perspective.”
Orton’s voice sounds different on ‘Kidsticks’. Perhaps that’s to
do with the children, perhaps not. It’s stronger, gutsy even, more
embodied, the folk lilt less audible.
“It’s different in the sense that I’m older and my voice has
changed,” she admits. “But a very different part of myself made
this record. I had to be quite driven to make it happen, to take
control of it and take it where it went. There’s quite a lot of power
in my voice and I think that definitely comes out. Not singing with
the guitar has allowed another part to come through.”
After all that, I’m left wondering who the real Beth Orton is. Is she
the fey, whimsical, folky singer-songwriter of ‘Trailer Park’ and
‘Central Reservation’? Is she the feisty, Debbie Harry-ish, belt-itout vocalist of ‘Kidsticks’? Or is she maybe this prickly, slightly
difficult character I encountered.
“I’ve always found it quite hard when people say, ‘You’re this
kind of person’ and it’s usually like, ‘No, I’m not, never have been’,”
she concludes. “I think it takes us all a long time to become who we
actually are. It’s funny, when you get a bit famous, along the way
you get very stuck with who you’re supposed to be. So it’s not like
I’ve become a different person with this record, it’s more that I’ve
made the record because of who I am.”
‘Kidsticks’ is out now on ANTI-
57
AC
ROSS
THE
UNI
VERSE
One of them is French and best known as half
of Air. The other is Icelandic and made a name
for himself with Bang Gang. Together they are
STARWALKER and they’re lighting up the night
sky with their twinkling electropop songs
Words: DAVID STUBBS
Pictures: TAKI BIBELAS
58
“When there is too much beauty, it becomes too clean. We prefer
dirty beauty to pure beauty.”
So says Jean-Benoît Dunckel, one half of the hallowed French
duo Air, who first ascended in the late 1990s on a quite unexpected
wave of Gallic creativity that also encompassed the ingenious
tech-house of Daft Punk and the blue-eyed soul of Phoenix. Air’s
weightless retro-futurist pop, as evidenced on their ‘Moon Safari’
debut album, was the perfect soundtrack for those woozy, uncertain
times, dazed by trip hop and anticipating the post-space age of the
21st century.
Dunckel and his Icelandic pal Barði Jóhannsson (from Bang Gang
and Lady & Bird) are Starwalker, whose 2014 ‘Losers Can Win’ EP
earned much praise for stretching notional bubblegum pop music to
cinematic dimensions. Now Starwalker have released an eponymous
album which sees them “explore a universe together”, as Dunckel
puts it, drawing on the Air man’s synth sensibilities and robotically
plaintive, vocoderised vocals and Jóhannsson’s skills as a composer
and pop sculptor.
“When we started working together, we connected, we found
a nice presence,” says Jóhannsson of the pair’s initial recordings,
which followed a chance meeting at a festival. “After so many years
of working with different people, I think it’s important that the first
impression, the number one thing, is that you like someone, and
then you see if you can work together making music. When we did
that, something happened. It was as if we triggered something in
each other.”
‘Starwalker’ is an album of myriad, deceptive pleasures. ‘Holidays’ is
all cartoon sunbeams and a calculatedly inane vocal – “The sun is
bright and I feel alright” – giving way to genuinely warming waves of
synth-soaked, reverberating pop. ‘Blue Hawaii’ is faintly reminiscent
of the sort of deep azure mood favoured by The Associates; a
pleasure dome, but a place for rumination, not necessarily relaxation:
“You want to change the world / But the world can only change you”.
‘Radio’ is a lovely reminder of Air contemporaries Phoenix and is
in the tradition of countless musical tributes, from Kraftwerk to Rush,
to the medium’s favourite medium. By the time of ‘President’ and
‘Bad Weather’, the initially blue skies have developed into something
very interesting indeed; the “dirty beauty” to which Dunckel refers.
“It’s also emotional,” says Jóhannsson. “It’s got everything.”
Air dropped into a fairly untroubled world, the relatively tranquil
pre-millennial era. I wonder how they feel Starwalker sits in today’s
more fraught and darkened times?
“When you’re in Iceland, maybe the rest of the world is darker,
but it’s pretty nice here,” laughs Jóhannsson. “We don’t have an
army, we just have the Salvation Army, that’s the only army we have.”
Well, they did jail their corrupt bankers, at least.
STARWALKER
STARWALKER
Jean-Benoît Dunckel and Barði Jóhannsson represent two countries
generally believed to have no modern musical histories before Daft
Punk and Björk respectively, despite being major global hubs today.
But both France and Iceland have deeper national pop traditions
than is often assumed.
“There is great 70s music from Iceland, psychedelic bands like
Trúbrot, for example,” says Jóhannsson. “But I think Björk and The
Sugarcubes unlocked the door for a lot of indie bands, showing them
there was a possibility for them to make it. When I was 20 years old
and starting to make music, there was no radio station that would
play my stuff. But this freed me. It meant I felt I could play whatever I
wanted, since there was no chance that radio would play it. But then
accidentally that music did end up on the radio.”
When I interviewed Dunckel with his Air partner Nicolas Godin
way back when, they played me a number of French albums from the
1960s and 1970s; immaculate, filmic, chic pop, none of which I had
come across before. This was their musical hinterland, submerged
from international sight.
“Yes, of course, this music is from when I was a small child,” says
Dunckel. “You’re right, this music didn’t cross the border because of
the language barrier. I’m not just thinking of Serge Gainsbourg, but
also artists like François De Roubaix, a film score composer who
used synthesisers and drum machines in the 60s and 70s [and who
sadly died in a diving accident in 1975].”
If French pop was once invisible to the wider world, it’s
interesting that Daft Punk chose to hide their faces when they went
global, a tactic that Dunckel understands.
“I don’t mind not being them!” he says. “It’s good not to be
over-exposed. I like Air remaining a little in the shadows, for the
music to be well known, but for the people who make it to be a
little mysterious.”
He adds that he finds the process of interviews irksome,
particularly television interviews, a medium with a facade of
showbiz politesse.
“Sometimes I am tempted to answer questions with really horrible
things, not politically correct things.”
Jóhannsson shares this disdain but comes from a very different
background, having tried his hand at TV with a bizarre programme
called ‘Konfekt’, extracts of which can be seen on YouTube. It was an
almost Dadaist attempt to tear through the bland, cathode veneer of
television, which ultimately was too much for Iceland’s broadcasters.
“It was a one-off show,” explains Jóhannsson. “We tried to sell
the sequel to the TV stations five years ago, but they said it was too
brutal. We wanted to do a show that hated the audience and remind
the audience frequently that the show did not like them. But the TV
stations didn’t want to put money into this idea. One thing we did
was we interviewed a famous writer, but when we watched the tape
back it seemed quite boring... so we reversed parts of it to make it
more interesting. The general public didn’t understand this, though.
A 10-minute interview, six minutes of which were backwards.”
In 2003, he also made a promotional mockumentary, ‘Who Is
Barði?’, in which he sets himself up as an enigmatic “arsehole”.
“My record company wanted to do a press film, but those things
are always the band in the studio making themselves seem like cool
artists. If I was a journalist, I thought I’d be bored to receive a promo
like this. I wanted to make something that would be more fun. So I
made myself out to be this horrible, pretentious arsehole. It’s a
fake promo, but maybe 10 per cent of it is true. It ended up touring
film festivals. People weren’t sure if it was serious or not.”
“EVEN COUPLES
LIKE TO HAVE
A THREESOME
SOMETIMES”
So where do Starwalker see themselves on the electronica
spectrum, which these days harks back to pasts manqué as much
as it tries to foretell the future?
“We want a sound that sticks, a sound that is timeless,” says
Jóhannsson. “Much of today’s music is very compressed, designed
to be played through computer speakers. In 20 years, when we have
computers with amazing speakers and dynamic sounds, this music
is going to seem very small. With the mastering, we were looking to
make the sound warm and fat, so everything is organic and dynamic.
This is more futuristic than making music just for today’s demands.”
“I like both digital and analogue,” adds Dunckel. “Digital is good
for anything linked to information and data, but analogue is good
for warm sound. It’s interesting to use the force of the two worlds.
Analogue technology is actually still progressing. It’s not a thing of
the past, there is still research in this area.”
Even this late on, do they still encounter the Luddite idea that their
music is somehow not “real”?
“Among classical musicians, yes,” says Jóhannsson. “Having
finished school, they have to justify their own studies. So when you
ask classical musicians to do something minimalistic and you come
from a pop world, they’ll say, ‘Yeah, this is simplistic’. Yet they are
happy to play Satie or Glass, which is minimalistic and repetitive,
that’s somehow OK. Still, it’s getting better. Twenty years ago, metal
people shouldn’t speak to rock people, classical people shouldn’t
speak to anybody to do with any pop, but now everybody is into
everything.”
Dunckel and Jóhannsson are happy working as a duo; it’s
what they’re used to. One is too lonely, three or more is a crowd,
bogged down by tedious discussions, group meetings and musical
differences. It’s one of the advantages of the compact electronic
format, they say.
“It’s a different dynamic, of course,” notes Dunckel of the contrast
between working with Jóhannsson and with his long-time Air
partner Nicolas Godin, with whom he will be touring later this year.
“It’s like couples in love.”
“But occasionally we bring in other musicians,” adds Jóhannsson.
“Even couples like to have a threesome sometimes.”
Channelling the ghost of Cilla Black from ‘Blind Date’, I ask if
they’ll be working together again in the future.
“I think this was Starwalker album number one,” says Dunckel.
“We have ideas left over after the recording, plenty left to explore.
This has been a pop album, but next time we will go in more extreme,
artistic directions. Sometimes you are not doing things for the people
of now, sometimes it’s for the people of the past or the future.”
‘Starwalker’ is out now via Prototyp Recording & Bang Ehf
61
62
NISENNENMONDAI
HASHTAG
INNOVATION
Take Japanese noiseniks-turned-minimalists
NISENNENMONDAI. Add a big dollop of On-U
production wizard ADRIAN SHERWOOD.
The result is ‘#N/A’, an album where human frailty
meets precision engineering
Words: MARK ROLAND
Three Japanese women step onto a stage. One of them picks up a
bass, another sits at a minimal drum kit, and a third with a guitar
around her neck starts playing a series of patterns which are picked
up, repeated and filtered by some of the dozen or so devices she has
wired together on a table in front of her. The hi-hats join the pattern,
scarily precise, then the bass starts to pulse. All three players are
locked in, focused, inward.
The performance has all the cleanliness and precision of a robot
factory line spot welding cars. It includes the thrilling occasional
sprays of dancing hot sparks and it’s just as mesmerising. At times,
like on the bouncy ‘#3’, it’s reminiscent of those Conny Plank and
Mani Neumeier albums, like ‘Zero Set’.
This is Nisennenmondai, formed in Japan in 1999, much beloved
by the post-rock cognoscenti for their outré approach to the idea of
what a band should be. Take the group’s first EP, ‘Sorede Souzousuru
Neji’ (‘So Imagine The Screw’). Three of the five tracks are named
after bands: ‘Sonic Youth’, ‘This Heat’, ‘Pop Group’. Much like
the work of these artists, the music is a spectacular collision of
distortion and noise.
“I first started playing the guitar when I joined a music club at
university,” explains Masako Takada, the most forthcoming of the
trio. “When I first heard the senior students play ‘noise’ music,
alternative and instrumental music which was unfamiliar to me at the
time, I thought it was so cool, even though I didn't really understand
it. Also with noise music, I thought I could give it a go myself, even if
I couldn’t play any instrument. From then on, I started making noisy
instrumental music.”
Once she’d taken the plunge, Takada quickly encountered The
Velvet Underground and Silver Apples. When she started playing
gigs, people would ask her if she was into the likes of Can and Neu!
and PiL. Which, at the time, she wasn’t.
“I was listening to Gong, but then I discovered krautrock. As the
band progressed and started incorporating repetitive loops, I
became more aware of techno and disco... and here we are. I’ve not
listened to a lot of music, but I’ve picked up influences from different
genres at crucial points.”
63
Nisennenmondai sit at that nexus between guitar noise and
electronica, a magical mystery zone where the impulsive explorer
plays around with sound and form, looking for new textures and
moods in the kinds of places that have attracted everyone from
Can to Chris & Cosey to Factory Floor over the years, places where
you’ll also find the current crop of motorik freaks.
Ever since their noisy early days, Nisennenmondai (the name
refers to the Y2K bug – remember that, technophobia fans?) have
been on a mission of reduction. Drummer Sayaka Himeno, once
very keen on splashing around an array of cymbals, now plays with
just kick, snare and hats, and with a discipline that borders on the
supernatural (“You need to practice daily and concentrate very
hard,” is her matter-of-fact answer when I ask her how she does
it). Yuri Zaikawa’s basslines, which previously riffed and provided
melody, are now either luscious slabs of slowly moving pure tone or
single note pulses held for 10 minutes or more at a time.
“A lot of our music has single notes, yet structured without any
break, so I play standing straight and still in order not to play a wrong
note,” says Zaikawa. “I don’t really do classic basslines and riffs, but
you can’t get away with making mistakes. It’s challenging to shut
down every single emotion and play a single note mechanically.”
Masako Takada’s guitar meanwhile no longer slashes and burns
with post-punk fury, but is instead a series of loops and textures,
layered and filtered, the work of a technician. And so the roomy
messiness of Nisennenmondai’s initial work, all snare rattle, earth
buzz and beery rehearsal room ambience, has mutated into clean,
regimented minimalism on the group’s new album, ‘#N/A’.
One of the reasons for this is the fact that On-U Sound man Adrian
Sherwood, the UK’s very own producer of legend, is at the controls.
That clunky but hashtag-hip album title means ‘Nisennenmondai
With Adrian Sherwood’, as well as suggesting that this music fits no
category; “not applicable”. Sherwood was introduced to the band by
Paul Smith from Blast First Records.
“He used to work with Nisennenmondai and was chatting about
them to me,” says Sherwood. “Lots of friends who were interested
in alternative stuff, any time that Japan was mentioned, they would
ask if I'd heard them. I checked them out and thought they seemed
really interesting. They have a real intense uniqueness about them.”
He was impressed when he saw them play, but less so when he
heard their albums.
“When I got the chance to work with them I thought, ‘Yes please,
that would be great’,” he continues. “I realised they hadn't really
made a good studio album, so I studied them live and thought about a
way of going about making an interesting studio record.”
