Electronic Sound CLUB_ISSUE MAY

MU S I C
C LU B 1 5
0
M AY 2 ON
ED I T I
WOLFGANG FLÜR & JACK DANGERS
T E A M U P E XC LU S I V ELY F O R
THE ELECTRONIC SOUND MUSIC CLUB
—RI N
T
PG
RA
ONDG
I GFYL ü
E S
UADN
IO
L IUALMHHAO
ET
T.
WHOEL F
& TJHAC
K TD
G EW
RIST. HPA
RW
T NLO
LL
E
ST
I NMDAIN
AG
YEO.UETAHS.TBILNADNIC
AN
E . CA
OL
TA I R E .
BA
LA
NC
AM
YO
UG
TH
CAB A R E T V
VO
LTA
PAU
AO
RT
NU
OTLUL R
. PAO
IC
OT. IFVA
UTL
UR
A-M8A3 .FK
EO
S TRIG
VA
3.
P O RLT H
IC
.F
MRAT F
ES
79
MLS7-92-08M
Editor: Push
Deputy Editor: Mark Roland
Art Editor: Mark Hall
Commissioning Editor: Neil Mason
Graphic Designer: Giuliana Tammaro
Sub Editor: Rosie Morgan
Sales & Marketing: Yvette Chivers
Contributors: Andrew Holmes, Anthony Thornton, Bethan Cole, Carl Griffin,
Danny Turner, David Stubbs, Emma R Garwood, Fat Roland, Finlay Milligan,
Grace Lake, Heidegger Smith, Jack Dangers, Jason Bradbury, Johnny
Mobius, Kieran Wyatt, Luke Sanger, Mark Baker, Martin James, Mat Smith,
Miles Picard, Neil Kulkarni, Ngaire Ruth, Patrick Nicholson, Paul Thompson,
Sam Smith, Simon Price, Steve Appleton, Tom Violence, Velimir Ilic,
Vik Shirley, Wyndham Wallace
Published by PAM Communications Limited
© Electronic Sound 2015. No part of this magazine may be used or reproduced in any way
without the prior written consent of the publisher. We may occasionally use material we
believe has been placed in the public domain. Sometimes it is not possible to identify and
contact the copyright holder. If you claim ownership of something published by us, we will
be happy to make the correct acknowledgement. All information is believed to be correct
at the time of publication and we cannot accept responsibility for any errors or inaccuracies
there may be in that information.
HELLO
welcome
to the
Electronic Sound
music club
This issue marks the beginning of a new adventure for us
and hopefully for you. From this month, Electronic Sound is
changing from a quarterly to a monthly magazine, so you’re
going to be getting much more Electronic Sound much more
often.
In order to do that, we’re making a few changes. Starting
from this issue, we are producing two different versions of the
magazine – a regular edition and a bumper “club edition”. What
you’re reading here is the club edition, which contains lots
more content than the regular edition – lots more features, lots
more interviews, lots more tech, lots more everything.
You can buy club issues on a one-off basis or you can save
a big pile of money and get the next 12 club issues of the
magazine by joining the Electronic Sound Music Club, our
exciting new subscription service. As well as the club edition
of the magazine 12 times a year, Music Club members also
get regular giveaways of electronic music downloads, offers,
discounts and competitions, plus a free gift of an extra
special vinyl release. This is available exclusively to club
members. We’re kicking things off in style because the very first
Electronic Sound Music Club vinyl release is ‘Staying In
The Shadow’, a collaboration between Kraftwerk legend
Wolfgang Flür and Meat Beat Manifesto’s Jack Dangers,
released as a clear vinyl seven-inch in a strictly limited
edition of just 750 copies. As we said, it’s free when you
join our club and you can’t get this record any other way. If you’re already a Music Club member, you’ll know a lot of this
already and you can expect your free record to drop through
your letterbox in the next few weeks. If you’re not a member,
visit our website at www.electronicsound.co.uk to find out how
to sign up. And keep scrolling down for the lowdown on how
the Wolfgang Flür and Jack Dangers collaboration came about... Electronically Yours,
Push & Mark
THE SINGLE
A
M EE T
O
MIN
A
TING
OF
N DS
Electronic Sound deputy editor
MARK ROLAND explains how
two electronic music kingpins
came together to create
‘Staying In The Shadow’, our
unique seven-inch single
THE SINGLE
Many electronic music fans share an obsession with Kraftwerk.
Jack Dangers, who I first met in 1990, around the time Mute
released the classic Meat Beat Manifesto album '99%', is no
exception. My earliest conversations with Jack would often
veer off into Kraftwerk chat, dissecting the group’s records,
noting the shift from the experimental noise of the first album
to the tunefulness of the second, through to the change in
sound that came after ‘Autobahn’, when they abandoned studio
genius Conny Plank and produced themselves on ‘RadioActivity’.
Jack and I have stayed in touch over the years, even when
we had nothing particular to talk about. There was an email
here, a phone call there, and the Kraftwerk chat was never
far away. These days, Jack Dangers has a regular column in
Electronic Sound, which involves us talking regularly again. The
conversations we have about his column almost always end
with discussions about Kraftwerk.
A while ago, Jack told me that The Prodigy's Liam Howlett
had once interviewed him for one of those “interview your
heroes” pieces. Liam said he felt Kraftwerk were overrated
and didn’t fully deserve the importance they were afforded on
the electronic music scene. Jack disagreed, of course. At the
time, Liam's music, which owed more to punk than German
electronic records of the 1970s, must have felt a million miles
from the sleek subtlety he heard in Kraftwerk. But like anyone
in a half-decent guitar band who hasn’t listened to The Beatles,
the influence is there whether they’re conscious of it or not.
When we started planning the new Electronic Sound Music
Club, we decided to release a record to launch the club, but
we weren’t quite sure what it should be. But the answer was
staring us in the face. Last summer, while I was researching our
cover feature to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Kraftwerk’s
‘Autobahn’, I interviewed Wolfgang Flur. And over the course of
several exchanges with Wolfgang about the feature, a thought
began to grow. Perhaps we could ask Wolfgang if he would be
interested in collaborating on a record with Jack?
The idea made perfect sense. Wolfgang, who needs no
credentials beyond having actually been in Kraftwerk (and one
quarter of the classic Kraftwerk line-up, no less), working with
Jack Dangers, a hugely influential producer with a formidable
track record and an equally impressive collection of vintage
electronic instruments in his San Francisco home.
This would be a record that joined two dots from electronic
music's rich history in a new, fresh, 21st century way. And so
the first Electronic Sound Music Club release was born. All we
needed to do now was to make it happen. Not as easy as you'd
imagine with the pair living on different continents...
VOICE FROM THE SHADOWS
With a nod to the pioneers, Jack Dangers dusted
down an essential piece of kit for use on
‘Staying In The Shadow’
The vocoder is probably one of the most important
instruments in the development of electronic music, as
Kraftwerk’s continuing interest in it testifies. When the
vocoder used by Kraftwerk on ‘Autobahn’ came onto eBay,
Jack Dangers was beaten to the prize by his former label
boss Daniel Miller and had to console himself with another
model of vocoder that the German band used, the EMS
3000. So when we invited Jack to collaborate with former
Kraftwerk man Wolfgang Flür, it was no surprise that he
chose to bring the vocoder into the mix.
YOU'VE GOT MAIL...
The making of a record via the power of email
2 December 2014
8 January
We email Jack Dangers to ask if he’d be interested in a
collaboration with Wolfgang Flür. His reply: “Yes, definitely.”
4 December
Update from Wolfgang: “I'm in a good process today and get
Isabelle's vocals on Friday. Then I fill in and send back to Jack
with all I did. 'Back To Jack’ would also be a good title, ha ha
ha!”
We put the same question to Wolfgang Flür: would he like to
collaborate with Jack Dangers? He says he would.
13 January
5 December
We introduce Wolfgang and Jack: “We’re really thrilled that this
collaboration is happening and are looking forward to hearing
what you come up with. We’ll leave you two to communicate
about the track, but it’s our understanding that Jack will come
up with something and send it to Wolfgang, who will listen,
and send something back for further work.”
6 December
Jack to Wolfgang: “Great to be working with you, I will send
you something soon.”
And then it goes quiet for 10 days, until…
16 December
Wolfgang to Jack: “Would it be possible to send me something
before Christmas, as I go on holidays and it would be fine to
have something on my MacBook for inspiration. Electronic
Sound want results before the end of January, if I remember.
Have a good time and a pleasurable Christmas, Wolfgang.”
17 December
Jack sends Wolfgang a link to download the first draft of the
track. “I called it ‘Agelast’ (someone who never smiles) as a
start point,” says Jack. “Merry Christmas! PS: The tempo is
120 BPM.”
Wolfgang replies the same day: “Sounds very nice, tender,
vulnerable… music fits to a doubter. One who is in doubt with
himself, but also has a sensitive side to him. Very nice indeed,
I really like it.”
4 January 2015
Wolfgang to Electronic Sound: “Just to send you an update.
Jack had sent me a soundpiece, which I liked immediately. It is
a warm, but sentimental piece of music and I thought to write
some lyrics about a guy who is not very self confident and
who always quarrels with himself, his look, how he walks, how
he talks. He cannot see himself, he's afflicted with himself. I
have already recorded the vocals and set them into the track. I
have also created some tunes and a high string and additional
synth melody to go with the chorus, which I'm awaiting from
Stockholm singer Isabelle Erkendal. She also accompanied me
on my song ‘Greed & Envy’ which I co-wrote with Bon Harris (is
on my website). As soon as I have her vocals, I will set them
into the track and send back to Jack within the coming week
so that he can continue and finalise the song. Title now: ‘I
Can't See’. Have a good year 2015, see you in London soon.”
We receive the first mix. We write to both Jack and Wolfgang:
“The way the piece is developing and shifting is fascinating. It
has a strong mood now, evocative of the kind of thoughts that
come in the night. We like how the melody is growing too,
becoming almost a romantic song, but staying in the shadows.”
Wolfgang replies: “‘Staying In The Shadow’ is a really good
description. It would make a good final title I think.”
The deadline for the completed track is the end of January...
30 January
From Wolfgang: “Today I have mailed Jack and asked him to
push up Isabelle's vocals a little before he gives you the track
for the mastering. Please await a new mix from Jack tonight.
Sad that I could not be with Jack in his studio for the mix in
general.”
Over the next few days, final tweaks are made to the mix
of the track, which Wolfgang and Jack have now agreed
to call ‘Staying In The Shadow’, bringing the vocals up a
bit, smoothing out one of the sections. Wolfgang sends an
alternative mix. Jack produces an instrumental mix and several
updates to the original version. We send them both the artwork
concept, which they like. “The shadow-guy design is brilliant!’
says Wolfgang. “Wow, looks great!’ says Jack.
31 January
Jack writes: “What's the very, very ultimate deadline? I am still
getting files from Wolfgang and he might send some more next
week when he gets back from a trip. Sounds great so far!”
8 February
We receive the final files, book the pressing and the cut with
the catalogue number ESMC001.
19 February
We head to London, to Curve Pusher, a music mastering and
vinyl cutting studio in Hackney, where we see ESMC001 being
cut before it goes off to be pressed and packaged as the first
Electronic Sound Music Club release.
The finished result is a unique moment caught on vinyl, made
for the best reasons by people who care passionately about
electronic music. In many ways, we feel it's a collaboration
that sums up what this magazine is all about in one lovingly
produced clear vinyl seven-inch single.
We couldn't think of a better way to launch
The Electronic Sound Music Club.
FE ATUR E S
CONTENTS
THE
PRODIGY
Our writer Martin James has
been pals with Liam Howlett
for years. Which means when
it comes to listening to the
new Prodigy album, he’s on
the front row, in the best seat
in the house. And he’s got
popcorn
8.58
Paul Hartnoll makes a
welcome return after calling
time on Orbital. His new
8.58 project features a raft of
guest vocalists, but he’s lost
none of his old band’s oomph
BLANCMANGE
PORTICO
Returning with a gloriously
dark new album, Neil Arthur
talks hopes and fears, as
well as carpets, Sellotape,
murder, ‘Top Of The Pops’,
Tupperware… Oh you know,
the usual
From jazz hopefuls to electronic
trailblazers in three easy steps.
Sort of. The metamorphosis
from Portico Quartet to Portico
is as extraordinary as their new
album
EAST INDIA YOUTH
So how do you follow up a
Mercury-nominated debut
album? You go and make a
better one. William Doyle
puts on his best suit and
explains how
TECH
KORG
MS-20M
SYNTHESISER DAVE
We rummage for the office
screwdriver and get to work
on the build-it-yourself
version of the rather popular
Korg MS-20
Noises that go whumpwhump-weeeeeeeoooooooooh in the night.
Sounds to us like you’ve got
a broken synth. Who are you
going to call?
READERS’ SYNTHS
DAVID FANSHAWE:
EARTH ENCOUNTERS
Big ones, little ones, cheap
ones, expensive ones, shiny
ones, dusty ones. Want an
excuse to wax lyrical about
the love of your life? Here it is
A cracking sample
collection featuring the
field recordings of the late
great English composer and
ethnomusicologist
ALBUM R EV I EWS
UVI BEAT HAWK
UVI unleash an iPad app into
the wilds of the rather busy
portable beat-making market
PORTICO, ALSO, EAST INDIA YOUTH, BLANCMANGE, STEALING
SHEEP, SONNYMOON, TWIN SHADOW, PREFUSE... and more!
WHAT’S
INSIDE
UP THE FRONT
THE
OPENING SHOT
GARY NUMAN snapped
live at the Royal Festival
Hall in London, one of the
highlights of last month’s
2015 Convergence festival of
music, art and technology
FAT
ROLAND
Prowling the corridors of
power, ear pressed against
the doors of the rich and
famous, that’s our Fats. One
day he’ll be doing it without
a mop and bucket
TIME MACHINE
It’s 1979. Want to see a
gazillion great bands in a
single weekend? You had
to be at the FUTURAMA
FESTIVAL in Leeds.
Promoter John Keenan
remembers those heady
times
BURIED TREASURE
A new regular series
unearthing, dusting down
and reappraising classic lost
electronic albums. We’re
starting with ‘Sequencer’ by
Larry Fast’s SYNERGY project
JACK DANGERS
Four new electronic artists
we think you really should
be paying some attention
to – LTO, AERO FLYNN,
EVVOL and ROMARE
When he’s not recording
with Kraftwerk legends, he’s
writing a regular column for
us. This issue, Jack talks
about 1970s New Zealand
electronic pioneer JOHN
COUSINS
60 SECONDS
ANATOMY OF A
RECORD SLEEVE
UNDER
THE INFLUENCE
LANDMARKS
PULSE
The latest in our series of
minute-long video portraits.
This month, VERONICA
VASICKA from Minimal
Wave Records sits nice and
still for a whole minute
Former Fila Brazillia big
chief and now a solo artist
in his own right, the very
excellent Mr STEVE COBBY
picks a path through his lifechanging influences
BRIAN ENO’s ‘Music For
Films’? A blank canvas with
some little letters, right?