Sherwood describes his contribution to ‘#N/A’ as emphasising the
“sonic intensity”. He wanted to make sure the album was recorded
well in the first place, clean signal paths and all that. When he was
satisfied that the band was happy and feeling creative, he travelled
to Tokyo and the whole thing was done and dusted in two days.
“We did a couple of overdubs to sparkle it up, but I kept it very
simple. You don't want to over-produce something like that, but at
the same time you’ve got to add that little extra 10 per cent, which
I think is the job of a producer. I didn’t want to go On-U crazy with it
either, so I made a conscious effort to use a similar set of sounds. I
only let myself go on a couple of the extra tunes we did.”
The two extra tracks were recorded live at the Tokyo club Unit,
with Sherwood on the mix.
“I was dubbing the shit out of it,” he laughs. “The fan base at that
gig was an On-U crowd, because it was my night in Tokyo I invited
them to play at, and I think a lot of the Japanese people were seeing
them for the first time. It kind of works both ways. People realise I do
more than just reggae-flavoured stuff and the band made a few fans
that night because they were brilliant.”
64
NISENNENMONDAI
‘#N/A’ is an album that rewards close listening, revealing both
Nisennenmondai’s and Adrian Sherwood’s attention to detail, from
the slight scratches of sound and subtle atmospheres that emerge
out of the rhythmic precision, to the enveloping warmth of the
bass (you’d expect as much from Sherwood’s bass shaping chops),
to the overall sense of structure that isn’t entirely obvious on a
cursory listen. Themes weave in and out, but they might be metallic
clankings rather than melodies, and there’s always an airy sense
of space.
“I worked on the tone,” says Sherwood. “I used the same
approach as I do with reggae. I always work on getting the tonality
right, that's what I learned from all my years working with the
Jamaican producers, and I've applied that to everything I've ever
done. Get the right EQ on the hats, on the foot drum, as a picture
within that band. I tried to make a nice experience that captured
them and then I added my tonal things to it.”
What do the group think of Sherwood’s contribution?
“We worked very well together, I think,” says Takada. “We met
him for the first time in the recording studio and I was struck by his
gentlemanly vibes. I was worried at first, but when he put a live dub
and effects on a session we’d recorded, it sounded interesting. It felt
like we shared something in common, so I thought everything was
going to be alright with him.”
And their verdict on the end result?
“This album is completely different from our previous records,”
replies Takada. “In terms of tracks, when we do it ourselves, we get
a direction we want to follow, then we compose, then we record.
On ‘#N/A’, apart from a couple of tracks, we just recorded our jam
sessions. We also added some stuff afterwards on top of what’s
already been recorded, following Adrian’s suggestions.
“We usually communicate thoroughly with our engineer during
mixing and mastering, so we can achieve the music we think is ideal,
whereas this album was shaped by Adrian’s skill and keen sense
of sound. Because it contains a lot of objective perspectives
that enabled us to show our different side, it turned into a very
interesting work as a whole.”
And taken as a whole, with a pair of headphones clamped
onto your skull, ‘#N/A’ creates a feedback loop in your brain that
becomes almost meditative.
“When I’m playing well, I feel like I’m at one with nature,”
declares Takada.
“When various elements are working well together and I’m
concentrating, I feel like I’m in a trance,” adds Yuri Zaikawa.
Nisennenmondai might have made themselves sound like a
machine, but their special appeal lies in the fact that they are
not using machinery to generate their beats or engineer their
precision. Like mid-period Kraftwerk – an odd comparison for
sure, but bear with me – they play with the idea of a machine,
but the human frailty at the heart of what they do is what makes it
work. You hear the slips on the hi-hats and the fret buzzes, tiny but
instantly recognisably natural touches. None of this is quantised.
As if to prove the point, their most abiding memories of touring the
world are entirely human. They’re also particularly Japanese.
“They had natural hot spring water coming out of the shower in
a hotel in Iceland,” says Sayaka Himeno. “My skin felt so smooth
and I felt so relaxed. I was overjoyed by the power of hot springs!”
“I love it when people come and listen to Nisennenmondai in the
middle of nowhere and then we bump into a fan walking around in
a Nisennenmondai T-shirt in town the next day,” smiles Zaikawa.
“It’s amazing to think that we are patiently making music in a
corner of Tokyo but we’re connected to people from very far
away places.”
‘#N/A’ is out now on On-U Sound
65
PHONE OHM
“ T HE R A DIO W OUL D BE
T HE F INE S T P O S SIBL E
C OMMUNIC AT ION A P PA R AT U S IN
P UBL IC L IF E , A VA S T NE T W OR K
OF P IP E S . T H AT IS T O S AY, I T
W OUL D BE IF I T K NE W HO W
TO RECEIVE AS WELL AS TO
T R A NS MI T, HO W T O L E T T HE
L IS T E NE R SP E A K A S W E L L
A S HE A R , HO W T O BR ING HIM
IN T O A R E L AT IONSHIP INS T E A D
OF IS OL AT ING HIM . ON T HIS
P R INCIP L E , T HE R A DIO SHOUL D
S T E P OU T OF T HE S UP P LY
BU SINE S S A ND OR G A NIS E I T S
L IS T E NE R S A S S UP P L IE R S .”
BERTOLT BRECHT
The rise of tech and how we use it
to communicate is the central focus
of KARL BARTOS’ debut solo album
from 2003. We connect with the
former Kraftwerker to talk about the
welcome reissue of the record
Words: MARK ROLAND
Pictures: NEIL THOMSON
66
“I never liked this ambiguity about atomic energy and
bombs. I always thought it would have been much better
had they called it ‘Radio On’ or ‘Radio’, and stick on the
concept of communication.”
Karl Bartos is talking about Kraftwerk’s ‘RadioActivity’, his debut vinyl appearance with the band back
in 1975, a concept album that, in his eyes, was flawed
by its conflating of ideas about radio and radioactivity.
Nearly 30 years later, in 2003, Bartos put the “mistake”
right, by releasing his first solo album, ‘Communication’.
The record got lost in an internal reconstruction at his
then label, Sony (the usual woeful tale of corporate
neglect), and then, shortly after its release, he was
offered a post lecturing at the University of Berlin.
“I stayed there for five years and forgot about the
record,” says Bartos, his face crumpling into a broad
grin, as it does many times during our time together,
chatting in a hotel bar and later trawling the streets near
London’s Green Park looking for suitable backdrops for
the photos. “But there it was, gathering rust, so why not
re-release it?”
So here it is then, ‘Communication’, sounding great 13
years on, sparkly and remastered. There’s a small pile of
the CDs on the table between us. The guy from the label
responsible for the re-release beams at us happily. The
album is presciently fixated on image making, whether
it’s photography or the process of fame.
“‘Communication’ in a way was my ‘Radio-Activity’,”
explains Bartos. “But it’s not about radio. Radio is very
important, should I say was very important, especially
in America. And at the beginning of the 20th century, it
was the media. Bertolt Brecht actually said that every
listener should be an antenna and be able to receive
and transmit. There should be a communication going
on, but instead we just have receivers. He foresaw
the situation of what television would be in the future,
where you have the TV connected to the internet and
you can respond… [he pauses to look up at the TV
above us in the bar and address the newsreader on the
screen, saying ”Change your tie, please”]. So I thought
I’d make a record on the media, based on the thinking of
philosophers and theorists such as Marshall McLuhan
and Neil Postman. I always liked these ideas.”
KARL BARTOS
67
‘Communication’ explores the belief that the media we
use shapes our thoughts; that, as McLuhan famously
explained, the medium is the message. At the time
of the original release of the album, Time magazine
announced 2003 was the year the camera phone came
of age, because ownership had reached critical mass,
and because the impact it had on people’s lives had
already provoked a backlash, mainly around ideas of
privacy invasion, never mind selfie deaths and the hypernarcissism of the social media age. Was Bartos thinking
about any of this when he embarked on ‘Communication’?
“The funny thing is, I was thinking about the past,”
he says. “I read ‘On Photography’ by Susan Sontag,
and she was observing the way photography in the
past had changed thinking. Neil Postman said that, as
people photographed the world, the world changed;
people became objects. Photography and film are
part of modern mind construction tools. At the end of
Sontag’s book, which I highly recommend, it’s supercheap, is a collection of quotations from Polaroid camera
advertisements. I stole some lines from that.”
So that line, “I take a picture of the world” was from a
Polaroid advert?
“Probably,” he smirks.
The lyrics on ‘Communication’ are often simplistic,
not quite as reduced as Kraftwerk lyrics, but not far off.
In ‘Ultraviolet’, Bartos repeats the words, ‘I had to return
a video tape…’ until it becomes an almost nightmarish
mantra, while simultaneously making you laugh at the
very thought of it. When did any of us last need to return
a video tape?
“That’s from another book, ‘American Psycho’,” he
explains. “This guy is running through Manhattan, he’s
killing people and he has to return a video tape. It’s about
visual media. I wasn’t interested in the violent story, I
was interested in the state of mind of someone sitting
in his apartment in Manhattan, watching television. I
thought it could be everybody and everywhere, this
strange character in front of a TV with his remote
control, zapping through the channels. What would he
see? Some commercials about cars, cars that improve
his sex appeal, and he feels insulted, and sooner or
later there is an anchorman who says, ‘And now…’,
so he’s experiencing this cut-up reality. It feels like I
have described this character, and he’s observing this
cut-up reality.”
68
This story is very
complex, and for once
in my life I wanted to
write it down correctly
Is ‘Communication’ a concept album, like ‘RadioActivity’ was?
“It is a concept album, but in the end it’s just music,
pop music with simple words. If you don’t understand
what I’m saying, you should at least have this layer of
simple words and pop music; ‘The camera’s going to
be my best friend’, that’s fine with me. But nothing is
so hard to achieve as simplicity. If I have to explain it, I
might refer to Susan Sontag’s book, and she’s referring
to another source, like you do at university, but then
the problem is it’s not pop music anymore. Sometimes
I like to write a song like ‘15 Minutes Of Fame’; ‘Stars
ain’t what they used to be’, it’s just blah-blah, but there’s
another level, if I write down what it all means, it loses
the secret.”
The album heavily features that constant Kraftwerk
sonic helpmeet, the vocoder. What is it that seem so
attractive to electronic musicians about the sound of
synthesised speech?
“It’s like in fables, in ‘Animal Farm’, when animals
start to talk… or sometimes in cartoons, when, say, a
bottle talks to the alcoholic, ‘Drink me!’. If an idea, or
not a human being, starts talking, this is the thing. So in
connection to Kraftwerk, the technology talks, teknik
talks. So it gives you another perspective, there's me as
a human being, but I can let somebody else talk. ‘I’m a
big engine and I drive on the autobahn…’ and then the
car starts talking, you hear the sounds of the car. So I
think this is the attraction: we want to make technology
itself articulate the meaning.”
By contrast, your voice is very human, almost fragile,
and quite naked.
“This is what I like,” he says. “And by the way, it’s
not always a vocoder, it’s speech synthesis, which is a
different thing. You have the phonemes, and you put the
phonemes to words, and then you put the words together,
so it’s really data entry.”
KARL BARTOS
Deconstructing language into its little carriers?
“Into the tones,” he confirms. “So we have the real
voice, which is apparently my point of view, so it’s
autobiographical, or it’s someone else, like a journalist,
approaching a subject. ‘15 Minutes Of Fame’ is from a
journalist’s perspective, whereas ‘Life’ is just firstperson singular, me, I. And then ‘The Camera’ is just epic,
and it was good to be able to put a big thing like that on
the shoulders of somebody anonymous. Lou Reed could
have done it in his New York intellectual way, but that
doesn’t feel right for me, but this machine, it could do it,
so I’m not responsible, it’s the machine.”
Are you writing any new musical material?
“All the time,” he nods. “I wrote a Christmas song
recently, but it’s just music, and music only becomes
important if I share it with other people, otherwise it’s
just my music, inside me, inside my head. It makes me
warm from the inside. When I start producing music, it’s
a process. I have the vision, and as it becomes reality
I’m responsible that the gap between my vision and the
reality is not too big.”
When he’s not in London talking about his music,
Bartos’ time is taken up writing his autobiography. He
keeps office hours, going into his studio after breakfast
and writing for six hours a day. He says he’s on his third
pass through his life story, filling in the gaps, checking
the dates and events he’s chronicling against the
evidence in his diaries, which he has kept since 1969.
The diaries, he says, capture everything.
“Being in America for the first time in 1975, meeting
Bettina [his wife] in 1977, playing The Ritz in New York
with Kraftwerk, some reflections, some thoughts…”
So will it tell the full story of his time in Kraftwerk or,
thanks to Raph Hütter’s famously litigious tendencies,
skirt around it?
“I have no secrets,” he smiles. “I never have. This
story is very complex, and for once in my life I wanted to
write it down correctly, in my words, and to make sure
that everything I say is right, at least my version of the
truth, the way I consider reality. There are many threads
going on, the music thread, the business thread, there’s
my own life and the life of the group. There are so many
parallel lines and they have to be communicated with no
improvisation, I have to write it down in counterpoint, in
a musical way. And this is how I approach the book. It’s a
little bit like the composition of a musical form.”
The process is “a nightmare” he adds with a laugh.
“But some people will be surprised by how it all looks
from the inside.”
We can’t wait.
‘Communication’ is out now on Trocadero 69
18-CARAT
LOVE AFFAIR
THE ASSOCIATES, 1981. LEFT TO RIGHT:
JOHN MURPHY, MICHAEL DEMPSEY, BILLY
MACKENZIE, ALAN RANKINE, DEREK REID
70
THE ASSOCIATES
Arty new wave outsiders who became
unlikely pop stars, THE ASSOCIATES shook
the 80s firmly by its lacy lapels. Three
decades on, bandmates Alan Rankine and
Michael Dempsey try to make some sense
of it all…
Words: STEPHEN DALTON
Pictures: SHEILA ROCK
Billy MacKenzie and Alan Rankine met on the
Scottish cabaret circuit in 1976, forming an instant
bond that would span two decades of hits and splits,
break-ups and breakdowns. It was a rare, potent,
combustible chemistry that made The Associates
one of the most glamorously strange British bands
of the 1980s.
Blessed with a unique voice of volcanic power
and multi-octave range, Dundee-born Billy
MacKenzie was a hugely charismatic frontman.
The eldest of six children from a working class family
with Irish traveller heritage, he was diabolically
charming, elusive, bisexual, given to myth-making
about his colourful life, but easily bored and prey to
mercurial mood swings. Raised in Linlithgow near
Edinburgh, Alan Rankine was younger and provided
a stable anchor for his friend’s flighty temperament.
A gifted multi-instrumentalist, he combined darkly
brooding good looks with the quick-witted skills
to translate MacKenzie’s audacious ideas into
magnificent music.
“They were a very unusual partnership, but
they bounced off each other brilliantly,” recalls
Michael Dempsey, who left The Cure to play bass for
MacKenzie and Rankine after The Associates signed
to the London-based Fiction label in 1979. “I’d never
heard anything like it. I’d come from The Cure, which
was a completely different world. The Associates
didn’t really sound like anything else to me then...
and they still don’t now.”
Drawing their electrifying energy from Roxy
and Bowie, Sparks and Moroder, Billie Holiday and
Diana Ross, funk and soul and disco, The Associates
created maximalist mini-operas of emotionally
charged, densely layered, high-gloss melodrama.
MacKenzie’s self-styled “screeching hysterics”
delivery suggested euphoric release, but always
with a hint of mania behind his twinkle-eyed, heavily
dimpled smile.
“I think it must have been quite tortuous to be him,”
Rankine says of his late musical comrade. “Singers
and frontmen, that’s a hell of a lot of pressure. Bill
couldn’t turn off the creativity within him. I think
sometimes he just wanted someone to open up the
back of his head and take out his brains, like blankets
that had been in the spin dryer, then fold them neatly
and put them back.”
72
THE ASSOCIATES
AL AN R ANKINE
After a brief but incandescent imperial phase, the
classic Associates line-up was over by 1982. Now
their first three albums from this blazing first act –
‘The Affectionate Punch’, ‘Fourth Drawer Down’ and
‘Sulk’ – are being repackaged in expanded double
CD and vinyl editions. Charged with overseeing the
project, Michael Dempsey spent nine months tracking
down more than 600 tapes in various studios and
vaults. He also handled negotiations with the lawyer
appointed by Billy MacKenzie’s family to look after
his estate.
“Everything about their existence was chaotic, so
the placement of master tapes was equally chaotic,”
says Dempsey. “They were all over the place. They
were stuck in record company cupboards, basements,
studios. Warners had some, Universal had some, I
had some which I’d kept my hands on. We haven’t got
everything, though. I’m very often asked for the multitrack masters for ‘Club Country’ and ‘Party Fears Two’,
which long ago disappeared. Nobody really knows
what happened to a lot of the tapes. There are stories
that Billy found a home for them at the bottom of the
River Tay. That was the story of ‘The Glamour Chase’,
one of his later albums.”
Among the half a dozen previously unheard tracks
scattered across the reissues are a ragged cover of
the vintage Paul & Barry Ryan hit ‘Eloise’, a couple of
shelved collaborations with future Stone Roses and
Radiohead producer John Leckie recorded at Abbey
Road Studios, and a handful of scrappy sketches from
the duo’s early years in punk-era Edinburgh.
“Some of these tracks I haven’t heard for 35 years,”
laughs Alan Rankine. “There’s a song called ‘Jukebox
Bucharest’... that’s going back 38 years! It’s too fast
for its own good. My guitar sounds like a wasp that’s
about to die, it’s so tinny and massively compressed.
There’s nothing that makes me cringe, but the naivety
in some of the performances and some of the lyrics...
You think, ‘Eeee!’, but it does kind of fit in with the
punk ethos.”
MacKenzie and Rankine were equally punk in
their embrace of analogue electronics. If their
early recordings sound wonky, warped and slightly
otherworldly now, that’s because they treated
technology as a toy to be creatively abused and
studios as experimental sound laboratories. Rankine
recalls using a Fairlight synthesiser and early
Roland drum machines, but also finding alternative
percussion sources, like an electric typewriter with
its carriage return lever stuck on shuddering repeat.
“The mixing of analogue and digital definitely
made things sound a little out of sync with each
other,” he nods. “I really can’t think of one song
where anything was sequenced.”
“You weren’t going to get those two to read the
manual or learn how to programme a drum machine,”
laughs Dempsey. “There was probably one guy in
London at that time who knew how to programme
a TR-808, but we didn’t have the money to pay him
so we just pressed play. That was nearest The
Associates got to electronics for me.”
The crown jewel among the reissues is ‘Sulk’,
the sumptuous 1982 album that transformed The
Associates from cult-ish outsiders to bona fide
major label pop stars. It was recorded at Playground
Studio in Camden, the band blowing most of their
£60,000 advance from WEA Records on blockbooked sessions and a lengthy stay at the nearby
Holiday Inn, where they racked up huge weekly bills.
MacKenzie’s beloved pet whippets had their own
room, dining on expensive smoked salmon delivered
to their door. Vast amounts were also spent on
cashmere jumpers, taxis and unorthodox sonic
experiments, such as dunking drum kits under water
and urinating in guitars.
During the album’s all-night recording sessions,
the group became notorious for a reportedly
prodigious cocaine consumption, a reputation
that both Rankine and Dempsey insist has been
greatly exaggerated.
“We were probably doing about two grams of
cocaine between seven people in the studio in a
whole day,” Rankine protests. “We were actually
complete lightweights! Other bands were much
more excessive.”
In fact, their provincial innocence about drugs
almost proved fatal.
“We were so green,” continues Rankine. “One
night in the studio, we couldn’t get any coke, so we
got seven grams of amphetamine sulphate. We didn’t
know the difference! So after two or three days in
the hospital on heart monitors, balls up inside our
bodies, cocks the size of fucking chestnuts... We
learned our lesson with that.”
73
‘Sulk’ became a Top 10 album in May 1982, spawning
two all-time classic singles, ‘Party Fears Two’
and ‘Club Country’, which the band promoted with
some memorably mischievous ‘Top Of The Pops’
appearances. Against the odds, The Associates had
gatecrashed the palace of pop.
“We just didn’t fit,” says Rankine. “We weren’t
new romantics. We didn’t obey any rules. We were
a bit barking mad. But you just go along for the ride.
Once that machine kicks into play, you’ve really just
got to go with it.”
“They weren’t trying to please anybody at all,”
says Dempsey. “The Associates never fitted in, they
were always on the outside, but not so far on the
outside as to be unlistenable. It’s not easy in places,
but if you persist it is interesting. There was also an
indie chart at the time and their early stuff did belong
in that world. But they had expensive habits, they
liked to stay in nice hotels, so pop exposure was a
necessary part of the equation. I don’t really think
that’s where they would have stayed forever, though.”
And so it proved. Inevitably, the obligations that
come with major label success soon became too
restrictive for a volatile free spirit like MacKenzie.
Never at ease on stage, the singer cancelled a
promotional tour for ‘Sulk’ at late notice, scuppering
a $600,000 deal with Seymour Stein’s fabled US
label Sire in the process. Rankine quit the band in
frustration, his friendship with MacKenzie in tatters.
“You could sense it,” recalls Rankine. “With a
world tour coming up, Bill just said, ‘There’s no
way I’m fucking doing this...’. But I don’t hold that
against him in any way. Not now. I know he didn’t
feel comfortable. I think he just wanted to create, he
didn’t want to do what was required of him. He felt
that was stagnation.”
“Billy had sort of tipped me off that this wasn’t
going to go much further,” says Dempsey, who left
the band soon after Rankine. “I don’t think even he
knew how he was going to dismantle it, but he did it
in pretty dramatic style, waiting until the night before
a gig up in Scotland to announce he wasn’t going to
do it. Prior to that, they had met up with Seymour
Stein and been offered a very substantial deal, but
Billy didn’t want to do it. I think Alan knew this was
going to be a struggle. Billy was such a forceful
character, you couldn’t make him do anything.”
74
Rankine admits he initially felt anger towards
MacKenzie for sabotaging The Associates, but
only for a few weeks. He now accepts the singer’s
reasons for aborting the tour were valid, since the
task of reproducing their lush studio sound onstage
was becoming increasingly laborious.
“It was too unwieldy,” nods Rankine. “In the
summer and autumn of 1980, we had been a lean
four-piece: guitar, bass, drums and Bill. Then
suddenly, two years later, we were a nine-piece with
two keyboard players, a female back-up vocal, a
male back-up vocal... and it was all wrong. It didn’t
feel right to me either, but I thought we would be
able to iron out the problems. We should have just
stripped it back again. Whether we would have got
away with that on a world stage, I don’t know, but
you’ve got to keep on moving things along.”
The Associates’ name endured for another eight
years, essentially as a vehicle for MacKenzie’s
erratic output, but he never regained the commercial
heights of ‘Sulk’. Both MacKenzie and Rankine
worked separately on a number of collaborations and
solo albums, briefly reuniting to write songs together
again in 1993. But as before, the singer’s allergy
to record companies and touring soon stifled any
comeback potential.
'THE AFFECTIONATE
PUNCH' (TOP),
'FOURTH DRAWER
DOWN' (BELOW LEFT)
AND 'SULK'
THE ASSOCIATES
In January 1997, Billy MacKenzie killed himself
by taking an overdose of prescription drugs and
paracetamol at his father’s house near Dundee.
Depression over his mother’s recent death was a
major factor. He was 39. His former band members
were deeply shocked.
“I never saw him tortured,” says Michael Dempsey.
“He was one of those people who was always upbeat
and always ready to move on to the next thing.”
A glorious musical fireworks display that ended
in tragedy, The Associates’ story now feels like an
unfinished symphony. Their premature demise left a
big question mark hanging. If MacKenzie had bitten
the bullet, signed to Sire and toured America, maybe
these self-destructive outsiders would be arenafilling alt-rock veterans today.
“That’s a very big ‘What if?’,” frowns Dempsey.
“Billy was never really a comfortable live performer
and he wasn’t someone who liked structure in the
slightest. He just wasn’t built for touring. Alan was
different, he was prepared to do it and he would have
enjoyed it as well. But if your singer isn’t prepared to
do that, it’s not going to happen.”
Alan Rankine has spent more than three decades
pondering what might have been if MacKenzie had
been more disciplined and career-minded.
“You can’t dwell on the past, there’s no point... but of
course I do,” he smiles. “I still think it would have come
apart at the seams at some stage. In time, the wheels
would have come off the wagon, without a doubt.”
Despite their relatively brief time in the limelight,
The Associates left a rich musical legacy. They remain
beloved by friends and contemporaries such as Bono,
Morrissey, Siouxsie Sioux, The Cure and Heaven 17,
while many younger artists cite Billy MacKenzie’s
spine-tingling vocal acrobatics as an inspiration. But
something so rich, strange and beautiful could never
have lasted.
“They were quite unmanageable, in virtually every
respect,” says Dempsey. “They were so headstrong,
they wanted to do what they wanted to do, they didn’t
think in terms of commercial decisions or having a
career in music. It’s a great story of a short-lived
success, but a very bright star when it did burn.”
BIL LY M ACKENZIE
The deluxe editions of ‘The Affectionate Punch’, ‘Fourth
Drawer Down’ and ‘Sulk’ are out now on BMG
75
album towards some unknown port. The
destination is not really the point, just
the apparently rudderless journey itself.
“The sail is down, the wind is gone,” he
sings at one point, underlining the sense of
doomed tranquility.
Sonically, lest you think this is just Eno
exercising his ageing and slackened vocal
chords for fun and profit, the piece is alive
with sound; disembodied mutterings and
whisperings, dots of noise darting around
convulsively or floating like plankton, dense
and nutritious. This stuff can only be heard
with headphones and is a reminder of Eno’s
mastery of landscaping for the ears, how he
can weave techniques of musique concrete
into proceedings and still be melodic.
‘The Ship’ revolves around the title track,
but there are three further offerings, a
trilogy called ‘Fickle Sun’. ‘Fickle Sun (ii)’ has
the eye-catching subtitle ‘The Hour Is Thin’
and this lovely descriptive phrase, like most
of the album’s lyrics, came out of a Markov
chain text generator. What’s that, you say?
Well, a Markov chain is a random process
BRIAN ENO
in which something undergoes a transition
The Ship
from one state to another under the
Warp
conditions of “memorylessness”, meaning
it doesn’t depend on a sequence of events
The engine room of ‘The Ship’ is Brian Eno’s
to achieve the next event. The transition
discovery that his voice can now hit
is contingent only on the current event.
previously unfathomable depths. So what
It’s hard maths, chiz chiz, but to a lay idiot
we get on the 20-plus minute opening
like me, it looks like a way of achieving the
title track of this album is a stentorian vox
William Burroughs cut-up technique without
regularly exercising that low C, rattling the
glassware in a series of simple melodic lines. scissors, using the wonder of the internet
and someone else’s clever coding.
It’s a sound that resonates and undulates
‘Fickle Sun (iii)’, the final piece here, counsteadily as it takes a bathyscaphe trip
opts The Velvet Underground’s ‘I’m Set Free’.
down to its murky seabed at the end of
It was Eno who said that while only 30,000
each stanza.
people bought the first Velvets’ album, they
Eno’s vocals are predictable because
all went on to form bands (he actually said
he sings the same tune over and over, four
it to Lou Reed), so it seems fitting that he
white notes from the key of C, but they
should cover them after all this time. And
waver and shift and always resolve on that
that, on a record focused on voices, he
timber-shivering low note, while another
voice, rendered into a processed and crackly should choose a track on which the vocals
drone, harmonises throughout. It’s peculiarly are layered prettily together in a beautifully
constructed ballad that saw the Velvets
affecting and pleasant.
The track has echoes of Gavin Bryars’
saintly ‘Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet’,
a live performance of which was released
on Eno’s Obscure label in 1975. ‘Jesus’ Blood’
was a tape loop of a few lines being sung by
a homeless man, ornamented and built on
by Bryars until it achieved a breathtaking
unearthliness. ‘The Ship’ doesn’t have the
same out-of-body spirituality pushing it into
the heavens, but it certainly connects the
listener to the eponymous water vessel,
with its mournful and hypnotic sea shanty.
Glistening electronic strings, Eno’s
discreet trademark (no-one else does
ambient the way that he does), overlap
and slowly shift the currents of the
FLOAT ON
76
THE BACK
consciously move away from the frenetic
and edgy experimentalism of their first
two albums. Eno’s cover is straight up, no
messing around.