Wrong. There’s a lot more
here than meets the eye.
Probably
Stephen Mallinder talks us
through the life and times
of CABARET VOLTAIRE’s
seminal ‘Nag Nag Nag’, a
track with more edge than
the sharpest Sheffield blade
THE OPENING SHOT
GARY NUMAN
Royal Festival Hall, London
20 March 2015
Photo: MARK MAWSTON
Gary Numan seemed pretty anxious in the lead-up to his soldout Royal Festival Hall show as part of the 2015 Convergence
festival of music, technology and art. The great man took to
Twitter to fret about his preparations. “At least half the set is
made up of songs I haven’t played for a few years,” he said.
“Lyric nightmare. Been up all night learning my own songs.”
Following what he describes as a “looooooong” soundcheck,
Numan seemed more assured. “I think I remember how the
songs go at last,” he tweeted. As promised, the rip-roaring
set featured a number of songs he hadn’t aired live in a while,
as well as old favourites like ‘Cars’, ‘Are Friends Electric’ and
‘I Die, You Die’. Most notable among these were ‘Prophecy’
(which he last played live in 2004), ‘Dark’ (not performed since
2006), and ‘The Machman’ (last heard live in 2008).
A couple of days after the show, Numan took to Twitter again.
“All very showbiz, but now I’m back on the school run,’ he said.
“Odd life.”
THE FRONT
HEN
BACK WGS
THIN ,
T
WEREN ARE
Y
E
HOW TH W
NO
THE
FUTURAMA
FESTIVAL,
1979-1983
We’re heading back to the post-punk daze
of the FUTURAMA FESTIVAL, with promoter
JOHN KEENAN telling tales of flooded
venues and vomiting singers
Words: PUSH
“I got a phone call from this bloke who said his name was Stevo
and he was a DJ,” says John Keenan. “I’d never heard of him.
Nobody had. This was before he started Some Bizarre Records.
He said, ‘I play futurist music, can I come and DJ at your club?’.
So I said, ’Futurist music? OK, that sounds good’. My main DJ
at the club was Claire and she played lots of electronic music
– OMD, Human League, Fad Gadget – but I thought this Stevo
would bring something different, something special, you know.
on the flyers as a sort
of sub-title.”
John Keenan seems to have a story about pretty much every
major figure on the late 70s and early 80s UK music scene.
But then he knew most of them long before anybody else did.
Keenan has worked as a promoter in Leeds for almost 40 years,
starting with a weekly punk club at Leeds Poly in 1977 before
opening the city’s famous F Club, which took place at three
different venues in Leeds, none holding more than about 300
people, and later morphed into the Fan Club. The bands that
Keenan put on reads like a Who’s Who of punk, post-punk and
early experimental electronica, but he’s perhaps best known as
the man behind the Futurama festivals, the first of which took
place at Leeds Queens Hall in September 1979.
The line-up of the
inaugural Futurama
included OMD,
Cabaret Voltaire, Joy
Division, The Fall, A
Certain Ratio, Echo
And The Bunnymen
and Scritti Politti.
PiL headlined
the Saturday and
Hawkwind, then
arguably in their most
electronic-oriented
phase, topped the bill
on the Sunday. The
original plan was to
also show sci-fi films,
but the British Film
Institute was having
none of it. Keenan did
manage to get hold of
some lasers, though,
but the water needed
to keep the equipment cool almost flooded the venue. Tony
Wilson from Factory Records acted as a compere for the event,
with the bands playing on two stages arranged side by side.
“A lot of the northern bands weren’t getting the attention I
thought they should, so I decided I’d put some of them on at
a big weekend event and try to get the music press up for it,”
he recalls. “I was young and naive and I thought it would be
like doing a normal gig, but a bit scaled up. Apart from the
headliners, I got the bands for 50 quid, 100 quid tops. Looking
at the line-up now, it seems pretty obvious, but most of those
groups were just starting out then. It was actually billed as the
World’s First Science Fiction Music Festival and I put ‘Futurama’
“I paid £1,500 for the Queens Hall, which was a cavernous place
where they parked buses by day and held car auctions most
weekends,” notes Keenan. “They said they’d provide staging
but they didn’t, so I had to get hold of some scaffolding and
some eight-by-fours from a timber yard. I rounded up as many
F Club members as I could find and we spent all night putting
up the stages on the Friday. Splitting the PA and having two
stages was a unique idea at the time, although it was later
copied by lots of other festivals. While one band was playing
“So we sorted out a date for him to come up, but when he
arrived at the club he didn’t have any records with him. So I
said, ‘Hang on a minute, where are your records?’. And he goes,
‘Records? I haven’t brought any records’. So I said, ‘What do
you mean? You’re a DJ, aren’t you? Why haven’t you brought
any records?’. And he goes, ‘Oh, I thought I’d just use some of
yours’. I couldn’t believe it.”
THE FRONT
on one stage, the next was line checking on the other, ready to
start as soon as the first band was finished.”
The success of the 1979 Futurama was repeated at the same
venue the next year, the line-up featuring Soft Cell, Siouxsie
And The Banshees, Robert Fripp, Clock DVA, Classix Nouveau,
Young Marble Giants, The Durutti Column, Naked Lunch and
Vice Versa, who changed their name to ABC a few months after
the event. Keenan says Vice Versa were managed by one of the
group’s mothers, who he remembers as “a very shrewd woman”.
U2 also played the 1980 Futurama, appearing five or six bands
down the bill on the Saturday evening. Soft Cell played even
earlier that day, coming onstage at around 2pm, while the
venue was still filling up.
“Marc Almond was a student in Leeds and he used to come
down to the F Club,”
says Keenan. “If
he didn’t have any
money he’d say,
‘Will you let me in
if I help hump in
the equipment?’. I’d
always let a few of
them in for free like
that. I bumped into
him one day and
he gave me a tape
of his band, but I’d
already compiled
the Futurama bill
for that year. He
was like, ‘Oh, John,
can’t you get us in
somewhere please?’.
So I said, ‘OK, I’ll fit
you in’. So I fitted
him in.
“Soft Cell got so much coverage from that gig. We had lots of
European journalists at Futurama 2 and Soft Cell went down
really well with them. I can understand that because they were
doing something quite different. They were doing electronic
music, but they weren’t like, say, Cabaret Voltaire, they had
much stronger melodies and a pop feel and a very theatrical
frontman. It wasn’t long before my old pal Stevo got on the
phone to me again and he ended up putting Soft Cell on that
first Some Bizarre album.”
Three more Futuramas followed, the 1981 and 1982 festivals
taking place at Stafford Bingley Hall and Deeside Leisure Centre
in Queensferry respectively, before Futurama 5 saw a return
to the event’s spiritual home in Leeds in 1983. As always, the
bills featured some of the most interesting groups of the time,
among them New Order, Blancmange, Simple Minds, Dead Or
Alive, 23 Skidoo, The Box and B-Movie.
“I never made any money out of the festival, but I came away
with so many wonderful memories and I could tell you an
anecdote about every single band that played,” laughs Keenan,
who continues to promote gigs in Leeds to this day. “Jim Kerr
was sick onstage when Simple Minds headlined Futurama 3. I
think he might have told people afterwards that it was food
poisoning, but it was his nerves. He was always very nervous
when they played live and that was a big gig for them. But he
kept on singing and it was a really good performance.
“That was also the year the Virgin Prunes wouldn’t get off the
stage at the end of their set. They were funny. They were
dressed up as cavemen. We pulled the plug, but they kept
banging on the stage even while the next band started playing.
I didn’t mind stuff like that, though. That’s what the Futurama
was all about. Ideas that were a bit out of the ordinary, people
trying to do something different and going against the grain.
It made it a bit more difficult for us, but we were always able
to adjust things. Everybody got out of it alive. Most of us did
anyway.”
PULSE
WE'VE GOT OUR
FINGER ON IT!
There are tons of great new artists around at the moment.
This month we’re giving love to the shadowy LTO, American
dreampopster AERO FLYNN, the elegant and seductive
EVVOL, and the cut ‘n’ paste funk of ROMARE
THE FRONT
LTO
Mysterious producer, equally enigmatic EP
WHO HE?
From the shadowy world of the Old
Apparatus collective, Bristol producer
LTO first broke ranks in 2013 to work
with rapper Mowgli as Khing Kang King.
Now he’s popped up again with his
second solo EP, ‘No Pasa Nada’.
WHY lto?
He’s been compared to Autechre. Do
you need any other reasons? Seriously
though, his work is all about using
distorted and disguised found sounds
and field recordings to create totally
immersive soundscapes that stand up
as great tracks at the same time. It’s
brilliant stuff. Is that a waterfall? The
pounding of machinery or processed
beats? We don’t know – and it sounds so
good, we don’t really care.
‘No Pasa Nada’ really whirrs along. It
ticks, it pounds, it crashes. It’s only four
titles long, but size isn’t everything: this
is an intense, atmospheric record that
builds a strange landscape around you
as you listen, shifting as the elements
of each track synchronise and fall apart
again. At times, it feels like LTO is trying
to lasso that waterfall and drag it into
place, but the found sounds and samples
always get the better of him and run free
throughout the record.
TELL US MORE
LTO specialises in blurring the line
between the organic and the mechanic:
you get natural sounds contrasted with
industrial breakbeats, bound together by
fragmented piano melodies. A lot of the
sounds on ‘No Pasa Nada’ were recorded
on backpacking trips to South America,
but it’s not just Latin influences you’ll
find here. There are glimpses of modern
classical, grime, dubstep, even post-rock.
Here’s hoping for a full album hot on the
heels of this gem of an EP.
ROSIE MORGAN
‘No Pasa Nada’ is out now
on Injazero Records
THE FRONT
AERO FLYNN
Lush textured, psych-folk splashed dreampop
WHO HE?
Josh Scott – from Eau Claire, Wisconsin,
and more latterly based in Chicago – is
Aero Flynn. He started out in a band
called Amateur Love and is a close
musical compadre of Bon Iver frontman
Justin Vernon, who has produced Scott’s
self-titled debut album. The record
features a raft of Bon Iver players, so
let’s take top-drawer musicianship as a
given. Bodes well so far, right?
WHY aero flynn?
‘Aero Flynn’ is, in a word, dazzling.
Expect uptempo experimental pop
tendencies and analogue synth textures
brilliantly fused with washes of psychfolk haziness. If you enjoyed the
grandiose, landscaped depth of War On
Drugs’ 80s-informed breakthrough ‘Lost
In The Dream’ and also dig Beach House
and Wild Beasts, you’ll definitely want to
hear this.
‘Aero Flynn’ club-bangs, psych-jams and
cathedral-shivers. It sounds like it could
have been made by someone who grew
up on a lunar outpost listening to Robert
Wyatt and Thom Yorke Earth-tapes. And
that’s probably as much as you need to
know.
TELL US MORE
It’s quite a story. The big time beckoned
for Josh Scott and Amateur Love,
whose members also played alongside
Justin Vernon in his pre-Bon Iver band,
DeYarmond Edison. Scott wrote the
song ‘Lip Parade’ as referenced in the
lyrics to Bon Iver’s Grammy-nominated
‘Holocene’. But things didn’t exactly
fall into place. We’ve heard tales of
breakdowns, deep depression and a
mystery illness. This much history surely
goes some way to informing Aero Flynn’s
captivatingly singular sound. And from
where we’re standing, it has every
chance of catching fire this year.
CARL GRIFFIN
‘Aero Flynn’ is out now on
Ooh La La Records
THE FRONT
EVVOL
Exotically brewed, haunting trance-pop
WHO THEY?
Known until recently as Kool Thing,
Evvol is a trio of Irish girl Julie Chance,
Australian Jon Dark, and their French
touring drummer Valentin Plessy.
Reinventing themselves under a new
name, the Berlin-based group have
turned from indietronica to something
entirely different
WHY EVVOL?
Since leaving Kool Thing behind, Chance,
Dark and Plessy have kept their hands
in through solo projects, DJing their way
across Berlin, and founding a new house
music label, imaginatively called My
Haus. All this experimentation appears to
have paid off because their name change
has brought with it a brand new sound.
That sound is a haunting style of elegant,
euphoric trance-pop set to send shivers
down your spine and all the way back
up again, just for good measure. There’s
real depth and darkness to Evvol’s music,
plus it’s totally sexy too: Julie Chance’s
seductive voice drifts effortlessly over
the tight synths. The guitars are hazy,
but not shoegazy, the deep bass ebbs
and flows like waves, while the tense
percussion contrasts exquisitely with the
mesmerising vocals. Trancey Germanic
electronica you want to dance to. Slowly.
TELL US MORE
There’s definitely something of the 80s
about their ‘Eternalism’ debut album (see
the flute solos on ‘Sola’), but that’s not
to say Evvol don’t fit neatly alongside
the modern trailblazers. They’ve got
the complex minimalism of a group like
The xx and the dramatic, soaring vocals
of Bat For Lashes. There’s also the
danceability of La Roux and the edginess
of Grimes, all in one place. Evvol, you
spoil us!
ROSIE MORGAN
‘Eternalism’ is released on
Mad Dog & Love Records on 18 May
THE FRONT
romare
Funk-fuelled cut ‘n’ paste (BA, Hons)
WHO HE?
London producer Archie Fairhurst, who
keen observers will already know thanks
to a brace of dazzling cut ‘n’ paste EPs,
2012’s ‘Meditations On Afrocentrism’ and
2013’s ‘Love Songs: Part One’, both of
which appeared on Bristol’s future-facing
Black Acre label.
WHY ROMARE?
Not least because said EPs caught the
attention of Ninja Tune – and when
they scoop up an artist you’d be daft
not to listen. A drummer and a guitarist,
Fairhurst added some turntable-meetssecondhand-record-shop shizz to his
sound while living in Paris and the
result, as evidenced by his debut album
‘Projections’, has much in common with
his new label’s founders Coldcut.
But there’s more. As a student, Fairhurst
studied African American Visual Culture
and he’s turned that learning into music,
music, music. The album is, according
to his people, “a homage to the cycle of
cultural appropriation in America”. While
that might sound terribly academic, it’s a
seriously cunning record that has turned
ears in the Electronic Sound office every
time we’ve played it.
TELL US MORE
The inspiration for the whole shebang
comes from Afro-American artist
Romare Bearden (whose 1964 exhibition
‘Projections’ lends its name to the
album). Our Romare took his lead from
that Romare’s cut ’n’ paste artworks and
applied similar techniques to his music.
The result isn’t just a hotchpotch of
interesting samples and vocal snatches,
but a carefully constructed collection that
verges on aural documentary. So we get
everything from tributes to the classic
American work song (erm, ‘Work Song)
to a celebration of disco (‘Rainbow’). It’s
fascinating stuff, guaranteed to work the
old grey matter as well as fuelling your
dancing feet.