So where does this new ambient work
sit in the Eno canon? Like a lot of his music,
the decisions he makes, and the man
himself, ‘The Ship’ is an elusive bugger.
There’s something hiding in plain sight about
it, as there is about him. For all his clarity
and ubiquitousness – producing Coldplay
and U2, delivering the John Peel Lecture,
campaigning for various worthwhile causes,
appearing on ‘Question Time’ – he slips out
of your grasp just as you think you might
have a handle on him. It’s part of what
makes him so interesting.
And so, in homage to Eno’s methods,
the rest of this review has been written by
putting an early draft and the Wikipedia
entry on Eno through an online Markov chain
text generator. Some think you might be Eno.
He makes him. In 1996, he collaborated by
his modification. My Life in the program of
generating and of cards.
MARK ROLAND
BRIAN ENO
PHOTOGRAPHED BY
SHAMIL TANNA
77
SHIT ROBOT
SHIT ROBOT
What Follows
DFA
TIM HECKER
Love Streams
4AD
A Dublin boy who fell in with
The Canadian composer’s eighth
James Murphy’s crowd while
album, his first for 4AD, was
DJing in New York, Shit Robot’s
recorded in the same Reykjavik
genesis should be an electronic
studio as parts of his last outing,
fairy tale, but Marcus Lambkin’s ‘Virgins’, whose approach to
project has always seemed more “avant-classical orchestration
pumpkin than Prince Charming.
and extreme electronic
On ‘What Follows’, he takes a
processing” it shares. Check
new approach – and the DFA
the gorgeous synths on ‘Music
Chicago house manifesto has
Of The Air’, or the numerous,
never been clearer. The DFA
heavily processed contributions
tropes are nothing new here, a
from the Icelandic Choir
neater comparison may be the
Ensemble. Though somewhat
Pet Shop Boys’ recent clubbier
detached in places, there’s
sound, but this is a rejuvenated
something deeply spiritual
Robot with better dancefloor
about this music. ‘Love Streams’
smarts. FR
bleeds craft and devotion and
deserves your attention. CoG
78
HIGHASAKITE
AMP STUDIO
Camp Echo
Propeller Recordings
Uncertainty Principle
Ampbase
Norwegian five-piece
Highasakite’s second album is
apparently a political affair, its
themes filtered through the 15
years of angst since 9/11. Little
of that is evident in anything
audible here, though. ‘Camp
Echo’ is, first and foremost, a
clever IDM-flecked pop record
full of deceptive choruses, with
tracks like ‘Samurai Swords’,
‘Deep Sea Diver’ and ‘Someone
Who’ll Get It’ feeling like
refreshing blasts of icy air from
across a fjord. MS
Happenchance is at the root
of these two discs, the tracks
generated through a series of
unpredictable coincidences and
events. Richard Amp comes to
his sonic explorations by way
of sound itself (thanks to early
exposure to a BBC sound effects
album), rather than traditional
melody. Once adjusted to an
aesthetic that rejects tunes,
these swirling interventions
of raw tones and noise can
be quite beautiful, capable of
simultaneously filling a space
and emptying a room in under
10 minutes. MR
THE BACK
BETH ORTON
BE TH OR TON | PHOTO: TIERNE Y GE A RON
M AT THE W BOURNE | PHOTO: MICHAEL ENGL AN
TELEMAN
NIAGA R A
Kidsticks
ANTI-
moogmemory
The Leaf Label
MATTHEW BOURNE
TELEMAN
Brilliant Sanity
Moshi Moshi
Hyperocean
Monotreme
NIAGARA
The original acoustic/electronic
line-blurrer, Beth Orton makes
a welcome return with Fuck
Buttons’ Andrew Hung on
co-production duties. Opener
‘Snow’, with Orton’s folky pipes
atop a slap-bang-right-now
backing, leaves you in no doubt
you’re in for a treat. Highlights
include the frantic swirling
‘Petals’ and the infectious popfuelled ‘1973’. The whole thing
is beautifully playful, a gleeful
warm hug of a record that sets
Orton a good head and shoulders
above the competition. SR
Tinkering in his studio in the
wilds of rural West Yorkshire,
‘moogmemory’ is an intense
collection of purely organic
synth material. All recorded
on the Lintronics Advanced
Memorymoog (modified by
Moog wizard Rudi Linhard),
this is refined perfection. The
composition, tone and mood are
all impeccably arranged through
the non-digital environment
they were created in. Serene
and delicate, Matthew Bourne
shows that traditional methods
of production can outclass the
more modern means. FM
For the follow-up to their 2014
debut ‘Breakfast’, the east
London art rock four-piece
turn up the gas with a record
bursting with crowd-pleasing
goodness. Ghosts in the machine
abound – Pixies in ‘Glory
Hallelujah’ and Julian Cope-isms
in ‘Melrose’ – while ‘Drop Down’
is a treat, a swirling, locked
groove monster of no mean
proportions. Oh, and the opening
cut is called ‘Düsseldorf’. We
know a nod when we see
one. Sound of summer sorted,
basically. NM
Our favourite zany Italians
have delivered a second album
of beautiful experimental
electronica. ‘Hyperocean’ is a
dark, funky record, not afraid
to push the boundaries (if it
has any at all). Conceptualised
around water, ‘Mizu’ flows
gracefully before fracturing into
a cacophony of glitches and
abstract rhythms, and the whirrs
and hums of ‘Fogdrops’ swiftly
turn into a tsunami of rhythmic
booms offset against avantgarde vocals. Do they sell this by
the bottle? FM
79
BURIED
TREASURE
UNEARTHING ELECTRONIC GOLD
A proper best-kept secret, 1980s Edinburgh outfit WIN
are the greatest band most people have never heard of
Until fairly recently, I had no idea that Edinburgh’s stuff-of-legend
Fast Product label – who released The Human League’s ‘Being
Boiled’ single – had a sister label. To me, Pop Aural was just home
to the entirely magnificent Fire Engines, who debuted in December
1980 and burnt out in under a year.
Fast forward to 1988 and I’m a first year art student at Sheffield
City Polytechnic, Psalter Lane branch. One afternoon, an aspiring
documentary filmmaker called Lois Davis was in the building to
give a talk about her work. Turns out she’d done some pop promo
production, most notably working with Derek Jarman on Orange
Juice’s ‘What Presence?!’. She’d also been involved with a band
called Win. From Edinburgh. She showed us a video, can’t recall
which one. It took a second or two for the penny to drop, but
Win were the new band of former Fire Engines’ frontman Davy
Henderson and drummer Russell Burn.
The plan was screamingly obvious: make polished major label pop
and score a ton of hits. Win unleashed two almighty albums, the first,
1987’s ‘Uh! Tears Baby (A Trash Icon)’, was awash with potential
hits, including ‘Super Popoid Groove’, ‘Shampoo Tears’, ‘Binding
Love Spell’, ‘Un-American Broadcasting’ and ‘Hollywood Baby Too’.
And that was just the first side. We’ve not even got to the stone-cold
Number One elect, ‘You’ve Got The Power’.
And yet, somehow, Win barely scraped the Top 40. I’ve often
wondered why Win weren’t massive. Even now, both of their albums
sound as fresh as daisies. Their second, 1989’s ‘Freaky Trigger’, was
a little more leftfield but no less pop-fuelled, and it fared no better.
Worse even. Win were duly knocked on the head in 1990. Thankfully,
Henderson resurfaced as Nectarine No. 9 and Burn as Pie Finger and
Spectorbullets. The pair worked together again recently, with Burn
producing Henderson’s current band, The Sexual Objects.
A few years back, I was talking to Fast Product label boss Bob
Last. We chatted about his work as the music supervisor on films
such as ‘Chocolat’, ‘A Room For Romeo Brass’, ‘Little Voice’ and
‘Backbeat’, and as a producer with Terence Davies and on the Oscarnominated animation ‘The Illusionist’. Which was all very interesting
because I’ve always thought Davy Henderson’s music had a certain
soundtrack-ish appeal. So I asked Last about Henderson. They’re
still pals. Has he, I wondered, considered using Henderson for a film
soundtrack? He laughed like a drain. It had never crossed his mind,
but he said he’d give it some thought. I hope he did.
NEIL MASON
DAVE CLARKE
Charcoal Eyes:
A Selection Of
Remixes From
Amsterdam
541
Europe’s most unwavering DJ/producer
uncorks recent remix cream
Since his debut as Hardcore in 1990, then as Directional
Force on his own Magnetic North imprint, Dave Clarke
has trampled over current fads like a dark lone rider
firing off Molotov electronic dirt bombs and seductive
lightning bolts.
When I used to run into him on the DJ circuit and
as labelmates on DeConstruction (who released his
seminal ‘Red’ trilogy), he always towered above the rest,
committed to hooking his crowds with the knowledge,
quality and power that extended into the music he
produced, prompting his friend and fellow conspirator
John Peel to name him “The Baron of Techno”.
While vapid careerists sold their souls, Clarke
operated at much deeper levels and never took no shit
from no one, to quote a band I once knew. Since 2008,
he’s been living in Amsterdam and ‘Charcoal Eyes’ is
a selection of remixes he’s served up in recent years;
compelling tales of mystery, imagination and electronic
battle, which invoke his essential grounding in punk,
electro and industrial forms, while hammering any
dancefloor they’re pointed at.
Here you will find Placebo swathed in high-rise
electronica and with a bass like a five-foot mosquito,
Louisahhh!!! & Maelstrom’s ‘Rough And Tender’
reinforced with a tugboat undertow as a sensual,
post-punk electro-thwacker, new-beat heroes Neon
Judgement laced with reverential wired attitude, and
a possible career peak as The Soft Moon’s ‘Wrong’
courses with the slashing funk of an Underground
Resistance electro beast.
Every track is an event. Further highlights include the
audacious dreamscape of Gazelle Twin’s ‘Exorcise’, two
juddering takes apiece on The Amazing Snakeheads’
‘Here It Comes Again’ and I Am Kloot’s ‘These Days Are
Mine’, while Crash Course In Science’s ‘Flying Turns’ and
House Of Black Lanterns & Ghettozoid’s ‘Broken’ display
Clarke’s darkly-hued collaborations with Mr Jones as
_Unsubscribe_.
Paraphrasing Patti Smith, Dave Clarke declares, “I
have fucked with the past, now it is time to dance with
the future” in the poem that accompanies his illuminating
notes, which explain each track’s backstory. He knows
he long ago transcended simple dance fodder, but this
evocative, unflinching collection places Clarke among
the all-time great revolutionaries of electronic music.
KRIS NEEDS
80
THE BACK
OL IVER COATES
W IRE | PHOTO: OW EN RICHA RDS
OLGA BEL L
OLIVER COATES
WIRE
Nocturnal Koreans
Pinkflag
Tempo
One Little Indian
OLGA BELL
JAMESZOO
The renowned cellist (last heard
round these parts on Anna
Merdith’s ‘Varmints’) uses his
weapon of choice to generate
almost all the sounds on
‘Upstepping’, his debut on Moshi
Moshi’s experimental offshoot
PRAH. Drawing influences
from Coates’ formative years –
practising and performing during
the day and being glued to
London pirate radio at night – it
wears both classical chops and
dancefloor licks with ease. It has
something of an ‘Original Pirate
Material’ garagey vibe too,
which is always welcome. NM
‘Nocturnal Koreans’ is a
collection of tracks generated
during the sessions for last
year’s ‘Wire’ album. Always
tempered by heartbreakingly
lush melody, an irresistible
twitchiness is ever present
in Colin Newman and Graham
Lewis’ unique take on the art of
songwriting. The title cut is as
good as anything Wire have ever
recorded. The extraordinarily
huge ‘Still’ is meanwhile a fine
gateway drug to tempt newbies
into the often difficult but
ultimately rewarding world of
one of the UK’s most influential
bands. MR
As the title suggests, Olga Bell’s
third album is all about speed.
A mish-mash of clubby beats
leading to more avant-garde
clicks and knocks, ‘Tempo’ flits
around in a strange, dream-like
world of noise that somehow all
fits together nicely. Confident in
its execution, it manages to be
both abstract and melodic, Bell’s
mesmerising vocals adding an
extra layer to the whole package.
‘Randomness’ epitomises
what the album is all about, its
hypnotic strangeness keeping
you listening. FM
The apparently disparate worlds
of 70s experimental jazz and
noughties electronica combine
with intriguing results on this
debut from Dutch producer
Mitchel Van Dinther. With
a spirit of playful musical
rule-breaking throughout its 11
tracks, there's noodling aplenty.
But even when Van Dinther
lets melodies scuttle off, he’s
ready with a firm hand to bring
them back into line. Among
the highlights,‘Toots’ climaxes
with a stampede of super-crisp
live beats and ‘Flu’ is wayward
stoner jazz-funk. BW
Upstepping
PRAH Recordings Fool
Brainfeeder
81
LONDON ELECTRONIC
ORCHESTRA
London Electronic Orchestra
Vinyl Factory
From Pete Tong’s Ibiza Proms to
The Heritage Orchestra, getting
all classical with electronic cuts
certainly has an appeal. Giving
it a contemporary feel comes
Chicagoan classical pianist and
electronic music head Kate
Simko. Fresh from the Royal
College of Music, where LEO
were born, Simko serves up a
silky smooth record. Largely
downtempo, with strings to the
fore and underpinned by the
gentlest of beats, expect it to
sprout roots on the terraces of
Ibizia this summer. SR
82
LONDON EL EC T RONIC ORCHES T R A
JOL LY M A RE | PHOTO: LORENZO FA RIEL LO
BOYS NOIZE
NISENNENMONDAI
BOYS NOIZE
JOLLY MARE
Mechanics
Bastard Jazz
#N/A
On-U Sound
The fourth solo outing from
Berlin wunderkind Alex Ridha
sees him shovel influences
galore into that wild techno
furnace in a celebration of
his craft. ‘Mayday’ embraces
everything from early rave (‘2
Live’) to hip hop (‘Rock The
Bells’ nods at LL and comes on
like ‘Paul’s Boutique’) to urban
soul (the delicious ‘Starchild’
featuring Poliça), and dare we
suggest opener ‘Overthrow’ is
a hardass nod to Fatboy Slim?