NEIL MASON
‘Projections’ is out now on Ninja Tune
THE VERY BEST
IN ELECTRONIC MUSIC
AVAILABLE ON ALL
SMARTPHONES & TABLETS
DOWNLOAD THE
ELECTRONIC SOUND APP
FOR FREE AT
www.electronicsound.co.uk
00:00:60
sixtySECONDS
VERONICA VASICKA, owner of Brooklyn-based boutique electronica label Minimal
Wave, gives us a one minute portrait, just enough time to learn the essential details
https://youtu.be/dVQW251vBc8
NAME: Veronica
Vasicka
BORN: 18 March
1975, Coney
Island Hospital
in Brooklyn,
New York
FIRST
ELECTRONIC
RECORD: New
Order – ‘Substance’
FAVOURITE
ELECTRONIC
ALBUM OF ALL
TIME: Throbbing
Gristle – ’20 Jazz
Funk Greats’
MINIMAL WAVE
FOUNDED: 2005
FIRST MINIMAL
WAVE RELEASE:
Oppenheimer
Analysis –
’Oppenheimer
Analysis’ EP,
December 2005
NUMBER OF
RELEASES: 61
(and 15 on
sub-label Cititrax)
MOST RECENT
MINMAL WAVE
RELEASE:
In Aeternam Vale –
‘Gnd Lift’ 12-inch,
December 2014
MOST
SUCCESSFUL
MINIMAL WAVE
RELEASES:
Oppenheimer
Analysis –
‘Oppenheimer
Analysis’ EP
(2005), Das Ding
– ‘H.S.T.A.’ LP
(2009), Deux –
‘Decadence’ LP
(2010)
FORTHCOMING
RELEASES:
An Oppenheimer
Analysis
double album
retrospective,
due in May,
neatly topping
and tailing the
label’s first
10 years with
the same artist
THE FRONT
UNDER THE
INFLUENCE
STEVE COBBY, the Hull producer
behind Fila Brazillia, The Solid
Doctor and The Cutler, picks out
some inspirational highlights
Interview: NEIL MASON
‘ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST’
I saw ‘One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest’ when I was about 17
and it had a deep resonance with me. I’d just left school and
I was finding out about the wider world and how it worked.
Hull’s not exactly an uber metropolis, so ‘Cuckoo’s Nest’ was
really the first time I realised it wasn’t just me shouting against
the world and this film was speaking about exactly the same
things that concerned me.
I’ve never seen it manifested quite as well as through Randle
P McMurphy. They eventually take the twinkle out of his eye
and he’s a beaten man, and I remember thinking, “That is how
the world works, isn’t it?”. There’s that great scene where he
nicks a boat and takes his fellow patients out for a day. It’s just
unfettered joy, a brief glimpse of how it could be, and then it’s
back to the grind. I saw all that as an analogy for freedom and
how hard it is to get. It was a clarion call for rebellion, but also
a reminder of how little power you have as an individual.
The film also made me realise that if there’s an otherness to
you, there’s a good chance it’ll be ironed out. It takes a huge
amount of effort to stand up for what you believe in and not
be steamrollered by power, authority, the state, the system,
the man. ‘Cuckoo’s Nest’ just confirmed what I feared. You
can rebel as much as you like, but how do you beat the power
of the state? You are just an amoeba. It’s like trying to shoot
down Concorde with a spud gun. That was a real eye opener for
me.
THE FRONT
‘ZEN AND THE ART OF MOTORCYCLE MAINTENANCE’ BY
ROBERT M PIRSIG
My sister bought me ‘Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle
Maintenance’ for Christmas when I was about 16 because she’d
heard me going on about it. I was intrigued by the title and
kept wondering what could that book possibly be about? When
I started reading it, there were lightbulb moments on every
other page. There’s a lot of existential angst when you’re at
that age, so that sort of philosophical discovery really appealed.
It was like, “Somebody’s thinking like I am”, which was
massively empowering.
The book talks about quality and how you can define it. We try
and measure everybody, but it’s almost impossible, certainly
academically, which got me thinking. I didn’t get on with
school, I felt it was a load of pointless data being thrown at
me that I was meant to spit back to show that I was somehow
perceived as intelligent. I thought intelligence was something
completely different, something they weren’t even interested
in developing at school. In the book, Robert Pirsig talks about
how the ancient Greeks went to university to be made wiser.
They weren’t tested, they didn’t come out the other end with
qualifications for this, that and the other job. They realised that
if we have wiser people, we have a better society. And that,
somewhere along the way, has got lost.
‘Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance’ was the first book
that had a big impact on me. It affected the way I think and
look at the world. As an artist, the idea that your work can
affect people to that kind of level, that’s your dream.
DR JOHN
‘ROCK REVELATIONS’
COMPILATION ALBUM
My dad didn’t have many records.
There can’t have been more than a
dozen albums – Frank Sinatra, Tony
Bennett, ‘Motown Chartbusters
Volume 3’, ‘Tubular Bells’ – but the
one that planted the most seeds
in me was a mail order Sunday
Times triple album called ‘Rock
Revelations’. I think you had to
collect vouchers and dad wasn’t
even a Sunday Times reader.
I was reminded of it when I put an old Solid Doctor album,
‘How About Some Ether’, on Soundcloud recently. I was giving a
bit of a backstory to each track and one of them, ‘Light On The
Vibe’, samples ‘Right Place Wrong Time’ by Dr John. The first
time I heard that was on ‘Rock Revelations’.
Whoever curated the album must have had very catholic tastes.
Or maybe they just got what they could. I think The Sunday
Times were probably a bit cheapskate, they couldn't afford The
Who and Led Zeppelin so they went for more marginal artists
– Dr John, Frank Zappa, The Electric Prunes, Tim Buckley – but
at the same time there are people like Buffalo Springfield,
Fleetwood Mac, Average White Band and The Doobie Brothers
on there. It opened up so many other worlds to me. I played it
to death. I wore the grooves out.
My dad’s copy has long since gone to the secondhand shop, so
I went to have a look for another one and, sure enough, there
was one on Discogs in perfect condition for £15. So I sent off
for it. I could remember at least 20 of the tracks, they were
really cemented in my mind. I must have thumbed the record
time and time again, reading the sleeve notes that gave you a
bit of background on each artist. The beauty of vinyl is you can
pore over the sleeves much more than you can ever do with a
CD or digital files.
I had a lump in my throat when the album arrived in the
post. It was like I’d been reunited with a long lost friend. You
couldn’t wish for a better grounding in how wide and varied
music could be. In my own work, I like to fly the flag for variety
and this is the springboard that I bounced off. As much as it
pains me to have any connection to that Tory shit rag The
Sunday Times, I have to pick this because nothing else even
comes close in terms of waking me up the possibilities in
music.
Steve Cobby’s next album, ‘Everliving’, is released
on Declasse in May
FAT
ROLAND
BANGS
ON
Peering down the corridors of power, our intrepid
correspondent is the one with his ear pressed up against
that door at the end. On the other side, someone is
shouting about THE PRODIGY...
Words: FAT ROLAND
Illustration: STEVE APPLETON
A record company mogul sits on a gold
sofa, liquid cash spewing out of her
ears. “Get me Brian Starter,” she shouts
amid an inexplicable mouth-vomit of
diamonds and yachts.
Brian Starter is a feeble man, all
dandruff and bowlegs. He is the hapless
representative of the popular dance
outfit The Prodigy. He leaves a brown
slug trail everywhere he goes because
The Prodigy literally scare the crap out
of him.
“How can I be of service, O Holy Ruler of
All Music?” he says, because that’s how
everyone addresses label bosses these
days.
The mogul says she wants The Prodigy
back. They haven’t brought in any
income for five years. If Brian doesn’t
persuade them to do a new album, she’ll
grind his intestines to mush. She pops
a Xanax. She probably has a fascinating
backstory, but we don’t have time for
that right now.
Brian Starter thinks of the Prodigy videos
he’s made. He is full of nice ideas: the
girl tinkling a glockenspiel in ‘Omen’; the
cow milking in ‘Baby’s Got A Temper’;
the lovely countryside in ‘Out Of Space’.
“We could have them eating candy floss
at a fairground,” he says. “Or at a teddy
bear’s picnic. How about them riding
unicorns down
a rainbow?”
The mogul is furious. She crushes the
head of a nearby kitten and its brain
explodes into a shower of hundred pound
notes. “No, you idiot, we don’t want
cute. We want them nasty. Dangerous.
With weird contact lenses.”
Brian Starter blanches with terror. He
doesn’t like it when The Prodigy are
nasty. He’d rather be working with nice
musicians like Ed Sheeran or Sade. He
ducks as the mogul throws a magnum of
champagne at his head.
“Anything you say, O Great Bringer of
Musical Light,” he says. As he retreats
out of the record company offices, Brian
bows and scrapes and drops a snowdrift
of dandruff onto the floor.
But Brian knows something. As he walks
away, his fearful slump turns into a
confident stride. In August 2004, he’d
secretly replaced Keith Flint with Charlie
from Busted. No-one noticed the swap.
Charlie from Busted does a pretty good
Keith Flint. He spikes his hair. Wears the
contacts. Gurns at the right moments.
But deep down inside, the Charlie Busted
Keith Flint is full of fairy dust and candy
floss and unicorns and rainbows. Just
how Brian likes it.
He’s clever, Brian Starter. Twisted Brian
Starter.
THE FRONT
BURIED
TREASURE
ON THE HUNT FOR ELECTRONIC GOLD
X marks the spot when it comes to unearthing lost
gems from the hidden chest of electronic music past.
This month, we dig up ‘Sequencer’, SYNERGY’s
seminal late 1970s album
Words: MARK ROLAND
‘Sequencer’, the second album from Larry
Fast’s Synergy project, was released in 1976.
The original cover was a prog horror story,
a Dali-esque dreamscape image of an arid
desert, ornangely lifeless bar a couple of
seed pods, one of which has cracked open to
reveal an orchid-type flower. However, some
smart cookie at Sire Records realised that
austere machine love was the way to go to
promote the record in the UK and stuck a
picture of a cool looking on/off
switch on a burnished aluminium
panel on the sleeve, part HAL
from ‘2001 A Space Odyssey’,
part synth porn. It sent out all
the correct messages about the
nowness of electronic music in
the post-Kraftwerk age (post‘Autobahn’ and ‘Radioactivity’,
but pre-’Trans Europe Express’).
This tale of two covers neatly
sums up the dichotomy at the
heart of ‘Sequencer’. The album
skates on the thin ice of the
“What would Mozart do if he’d
had synthesisers?” question
that was asked so often in the
1970s. But while it takes its lead
from the likes of Wendy Carlos’
Mozart/Moog sets and Yes’ movement-laden
rock epics, it has a pop sensibility and often
fuses strangely quite pretty yet futurist
segments with its impersonations of trilling
harpsichords. What really makes ‘Sequencer’ a worthwhile
addition to your electronic listening is
Larry Fast’s commitment to the machines
themselves and their potential for creating
new kinds of noises. Fast had several
powerful signature sounds, notably rolled out
for the lead melody on the cover of Mason
Williams’ ‘Classical Gas’, a piece put together
as a demonstration of finger picking guitar
skills, transposed to electronics and made
extra flashy in the process. Even the stab
at Dvorjak’s ‘New World Symphony’ (that’s
the Hovis bread advert music to any Brit
born before 1980) boasts some disturbing
electronic undertones, detuned oscillators
subtly introducing some
unsettling howls into the track.
But it’s ‘Sequence 14’, the album
closer, that’s most interesting.
It features sections of alarming
electronic experimentations, far
more in the tune with Wendy
Carlos’ ‘Timesteps’ from the
‘Clockwork Orange’ soundtrack.
Using the synthesisers’ abilities
to self-oscillate and sequence, it
builds into an explosive climax of
hissing and whining that sounds
like the aftermath of a UFO crash,
and then gradually moves into
a nightmarish soundscape from
a cannon of an almost nursery
rhyme-like melody. Larry Fast was also involved in the
development of the Polymoog, and the press
launch of ‘Sequencer’ in New York in May
1976 was combined with the announcement
of Moog’s new polyphonic beast. Fast took
a call from producer Bob Ezrin at the event,
inviting him to work on Peter Gabriel’s first
solo album. His synth smarts aided Gabriel’s
transition from prog frontman to electronic
pop star and beyond, and the pair went on to
work together for more than decade.
THE FRONT
JACK DANGERS’
SCHOOL OF
ELECTRONIC MUSIC
In today’s lecture, Professor JACK DANGERS talks about JOHN
COUSINS, New Zealand’s musique concrete master
‘New Directions In New Zealand Music’ was a compilation
album released in 1979. I say “released”, but it was actually
only available at an art exhibition, the Festival of New Zealand
Music and Sound Installations, which ran in October and
November 1979 at the National Museum in Wellington on the
North Island. The album featured artists such as Jack Body,
Douglas Lilburn and John Cousins, and the original vinyl version
came with a 20-page booklet. The vinyl came up on eBay
while ago and I bid for it, but I ducked out when it reached
$260. It went for $300 in the end and I regret not buying it
because it’s really good.
The John Cousins track on ‘New Directions’ was ‘Sleep
Exposure’ and it resurfaced in 1993, when it was put out on a
compilation CD dedicated to Cousins’ work, which is essentially
tape-generated musique concrete. The whole of this CD, which
is also called ‘Sleep Exposure’, is excellent. I think I mentioned
before that my all-time favourite album is probably Jon
Appleton’s ‘The World Music Theatre Of Jon Appleton’, but this
is a close second.
John Cousins was born in 1943 in Wellington and studied
composition at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch,
graduating in 1965. He started teaching at Canterbury in 1967
and stayed there until 2004. He wrote about the difficulties of
continuing a creative career while teaching in an institution,
but his work is brilliant. He handles the audio so well. It’s very
minimal and it has a distinct New Zealand feel to it, mainly
because Cousins likes to use his own voice a lot and he has a
very recognisable accent.
One of Cousins’ pieces, ‘Parade’, is made up of recordings he
made on a trip to the United States in the early 1970s. He
recorded everything: his thoughts, television broadcasts, street
sounds, his own narration. Until recently, if you made music
in New Zealand, you had to become successful in the UK or
America before you would be accepted back home, so tracks
were often diluted and made to sound more international.
But this is pure New Zealand music, made for a New Zealand
audience nearly 40 years ago, so it’s like a time capsule of an
approach that was being taken almost in isolation.
I find Cousins’ material really fascinating because of that and
also because the equipment he used was extremely minimal.
They had everything in Australia – the Synthi 100 I own [a
behemoth of a synthesiser, only a handful remain] came from
Australia, for example – but they had none of those kinds of
resources in New Zealand. That didn’t matter, though. The
classical electronic music that was being produced in New
Zealand at the time was better than the stuff coming out of
Australia.
The ‘Sleep Exposure’ album was included on a box set of
electronic music from New Zealand and it was by far the best
part of it. John Cousins’ work deserves to be heard by a much
wider audience and I would urge everyone to seek it out.
ANATOMY OF A
Our resident expert in Secret Coded Messages On Record Covers
(No Really, They Are There) turns his attention to BRIAN ENO’s ‘Music For Films’
Words: FAT ROLAND
Some coded
messages are
more dangerous
than others. I
would explain the
message here, but
I’d have to kill you
Squint your eyes.
A bit more. Keep
squinting. Yeah,
you look stupid,
you can stop
squinting now
If you mix
this bit of the
image with
water, you can
make a papier
mache Village
People
Sorry about
this area.
Brian was
going
through a
Daily Mail
phase
‘Music For Films’
was inspired by
a rich history
of movies. This
section is called
‘Back Of Cinema
Seat’
North Korea tried to get
this area of the cover
banned. They even
started a hashtag
Here are the warm jets.
Use gloves
Dulux swatch number
176JT00B
Zoom in. Zoom in.
Further. Zoom in. Zoom
in. A little more. There.
I TOLD you there was a
coffee stain
The 51st shade of grey
Draw your own cover
here
To capture his ‘Low’
look, David Bowie used
the whole of this sleeve
as foundation
An optical illusion in
which, when looked at
directly, the polar bear
completely disappears
Why couldn’t I have done
an ELP album cover?
They had armadillo tanks
and everything
This bit is beige. I don’t
care what Brian says
Press here to activate
the sound of Eno burping
‘Mull Of Kintyre’
A scratch ‘n’ sniff patch.
This week’s ambient
smell is “excremental
waft”
If you can see this part
of the cover, your free
whale noise cassette
tape is missing
‘Music For Films’ led to two
sequels: ‘Music For Those
Anti-Piracy Ads You Used To
See On VHS Tapes’ and the
even less successful ‘Music
For YouTube Videos
LOL WTF’
The controversial
bit of the sleeve
that led to six
e-petitions, 12
fights and a
particularly painful
wedgie
“It’s not
beige, it’s
BUFF.”
Alright,
Bri, calm
down
This album is dedicated
to classic comedy films
such as ‘Nil By Mouth’,
‘Requiem For A Dream’
and ‘Sex Lives Of The
Potato Men’
The colour
of buffet
food.
Eno is
partial to a
sausage roll
Sorry, this corner
overcomplicates
everything.
Best not look at it
THE FRONT
LANDMARKS
CABARET
VOLTAIRE
'NAG NAG NAG'
Where to start when picking a classic Cabs’ track? Founding member STEPHEN MALLINDER
gamely takes on our suggestion of the band’s 1979 single – and it’s quite a tale
Interview: NEIL MASON
People get strangely partisan about
the Cabs. Some like the early period,
when we were messing around with
the experimental stuff, or they like the
Rough Trade releases, while others prefer
the electro-ish tracks. We did go through
different periods, but ‘Nag Nag Nag’ is
quite specific because we never really did
anything else like that.
We’d released the ‘Extended Play’ EP
for Rough Trade and then the ‘Factory
Sample’ record. It was a lovely cavalier
time, it was just, “We really like what
you’re doing, we’d like to put your record
out”. After the Factory release, Tony
[Wilson] decided he wanted to do an
album with Joy Division, so we went
with Rough Trade. Obviously, history tells
us different things about those labels,
but it would have been interesting if it
had gone the other way. They were both
great options for us, though, so we were
very happy to go with Geoff [Travis] and
Rough Trade.
When we did ‘Extended Play’, we just
had the ReVox, the B77, so constructing
music was literally done on a two-track.
What Rough Trade allowed us to do was
buy a Tascam four-track, which meant
we could do the ‘Mix Up’ album. It was,
“If you can buy us a four-track, we can
do an album”, so signing to them was a
no-brainer in that sense.
The thing with ‘Nag Nag Nag’, and this
might break the myth for some people,
is that a lot of it was driven by the fact
that one of the tracks on ‘Mix Up’ was
a cover of ‘No Escape’ by The Seeds.
We were obviously listening to a lot of
electronic and avant garde music, like
Can and the early Kraftwerk, but we
were also listening to a lot of American
60s garage records, people like The
13th Floor Elevators and Red Krayola, as
well as the ‘Pebbles’ and the ‘Nuggets’
compilations coming out of the States in
the late 70s.
We were also big fans of the first two
Roxy Music albums and one of the things
that Bryan Ferry said was they never
took singles off albums. We liked that
philosophy, so we adopted it. When we
came to do a single for ‘Mix Up’, we
wanted to do our own song with that
garagey sort of feel. So ‘Nag Nag Nag’
was a one-off. We just sort of twisted
that 60s psyche rock thing into a
northern electro version of it. It was our
homage to that period.
‘Nag Nag Nag’ was recorded in London in
a studio on Berry Street, off Clarkenwell
Road towards The Barbican.
Up until then, we’d recorded everything
at our Western Works studio in Sheffield
and this was the first time we’d ever
really been into another studio. It was
a bit of an eye opener. Mayo Thompson
from Red Krayola had just come over
from the States and was working with
Rough Trade on Scritti Politti and The
Raincoats around that period, so Geoff
and Mayo went, “Well, let’s do a single,
we’ll record it”. So we sort of did it for
the experience. And obviously with
Mayo Thompson’s history with Red
Krayola it was, “Oh wow, we’re actually
making that connection with that 60s
psychedelic garage thing”.
If I can remember correctly, the drum
machine might have been a Salmo.
It had a variable drum roll that you
could pull in with a little switch. Drum
machines at the time all seemed to
have a bossa nova setting, that’s why
a lot of early records featuring a drum
machine have that strange swing to
them, because they’re based around the
old home organ principle that everybody
wants to do a polka. I don’t know what
the bpm was, but I know it was fast.
The vocals were pretty loud and
distorted, but they were still
decipherable. There was a part of us that
didn’t want to compromise, we had a
particular sound and we just wanted to
shape that into a regular pop song, but in
a warped way. You find out how people
relate to your music and that versechorus-verse-chorus bit of a middle eight
is a proven formula, but it’s what you do
with it that’s the interesting thing. The
Flying Lizards’ version of ‘Money’, for
instance, is a pop song but it’s twisted.
Devo made twisted pop songs too.
The lyrics of ‘Nag Nag Nag’ are rather
Burroughs-ish. I’ve always been loath
to tell people, “This is a song about
this”, but it was crafted. The lyrics had a
meaning to me, but I would never force
that on other people. It spoils the fun of
music if someone goes, “This is about
this”, and you go, “Oh, that’s a blow, I
thought it was about something else”,
but the song is about us and the people
around us at the time. It was a rather
edgy period and it’s about what we were
going through, so “15 minute pharaohs
/ Happy now / Golden hands then back
below” is just that idea of short bursts of
fame and infamy that were happening to
people at that moment, which I thought
was... Actually, I’ve just interpreted it,
having said that I wouldn’t.
All we really knew about how the record
was received was that it sold pretty well.
You weren’t sure who your audience was
until you turned up and did a gig, so the
only barometer you had of anything you
released was via the three weekly music
papers – Sounds, Melody Maker and NME.
I know it got slagged off in the NME. I’ve
got a feeling it might have been Danny
Baker who reviewed it. I’ve got a vague
memory of him saying something about
him throwing it in the bin and it was still
shouting “Nag Nag Nag” at him. But I
may have made that up... And it may not
have even been Danny Baker.
I do understand why people like ‘Nag
Nag Nag’. I think it caught the zeitgeist.
It has a massive attitude, which I really
love. As a band, you see yourself as a
spectrum of ideas and sounds and how
those come into being, so it was quite
good to go, “We can write a weird pop
song if we want”. It also makes a bit of
sense of the other things we were doing.
It makes the weirder stuff sound more
sensible. There is some sense in going,
“We’ll give you something that you can
relate to and if you unpack that, then
there’s loads of different ideas to have
a look at. We’ll make you laugh, we’ll
make you dance, and we’ll freak you out
as well”.
I think we’re fortunate in that, even
though ‘Nag Nag Nag’ is often picked
out as the classic Cabaret Voltaire
track, we’re known for a lot of other
things as well. It’s nice to have different
facets about what you do. I don’t think
everything should all be one dimensional.
THE PRODIGY
THE SOU
THE F
Pic: Hamish Brown
UND AND
FURY
Marking 25 years at the coalface, ‘The Day Is My Enemy’ is THE PRODIGY’s
first album since 2009’s ‘Invaders Must Die’ and finds them at their
raging best. In this exclusive piece for Electronic Sound, the band’s
official biographer takes us inside the camp with a personal account of his
unfolding friendship with Liam Howlett and talks to the producer about the
fury that remains at the heart of his sound
Words: MARTIN JAMES
THE PRODIGY
I first met Liam Howlett at a Perception rave during the first
days of The Prodigy. I wasn’t a journalist, he wasn’t a pop
star. We were just ravers-in-kind and we bonded in a way that
everyone did back then. With a grin, a nod, a few words of
infinite wisdom, a shared bottle of water, a shared experience. Years later, we struck up a friendship thanks to a mutual love
of ‘Tomb Raider’ on the PS1. The unlikely vehicle for this
discovery was a Playstation league that I organised for Muzik
magazine. The league, which pitted the great and the good
of the dance music world against each other on pre-release
Playstation titles, had a number of surprising impacts on the
underground fraternity of 1997. Drum & bass lynchpins Reinforced and Metalheadz went to
war over topping the league, with Goldie regularly phoning my
home demanding early copies of the games before his rivals got
theirs. “I know where you live and I’m fucking coming round,”
he yelled down the line one night, having left me over 50
answerphone messages that day.
Liam Howlett seemed to be taking it as a bit of fun, until he
suddenly asked me to stop sending him games and let his
Prodigy bandmate Leeroy Thornhill take the job on instead.
“The record label are on my back about the album and I can’t
get on with it ‘cos I’m spending all my time on ‘Tomb Raider’,”
Liam told me. The album that the Muzik Playstation League was inadvertently
holding up? ‘The Fat Of The Land’.
‘Firestarter’, released in March 1996, had primed an excited
public for the follow-up to 1994’s epoch defining ‘Music For The
Jilted Generation’. It was only when someone from the band’s
then-label XL also mentioned they would rather I didn’t send
Liam any more gaming distractions that I realised how worried
they’d become. XL’s future would be built around the success
of ‘The Fat Of The Land’. No Prodigy? No Adele. The label’s
unofficial ban didn’t stop Liam arriving at Leeroy’s Braintree
home in a state of youthful excitement when I brought round
a development version of ‘Tomb Raider 2’ for them to demo,
though. But that’s another story.
My friendship with Liam has developed over the years and the
Prodigy family have become part of my everyday life. When
I was with them on a particularly memorable trip to Paris on
the ‘Fat Of The Land’ tour, they made sure I made it back to
the UK when my wife went into labour. That meant getting me
from the ganja-choked backstage area, where photographer
Pat Pope had set up an impromptu studio to create a series
of intense, iconic portraits of the band, to my home in south
London with alarming efficiency. That family connection has remained ever since. A couple of
years back, Liam sponsored my son’s football team, which the
tabloids loved. Cue ‘Smack My Pitch Up’ headlines. When the
band toured Brazil soon afterwards, every interview started
with questions about football, a sport that Liam actually has
very little interest in.
My relationship with The Prodigy hasn’t all been oneway, mind.
I once advised Liam to buy ‘Two Pages’ by 4 Hero, a record he
hated (“I left it in me hotel room. Fucking shit, man”). I also
put the wheels in motion for his DJ session on Mary-Ann Hobbs’
Radio 1 show that eventually became the ‘The Dirtchamber
Sessions Volume One’ set. Does any of this impact on my
ability to remain impartial? Maybe. Has it affected my honesty?
Not at all. In fact, I’ve always been totally honest whenever
Liam’s invited me in to listen to a new track or a new album. When I first heard ‘Shoot Down’, his collaboration with Liam
Gallagher, I said I thought it sounded out of place and old
fashioned. When he called from the studio one night to play
me a version of ‘Memphis Bells’ (which at the time had this
deep south hip hop vibe, like a leftfield Timbaland), I raved
about it. Probably wisely, he ignored me and released the
Gallagher mash-up and a different version of ‘Memphis Bells’.
But I think he appreciated hearing my opinions. The only time I haven’t been completely truthful about a
Prodigy track was when Liam first played me ‘This Baby’s Got A
Temper’. What I wanted to say was that he’d lost all the tension
in his production, that he sounded like he was trying too hard
to be The Prodigy that everyone expected, that a really strong
song had become kind of mediocre, a parody of The Prodigy
rather than a brave new statement. Instead, I said it was
“fucking awesome, dude”. It later transpired that he knew it
wasn’t the track he’d intended it be. Maybe that was the time
above all others for honesty.
Liam Howlett is someone who is never afraid to speak his mind.
I like that. He has a loyalty to his friends that runs deep. I find
that admirable too. Every move he’s made has been with great
integrity and his music is created without any sense of cynical
calculation. Everything he produces (with the exception of ‘This
Baby’s Got A Temper’) is the result of an emotional toil that
is always underpinned by the exacting statement “If I’m not
feeling it, it won’t get released”. Why else would The Prodigy have taken seven years to follow
up ‘The Fat Of The Land’, dumping nearly an album’s worth of
recordings along the way? Many groups would have knocked
out a pale imitation and had done with it. Not a group led by
Liam Howlett. And if you want proof that his integrity remains
fully intact, check out The Prodigy’s latest album, ‘The Day Is
My Enemy’.
It’s why I find myself sitting in his studio in London’s King’s Cross
on a cold, drizzly afternoon, listening to the album and being
tempted out of retirement as a music critic. Not many artists
could get me to do this. But not many artists are like Liam
Howlett.
“Pull up something to sit on,” he says, speaking from the
captain’s chair where he steers his creative ship. I have the
choice of a drum stool or something that looks like Sweeney
Todd might have passed through the building at some point. I
choose the drum stool.
Starting with the release of ‘The Dirtchamber Sessions Volume
One’ mix album in 1999, the ritual of listening to each new
Prodigy release with Liam has become one of the most
enjoyable and interesting regular occurrences of my life. Back in
1999, my personal playback took place in his Essex countryside
home, a converted barn next door to a farmhouse where Keith
Flint lived. Since then I’ve been introduced to each new album
in a different location, each somehow fitting the moment.
I first heard 2002’s ‘This Baby’s Got A Temper’ single during
the final mixing stages at Rollover Studios in west London. The
record emerged at a time when both Prodigy fans and the band’s
label were looking for something new in the wake of the global
success of ‘The Fat Of The Land’.
‘Baby’s Got A Temper’ was only the second new track that Liam
completed in the five-year period between 1997 and 2002. The
other was a (still unreleased) collaboration with 3D from Massive
Attack called ‘No Souvenirs’. Drawing heavily on psychedelia
and described by Liam as “like The Beach Boys on acid”, ‘Baby’s
Got A Temper’ featured that leering, punch-drunk rebellion of
a chorus declaring, “He love Rohypnol / She got Rohypnol / We
take Rohypnol / Just forget it all”.