Even by Ridha’s always high
standards, ‘Mayday’ is one hell
of a triumph. NM
The new face (and glasses) of
Italian disco, turntablist Fabrizio
Martina hails from the sunny
shores of Puglia and has a PhD
in Vibration Dynamics tucked
into his budgie smugglers. Both
salient facts make perfect
sense upon hearing the slinky
sundowner funk of ‘Hun’ and the
crunchy geometric precision
underpinning ‘Steam Engine’,
complete with trumpeting
elephant sample. This is the
sound of selfie-strewn, pre-club
beach warm-ups. As debuts go,
it’s as smooth and dayglo orange
as an Aperol spritz. JS
Titled to mark the meeting
between the three Japanese
women of Nisennenmondai
and On-U bass-botherer Adrian
Sherwood, ‘#N/A’ finds the
latter applying his infamous
dub techniques to the former’s
long, minimalist jams. Fans of
variety should take their asses
elsewhere – this is guitar music
at its most motorik and hypnotic.
And if Sherwood is a little
restrained on the album tracks,
he really lets fly on an essential
second CD of live material. AH
Mayday
Boysnoize NISENNENMONDAI
THE BACK
S TA RWAL KER | PHOTO: TA KI BIBEL AS
M A RK MOORE | PHOTO: NICK KNIGHT
MELT YOURSEL F DOW N
MELT YOURSELF DOWN
MEMOTONE
STARWALKER
S’EXPRESS
Last Evenings On Earth
The Leaf Label
Chime Hours
Black Acre
Starwalker
Prototyp Recording & Bang Ehf
Enjoy This Trip
Needle Boss
Ever the category defiers, the
sub-Saharan poly-rhythms of
Melt Yourself Down head to the
dark heart of the city and never
has the time/place maxim felt
more apt. Crazed Pigbag gypsy
ska brass tussle with whirling
dervish hypnotics (‘Dot To
Dot’) and stadium rave meets
turbo-funk basslines (‘Jump
The Fire’). This is life-affirming,
adrenalinised stuff that might
sound relentless on a Monday
commute, but when you're
heading off to the Elysian fields
come summer, it’ll hit the spot.
The first track on Memotone’s
chilling second album begins
with sedate, Sunday brunch
jazz piano punctured by swells
of indeterminate noise, before
suddenly lurching into menacing
industrial techno. Elsewhere,
‘Chime Hours’ imagines a
bleak, post-apocalyptic future
soundtracked by recordings of
medieval rituals blended with
brooding synths, or muted cellos
colliding with grids of distorted
beats. These improbable
soundclashes give the album a
threatening, pagan atmosphere
that makes ‘The Wicker Man’
feel like a Disney cartoon. MS
From the get-go, the children’s
chorus of “Holidays / The sun
is high / And I feel alright” sets
the tone for this album from Air’s
Jean-Benoît Dunckel and Barði
Johannsson of Iceland’s Bang
Gang. It’s unmistakably Air-like
in its electronic dreaminess;
the atmospheres of psychedelic
ecstasy that pervades ‘Blue
Hawaii’, for example, might as
well be an Air song. A luscious
and romantic album, delicate
and insubstantial at times, yet
strangely affecting. MR
Mark Moore makes a welcome
return to releasing stuff with
a raft of S’Express re-rubs on
his new label. Make a beeline
for Chris & Cosey’s thumping
remix of ‘Lollypop’, the bold
‘Theme…’ update from The
Horrors’ Tom Furse, and Jagz
Kooner’s delicious old school
take on ‘Superfly Guy’. Moore
has always had excellent
musical radar, so although it’s a
little odd, the addition of original
cuts from newbies Fragile Souls
and Noam Kantatik are quite the
treat too. SR
CG
83
TUXEDOMOON / VARIOUS ARTISTS
Half-Mute / Give Me New Noise
Crammed Discs
JOHN CARPENTER
Lost Themes II
Sacred Bones
‘Half-Mute’, the first album from San
A one-off as a sci-fi/horror auteur, injecting
Francisco’s Tuxedomoon, is a justified
his genre with psychologically sophisticated,
post-punk classic: tentative synths and
dystopian style, John Carpenter also stands
primitive drum machines, jazz motifs, strings, out for his ability to self-score, which he’s
roughed-up industrial edges, some funk,
always done with wild aplomb.
some implied menace, and occasional nods
For this sequel to 2014’s first instalment,
to Roxy slickness and Residents artsiness.
again put together with son Cody and
Accompanying this reissue is ‘Give Me
godson Daniel Davies, Carpenter has
New Noise’, a collection of 13 re-imagined
assembled a previously unheard collection
versions of the songs on ‘Half-Mute’,
of stand-alone instrumental passages that
and on the whole it feels like a wasted
were either considered superfluous or
opportunity. Even the normally dependable
composed without visual accompaniment.
Foetus misfires, presenting ‘What Use?’
The fact remains, however, that
as a Laibach homage. The best tracks
Carpenter’s association with film is absolute,
are those that exploit the noisy potential
so it’s tricky not to imagine the sequences
of the originals – the industrial free jazz
these pieces might have scored, like the
expressiveness of 2kilos &More & Julius
80s tough-cop TV pilot that ‘Angel’s Asylum’
Gabriel on ‘KM/Seeding The Clouds’ or the
conjures. Aargh, those hair-metal guitars.
squeals and scrapes deployed by Simon
That said, this is mostly compelling stuff.
Fisher Turner and DopplAr.
‘Distant Dream’ electrifies and the glacial
Much of the rest is scrubbed-up, overly
proto-techno pursuit vibe of ‘White Pulse’
reverential and focused on hidden beauty.
instils fear and menace, just as the music for
It’s undeniably pretty, but it’s way too nice.
his best work – ‘Assault On Precinct 13’, say
The old noise, as the reissued set shows, is
– always has. CG
much better. MS
ANOHNI
84
PARQUET COURTS
WILD PALMS
Live Together, Eat Each Other
One Little Indian
‘Live Together, Eat Each Other’ was five
years in the making, during which time the
Wild Palms trio seem to have undergone
a stylistic metamorphosis from the
Interpol-meets-Joy Division-via-Bloc Party
melancholic rock of their debut. Here you’ll
find those rock angles subsumed into a
clever pop construct that fuses the fraught
synth shapes of Years & Years with a
soulful edge that has more in common with
mainstream R&B.
Highly processed and studio dependent
throughout, the album is at its best when
the multiple layers coalesce into something
epic and vital, as on ‘A Is For Apple’ and the
intriguingly slow build of ‘Hungry-Mouthed
Hunting Dogs’. Here as elsewhere, you'll
find electronics vying for attention with
clipped, reconstructed beats and softly
soaring guitars, making for a collection of
tracks that finds Wild Palms stretching out
and exploring just what a modern rock band
can be. MS
SPACE DIMENSIONAL CONTROLLER
Hopelessness
Rough Trade
Human Performance
Rough Trade
Orange Melamine
Basic Rhythm
The concert hall, piano-heavy compositions
of Antony And The Johnsons seem a
world away from Anohni’s new album, a
collaboration with Oneohtrix Point Never
and Hudson Mohawke.
‘Hopelessness’ is deeply embedded in
soulful dance music. Anohni’s unmistakable
deeper-than-deep voice remains, but
the words emerging from her mouth are
different. She’s urgently addressing
worldwide problems, from the story of
an Afghan girl whose family have been
killed by an unmanned US aircraft ('Drone
Bomb Me’) to the issues around global
temperature change (‘4 Degrees’). It’s a
record completely devoid of metaphor and
all the richer for it.
And then there’s the music. It’s up and
down, it’s dark and light. There’s a huge
array of electronic sounds punctuated
by sparse beats and the odd tinkering of
familiar instruments. Which could have been
annoyingly random, but is saved by Anohni’s
distinctive voice and direct narrative. SL
Parquet Courts are by no means the first
wise Americans to realise that there is
inspirational gold in them hills of The
Fall’s back catalogue. LCD Soundsystem,
Pavement and Sonic Youth, to mention just a
few, all had their own personal Fall fixations
running through their work, and now Parquet
Courts kicks off ‘Human Performance’ with a
‘Draygo’s Guilt’ earworm.
Apparently an attempt on the part of colead frontman Andrew Savage to reconnect
with his humanity after some kind of crisis of
confidence, the album mines that extensive
Jonathan Richman/Talking Heads/Fall seam
for all its worth, but with plenty of style,
melody and lyrical wit.
It comes as a bit of a shock when they
launch into the Elvis Costello pastiche,
the single ‘Berlin Got Blurry’, but ‘Human
Performance’ amounts to more than the sum
of its impeccable post-punk influences. MR
Like your electronica off-kilter, but not so
wibbly it makes your ears seep? You need
a bit of Belfast’s Jack Hamill in your life.
Career highs so far include releases on R&S
and a Boiler Room set of legend, but this, his
second full-length, eclipses the lot.
Here Hamill takes his teenage universe, in
turn inspired by his brother’s old VHS tapes
and 80s/90s sci-fi films, and with the help of
Casio synths, serves up a delightful hotchpotch, from the tip-toeing pops and crackles
of ‘West G Cafeteria’ to the plinky music box
Grandmaster Flash-isms of ‘Adventures In
Slime And Space’.
‘Orange Melamine’ is a record that
catches the attention time and again, thanks
not only to strange squibbly bits aplenty and
vaguely familiar samples galore, but also
because it’s so gloriously melodic. It will
have you reaching for those distant glimpses
of ‘Axel F’, Hans Zimmer, ‘The Twilight Zone’,
‘Ghostbusters’ and ‘The Fifth Element’ as
often as you press repeat. NM
THE BACK
LADYHAWKE
Wild Things
Mid Century
REMIXED!
Three albums in and finally staring down
the barrel of the big time? Let’s see…
The saying goes it’s the second album that’s difficult.
For Pip Brown, it seems they all are. Ladyhawke’s
2008 self-titled debut took four years to follow up
and four years after ‘Anxiety’ comes this, her third
long-player.
Like everything Pip touches, the 1980s influence
isn’t so much worn on her sleeve as waved about on
a bloody great big flag. Yet ‘Wild Things’ is different.
“I think I went even more synthy and poppy this time
around,” she confesses. She’s not kidding. ‘Wild
Things’ is buffed so pop bright that it’s dazzling. In
fact, it’s so polished, it makes her first two offerings
seem dull in comparison. And anyone who’s heard
either of those records will know how absurd that is.
‘Wild Things’ sounds huge. The basslines rumble
that little bit lower, the keys thrum that much
warmer, the rhythms are a slice sharper. The whole
thing almost purrs. So we get the Cindy Lauper-ism
of ‘Chills’, with one enormous sing-along chorus,
and there’s the delicious, gently growing glow of the
title track, while ‘Sweet Fascination’ is so familiar
you’re sure you must have heard it before.
Therein lies the conundrum. Something like
‘Golden Girl’, an incredibly immediate track full
of catchy “whoo-oooh-oooh” backing vocals, is
the sort of cut that gets snapped up for TV ad
campaigns and theme tunes. Thankfully, while
Ladyhawke is no stranger to sync world, you get
the feeling there’s little danger Pip is going to get all
Clean Bandit on our ass.
There’s a sass deep at work here, though. ‘Wild
Things’ is a tight-knit gang of songs that goes way
beyond flogging posh nib-nibs. And while Pip Brown
is more indie kid than pop princess, this outing
suggests she could well be on the brink of crossing
over. With ‘Wild Things’, she has really nailed her
art. Problem now is where next? Roll on 2020, then.
NEIL MASON
MAX RICHTER's ‘Path 5’ from his acclaimed
‘Sleep’ album gets a rude awakening in the shape
of a CLARK re-rub…
The work of German-born, British-based composer Max Richter has
graced the soundtracks of around 40 films, as well as a number of
influential solo albums. Last year’s ‘Sleep’ project is perhaps his
most ambitious work yet. Stretching to eight and a half hours, and
typified by its woozy, lazy, lullaby-like atmospheres, it is designed to
be slept through.
“I wanted to look at how music and consciousness can connect in
the sleeping state and make a piece that can work like a pause in our
busy lives,” explains Richter. “‘Path 5’ is built of overlapping shapes
that give rise to all sorts of patterns, a bit like a mobile rotating
slowly before our eyes. It is all focused on the solo vocal, sung by
Grace Davidson, which is accompanied by a muted organ.”
Generally known by just his surname, Warp Records’ live techno
wizard and studio maverick Chris Clark admits to being overwhelmed
with excitement when he was initially approached to work on ‘Path 5’.
“When I was first contacted, I wanted this remix to be about 30
different things,” he notes. “In my head, if it was a film, it would start
all Tim Burton prancing around in a wetsuit with a glockenspiel, then
a scene where a bifter-toking hippy is enjoying some optimistic tarot
card readings, then a full-on adrenalised panic attack chase scene.”
Clark’s final version ended up being “three solid good things“, he
says, as opposed to “30 brittle little sketches”.
“It’s a funny old game, how music works on me and how I work on
it,” he continues. “The transitions felt very natural, almost not manmade, like it’s a change of season, the landscape shifting without
you really noticing it. Sometimes I spend ages contriving this effect
and sometimes it happens in about 20 minutes. It just flows. This
remix was like that. Melding it together took hardly any time at all,
the time-consuming bit was the ending. I wanted the distortion to
have the right amount of pinch, like it makes you blink a little, but you
still enjoy it.”
“When I started thinking about remixers for the project, I went
for people who I thought could bring a completely new vision to the
material, a new frame of reference,” says Richter. “I’m really happy
with the incredibly diverse range of things people have done.”
BEN WILLMOTT
‘Sleep Remixes’ is out now on Deutsche Grammophon
85
BELBURY POLY
KOWTON
Topiary
Ghostly International
Utility
Livity Sound
Since 2012’s ‘Belbury Tales’, Ghost Box
co-boss Jim Jupp has been busy. Handling
production work, side projects and one-off
singles, including a superb collaboration
with John Foxx, you wonder where he finds
time. But find some he has, and he’s changed
his beat here to boot, channelling a fresh
ebullience into his Belbury Poly alias.
‘The New Harmony’ is a beauty, fusing
Neu!’s whirling insistence with incidental
jaunt, and ‘The Green Scene’ brilliantly
imbues a folk sample with the quality of a
reggae echo chamber piece. ‘Hey Now Here
He Comes’ is a glam stomper, tossing Tull
flutes around with joyous Radiophonic game
show abandon, while ‘Playground Gateway’
nods deliciously to Chicory Tip’s ‘Son Of My
Father’, giddily melding distorted schoolyard
rhymes to hormone-high keyboards.
With characteristically off-kilter verve,
‘New Ways Out’ transports you to those
Tizer-fuelled 70s youth club discos with siderooms for ouija boards in a way that only
Belbury Poly can. CG
“We began from a kind of Year Zero,” says
Sean McBride, one half of Xeno & Oaklander,
talking about the Brooklyn-based minimalist
electronica duo’s new LP. “We’ve always
referred to our synths as elemental,”
adds Liz Wendelbo, the other half, and it
is precisely this back to basics, organic,
analogue approach that has served them
so well.
As you’d expect, there are moments
of greatness. ‘Topiary’ and ‘Chevron’ are
atmospheric, moody, full of drawn-out
synths and alien-like percussion, while
‘Chimera’ slowly builds, jolting into darker
whirs and harsher clangs.
And yet this, Xeno & Oaklander’s fifth
album, feels a little flat. ‘Topiary’ lacks
the fizz of raw energy we know these old
machines can offer up, especially on tracks
like ‘Baroque’ and ‘Worldling Worlds’, which
are a bit stale and uninteresting. Ultimately,
‘Topiary’ doesn’t quite pack the punch that
we know X&O are capable of. FM
Since its inception in 2011, Livity Sound has
been a bastion of inventive dance music, so
it’s remarkable that this is not just a debut
album for Kowton, but for the label as well.
Coming off the back of stellar collaborations
with labelmates Peverelist and Asusu, and
a heralded EP for new Young Turks imprint
Whities, Kowton proves more than up to
the task.
With ‘Utility’, he continues to blend
the austerity of techno with the weight of
Bristolian bass music. His tracks all pull off
that trick of doing a lot with few elements
and, as ever, the sound design is pristine.
The surgical percussion in ‘Comments Off’
sounds like freshly blown glass, while ‘Some
Cats’ is a strange mantra and ‘A Bluish
Shadow’ could be the soundtrack to lonely
winter nights spent fighting insomnia.
If Kowton’s aim was to create an LP that
works on the dancefloor and is also nuanced
enough for home listening, he’s certainly
pulled it out of the bag. CG
WRANGLER
86
XENO & OAKLANDER
New Ways Out
Ghost Box
Sparked: Modular Remix Project
MemeTune
Genius Of Time
Universal
LARRY LEVAN
THE LINES
Orson Welles once commented that “The
enemy of art is the absence of limitations”.
So when the Wrangler trio of Stephen
Mallinder (Cabaret Voltaire), Benge (John
Foxx And The Maths) and Phil Winter
(Tunng), enlisted their peers to rework their
2014 debut album ‘LA Spark’, they insisted
each remixer only use one modular synth
of their choosing alongside the supplied
samples from the original tracks.
Naturally, the results share a common
factor, basking in the warmth and spiky
character of analogue sound. Within that
frame, however, there’s plenty of sonic
scope. Mute boss Daniel Miller’s mix of
‘Theme From Wrangler’ makes an immediate
impact with its irresistible, bass-driven
electro pulsations, as does Steve Moore’s
brutal but beautiful ‘Harder’. Other outings,
such as Scanner, Chris Carter and the band’s
own Orb-meets-Kraftwerk 15-minute epic
‘Theme Meme’, take a little longer to reveal
their charms, but are no less rewarding. BW
Larry Levan has long been established as
the untouchable Hendrix of the turntables,
the antithesis of the lazy laptop culture that
robbed DJing of its craft and excitement.
Lesser trumpeted are his trailblazing
achievements in the recording studio, where
he forged so many influential remixes and
productions. The outings assembled here
over two CDs display templates regularly
heisted (then inevitably watered down)
by everyone from synthpoppers to house
plagiarists.
What Larry Levan did to tracks such as
Gwen Guthrie’s ‘Peanut Butter’, electro
pioneer Man Friday’s ‘Groove’, or his own
productions, such as the mind-frying ‘Don’t
Make Me Wait’ by the NYC Peech Boys, rank
among the most important electronically
created music of that whole seminal period.
Like Levan‘s DJ sets, these tracks are built
to be felt, deep down inside.
An immaculate collection of startlingly
fearless blueprints, ‘Genius Of Time‘ is
nothing short of the year’s most essential
and euphoric history lesson. KN
The Lines were a 1980s post-punk band
formed around Rico Conning, Joe Forty and
PragVEC drummer Nick Cash. After two
albums and moves towards a more electronic
style, financial issues put The Lines on hiatus,
leaving the tapes for their third LP unfinished
and forgotten. Conning later went on to
become a celebrated mixer and engineer,
working out of William Orbit’s celebrated
Guerilla studio before upping sticks and
moving to California.
‘Hull Down’ puts Conning recovering what
was salvageable from those hissy tapes to
deliver a third chapter in the overlooked story
of The Lines. The result puts Conning at the
crossing place between New Order circa
‘Temptation’ and Cabaret Voltaire’s postindustrial experiments, fusing funk, stuttering
guitar, bone-shakingly crisp rhythms and
tentative sampling. ‘Single Engine Duster’
steals the show with an urgent, paranoid vibe
delivered over squelchy proto-dance synths
and beats, while ‘Nicky Boy’s Groove’ is a
deliciously intense electro workout. MS
Hull Down
Acute
THE BACK
SUSANNA | PHOTO: ANNE VALUER
SUSANNA
KENNETH JAMES GIBSON
ANTWOOD
Triangle
SusannaSonata
The Evening Falls
Kompakt
Virtuous.scr
Planet Mu
The plaintive mantra “Nothing is holy,
nothing is sacred” opens this exploratory
journey into the inner mind of brilliant Nordic
artist Susanna, who lays bare her ghosts,
demons and longings on this scorching
22-track epic.
Disarming, resoundingly intense and
laden with astonishing musicianship, her
best tracks have the transcendental dark
pop experimentalism of Julia Holter or fellow
Scandinavian Islaja. A recent collaboration
with Jenny Hval makes perfect sense. ‘For
My Sins’ in particular is show-stopping, its
earthiness conjuring ancient forest rites,
perhaps in a lovelorn paean to her Nordic
roots. The searing, effects-laden alttorch song ‘Burning Sea’ similarly affects,
emanating as if opined from some future
church of the secular-spiritual.
There are moments when you might
wonder if a more dispassionate production
hand might have filtered out the odd overly
commercial offering, but when you’re caught
in the many enveloping, cathartic peaks of
‘Triangle’, you’ll scarcely care. CG
Relocating to a secluded mountain
community called Idyllwild has certainly had
a calming effect on electronica polymath
Kenneth James Gibson. Gone are the petscaring escapades of his breakcore alter
ego Eight Frozen Modules, while even the
chamber pop of his Bell Gardens project
seems a little strident in the context of this
entirely beatless and strikingly evocative
entry in Kompakt’s ‘Pop Ambient’ series.
‘The Evening Falls’ is an organic,
instrument-led affair, with its tracks split
between those of a modern classical bent,
where orchestral drones recall Gavin Bryars,
and those that tilt towards the kind of
weightless post-rock favoured by Kranky’s
ambient contingent: Stars Of The Lid, Dead
Texan, Growing et al. The steel guitar on ‘A
Conversation Between Friends’ is maybe
a little too reminiscent of Eno’s ‘Deep Blue
Day’, but frankly who cares when the rest of
the album is so sublime. AH
It makes sense that Tristan Douglas is a
microbiologist. On his unsettling debut
album ‘Virtuous.scr’, the listener is injected
deep into the throbbing innards of robotic
lifeforms. You can, sometimes literally, hear
the body breathing: liquid arpeggios spill into
a swirling windpipe of mechanical claps and
snaps, a watery belly seizures with rhythmic
twitches. And yes, that means actual water
samples. Indeed, one of the track titles is an
IP address registered near Virginia’s Great
Dismal Swamp.
All the time, the man formerly known
as Margaret Antwood scalpels influences
from synthpop, footwork and EDM. This is
the school of digital slice-and-dice: think
Oneohtrix Point Never or Holly Herndon.
He’s not afraid of playful silence, as on the
stop-starting ‘Spirit Fabric’ and ‘Anthracite’,
and although ‘Virtuous.scr’ sometimes lacks
the blistering immediacy of his ‘Work Focus’
EP, Antwood’s Planet Mu debut brims with
(artificially) intelligent evocations of modern
electronic life. FR
87
FIRST AND LAST AND ALWAYS
Do we really need to explain? Do we? We go digging
around in the record collection of Mr LUKE ABBOTT
NAUGHTY BY NATURE
19 Naughty III
Tommy Boy
FIRST
“I bought this album on cassette when I was at
high school after hearing ‘Hip Hop Hooray’.
I listened to a lot of rap music growing up,
but mostly this record and the first couple of
Pharcyde albums. I still like the production on
‘19 Naughty III’ and I can remember a lot of the
verses. Until recently, I would listen to the tape
in the car quite a lot, but then we got a new car
with a CD player.”
PHAROAH SANDERS
Karma
Impulse!
AND LAST
“I’ve been getting deep into spiritual jazz for a
few years now. Labels keep reissuing all these
amazing records, so I keep buying them. I really
love the feeling of freedom this kind of music
has. In its best moments, listening to it can be a
totally transportive experience. It's the perfect
antidote to modern life. The Pharoah Sanders’
albums ‘Thembi’ and ‘Elevation’ are also both
amazing and worth checking out.” CLUSTER
Zuckerzeit
Brain
AND ALWAYS
88
“This is one of the few records I think I'll never
get bored of. It’s like a prototype for a lot
of current ideas in music, it’s just a perfect
record. I’ve hung out with Roedelius a few
times at gigs, most recently in Portugal at the
Semibreve Festival. I was there with my wife
and our daughter, and we were in the hotel
garden having some lunch. Roedelius seemed
very entertained by my little girl running around
making silly faces at him. When she was born,
we had ‘Zuckerzeit’ playing in the background.”
MIRA, UN LOBO!
Heart Beats Slow
Tapete
The panoramic walls of synthesised sound
once forged in the name of sonic anarchy
have recently been hijacked by simpering
warblers who seem to be intoning through
mouths full of underpants. But with ’Heart
Beats Slow’, Portugal’s Luis F De Sousa
crucially injects his own glittering pyramids
of multi-tiered bombast with a wracked,
anguished soul born from the economic
destruction and resulting heartbreak
currently pillaging his country.
Luis initially recorded his outpourings at
home, alone, starting as a musical diary and
something of a lifeline. He then brought in
producer Ricardo Fialho and his former MAU
bandmates to bring it home as an album,
complete with guitars and vocal bolstering
(including a contribution from his baby son),
ending up with a personalised master work.
Like an electronic Woody Guthrie, Luis
reflects on the dire straits of his country, but
finds a way out in the process. Incidentally,
the name? Portuguese for Beware, A Wolf!
KN
KIKAGAKU MOYO
House In The Tall Grass
Guruguru Brain
This Tokyo five-piece conjure the warmest,
smokiest energy you’ll find anywhere
between here and the Sea of Japan, and
have become the hottest of nu-psych names
seemingly out of nowhere.
Bursts of soft Byrds-ian harmonics fuse
with baggy Roses-flavoured grooves right
from the off, and their dreamily unhurried
minor key delivery is consistent and
confident throughout. Knowingly referenced
(acid folk and kosmische treasure), it’s also
authentically marbled with a spirituality that
will please the star children of Popol Vuh
and hip-kid followers of Smoking Trees and
Foxygen alike.
Sometimes so heat-hazed and laid-back
that it might chill the march of time (see
‘Silver Owl’), the dropped back and reverbed
vocal layers are beautifully poised, and the
impressive lead guitar effortlessly channels
Tom Verlaine or John Squire at certain
points, giving tracks like ‘Kogarashi’ real
edge. Elaborately patterned, shimmering and
mosaic-like, you’ll want this beauty at hand
when the sun comes out. CG
THE BACK
M A RK PRITCHA RD
MARK PRITCHARD
THE FIELD
The Follower
Kompakt
1971–1981
Bureau B
As part of Reload, Link, Jedi Knights and
a host of other acts, Mark Pritchard has
been responsible for some of the most
imaginative techno, electro, house and drum
’n’ bass to emerge from the UK over the last
25 years. But his solo debut for Warp sees
the West Country veteran returning to the
ambient atmospherics he first forged under
the Global Communication banner.
The 16 tracks on ‘Under The Sun‘ all bear
the same soft and sensitive sonic hallmarks
that typified GC’s finest efforts. Fashioned
from the purest electronic sounds, giving
the impression they’ve descended from the
ether like mist, they’re universally evocative
and emotion tweaking, whether calmly
comforting or reflective and melancholy.
Among the key moments are ‘Beautiful
People’, where Thom Yorke adds his
plaintive vocal, and rapper Beans pouring
forth over ultra-minimal pulsations on ‘The
Blinds Cage’. Mark Pritchard’s singlehanded productions are just as enthralling,
though. BW
Since his 2007 debut, ‘From Here We Go
Sublime’, The Field’s Axel Willner has
been doing stuff with loops. Taking the
rough edges off them. Layering them.
Sometimes adding vocals. His particular
skill is manipulating them so gorgeously
that spending time with a Field record is like
taking an aural duvet day.
Even so, Axel Willner takes care to
occasionally toggle the switch, but just
enough that we stay interested. So it is that
the Swede’s fifth album begins with his
most dancefloor-oriented track yet: ‘The
Follower’. A pleasing hark back to 1990s
Tresor, it boasts a kick drum pulse and takes
us into the equally almost-banging ‘Pink
Sun’. Normal service (the soothing, near to
ambient techno for which he’s renowned) is
restored when we hear children playing on
the blissful album closer ‘Reflecting Lights’,
by which time you realise that you haven’t
so much listened to this album as been
transported by it. AH
Eight magnificent studio albums, plus a new
disc of live material with extensive and
illuminatingly personal liner notes by insider
German maestro Asmus Tietchens; this
remastered collection is a delight.
Tietchens nails Cluster’s importance
early in his notes, describing their records
as “the synthesis of pop music stripped of
embarrassing glamour and so-called serious
music without intellectual constraints”.