It was a lyric that was bound to bait the red tops, another
folk devil soundtrack to add to the list that already included
promoting arson (‘Firestarter’), violence against women (‘Smack
My Bitch Up’) and even Nazi ideology (the sleeve notes to
‘The Fat Of The Land’ appropriated one of Hermann Goering’s
speeches). And then there was the fact that Liam’s track with
3D had been recorded for the score to a porn movie featuring
zero gravity ejaculation as its USP. Mention of the date rape drug
seemed par for the course.
As I listened to ‘Baby’s Got A Temper’ with Liam, he seemed
obsessed by the finer nuances of the mix. He wandered
nervously from speaker to speaker, occasionally pressing buttons
on the mixing desk and asking the engineer to fine tune the
programming. His bleached mohican hairstyle was bedraggled,
his camouflage cords and white Ping Pong Bitches T-shirt
crumpled, his eyes bleary. Recording the single had, it seemed,
taken over his life.
THE PRODIGY
“To be honest, it never occurred to me that people would
be bothered about Keith’s words,” he told me later, when I
broached the inevitable criticism. “I loved the lyric when Keith
showed it to me and I just said, ‘I’m gonna do something with
this’.”
The track had started out as a demo for Flint, Keith Flint’s punk
group. Then called ‘NNNN (No Name No Number)’, it was a
blend of poppy punk and hardcore, with Flinty sneering like a
reality checked John Lydon. Liam might well have wished he’d
left it as a Flint track as it received short shrift and sent The
Prodigy to the controversy-courting has-beens corner.
It also led to disquiet in the band, with Leeroy Thornhill leaving
to put out his own music as Flightcrank, Maxim turning his
focus on a solo career, and Keith signing Flint to Interscope
Records. Following their headline appearance at the Reading
Festival in 2002, where there were rumours of a backstage
bust-up, The Prodigy seemed to be a thing of the past.
“That record was a mess,” Liam admitted later. “In fact, it was
as accurate a sonic description of us as a band at that time as
you could have got. We were hardly communicating. I suppose
we didn’t like each other very much really.”
Liam ditched the tracks from the album he’d been working on
and threw away the keys to his home studio. He decamped to
his bedroom with a bottle of wine, a James Bond movie and a
laptop, and started crafting an entirely new project. The result
was 2004’s ‘Always Outnumbered Never Outgunned’ album,
which I was invited to hear at Liam’s then-manager’s home in
Essex. Neither Keith nor Maxim appeared on the record. In their
place was an array of guests who were linked through a taste
for the wayward.
“I had to get back to what I was about,” said Liam. “This is
me writing tunes I can rock to and not thinking about other
people.”
As a whole, ‘Outnumbered’ is The Prodigy’s most expansive
album. True, there is nothing as zeitgeisty as ‘Firestarter’ and
nothing as influential as ‘Poison’, but Liam knew exactly what
he was trying to create. It may not have be the headlinegrabber that ‘The Fat Of The Land’ was, but as I listened to
the playback it was clear that it was the work of a man in love
with the idea of making music again.
The problem was, it would seem, fans of The Prodigy’s rocking
beats and guitar mash-ups weren’t ready for electro-funk, or
samples of ‘Thriller’, or female vocals from the likes of actresssinger Juliette Lewis and electroclash outfit Ping Pong Bitches.
‘The Fat Of The Land Part Two’ it wasn’t. But it did sow the
seeds for the albums that followed.
‘Their Law’, The Prodigy’s 2003 greatest hits package, was
a timely prompt of the band’s amazing output and it also
reintroduced the world to the greatest live show on earth. The
arena tour that followed brought Liam, Keith and Maxim back
together, reminding them just how much they vibed off each
other and how much they loved to rock live. They played
voodoo with their rave classics, reworking and rewiring their
smouldering best, and once again showed just what a potent
force they are.
The fusion of that positivity with Liam’s writing process became
clear to me in 2008, when I arrived at Trevor Horn’s Sarm West
Studio in Notting Hill to hear the band’s next album, ‘Invaders
Must Die’.
“We were all a bit paranoid and had to discover whether we
could be a unit again,” Liam told me at the time. “We felt other
people had started to infiltrate our band and they were having
a negative effect. We were talking and either Keith or Maxim
said, ‘Those fucking invaders must die’, and I was like, ‘That’s
the album title right there!’. It’s quite a personal title for us,
it’s about protecting what’s yours, about keeping things tight.”
Interestingly, the media weren’t hugely interested by the return
of the band – until ‘Invaders Must Die’ stormed to Number One
on the week of release. To date, the album has sold over 1.4
million copies globally.
“I love that we surprised people,” said Liam. “A lot of the music
press had written us off, they didn’t expect us to come back,
and now they’re eating their words. This is when we’re at
our best, when people don’t see us coming, when we’re the
underdogs.”
Which brings us back to this grey afternoon in King’s Cross
where I am about to hear ‘The Day Is My Enemy’, the followup to ‘Invaders Must Die’, for the first time. Liam Howlett’s
appearance has changed little in the intervening years. He still
sports that haphazardly home-cut bleached mullet hairdo. The
pallor of his skin still betrays too many nights in the studio. He
still talks with great passion and intensity about his music and
litters his conversation with laughter.
Despite looking like an office from the outside, Liam’s studio
offers a visual representation of both his personality and his
music. Scattered among the analogue equipment are humorous,
ironic artifacts that range from the kitsch to the downright
stupid. But even this isn’t as intensely packed with personality
as his previous studio in a tiny loft area at Sarm West. Every
inch of that space gave away clues to its inhabitant. Entering
the dark production lair felt like walking into Liam’s brain, filled
to the point of claustrophobia with kit, ideas, humour, stuff.
PAT POPE’S
‘FAT OF THE LAND’
PORTRAITS, PARIS 1997
“That was a really good place for me and I just wanted to get
straight onto this record in the same way as I did the last
one,” he confides. “But the building was fucked and water was
getting in. I had these really heavy velvet curtains covering
the walls all around the room and they started to go mouldy.
After a while, I’d put down loads of riffs, but I didn’t have any
finished tracks. I just thought, ‘Fucking hell, the elements are
against me here’. In the end, Trevor [Horn] wanted to sell up,
but to be fair to him he held off ‘cos I was working on the early
stages of this album. He was always really good to us.”
It was at Sarm West that the initial sketches of ‘The Day Is Our
Enemy’ were conceived. It felt like a personal decompression
chamber, a place where Liam could cut off the outside world
and get inside himself to dredge out his deepest motivations.
If the anger and the abrasion and the cluster bombs of ideas
sometimes have a suffocating energy, then that tiny space had
a lot to do with it. But the influence of Sarm West can also be
seen beyond the actual music. “I do most of my work at night, it’s when I’m at my best,” he
explains, showing off the painting that will become the cover of
‘The Day Is Our Enemy’. “So I started to see this fox when I was
leaving the studio in the dead of night. This one time, it just
looked at me, just stared at me like I was in his space. I loved
the idea of this fox coming into the studio and taking what it
wanted before leaving when it wanted. I watched this fox and I
thought, ‘That’s us, that’s The Prodigy’.”
LIAM
MA XIM
Liam cues up the opening title track of the album, pausing
briefly to place what I am about to hear in context.
“I had a great time making this record,” he says. “I was in the
fucking zone. Probably the best buzz I’ve had from making any
album. A lot of the new tracks we’ve been playing live aren’t
on it, tracks like ‘Jet Fighter’ and ‘AWOL’. I like them, but they
didn’t quite feel right to me. As soon as I got into the zone, I
knew what I wanted it to be and from then on in it was, ‘OK,
this is it, we’re off now’.”
At the click of a mouse, the sound of Switzerland’s famous Top
Secret Drum Corps comes thundering through the speakers.
Liam gives a satisfied smile.
K EI T H
“I wanted a military vibe and was looking at these militaristic
drummers with that Royal Tournament and Edinburgh Tattoo
type vibe,” he shouts over the intro. “Then I came across these
guys and I was like, ‘Fucking hell, these dudes are just like
another level’. They were almost playing Prodigy beats and I
thought, ‘I’ve got to get them on the album’.”
What follows is 14 tracks that travel the full range of The
Prodigy at their finest – a supercharged melange of pounding
breakbeats, 60s garage rock, weird retro sci-fi and analogue
driven mayhem. Throughout, the vocals draw on the melodies
L EER OY
THE PRODIGY
of old school rave, dub reggae and punk. In many ways, ‘The
Day is My Enemy’ is the angry twin to the ‘Invaders Must
Die’ party. It sounds very much a part of the Prodigy canon, a
logical next step in their story. Indeed, the album reveals a clear sonic development. The
tracks are more inherently experimental and that rock edge has
become enveloped into the electronic warfare. Interestingly,
listening to the band’s back catalogue, the only album that
seems out of place now is ‘The Fat Of The Land’. It’s almost
too laboured, as if Liam knew what he was after but couldn’t
quite get there. ‘The Day is My Enemy’ is that album, the one he was aiming
for back in 1997, a record on which all those opposing sounds
and ideas, the contradictions between the studio producer and
the live band, the conflicts between rock and rave, finally, fully,
come together. A sum of the whole that is significantly more
than its parts. And it’s a bloody angry whole at that.
“It’s not me personally that’s angry, it’s just that’s how I like our
music to be,” he laughs. “I see music as a form of attack, but it
has to attack in the right way. It has to drop into some kind of
dopeness for it to be The Prodigy. I hate manufactured anger. I
didn’t try and make it like that, it’s just what it is.
“It’s like with ‘Invaders’, that had a kind of a party vibe. It
was more old school sounding because I guess it was a sonic
representation of where we were at that time. I guess us
getting back together had a positive vibe. The majority of the
tunes on this album, even the old school ones, have an urgency
about them. They really sum up the band perfectly for me.”
From the fox on the record cover and its connotations of
outsiderness to the way that the production flies in the face
of the contemporary dance music climate of EDM, ‘The Day
Is My Enemy’ is a totally cohesive statement that comes with
an ideology of opposition. The clearest and heaviest assault is
‘Ibiza’, a track that finds Liam collaborating with Sleaford Mods
and pointing the finger at the single-minded hedonism of the
EDM generation.
“People have got lazy,” explains Liam. “It’s all presets on a
synth plugin. This album is us saying, ‘We know what’s going
on and we’ve got something to say’. But it’s not like us saying
that we’re better than anyone, it’s done with a fucking punch
and a wink. Why should we keep quiet? We have to speak our
minds. “Thing is, we cannot be put in the same category as those
fucking EMD twats. I need to have a very clear separation so
no one can be confused. We’ve got our own form of electronic
music, we always have done. We’re nothing to do with the EDM
thing because that’s just about going out and partying without
anything else. There’s much more to The Prodigy. I think you
can dive into any of the tracks on this album and go, ‘Yeah,
that’s The Prodigy’, but these EDM divs are all the same. How
long can it keep going? Same old bollocks over and over again.
You can’t tell some of ‘em apart.”
Liam’s frustration at the EDM scene runs deep. To him, it is the
product of a lack of ambition in musical terms. He believes a
lot of EDM producers don’t have the ability to step beyond the
confines of the genre and the limitations of a world of presets
and plug-ins.
“People don’t push it enough,” he continues. “It annoys me
when you know what a new electronic record is going to
sound like before you’ve heard it. It has to be authentic in
the analogue input. I won’t use those tricks that are on the
computer, I’m not interested. Turn the quantise off and let it
flow.
“Most of the riffs on ‘The Day Is My Enemy’ are played live and
we didn’t zoom in on them to make them tight. The first album
was the same, but that’s because I didn’t know how to turn the
quantise on. Then I realised that was a strength, so I’ve always
wanted to keep that looseness. I’ve worked hard to create a
sound that’s us and to go against the preconceptions about
what we should do.”
As the final track of ‘The Day Is My Enemy’, ‘Wall Of Death’,
comes to a close, I’m overwhelmed with the sense of having
just gone 14 rounds with a rottweiler, teeth bared and baying
for blood. Even the filmic moments snarl. It’s a rabid anger that
screams, “We are The Prodigy”.
“We’ve been around for a fucking long time and we’re still
making music that excites us,” says Liam. “It’s done for the
right reasons and it’s fucking serious. No one else is doing this
like us.”
No one indeed.
‘The Day Is My Enemy’ is out now on The Prodigy’s
Take Me To The Hospital label
THE FIRST LIAM HOWLETT INTERVIEW
The first interview with Liam Howlett in the music press was published in
Melody Maker in August 1991, around the time of the release of ‘Charly’.
The short piece was written by Electronic Sound editor PUSH
“A lot of my friends have told me that
they think the new single will get into
the Top 40 but I hope they’re wrong,”
says Liam Howlett, the brains behind
The Prodigy. “It’s not that I don’t ever
want to be successful, it’s just that I’d
rather continue to be an underground
act for another two or three records and
work on expanding a hardcore following.
The reason so many dance groups are
sitting in the charts one week and then
completely forgotten the next is because
they have no real foundation. The last
think I want is for The Prodigy to be a
one hit wonder.”
Whether he likes it or not, Liam’s friends
may well be right. The single in question
is ‘Charly’, one of the most ingenious and
infectious rave tunes you’ll try to break
your neck to this summer. The hard
and fast breakbeats are a clue to Liam’s
former role as a DJ with London rappers
Cut 2 Kill, the orchestrated keyboards
reflect his admiration for the new wave
of Belgian beat masters, and the samples
are instantly recognisable. First there’s
the sound of a cat angrily miaowing and
then comes the sad little boy’s voice:
“Charly says always tell your mother
before you go off somewhere”.
has performed at countless raves up and
down the country. He insists on as much
of the show as possible being live and
is usually joined onstage by an MC, a
couple of percussionists and two madcap
dancers.
“Yeah, I’m sure everybody will remember
that television advert from when they
were kids,” says Liam. “It used to be
on every Saturday morning without fail.
The samples have certainly helped the
track take off, but because I don’t want
it to be seen as a novelty record I’ve
made sure that the tracks on the flip are
radically different. ‘Pandemonium’ is a
fairly straightforward hardcore tune while
a piano and snatches of vocals give ‘Your
Love’ a more uplifting, melodic feel.”
“We work our live show along the same
lines as N-Joi and Shades Of Rhythm,
both of whom I have great respect for.
It’s a shame that more dance acts don’t
think about that side of things instead of
just aimlessly wandering about the stage.
Even when I’m not actually playing, I go
to a lot of raves and I’m forever hearing
people moan when a PA is announced.
On the other hand, because I am a raver,
I know what they want to see and hear,
and I’ll often come home from a night
out and feel inspired to switch on the
keyboards and the computer and start to
work. The Prodigy is basically all about
getting the buzz of a rave onto vinyl.”