You can pick any of these albums at random
and you will be rewarded with untold riches
of experimental electronic sounds. It’s
never less than delightful, always light of
touch, always tuneful, always witty and
thoroughly human.
‘Curiosum’, from 1981, reveals none of
Cluster‘s powers in any way diminished or
compromised by the world catching up with
them and ‘After The Heat’, their 1978 album
with Eno, is a flat-out masterpiece. The new
utilitarian artwork is tidy, but it’s a shame
we couldn’t have replicas of the original
sleeves. MR
Under The Sun
Warp
CLUSTER
89
K A RL BA R TOS | PHOTO: K ATJA RUGE
ONDE ADWAVE | PHOTO: CAT MOOK
THE COME T IS COMING | PHOTO: FABRICE BOURGEL L E
L E T'S E AT GR ANDM A | PHOTO: FR ANCESCA AL L EN
KARL BARTOS
90
Communication
Trocadero Music
ONDEADWAVES
onDeadWaves
Mute
THE COMET IS COMING
Channel The Spirits
The Leaf Label
I, Gemini
Transgressive
LET’S EAT GRANDMA
The technopop grandee’s
revitalised “lost album” from
2003 is a joyous affair. It sounds
far more like vintage Kraftwerk
than Kraftwerk’s last release.
‘Communication’ rings with
echoes from a golden era,
boasting shades of ‘Neon Lights’
in ‘Electronic Apeman’ and
poignant nods to ‘Radioactivity’
in the ambient closer ‘Another
Reality’. These tightly propelled
pop songs packed with robotised
vocals recall New Order too,
and there’s something ineffably
charming about hearing him sing,
“I have to return some video
tapes” on ‘Ultraviolet’. JS
In which two leading electronic
musicians join forces and turn
in an album that‘s anything but.
Polly Scattergood and Maps’
James Chapman fled to his place
in the sticks and the result is a
gently unsettling acoustic belter.
Fuelled by cabin fever, it’s proper
shimmering ‘Twin Peaks‘ outer
space C&W. There’s a dazzling
version of old standard ‘Autumn
Leaves’, which fans of Coldcut
will recognise, while lead
track ‘Blackbird’ is as spooked
as anything Scattergood has
served up on her own. NM
From the ever-esoteric Leaf
Label, this London trio, with
their bonkers outré monikers like
Betamax Killer and Danalogue
the Conqueror, produce exactly
the kind of mind-expanding,
apocalyptic, instrumental
galactic jazz that their band
name and aliases suggest. Lob
yourself headlong into ‘Star
Furnace’ and prepare to be
buffeted by its hypnotic pulse
and frenetic sax jibber. Guarana
for the soul, copiously laced
with popping candy. Magic eye
painting not supplied. JS
It’s unusual these days to hear
anything that stops you in your
tracks. Rosa Walton and Jenny
Hollingworth, a Norwich-based
teen duo and best friends
since they were four years old,
have served up such a rarity
with a weirdy-woo album of
stella proportions. Squeaky
unsettling vocals – sung, rapped,
whispered, whatever – are
underpinned with the warmest
and richest electronica. Max
Richter’s a fan. He says they
sound “very assured” and you
wouldn’t argue. Big things await,
mark our words. NM
THE BACK
CATE LE BON
Crab Day
Turnstile
Cate Le Bon describes herself as a
“monstrous pessimist”, and you can certainly
hear large slabs of Welsh lugubriousness
in her voice, immovable like the foreboding
but beautiful mountains Wales is famous
for. Le Bon ranges with apparent ease over
a wide variety of timbres and tones, soaring
into high registers with breathtaking purity
or fixing the listener in a dense viscosity,
an ability that marked her out when she
guested on Gruff Rhys’ excellent Neon Neon
project back in 2008.
The music itself on ‘Crab Day’ is thrilling
and has a shambolic air about it; thin guitars
crackle appealingly over rudimentary
rhythms, pounded out with Mo Tucker
discipline and focus, while artfully employed
saxophones and woodwinds recall 1960s
Bowie (‘I’m A Dirty Attic’) and later Bowie
(‘Love Is Not Love’). ‘Crab Day’ is a marvel, a
record that sets the jewel of Le Bon’s voice
into a collection of fantastical and magical
songs. MR
COMMODO
How What Time
Black Acre
Following last year’s collaborative album
with Kahn & Gantz, Sheffield bass producer
Commodo touches down with his debut
album on Bristol’s Black Acre label and it’s a
fascinating, if slightly uneven, listen.
Commodo recorded part of ’How What
Time’ in Turkey, and the region’s influence
seems to have bled through into his melodies.
The bass weight is as overpowering as ever,
but the rhythms are often less insistent,
allowing you to appreciate the more subtle
details of Commodo’s sound design, of which
there are many. The deep horns on ‘How
Dare You’, the fractured percussion of ‘HWT’,
and the haunted keys in ‘Russian Glass’ all
speak of the immense care that has gone
into this record.
Unfortunately, there are a handful of
tracks that fail to imprint themselves in any
meaningful way, but ultimately that matters
little given the quality of the material as a
whole. The two MC-led tunes, featuring
veteran Trim and newcomer Rocks FOE, add
a gruff injection of energy to an already
winning record. CG
LABEL PROFILE
THE INDIE IMPRINTS CATCHING OUR EARS
Label: Patterned Air
Location: Sherborne, Dorset, UK
Est: 2015
Potted History: Label head Matt Saunders, who formed 4AD act
Magnétophone back in 1995 along with art school mate John
Hanson and later recruited Spacemen 3’s Sonic Boom, had
a near-fatal car crash in 2013. Last rites were read. Life was
reappraised during a lengthy rehabilitation and Patterned Air
was born.
Mission Statement: To release a unique blend of exploratory
electronica and sonic archaeological gold, balancing new
work with previously unreleased 80s and 90s buried treasure.
“We’re a quarter of a century away from the beginning of techno
now,” says Saunders. “It’s becoming a distant memory and the
connection between early techno and current electronica is
becoming very hazy. I like making direct links to those roots and
thinking about how old sounds might ‘look’ with the passage of
time.”
Key artists and releases: As well as being the conduit for
Saunders’ Assembled Minds alter ego (his ‘Creaking Haze And
Other Rave Ghosts’ debut is an eerie alt-techno masterpiece)
and that of like-minded artist Vickie Wilson (aka woodland
electronica composer Cukoo, whose first album is coming
soon), there’s also a long-player slated for new ambient
experimentalists Lo_Five and a brooding Radiophonic-flavoured
record by The British Space Group. The label’s electroarchaeological release schedule will begin with Running On
Air, an early 90s Boards Of Canada-like act whose exploratory
dance/ambient atmospherics will stop you in your tracks.
Future Plans: Saunders is currently recording the next
Assembled Minds album with Sonic Boom. It should
surface towards the end of the year. He’s also working
with psychogeographer and experimental composer Drew
Mullholland on a mystical 23-minute 23-second drone piece
which will hopefully include some of the last recordings
made by the late Coil duo of John Balance and Peter “Sleazy”
Christopherson. Watch this space.
CARL GRIFFIN
Assembled Minds’ ‘Creaking Haze And Other Rave Ghosts’ is out now
91
BRIEF
ENCOUNTERS
A quick chat with
POLLY SCATTERGOOD
about being half of
onDeadWaves with Maps’
James Chapman
The seeds for onDeadWaves were sown at Mute’s Short Circuit
Festival in 2011, when you and James Chapman paired up to
perform each other’s songs…
“There are loads of artists on Mute who I find really inspiring but, as
with any collaboration, you don’t know what works until you try it.
That was the exciting thing about making the onDeadWaves album.
We were just friends making something in the moment and we didn’t
think about it any more than that.”
James’ studio is in the middle of nowhere, right? You wouldn’t
think he was so hermity… or would you?
“Kind of, but not in a bad way. When you make music and you love
what you do, it becomes your life and you sort of make your own
world and you get your own routine. It’s constant, your mind never
turns off, so when you are in the middle of making a record it's like
you go into this bubble. If you are lucky enough to have a studio in
your home like James does, then everything outside of that is on the
periphery. There was no need to leave the house other than when a
guitar string broke!”
Being in the country must have been nice… how come
‘onDeadWaves’ sounds so spooked?
“We have both been on our various journeys in the last few years
and we made this album as a kind of escape. The countryside was
a good place to reflect and take some time out. It's calm, peaceful
and expansive, which in turn felt freeing. All those elements rolled
together made the sound. The environment was just one part of it.”
Did things ever get a bit like ‘The Shining’? Who was more likely
to turn “Here’s Johnny”? “This is one of my favourite questions I’ve ever been asked! I can
confirm that no axes were used in the making of this record.”
We love how two electronic musicians have made rather an
acoustic album. Did that surprise you too?
“Thanks. It surprised us how quickly the sound came together. It
was really easy and effortless from the start. We both have very
eclectic tastes in music and love experimenting with sound, so the
fact this record ended up being less electronic wasn’t a big surprise.
It is still quite electronic, but in a subtler, more of a soundscapey
type way.”
Our reviewer describes it as “‘Twin Peaks’ outer space C&W”.
Does that sound like a fair summary?
“Yeah, we both love ‘Twin Peaks’, so thank you! We are currently
in rehearsals and will be playing live soon, so we'll hopefully be
channelling the ‘Twin Peaks’ vibes on stage as well.”
‘onDeadWaves’ is out now on Mute
92
ARBEIT SCHNICKERT SCHNEIDER
ASS
Bureau B
Many of today’s furthest out but most
rewarding experimental records seem to
beam in from Hamburg’s fearless Bureau
B imprint. By virtue of their collective
initials, Berlin guitarists Jochen Arbeit,
Günter Schickert and Dick Dresselhaus (aka
Schneider TM) can call themselves ASS,
but the sound they make on their telepathic
quest is far from simply flatulent as three
generations of German experimental
musicians come together and let rip.
Colliding and coercing are the astral
strains born from Schickert’s grounding
in 70s krautrock, Arbeit’s 80s post-punk
beginnings in Die Haut, which led to
Neubauten and Automat, and Dresselhaus’
emergence in late 90s electronica as
Schneider TM and with Angel.
Each take their axes to places this usually
confined instrument didn’t know existed,
from spectral psychedelic ambience to
krautrocking future funk, goosing punk and
minimal techno on the way, and enhanced by
unconventional rhythm sources. Haunting,
headily unusual and always evocative. KN
LOGAN TAKAHASHI
NoGeo
Ghostly International
Logan Takahashi is best known as one half
of Dutch-based American duo Teengirl
Fantasy, but this, his debut solo album, is a
very different kettle of proverbial fish to TF‘s
glossy, club-friendly sound.
With ‘NoGeo‘, Takahashi says he aimed to
follow in the footsteps of Ryuichi Sakamoto
in fusing contemporary Western influences
with the musical traditions of his Japanese
heritage. But aside from some ghostly
oriental vocals on the chilling ‘Cella’, that
concept isn’t flagged up with obvious,
wholesale sampling. Rather, these identities
are subtly woven into the fabric of some very
pure electronic compositions, with tracks
like ‘Orb-O’ and ‘Coral D’ sounding more
reminiscent of the much missed Susumu
Yokota than Sakamoto.
As on Yokota’s work, an endearingly low
key, modest personality shines through the
icy machinery of his tools, the arrangements
often embellished with an optimism that it’s
hard to find yourself not warming to. BW
THE BACK
THE ASSOCIATES
The Affectionate Punch /
Fourth Drawer Down / Sulk
BMG
Expanded reissues of the first
three outings from the everwonderful Edinburgh outfit also
offer some fresh insight, which
is rare in re-release world.
Packed with demos, alternate
versions and long-lost cuts on
extra discs, the whole set is
utterly essential. The previously
unheard instrumental version
of the magnificent ‘Party Fears
Two’ is worth the admission
price alone, while the album
that track came from, ‘Sulk’, still
stands up as one of the finest
long-players of the 80s. NM
THE ASSOCIATES
JOHN FOX X | PHOTO: A R T SL AB
THE GASM AN
TEHO TE A RDO & BL IX A BA RGELD
JOHN FOXX
21st Century: A Man,
A Woman And A City
Metamatic
This retrospective of John Foxx's
post-2000 work reveals a man
who, 40 years into his career, is
at the top of his game. Bypassing
his ambient instrumental works,
‘21st Century‘ focuses on his
canon of songs, highlighting
his penchant for circuit-singed
songsmithery and Ballardian
lyrics. Alongside two brand new
tracks and collaborations with
OMD, Gary Numan and Robin
Guthrie, the highlights include
the twitchy funk of ‘Catwalk’
and ‘Never Let Me Go’, both
showcasing those glacial Bowieish vocals. JS
THE GASMAN
Aeriform
Onomatopoeia
TEHO TEARDO
& BLIXA BARGELD
Nerissimo
Specula
Christopher Adam Reeves,
trading as The Gasman since his “I use up all the black,” sings
Planet Mu debut in 2003, unfurls
Einstürzende Neubauten
a matured, elevating sound
frontman Blixa Bargeld on his
derived from early electronic
latest collaboration with Italian
disco with splashes of YMO and
composer Teho Teardo. From
softcore porn for this, his 17th
another mouth, it might seem
outing. Tracks such as ‘Fade’
comedic, but his is a compelling
and ‘Trip’ jump and sparkle with
voice carrying echoes of
golden piano showers, testicular everyone from his old pal Nick
bass swings and synthetic string Cave to Scott Walker. Teardo’s
washes soaping their nether
subtle electronics, atmospheric
regions. A welcome blast of
strings and nods to heavy rock
human exercising control over
provide levity and drama when
his machines and giving them a
Blixa seems hell-bent on heading
stiffy in the process. KN
to darkest Poe-esque territory.
Easy on the ear it might be, easy
listening it ain’t. MS
93
MOGWAI | PHOTO: BRIAN SW EENE Y
GOLD PANDA | PHOTO: L AUR A L E W IS
SZUN WAVES
LAKKER
MOGWAI
GOLD PANDA
SZUN WAVES
While an album inspired by
themes like “the Dutch” and
“water” might sound as dry as a
cracker factory, commissioning
Lakker is a smart move from the
Netherlands Institute for Sound
and Vision’s RE:VIVE Initiative,
a fascinating project that pairs
artists with sound archives.
Made from field recordings
as well as old TV and radio
broadcasts, ‘Struggle & Emerge’
is a dark, brooding affair that
makes sense outside its brief
and adds to the considerable
stock the duo amassed with last
year’s excellent ‘Tundra’ LP. SR
Those who sat rapt by Mark
Cousins’ archive documentary
‘Atomic’ on BBC4 last year
might attribute a fair portion
of the film’s shock and awe to
Mogwai’s soundtrack. The band,
who once played Hiroshima,
unleash their funereal,
atmospheric soundscapes to
devastating effect here, with
opening track ‘Ether’ bringing
plangent horns to the postapocalyptic pity party. And you
know those “clanging chimes
of doom” that Band Aid alluded
to? Well, you can hear those on
‘U-235’. JS
’Good Luck And Do Your Best’,
the third long-player from
Derwin Panda, has its roots in
Japan, where GP is a regular
visitor. Shot through with a
warm Japanese-inspired haze of
sounds, from Buddhist temples
and neon skyscapers, it was
recorded in Chelsmford and then
shipped to the other exotic east,
Norwich, where the excellent
Luke Abbott shoved it through
his “magic smelter and made
it sound good”. The highlights
include the choppy ‘Chiba
Nights’ and the sleek buttonbright ‘Haylands’. SR
The ridiculously prolific Luke
Abbott, along with PVT drummer
Laurence Pike and Portico
saxophonist Jack Wyllie, spent
a day at James Holden’s Sacred
Walls gaff (hence the title,
see), the result of which is this
freewheeling mini album. On
paper, the idea of sax and drums
and diodes sounds… weird. In
your ears, it’s like being stroked
with kittens. The deliciously
slow building 12-minute opener,
‘Further’, sets out the stall rather
nicely. NM
Struggle & Emerge
R&S
94
L A K KER
Atomic
Rock Action
Good Luck And Do Your Best
City Slang
At Sacred Wall
Buffalo Temple
THE BACK
PANTHA
DU PRINCE
PETER
BAUMANN
The Triad
Rough Trade
Real-life collaborations prove key on the
Berliner’s distinctive sounding new offering
It’s six years since Pantha Du Prince’s last solo album,
‘Black Noise’, although Berliner Hendrik Weber did
collaborate with The Bell Laboratory on ‘Elements Of
Light‘, a symphony for electronics, percussion and bell
carillon released in 2013. ‘The Triad’ sees Weber step
ever further from strictly computer-created music, but
there’s plenty to link it with the past. The club-slanted
techno of his early albums still form the backbone of his
sound, albeit more as foundations to build on than as
the finished article.
‘The Triad’ gains its title from the three musicians
at its core, and again the connection with previous
efforts is strong. Having enlisted Noah Lennox from
Animal Collective on the 2010 single ‘Stick By My
Side’, this time Weber draws on the talents of Lennox’s
long-time collaborator Scott Mou (Queens), whose
falsetto vocals on ‘The Winter Hymn’ and ‘In An Open
Space’ add yet another dreamy layer to the sonic cake.
Bendik Kjeldsberg of The Bell Laboratory completes the
trio, and the reverberating tinkle of bells is a constant
atmospheric addition too.
While ‘Black Noise’ was very much about being
alone in a small room in Berlin and composing, as he
explains in the accompanying notes, this album is
all about meeting up and jamming. It’s a subtle but
concrete shift of emphasis that becomes clearer the
more ‘The Triad’ progresses. Tracks like ‘Chasing
Vapour Trails’ build up and fall away with the kind of
organic momentum of a jam session, dub-style echo
units steadily cranked up to a climax. It’s relaxed and
spontaneous, like catching Kraftwerk on an afternoon
off, sharing a few spliffs and messing about after
listening to Lee Perry or King Tubby.
There are echoes of Bernard Sumner’s nonplussed
singing style when Weber takes the microphone,
lending ‘Dream Yourself Awake’ and ‘Wallflower For
Pale Saints’ a nonchalant cool. You’ll notice a touch
of Autechre’s machine code rhythms and the chunky
bass end energy of Carl Craig too. But Weber has built
a distinctive, magical and instantly recognisable sound
of his own here, which is no mean feat in the copycat
world of electronica.
BEN WILLMOTT
Machines Of Desire
Bureau B
On-off Tangerine Dream man returns from an
age-long absence with a meditation on the
human condition
The death of Tangerine Dream founder Edgar Froese late
last year brought an obvious conclusion to his hugely
influential band’s legacy, particularly when core member
Peter Baumann officially severed his ties soon after the
sad news broke.
Baumann’s compositional output has been nonexistent for decades. Instead, he’s concentrated his
efforts on new age musical projects and setting up the
Baumann Foundation, a think tank that “explores the
experience of being human in the context of cognitive
science, evolutionary theory and philosophy”.
So it will be quite a surprise for many to hear that
he’s recorded his first new solo material since 1983’s
‘Strangers In The Night’. He began composing again in
October 2014 and rekindled his relationship with Edgar
Froese a couple of months later, the pair eventually
meeting in Austria. “An extraordinary encounter,”
according to Baumann, which felt like it would lead to a
collaboration. But although that didn’t happen, of course,
Baumann ploughed on regardless, attempting to give
musical voice to the philosophical themes that have been
occupying him as a thinker.
‘The Blue Dream’, the opening track of ‘Machines Of
Desire‘, hints at a degree of depth, a degree of weight,
but it doesn’t exactly feel revelatory and its downbeat
tones aren’t promising. ‘Valley Of The Gods’ is more
expansive, with mystical Middle Eastern synth lines, and
‘Ordinary Wonder’ carries some level of elevation.
Unfortunately, there’s a nagging lack of something
here. The rudimentary drum machine patterns sound
almost cursory; the basslines seem dated and lumpen.
Perhaps, with Froese in mind, this is a subconscious
reaction, both to Froese’s passing as well as the wider
and inevitable passage of time. But pensive doesn’t
have to mean sombre. Don’t forget that Baumann
produced some superb late-phase krautrock recordings,
Roedelius’ ‘Jardin Au Fou’ in particular, whose wistful
sound mosaics are spirit-lifting exploratory wonders.
So as the choral atmospherics of the final track, ‘Dust
To Dust’, brings the album to a darkly pessimistic close,
it’s difficult not to feel that you’ve heard a peripheral
memento mori footnote to the vast Tangerine Dream
canon. Let’s just hope it’s not the last word and that
Baumann can find something more compelling to say
about the zeitgeist next time round.
CARL GRIFFIN
REVIEWS BY
COSMO GODFREE,
CARL GRIFFIN,
ANDREW
HOLMES,
SOPHIE LITTLE,
NEIL MASON,
FINLAY
MILLIGAN,
KRIS NEEDS,
FAT ROLAND,
MARK ROLAND,
SAM ROSE,
MAT SMITH,
JOOLS STONE,
BEN WILLMOTT
95
NEEDS MUST
KUMO
96
Our very own audio miner,
KRIS NEEDS plugs in the weird
shizz hoover and fills his bucket
with essential new tuneage for
your listening pleasure...
CIRCLE SKY
Eastend Tales
Specimen
Download
Reveal / Interstellar
Circle Sky
12-inch
As my rabbits celebrate
Electronic Sound in an
exciting new format by
practising their linedancing on the terrace,
what better way to kick
off than this spanking
new six-tracker from
Metamono dynamo
Jono Podmore under his
long-time Kumo alias.
Producing music for Fin
Kennedy’s play ‘Eastend
Tales’, he’s enlisted help
from the fabulous Plink
Plonk label, which ruled
the pure techno roost in
the 90s. So the pulsing
waft of ‘Weather Bomb’
gets a throbbing acid
cracker down its shorts
by Rolo McGinty (aka
Pluto), before Hijacker
(Laggy Pantelli) turns
it into a fizzing electro
hamslapper, Eugene
Black (the legendary Paul
Rip) whips up spooked
techno dub splashed with
Basic Channel aftershave
flurries, and Ramjac
(Paul Chivers) takes the
dubstep route.
Richard Norris found
success with The Grid,
before working with
Joe Strummer and then
embarking on projects
including the Time And
Space Machine and
Beyond The Wizard’s
Sleeve. A true electronic
forager with a healthy
regard for analogue
tackle, now Richard is
unleashing the first 12inch missive from Circle
Sky, his new outfit with
Martin Dubka, which
came together in an
undercover residency
at Secret Cinema’s ‘Star
Wars’ event in London’s
Docklands last year.
The colossal modular
Moog System 55 is the
only instrument used
on these two 10-minute
slabs of spontaneous
combustion. ‘Reveal’
recalls Underworld’s live
knees-ups from 20 years
ago. This reaffirming
new enterprise will be
well worth checking as
it unfolds.
MAX GRAEF &
GLENN ASTRO
The Yard Work Simulator
Ninja Tune
2 × LP | CD | Download
Pleasure, seasickness,
groove-bliss, panic
attacks, spontaneous
bowel evacuation… Just
some of the reactions
experienced during this
heady barrage from
Berlin vinyl connoisseurs
Graef and Astro as they
mangle jazz, funk, soul,
disco and early house
into highly personalised
dreamscapes where
nothing is quite what it
seems. The pair started
with a list of track titles,
then set to work realising
offerings such as ‘Where
The Fuck Are My Hard
Boiled Eggs?!’ (eerie
dismembered funk),
‘Flat Peter’ (jazz-house
through the bottom
of a lysergic toilet
bowl) and ‘Money $ex
Theme’ (scratch ‘n’ sniff
groovage). This is what
it’s like at underground
obsessive level now.
Trust Ninja Tune to be
thrusting it forth with
such gleeful abandon.
EMMPLEKZ
Rook To TN34
Mordant Music
Cassette | Download
Since the turn of the
century, Baron Mordant
has been putting out the
most eccentric, weird
and often wonderful
electronica, often in
bizarre limited edition
formats. His fourth album
with Ekoplekz again
sees the poet intone his
bleak, biting missives
over an array of warped
backdrops and mutant
groove scratchings from
the Baron. Titles such as
‘Gloomy Leper Techno’,
‘Slag Heap Snow Angels’
and ‘Nostalgia For Early
Plug-Ins’ provide a new
take on geekery. There’s
also a hilarious barb at
a certain rich lowest
common denominator DJ
on ‘Guetta Life’. ‘Britain’s
Got Talon’ indeed, but
future-pointed music has
rarely sounded so arcane
and sinister.
THE BACK
VARIOUS ARTISTS
20 Years Of Henry Street
Music: The Definitive
7-Inch Collection (Part 1)
BBE
5 × Seven-inch
I’m an unashamed sucker
for lovely physical
treasures such as this
set of five 45s presented
in a sleeve that looks
like Brooklyn’s answer
to Led Zep’s ‘Physical
Graffiti’. And inside
you’ll find some genuine
electronic disco history.
Also coming as a triple
album boasting more
tracks, the singles
preserve landmark gems
from the label started by
DJ/vinyl junkie Johnny
DeMairo in 1994 (named
after his address in
Brooklyn), capturing
that magic time in New
York clubbing history
when The Shelter and
Sound Factory ruled and
the city’s underground
street sound invaded
the world through the
likes of Kenny “Dope”
Gonzalez’s Bucketheads,
Armand Van Helden, DJ
Sneak, Mike Delgado and
Scottie Deep.
DLS / KADER YANI
DEMIAN LICHT
OCH
Joint EP
Semper Memor
12-inch | Download
Female Criminals Vol 1
Motus
12-inch | Download
Time Tourism
Systematic
CD | 12-inch | Download
Half the fun of doing
this is discovering new
names and takes on
trusty blueprints. This
release rips ’em up to
create another world.
One EP, two artists, two
tracks each of unusually
subtle electronic
weaving. DLS starts with
the woozy minimalism
of ‘Raw Sushi’, which
is dominated by blurry
keyboard frequencies
like Morse code tapped
out on a Martian’s loin
cloth, while ‘Take Care
Of Your Baby’ plants
subterranean space
chords and rattling
reverb clatter over deep
strings. Kader Yani
explores more esoteric
terrain on ‘Gece’, whose
analogue jockstrap
rummagings and tom-tom
throb usher in a Richie
Hawtin-like 303 mewl.
Multi-layered synth
melodies (recalling early
90s Frankfurt) drape
‘Hayal’ as it develops over
ceremonial drum pulses.
Apparently inspired by
krautrock, classic female
rock singers and David
Lynch, Licht whips up
an impressively dark
foursome. ‘Indomitus’
rides an ominous bomber
drone gouged by stark
vocal shards, conjuring
a feeling of imminent
doom which continues
through the pattering
glow-worm flatulence
of ‘Furia’ and the eerie
‘Domina’. The final track,
‘‘Sin’, builds on its spooky
femme fatale vocal bite
before creepy Lynchian
atmosphere textures
are joined by a curiously
seductive keyboard
pattern, providing the
set’s most genuinely
surreal moments.
Rather than a Scottish
exclamation, Och refers
to the Swedish word
for “And”. This ex-pat
Brit producer, initially
championed by Baby
Ford, whips up a heady
brew of early 90s house
riff ghosts planted
over skeletal, creaking
percussion. Intriguingly,
and symbolic of how
times have changed,
much of the rhythm
comes from the keyboard
motifs rather than the
percussion. This is aimed
at the melon not the
rectum, although more
straightforward kick/hat
combinations underpin
the spectral floatation
of ‘Prince Agoo’ and
‘Flux’. The title track is
meanwhile a snarebasted parson’s nose of
bare house manipulation,
dripping with haunting
Larry Heard glaciers.
Och? Aye, the noo (sorry).
VARIOUS ARTISTS
Touched Bass: Music
For Macmillan Cancer
Support
Bass Agenda
Download
Last up, a project well
worthy of support, which
sees the Macmillan
cancer charity, started
by Martin Boulton to
raise money for nurses
who had helped his mum
through her illness, hook
up with Bass Agenda
and EPM to produce a
remarkable body of over
100 tracks from legends,
faves and newer names.
The contributors include
The Hacker, Billie Ray
Martin, G-Man (LFO),
Mark Broom, Tudor Acid,
Steve Stoll, Radical G,
Mark Archer, Marco
Bernardi and John
Tejada. Unsurprisingly,
most modern electronic
bases are covered, from
far-out electro to stridesscorching acid. Available
through Bandcamp. Go
on!
97
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98
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