Signed to XL Recordings at the end of
last year, ‘Charly’ is the long-awaited
follow-up to The Prodigy’s acclaimed
‘What Evil Lurks’ EP. In the six months
or so since the latter was released, Liam
BLANCMANGE
E
M
O
H HS
T
U
R
T
ense
o-nons
their n ou know.
d
n
a
E
MANG
think y
d’,
BL ANC et what you emi Detache
s
e
k
li
g
e
r
k
‘S
o
n
f
in
,
o
h
t
y
m
t
r
u
a re
?B
Eve
albu
z, right cellent new y is time for
iz
h
s
p
x
ll
o
synthp lease of an e ls why it rea
ON
re
ea
L MAS
v
e
e
h
r
t
r
u
h
s: NE I BAKE R
h
d
t
r
r
Wit
o
A
W
il
Ne
M A RK
:
Ph o to s
“This is lovely,” says Blancmange’s
Neil Arthur, taking in the hubble and
bubble and hustle and bustle around
us in a central London bar. “I don’t get
recognised anymore. Nobody’s spotted
me.”
Pop stars come in all shapes and sizes.
Back in the 1980s, Blancmange would
have been a size large. The duo of Neil
Arthur and Stephen Luscombe were ‘Top
Of The Pops’ mainstays, clocking up a
string of hits and a couple of gold albums
between 1982 and 1984. The equivalent
of a music industry hot wash saw their
third long-player, 1985’s ‘Believe You Me’,
emerge size medium. Not a bad album
by any stretch, but it barely grazed the
charts.
“I’m not deluded,” says Neil in his warm
Lancashire burr. “I know the level we
were at. We weren’t huge, but it was
enough. If I went to a pub, if I went
round a supermarket, there’d always be
somebody. Most people were nice, but
it didn’t sit comfortably with me. I just
wanted to get away sometimes.”
We’re here to talk ‘Semi Detached’,
Blancmange’s follow-up proper to
2011’s ‘Blanc Burn’. But first a bit of
housekeeping.
“When you’re not having the hits, there’s
no help from anybody,” he continues.
“It’s a really weird thing, that. You’re
only as good as your last hit and the
next one has to be better. And then,
when it doesn’t quite work out and the
pressure starts, you go, ‘Hm, this isn’t
much fun’. Me and Stephen got bored
of working with each other in the studio,
the machine had started to eat us, the
monster, and we just wanted to preserve
our friendship.”
But you know this, right? Split in 1987,
made their return 24 years later with
‘Blanc Burn’. So why the re-tread? When
you hear ‘Semi Detached’, it makes
sense. It makes ‘Blanc Burn’ sound not
so much the beginning of something, but
the end, a kind of drawing of a line under
Blancmange v1.0. We all need to do a
little looking back before we can look
forwards.
And ‘Semi Detached’ is very much the
sound of moving forwards. For this record,
Blancmange are a newly minted onepiece, with Stephen Luscombe handing
over the reins to Neil full-time following
his lengthy illness.
“He’s not well at all,” says Neil of
Stephen, friendship fully preserved. “He
won’t tour again, I’d love it, but I don’t
think it’s going to happen. We’ve known
each other a long time, so we had a chat
and I’m doing this with his blessing. We
did laugh about the fact that Blancmange
has been going longer this time than it
did first time round.”
Which begs the question, what makes
this a Blancmange album and not a Neil
Arthur solo outing?
“When I set out writing material, it
was always with the view of it being a
Blancmange album,” he explains. “There
may have been a point where Stephen
came in to do some production, but as it
turned out he wasn’t well enough. I think
it needs a name to belong to and the
songs kind of belong to Blancmange.”
‘Blanc Burn’ was a punt into the
unknown. Was anyone still interested in
a band who last saw acclaim disappearing
up the back-end of 1984? Was it some
sort of catharsis?
“In terms of artistic fulfilment, and
getting something out of your system,
this is the way to go,” says Neil. “‘Blanc
Burn’ was then and ‘Semi Detached’
is now. I’d rather do this than repeat
perfectly what we did before. There’s no
comparison for me. As David Thomas of
Pere Ubu said, ‘Get to our age and now’s
the time to rebel’. The one thing I’m
certain of is I’m not certain.”
Turns out folk were still interested, with
Blancmange’s return warmly received
both on record and on stage. Knowing
NE I L
UR
A R TH
vER
ON CO NS
O
VER S I
PA R T
ONE
Until ‘Semi Detached’,
Blancmange had just one
cover version to their
name, ABBA’s ‘The Day
Before You Came’. Their
second, Can’s ‘I Want
More’, has been
percolating for a while.
“I did a cover of it with
Malcolm Ross and David
McClymont from Orange
Juice when we were
working as Saturn 5 in
about ’87, ’88. I’ve still
got the recording we did
back then, but it was never released. I was
going through some old
non-Blancmange multitracks and there was a
load of stuff we’d done
together and that was one
of the tracks. Will it be
released? There’s a
possibility... I have to go
through it all, but I know
there’s some interesting
stuff there, so we’ll see.”
BLANCMANGE
there’s an appetite for his music has
clearly helped Neil because ‘Semi
Detached’ is right up there with both
‘Happy Families’ and ‘Mange Tout’. It’s
that good. It’s also Neil’s most revealing
record. Scratch the surface of a career
that’s spanned four decades and
there’s surprisingly little known about
Blancmange, even less about Neil Arthur
himself.
“You can go so far, can’t you?” he says.
“You might think you’re opening up, I
think I’m very open in my songs, but I
disguise the emotion.”
As a case in point, ‘Sad Day’ from ‘Happy
Families’ is about his long-term partner
Helen – and it’s an instrumental. In
these days of every last thought being
so publicly aired online, gentle souls like
Neil Arthur, who express themselves
beautifully without anyone going ‘Ouch’,
are rare. What does he think that’s down
to? Nurture rather nature?
“Mum and dad didn’t want me and my
sister to endure what they’d had to,” he
says. “They both worked in factories,
nothing wrong with that, but they
wanted us to have the opportunity to do
something else. As I grew up, the thing I
did all the time was draw.”
He wasn’t so good at spelling and maths.
These days, they’d call it dyslexic. Back
then, it didn’t have a name. Did he suffer
at school because of it?
“I suppose looking back... possibly,” he
admits. “But it didn’t feel like I did
because I’d over-compensate by being a bit
of a joker.”
A familiar tale, but to Neil’s parents’ credit
they recognised his artistic talents. His dad,
a foreman in a carpet factory, arranged a
visit to see how carpets were designed.
“So I could’ve ended up designing carpets,”
he says, “I thought, ‘That’s alright, they’ll
pay me’, and then this opportunity came
up to do an art foundation course at
Preston.”
It was there that the tutors pointed him
in the direction of a few well respected
illustration courses, including one in
Brighton and one in Harrow.
“I really wanted to be in London,” he
says. “So I went for an interview at
Harrow and they accepted me. We had
a friend of the family we used to go to
see in London, she was evacuated during
the war and my family took her in, way
before I was born, so I knew the city a
bit. I just wanted to be there. With the
music scene and everything going on...
can you imagine?”
Neil was 18 when he arrived in London in
1977. Can you imagine? He was already
well versed in what he was about to
receive, musically speaking.
“My mate introduced me to Brian Eno’s
‘Here Come The Warm Jets’ album,”
he says, “Eno really captured my
imagination and I thought, ‘Well, I know
where I’m going’, and that sent me on a
journey. So you end up finding out about
Cluster and then the Can connection and
that takes you to Kraftwerk. When I met
Stephen, he was of a similar vein. He
really liked people like Beefheart. I was
like, ‘Wow, this is fantastic’.”
Which explains the inclusion of what is
only Blancmange’s second-ever cover
version on ‘Semi Detached’. Two tracks
into the album comes Can’s classic ‘I
Want More’, which Neil and Stephen
both loved the first time they heard it.
“Even then it was like, ‘This is a bit
odd’,” he says. “So you have a listen to
the album and it takes you on a journey
again. It’s how I discovered Neu!, one of
my all-time favourite bands. It was like,
‘Bloody hell!’.”
London has clearly had a big impact
on Neil Arthur and it plays a leading
role on ‘Semi Detached’. He met Helen
in London, she was studying for her
A-Levels at the higher education block
that adjoined his art college, and they
lived in the capital for three decades.
NE I L
UR
A R TH
vER
ON CO NS
O
VER S I
PA R T
t wo
Following Can’s ‘I Want
More’, like buses, Neil
seems to have cover
versions turning up in a
right hurry.
“There’s another cover on
the deluxe version of the
album… Chic’s ‘I Want
Your Love’. I just loved the
idea of doing it with this
seedy, dark delivery. It
becomes all sinister. It’s
desperate, isn’t it?”
Oh, it is. The line “Do you
feel like you ever want
/ To try my love and see
how well it fits?” sung by
a man has never sounded
more threatening. What’s
more, as well as an
instrumental album, which
he says is “well underway”,
Neil is also working on…
“An actual covers album,”
he confirms. “I love some
of the strange choices
I’ve got in there, but
you’ll have to wait and
see. Can I tell you one?
‘Everyone’s A Winner’ by
Hot Chocolate. It’s very
much a reinterpretation.”
BLANCMANGE
They decamped to the Cotswolds with
their two children eight years ago.
“We just wanted a change,” he offers. “A
slightly slower pace. It seemed to make
sense for the family.”
Chez Arthur is quite a musical hothouse.
His son Joe is better known as house
producer Applebottom. Has he had a
word about the name?
“What can I say?” he smiles. “We called
ourselves Blancmange.”
You were never keen on that, were you?
“Never was,” he admits. “We agreed on
the name, but Stephen came up with
it. We were called The Blancmange and
then we changed it to Blancmange. At
one point we were nearly called A Pint
Of Curry, so it’s better than that.”
have to be onstage, which I didn’t want
to be. I got completely fed up with it. I
love it now, I really enjoy it, but no, I
didn’t like it at that point.”
Working as a jobbing composer, he’s
turned in a raft of soundtracks and
theme tunes for BBC and Channel 4
documentaries, films and commercials,
and has even held down a couple of side
projects. In the late 80s, he worked with
Malcolm Ross and David McClymont of
Josef K and Orange Juice fame in Saturn
5. More recently there’s been AWP1
with Brian Warner, Pandit Dinesh and
Dougie Neillands, which Neil delightfully
describes as being “all acoustic with
funny noises in the background”.
Back to the London love-in. There are
two homages to the capital on the new
album, ‘Paddington’ and the epic opener
‘The Fall’. Neil is clearly still very much
in love with the place.
How’s it going for Joe?
“He’s had to leave college because he
was that busy. I’m just proud of him
doing what he does. You can get an
education at any point. My daughter
Eleanor sings and she’s on the album, on
‘Paddington’ and ‘I Want More’. She’s got
a lovely singing voice... better than her
dad’s.”
Families have a habit of keeping you
busy, which goes some way to explaining
why he stepped out of the public glare
for 24 years. Above the parapet, there
was a Neil Arthur solo album, 1995’s
‘Suitcase’, but further sightings were rare.
Thing is, it was through choice rather
than design.
“I didn’t want to do the same thing again
after Stephen and I split in 1987,” he
says. “Because what we did was really
good and I didn’t want to fail to live
up to that. So I thought, ‘I’m going to
have a go at something else’. I had
the opportunity to do some film music,
which was ideal because I didn’t have
to step into any limelight whatsoever. I
didn’t have to be interviewed, I didn’t
“I always have been,” he offers. “I
absolutely adore this city. I used to go
walking the streets at night. I love that
time when the cars have gone and the
people are in bed.”
So of all the places in London to write a
song about, why Paddington?
“It’s not the prettiest,” he admits. “The
station is noisy and bustling, but I get off
the train and the first person who bangs
into me I almost want to go, ‘Thank you’.
I’m anonymous, I’ve just blended into the
background.”
His writing is, always has been, a joy. It’s
not just the warm, uplifting melodies
that seem to pour out of Blancmange,
it’s that each song is a mini drama, Neil
the actor delivering it. It’s all down down
down, over here, over there, I saw you,
oh no, I miss you... So where does it
come from, bearing in mind he likes his
privacy? Is he a poet and doesn’t know
it? Take the aforementioned ‘The Fall’.
“It’s not always me, but some of the
songs are,” he offers. “The thing is, it’s
not so much what they’re about... I’m
trying to play with fragments of imagery
and seeing where I can go with them.
‘The Fall’ started out as this story about
an imagined situation where someone
finds someone murdered on a beach.
Initially the opening line was ‘When I
saw you / By the moonlight / Walking
in the flotsam / In the bay’. And then
I thought about the Moonlight Club in
West Hampstead, where I used to go and
see bands… and then I thought, ‘Bloody
hell’. I don’t know if I did see The Fall
there, but I saw Joy Division there, so
it’s about me observing my ex in that
situation…”
A real ex?
“Well, no,” he sighs. “I’m in there, but I
thought it would be good if the chorus
reflected something of what those two
people used to be about, what they
would default to for comfort or to make
the pain even more agonising.”
It’s The Fall! Mark E Smith!
“That’s why I like the idea,” beams Neil,
watching our penny drop. “Or maybe it’s
autumn or the book by Camus.”
So where is Smith in it?
“Ah,” he says, knowingly. “The other
thing about it, if you wanted to analyse
it, is I saw Mark E Smith at The Nashville
in West London. I think it was a Human
League gig, but Mark was in the
audience. I had a few copies of ‘Irene
& Mavis’ [Blancmange’s first EP] with
me just in case, so it must have been
1980. So I gave one to Mark and he
wrote back to me. He particularly liked
‘Concentration Baby’ and he really, really
encouraged us. I love The Fall and I
just thought, ‘Blimey’. With his written
encouragement I was, ‘Right, I’m going
to send a copy to John Peel’... and he
bloody played it.”
You’re done, right there. Could’ve retired
happy?
“We really could,” he laughs. “People say,
‘What was the most exciting time?’. It
was when John Peel played your record.”
You just needed a ‘Top Of The Pops’
appearance and that would have been
the full set.
“But we wanted to be alternative,” he
protests. “Pere Ubu, Ludus, The Tiller
Boys, Young Marble Giants, This Heat...
that’s what I thought we were with
our funny tape loops. To me, if I think
Blancmange, I think of ‘Irene & Mavis’.
‘I’ve Seen The Word’, ‘I Can’t Explain’
and ‘Waves’ were all influenced by the
way Young Marble Giants put their music
together. We went off to see bands like
that thinking we were going to do our
version, whatever came out we wanted
to try to structure our music like that. So
how did we end up with songs like ‘Don’t
Tell Me’ and ‘Living On The Ceiling’? I
honestly don’t know.”
The other point to make about ‘The Fall’
is it’s a brazen way to start the record.
A record, any record. It’s over eight
minutes long, but it feels like three.
“It was that length right from the
beginning,” says Neil. “It was always
going to be that long, whether it was
the first track or not. It just seemed to
fit perfectly.”
And if that sounds good, and it is,
wait until you hear the rest of ‘Semi
Detached’. It’s a proper album that
you listen to from start to finish, with
peaks and troughs, joy and pain, a
beginning, a middle and an end. There’s
the instrumental ‘MKS Lover’, a tribute
to the MKS-80 synth, and the bouncy
pop vitriol of ‘Useless’. There’s the dark
double whammy of ‘Like I Do’ and ‘Deep
In The Mine’, the spiky fuck-you of
‘Acid’, and the bruising ‘Bloody Hell Fire’
finale, a song that leaves you sitting
quietly, rocking gently, after it’s faded.
“After all these years, it’s incredible
really,” Neil concludes. “Sometimes I
feel like a bit of a fraud because I’m
not a musician. I’ve been doing this so
long that by default I can play, not very
well, but I can play. I’ve got a bit of an
ear for picking up a melody and some of
my lyrics seem to string together and a
number of people seem to like the idea
of them. I’m quite lucky, really. You do
your best, don’t you?”
Blancmange will play two special
live shows at London's Red Gallery,
London, on 15/16 May 2015. For
details visit blancmange.co.uk
BL AN
C
C K I T OV E R A G E
The opening track of ‘Semi Detached’, ‘The Fall’, clocks in
at 8.08. We wouldn’t be doing our job if we didn’t ask if
he used an 808 on it…
“I’ve got an 808 and I do use it,” says Neil. “I can’t
imagine why I would not use it on that track. In all
honesty, I didn’t know it was that length.”
In the unlikely event that anyone else asks, tell them that
it was deliberate.
“I will, thank you.”
There’s also a track on the album called ‘MKS Lover’, a
tribute to the fatter than fat analogue weapon of choice
much beloved by Vince Clarke, OMD, the Pet Shop Boys et
al in the 80s.
“It’s a version of the Roland Super Jupiter,” explains Neil.
“Apart from an 808, all the sounds for that track are
generated on it. It’s our original one, as is the 808, which
was the first bit of kit I bought when we got a deal. Is kit
important? I’ll use anything, absolutely anything, me. I’ve
used Tupperware before. I’d use a cheap guitar, a cheap
mic, I’m not bothered. I’m quite happy to patch it all
together and l’ll use Sellotape if necessary, but it doesn’t
sound very nice.”
EAST INDIA YOUTH
R I G H T
H E R E,
R I G H T
N O W
From sleepy seaside town to thrumming
back streets of East London, EAST INDIA
YOUTH’s follow-up to his Mercurynominated debut is seeped in the sounds
of the city – and it’s a sonic stunner
Words: MAT SMITH
EAST INDIA YOUTH
Shoreditch has always been a noisy, vibrant place. Lying just beyond the City of London
walls, out of the puritanical reach of the capital’s administration, gave it an outsider
status that flourished over the centuries. Today, despite the collapse of its industries,
extensive damage during the Blitz, and the inexorable march of sleek office buildings
up Bishopsgate into the heart of the East End’s otherwise untouched core, Shoreditch
still retains that independent spirit.
In among that clamour, between hipsterism and the dynamic flows of the City, is
William Doyle, better known as East India Youth. By his own admission not exactly
the most social creature in the world, Doyle is a complex, solitary figure creating some
of electronic music’s least predictable gestures. His recently released second album,
‘Culture Of Volume’, is set to further confound listeners with its surprising cocktail of
styles. His journey to the epicentre of London’s creative nexus is a curious one.
“No-one gives a shit about Southampton,” says Doyle, referring to his spell in indie
band Doyle & The Fourfathers, an overlooked south coast unit that struggled to find a
foothold. “It was hard to keep going, especially as we weren’t based in London. You’re
not in the heart of it. It’s why a lot of bands feel they have to gravitate to the city to
actually get a foot in the door. We played quite a few gigs in London, but we were
never a London band. We reached a point where the momentum just dropped off.”
Disenfranchised by the lack of success, Doyle retreated to the solo electronic pieces
he’d been crafting before and during his time in Doyle & The Fourfathers. The result
was East India Youth’s debut album, ‘Total Strife Forever’.
“I’d already done half of ‘Total Strife Forever’ by the end of the band,” he says. “I
realised I felt so much more involved and invested in those songs than I did with what
I’d been doing before. I’d been trying to force some of the things I wanted to do, some
of the methods and sounds, into the band. It wasn’t that they were met with resistance,
but I felt so deeply connected to them that I knew I was only going to get what I
wanted out of them by doing it by myself.”
With ‘Total Strife Forever’ mostly in the bag, there was the issue of how to get his
music out of the metaphorical bedroom to a wider audience. A chance encounter at a
Factory Floor gig at Shoreditch’s Village Underground in 2012 proved to be the catalyst.
John Doran, the editor of The Quietus website, was so taken with Doyle’s music that he
established the Quietus Phonographic Corporation label with the sole intention of
releasing East India Youth’s first fruit.
‘Total Strife Forever’ was a restless album, full of left turns and unexpected moments;
it was utterly modern and defiantly different. Critical to its appeal was its ability to
straddle authentic electronic pop songs and dance music tropes. If its success lay in
taking the listener on a volatile path, a path that couldn’t be predicted, it is nothing
compared to the wild switches and twists of the newly released follow-up, ‘Culture Of
Volume’.
Anyone who thought they’d just about got Doyle pinned down on the debut East India
Youth album is likely to be left scratching their heads as they are taken off in a series of
ever more surprising directions – sensitive ambient passages, euphoric peaks, wild and
unstable electronica, and all of it bordered by emotive synthpop.
“I like to make records that will reward people who choose to listen to it from start to
finish,” explains Doyle. “I like to take them on a bit of a journey. I like manipulating
them when they’re listening to it – I do find it weirdly humorous doing that – but I like
eclecticism in records and I’ve always wanted to make eclectic music.”
EAST INDIA YOUTH
Marketers and sociologists describe those who have never known anything but the
internet as “digital natives”, while psychologists decry the immediacy of mobile devices
as creating a generation of impatient, hyperactive, always-on types moving through
websites, apps and playlists at high velocity. Some leading lights of the music industry
blame that inability to focus on any one thing for the decline of album sales, as
listeners amass collections of disparate songs with little genre faithfulness.
The genre-skipping approach could also be the reason why ‘Culture Of Volume’ sees
William Doyle, by age at least, firmly in the “digital native” demographic, jumping from
style to style so effortlessly, almost recklessly. ‘Culture Of Volume’ is an album that has
a buzz, a nowness if you will, suggesting a major leap into a different direction, into
multiple different directions, for East India Youth.
Which is perhaps why trying to pin down what makes Doyle tick is something he finds
wearing. When asked about influences, he’s not exactly evasive — he’s far too polite
and well-mannered for that — but it does seem to bother him.
“It’s a fairly loaded question,” he protests, albeit with a smile. “Maybe you would have
had to be there every step along the way for the last 10 years to work it out. Even with
the last record, everything jumped from style to style, and I think it’s just because I
don’t really feel any limitations with what I want to do. It’s taken me a couple of years
to make this record and in that time I’ve been influenced by anything that I’ve listened
to more than once. I’m influenced by so much, I absorb quite a lot in that sense, and I
shamelessly feel the need to jump around. I think that’s just my style.”
Despite his uncertainty, Doyle clearly feels the need to deliver some sort of response,
even if he doesn’t think much of the question.
“This record is a sort of musical diary of the places I’ve been and bands I’ve toured with
in the last couple of years,” he continues. “Bands like Factory Floor, Wild Beasts and
These New Puritans. When you’re sharing bills with other artists and watching them
night after
night, it’s hard for their influences not to seep in. What I want to do is take my
electronic ideas and combine them with what I consider to be my songwriting past.
On the surface of everything are these melodies, so quite immediate pop things, but
underneath are layers that might be more electronic.”
If defining his listening habits represents a challenge, it’s nothing compared to the art
of writing lyrics. ‘Culture Of Volume’ has a distinctly reflective, maudlin quality, but
Doyle is keen to assert that this isn’t intentional.
“The lyrics draw upon experiences of relationships,” he explains. “I don’t just mean in
the romantic sense. They’re about my interactions with people and the world around
me, but they’re kind of abstracted, they’re not about specific things. They’re there to
create an atmosphere of the time I was writing or recording the track, the time it was
being made. I’m not just drawing upon a particular relationship or event, it’s just a
vague approximation of a feeling.
“I find the whole process of writing lyrics really difficult. I labour over them in a very
unsatisfying way. I usually leave the lyrics until last as I don’t have the same pool
of unused ideas to draw from. That’s something I really want to change. I’ve started
writing down anything recently, even if it’s not going to be used in a song, just to keep
my mind ticking over, like it always is with music. The words I just find harder.”
When pressed on the lyrics to ‘The End Result’ or ‘Hearts That Never’, Doyle again
becomes politely vague.
“You have to wonder sometimes whether it matters or not,” he sighs. “People like to
know that there’s more relevance in lyrics than there needs to be. As long as I think
I’ve created an atmosphere with the words, I don’t believe I have to remain true to a
EAST INDIA YOUTH
feeling or anything. David Byrne and Brian Eno used an approach of just singing gibberish. I
believe in that sort of method, because that way the vocal is serving the song and not the
opposite way round.”
‘Culture Of Volume’ could be interpreted as meaning many things. One possible explanation
is that the world is a more cluttered, noisy place than it was a decade or two ago.
“I look at this album as my London record because I’ve made it entirely while I’ve
been living here, unlike ‘Total Strife Forever’, which was made in more of a suburban
environment,” he explains. “There’s something about the pace and relentlessness of living
in London, but the volume of it is hard to get away from. Living in that urgent environment,
it’s almost fucking deafening sometimes.”
And it’s not only his physical self that Doyle has moved this time around. There’s also his
signing with the similarly eclectic XL Recordings.
“I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t feel like the right thing to do would be to make an entirely
instrumental record,” he laughs. “But really, the reason why this record is more song-based
is because of how things have developed with my live performances. I’ve realised that the
strength of the live show was in the vocals and how they were given prominence in the set.
After doing that for the last couple of years,
I wanted to make more vocal-led records. But there’s no pressure at all from XL. It’s only
been a blessing.”
At a small showcase gig at East London’s Sebright Arms, a suited, immaculately presented
William Doyle looks for all the world like a young auditor letting his hair down after a
gruelling day of raking through a City firm’s dirty laundry. In a good way. In a now way.
As with ‘Culture Of Volume’ itself, he opens his set with ‘The Juddering’. Where the album
cut sounds like a beatless rave track, sirens and all, the live version comes across like a
distended Throbbing Gristle conjured out of the group’s dying corpse, replete with the
venue-shaking dynamics expressed in the title.
Doyle’s set is more or less bereft of breaks between songs, almost as if he is embarrassed
to receive the obligatory appreciative applause the audience wants to give him. The whole
thing further complicates and confounds what was already difficult to fathom in the first
place. In a good way. In a now way.
Two albums in, Doyle has so far resisted the temptation of collaborating. He expresses
frustration at the frequency with which producers load up their albums with guest
appearances. At the same time, he admits that working entirely by himself isn’t necessarily
a healthy proposition for the long term.
“I think I’m going to have to make quite a lot of personal changes before I can work with
someone else,” he reflects. “I find it hard enough to work if people are in the house at the
same time as me. I don’t know whether I just feel a bit embarrassed by the creative process,
or maybe the process itself can be a bit ugly and I don’t really want people around when it’s
happening. It’s going to take me a while to get over that.
“I don’t get this expectation, especially if you’re an electronics-based producer, to
collaborate with other people. It just seems to be the way of the world at present.
Everyone’s featuring on everyone’s track, everyone’s producing everyone else. I don’t like
that. I’m not that sociable. I’ve got a lot of my own ideas I really need to see out. There’s
definitely another record I need to make completely in isolation. Hopefully that will change
because I don’t know if I can do this forever. I think something will have to give eventually
and maybe I just haven’t found the right people to make that happen yet. I hope I do.”
With such a clear vision of what his music should and shouldn’t be, combined with the
stylistic leap into the unknown that is ‘Culture Of Volume’, the thought of a third East India
Youth album bodes well. It will no doubt be full of surprises. In a good way. In a now way.
Whatever now will sound like by then.
‘Culture Of Volume’ is out now
on XL Recordings. Read the review
PAUL HARTNOLL
T IME
LOR
D
PAU
L
be h i H A R T N O
nd O
L L, t
rb
h
unde
r the ital, is ba e creativ
e f or
time
ck w
nam
ce
. T he
e
it
clock 8:58 and h a new
a
i
i
t
s
’
s
t
ickin
all a lbum
Word
bou t
g...
s: SI
M
Pic tu
res: ON PRIC
ST E V
E
E DO
UB L
E
Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.
And Paul Hartnoll has seven.
The former Orbital man's studio, a
brain-boggling treasure trove of classic
analogue synths and bleeding-edge
digital gear, is hidden in plain sight,
buried deep in the basement of an
outwardly unremarkable building on an
industrial estate near Shoreham Docks,
much in the same way that the TARDIS
masquerades as a police phone box.
Fittingly, the first thing you notice is a
huge framed photo of Jon Pertwee's Third
Doctor and his assistant Jo Grant looking
down on a platoon of Daleks. The second
thing you notice is that Paul Hartnoll
really likes to know what time it is. Or
rather, what time it isn't. The room's
white walls are home to a wide array of
timepieces representing various eras of
post-war household kitsch. Only Flavor
Flav has a bigger collection.
But where Flav's dial is often set at two
minutes to midnight, symbolising an
oncoming crisis or apocalypse, Paul's are
all set at two minutes to nine. Or, as the
name of his new recording alias has it,
8:58. A time of day which is filled with
significance for Paul.
“It's a big obsession,” he explains. “It
goes back to before Orbital and it's
probably what I should have called
Orbital in the first place. It's something
I've always identified with. I used to
draw a little clock at two minutes to
nine on my hand... You can still see the
ink. I associate that time with when, as a
petulant youth, I walked away from jobs I
didn't like, like stacking shelves in Tesco
or packing meat in a factory. It's the time
when you get to the factory gates and
think, 'What am I doing? Fuck off. Nah,
I'm off'.
“Whenever I've walked away, it's been
so empowering. It's like walking away
from a bad relationship or something. So
8:58 is when you readjust your path after
you've gone off-kilter. It's that moment
of choice. I'm not criticising anyone who
works in a factory or an office, whatever
floats your boat is what you should do,
but it's about realising you're doing the
wrong thing and doing something about
it.”
What happened to bring that feeling back
to the forefront of your mind?
“Making the decision to leave behind
Orbital and my brother,” says Paul. “It's
walking away from something that was
safe. I've got this big brand – Orbital can
headline festivals all over the world – but
I can barely get a gig at the moment as
8:58. But I feel like I'm doing the right
thing. I'm happier for it. Hopefully it'll
build up again once everyone twigs...
“The album I'm putting out as 8:58 is the
album people would have got anyway,
pretty much, give or take my brother's
opinion. I've always been the writer
of Orbital. Phil's done a few good riffs
along the way, but he's been more of a
sounding board. That's no small thing, it
can be an important part of the process,
but it wasn't working any more, on lots
of different levels. It had to stop. I wasn't
happy and I wasn't feeling creative.”
You've already put out an album as Paul
Hartnoll (2007's orchestral-based ‘The
Ideal Condition’), so why the change to a
band identity?
“I saw my name on a T-shirt and it looked
horrible!” he says. “But it's also the
smoke-and-mirrors and the magic of
creating a new brand identity. It just feels
more exciting. Calling it 8:58 leaves it
open so that in future there could be two
of us on stage, or four of us, and that way
it won't look like 'Paul Hartnoll and his
minions'.
“I also wanted this to have a strong
identity. Orbital grew a really strong
identity and I didn't want to stray too
far from that. With my solo album, I was
trying to do something different with an
orchestra, whereas 8:58 is really what
I was doing anyway. I haven't deviated
from Orbital's path just because I'm
not working with my brother. I'm doing
what I felt I was going to do anyway, but
possibly with a few more singers because
I enjoy collaborating with other people.”
Produced by Flood and with star turns
from the likes of Robert Smith, The
Unthanks and Cillian Murphy, 8:58’s
self-titled album is themed around time.
A monologue by Cillian Murphy, which
crops up a couple of times, speaks of
escaping “time’s tyranny” and imagines
“a watchless world”. Is that a cheeky
throwback to the “time becomes a loop”
sample featured on the first two Orbital
albums?
“I’ve always been obsessed with time,
so inevitably it’s a subject that comes
up over and over again,” Paul Hartnoll
explains. “I suppose it’s because I work in
a time-based medium. You can’t shuffle
past music in a gallery at your own pace.
Music flows in slices, at the same speed
as life, and all you’re doing is playing
with sound-pulses over time.
“It’s a weird, abstract concept, music. I
was going to call the ‘Wonky’ album
[Orbital’s 2012 swansong], ‘One
Big Moment’ because I had this
overwhelming sense of life not being
divided into days. I was like, ‘Shit, it’s
just one big thing’. I visualised life as this
rocket going off into the stratosphere and
bits fall off as you age. But we did it by
committee, so ‘Wonky’ it was.”
Orbital’s first single, the immortal rave
anthem ‘Chime’, was famously made on
the Hartnolls’ dad’s tape deck. Paul had a
job at a pizza parlour in Sevenoaks at the
time (which he had to quit to do ‘Top Of
The Pops’). To go from those lo-fi origins
to an era when anyone can get pro-level
editing software on their mobile phone
must be mindblowing.
“I don’t think it matters,” he argues. “You
can hand anyone a guitar, but only a
guitarist can play it. I’m grateful for
these tools being available now, because
when I was 14, 15, 16, watching school
science programmes, you’d have these
PAUL HARTNOLL
bits where people like Midge Ure or Peter
Gabriel would pop up with a Fairlight
sampler and I’d think, ‘Oh my God, I
want one of them’, but they were 30
grand. They were unobtainable, like most
synthesisers.
“Later on, when l was in a local
psychedelic band, one of the guys had a
[Roland] SH-101, a really cheap version
of a synth, and it was brilliant. From
then on, the prices started dropping and
dropping, and as the digital stuff hit
the streets the pro users sold their old
analogue gear, so people like me would
go around sweeping it up for next to
nothing. It used to be practically given
away because nobody wanted it. That
then became the sound of Chicago house
and Detroit techno, because all these
people could buy cheap drum machines.
“Certainly, that’s what happened to me.
Everything I bought was the budget
version. Instead of the [Yamaha] DX7,
I bought the cheaper DX100, which
contains lots of the famous house and
techno sounds. And the [Roland] 909
was the cheapest of the drum machines
because it wasn’t digital. Along with
the 808, it’s now the premium sound
of house music. More so than the 808,
really. The 808’s more hip hop.”
Are limitations, as opposed to a complete
carte blanche, a positive thing for
creativity?
“Totally,” agrees Paul. “This is ridiculous,
what I’ve got in here. It’s only because I
show restraint and have discipline that I
can get anything done. I’ve just started
a new project and I looked around the
room and picked my team. This, this,
this, that, those two. Nothing else is
turned on or plugged in. But inside my
laptop is a black hole of software that
never ends. You’ve got to have your
ideas and then realise them, rather than
floundering around in a sea of presets
and options.”
In contrast to certain plug-in-and-play
merchants on the rave scene, Orbital
were known to use improvisation on
stage. Does that continue with 8:58?
“Yeah, this is my current live set-up and
it’s based on improvisation,” he says,
gesturing towards a long wooden trestle
table covered in equipment. “Because
I’m a new artist starting out, I can’t take
around the huge amount of analogue
gear and drum machines that I did as
Orbital, so I’ve picked two high-quality
generals. The polysynth there, the
[Access] Virus, can do everything, and
I’ve also got a really good analogue synth
next to it.
“But my improvisational weapons are the
iPads at the front there. In the computer,
I’ve got all the clips, tiny sequences to
run. It took me three months to break
everything down. It’s set up more like
the old-fashioned way, when I had
[Alesis] MMT-8 sequencers with eight
buttons along the front, and you’d just
turn them on and off to change the
patterns. I’ve just done my first gig like
this and I really enjoyed it.”
So when you and Phil used to run around
the stage with your torch glasses on,
twiddling knobs and faders, that wasn’t
just showmanship?
“Oh Jesus, no,” he exclaims. “See, what
I loved doing was using this thing, this
Macbeth M5N synthesiser. There’s no
MIDI, no presets, so whatever those
knobs are doing is what you hear. It
might start off doing the bassline, but
then on the next track it would be a lead
line, so I had to get it from ‘bob-bobbob-bob’ to ‘wee-oo-wee-ooh’ and I had
to do it live so I had to learn it inside out.
Sometimes I’d keep the sounds going,
but change the sequence so it was, ‘Ahh,
it’s fallen into that’. Great fun.”
Last October, an announcement that
Orbital were “hanging up their iconic
torch glasses for the last time” appeared
on the band’s official website.
“Yeah, I wished I hadn’t said that,” Paul
smiles. “Someone came to see me live
"I h
ate
tha
phr
t
ase
'sid
e
pro
jec
t'. It
indi
cat
es
tha
t it'
s
not
as
imp
ort
ant
or j
ust
som
ethi
ng
I'm d
oin
g
whi
le I'
m
wai
ting
for
som
eon
e."
rec
the
ha
ac
Iw
‘Yo
are
go
Th
gla
Giv
ac
ful
pro
“It
8:5
tha
no
wh
ma
ins
joy
the
on
sco
so
do
Yo
an
“No
on
no
reu
the
em
tha
pro
Yo
tho
yo
alm
Wh
“Th
on
on
wa
film
I th
cently and I was wearing the glasses, and
ey pointed it out on Twitter... ‘Not quite
anging up the torch glasses, then!’. We
tually sold them as merch on the last tour.
was against it, but Phil insisted. I thought,
ou can wear a T-shirt anywhere, but where
e you gonna wear torch glasses? When you
o to the loo at night? Camping, maybe?’.
hey didn’t sell well. I’ve got boxes of torch
asses in my manager’s office.”
ven that the last burst of Orbital reunion
tivity ran from 2009 until 2012, ending a
ll two years before the announcement, what
ompted the timing?
was because I was getting ready to start as
58 so I didn’t want people to think... I hate
at phrase ‘side project’. It indicates that it’s
ot as important or just something I’m doing
hile I’m waiting for someone. I want to
ake it clear that this is what I’m doing now
stead of Orbital. This is fulfilling the creative
y I got from Orbital. I’m already planning
e next 8:58 album. I actually finished this
ne a year ago, but then Flood and I got the
ore to ‘Peaky Blinders’ [the BBC TV series],
o we spent all last summer and autumn
oing that.”
ou also quoted James Bond on the website
nnouncement – ‘Never Say Never Again’.
o, my brother did,” says Paul. “He insisted
n saying that. I said, ‘Don’t say that, it’s
ot true’. There is no ‘again’. The 2009
union was the ‘again’. We finished before,
en we got back together, so it would be
mbarrassing to do it again. The problems
at were there before hadn’t gone away, as
omised, so I said ‘Enough’.”
ou’ve left a whole generation with memories,
ough. Particularly at Glastonbury, where
ou seemed to headline the second stage
most every other year for a whole decade.
hat are your own memories of those shows?
he first one in 1994 was really the best
ne... Immense, unbelievable. I’d never been
n a stage that big. Looking out at the crowd
as like a scene from the ‘Lord Of The Rings’
ms. Did I enjoy it? About halfway through,
hought, ‘If it all goes wrong now, well,
we’re halfway through’. By the time we hit
‘Chime’, I thought, ‘Brilliant, we’ve done it’.
It’s one of only two gigs where I’ve thrown
up beforehand from nerves. That and playing
New York for the first time.
“They’ve all been good at Glastonbury, though.
The last one, with Matt Smith, was hilarious.
If you can pull off something like that, where
you know people are monged and it’s a bit
trippy and psychedelic, and then you pull
Doctor Who onstage... You know it’s gonna
be like, ‘Noooo!’.”
In between albums, Paul has been busy as a
composer for film and television (including
‘Event Horizon’, ‘The Saint’, ‘The Beach’, ‘xXx’
and ‘Pusher’, as well as the aforementioned
‘Peaky Blinders’) and for adverts (including
Range Rover, Rolex, Ralph Lauren and the
NSPCC). He views the challenge of working to
someone else’s commission as “a sharpening
of the tools”, dragging him from his comfort
zone and forcing him to work under “creative
bondage”. A Volkswagen ad, featuring music
made from samples of a real VW, being a
good example.
“That was one of the most creative things I’ve
been paid to do. I ended up stood in a field in
South Africa recording the sounds from a car,
getting them to rev the engine to the pitch
I needed. And after doing ‘Peaky Blinders’,
which used samples of ‘real world’ sounds, I
really wanted to get back into electronics
with 8:58.”
Paul’s rate of creativity seems, if anything, to
be speeding up rather than slowing down.
“Time’s running out, I’m 46, y’know?” he
laughs. “I don’t procrastinate as much any
more. I just get on with it. The older you get,
the better you get. If you truly love and enjoy
your art, you just keep developing. The ideas
don’t stop coming. And if they do, I go on
holiday. Then the ideas come flooding back.”
The clocks on the studio wall may be frozen
in time. But the one inside Paul Hartnoll’s
head never stops ticking.
‘8:58’ is out now on ACP
Recordings
PAUL HARTNOLL
PAS
ON STENGER
HE 8 S
:58
THE UNTHANKS
(‘A Forest’)
“I’ve liked them
since ‘The Bairns’
album, when
they were Rachel
Unthank & The
Winterset. I don’t
like the dancey, fiddly-diddly side of folk
music, it’s not for me unless I’m drunk
in an Irish pub, but The Unthanks are
right down my street. So melancholy and
dour. I’ve always been aware they tend
to do covers and traditional folk songs,
albeit in a new style. So I was listening
to their song ‘I Wish’ and a lightbulb
went on: ‘A Forest’ by The Cure, but in
that style, slowed down.
“I visited The Unthanks in their studio,
which is next to their house in a barn
in a field in the middle of nowhere
with bunting hanging up and these old
instruments on the wall. Very David
Lynch. They said, ‘Shall we show you
what we’ve got?’, and I was expecting
a CD, but they sat cross-legged on
the floor of their parlour, got out their
lyric books, which had pictures of trees
entwined around the pages, and just
started singing in these low voices. And
it was just... Oh God!”
ROBERT SMITH (‘Please’)
“‘Please’ comes from my solo album. I
did a dance version of the same track
that I really liked, but couldn’t quite nail
it. I put out 200 vinyl promos, no fuss,
and forgot about it. Then when I was
doing this album, I came across a demo
version that was much better than the
one I put out. When I played it to Flood
he said, ‘You’ve gotta do that’. I said,
‘Even though it’s a version of something
from the last album?’. He said, ‘Doesn’t
matter. Go for it’.
“I’d met Robert at a festival in
Scandinavia. We always seemed to end
up on the same stage, with The Cure
playing and Orbital being the disco
afterwards. They had all these yurts
backstage and I saw Robert peeping in
through the crack of our yurt holding
a bottle of Pernod and a bottle of
blackcurrant. So I ushered him in and
we sat there and got drunk. I loved ‘A
Forest’ and those early Cure albums. I
remember seeing them at Glastonbury,
when Robert came on with a big wig and
then took it off to reveal he had short
hair, and everyone went, ‘WOAH!’.”
LIANNE HALL (‘Please’)
“She’s a Brighton girl. I did an album
with her ages ago that didn’t get
released, but she took it to Berlin,
tinkered with it with some other people,
and it finally came out under the name
Haunted House. Originally, when Robert
Smith gave me the vocal to ‘Please’, he
said, ‘There’s a girl part as well’, and he’d
done the most hilarious pitch-shifted
version of his vocal to illustrate the
girl part. Lianne had the right kind of
swagger to match Robert, I felt.”
FABLE
(‘Cemetery’)
“Fable’s manager
Andy organises
a get-together
for musicians in
Brighton and he
said I should give
her a try. I listened to some YouTube
clips and, wow, she’s got an amazing
voice. She came in with the bones of an
idea, lyrically and melodically, and she
had some great little hooks in there,
although I asked her to change it to
make it more about the passage of time.
It’s got a sort of woodland, pre-Christian
versus Christian thing going on, with
elements of ‘The Wicker Man’.”
LISA KNAPP (‘The Past Now’)
“When I stayed with The Unthanks, they
put on the Lisa Knapp album when we
were having breakfast the next day.
It’s from that same folk world. Very
forward thinking. When I got home, I
bought her album, ‘Hidden Seam’. She’s
part of what I think of as the witchy
mid-section of ‘8:58’, which doesn’t
have anything to do with time, but for
me it fits in beautifully. It’s a kind of
folklore element and it makes me think
of the struggle that women had years
ago, when they had no power so they’d
literally be burned at the stake for
attempting to get any.”
CILLIAN MURPHY (‘8:58’ and ‘The
Clock’)
“I wanted an actor, someone who’s got a
bit of gravitas to their voice, for the intro
to the album. Flood’s a good mate of
Cillian’s – they’re school run dads – and
he suggested him. Cillian was filming
‘Peaky Blinders’ at the time and we were
getting on board to do the score. We
gave Cillian the script for the intro, he
did it into his phone during downtime,
and that mp3 was the performance.
I had a track I couldn’t finish, just
a bassline and a drum beat, and I
thought, ‘I wonder if Cillian’s the missing
ingredient?’, so I chopped the mp3 up
and sampled it over the top, which ended
up being ‘The Clock’, the single, and also
the title track. Two songs for the price of
one. I don’t have a problem doing that
kind of thing. I like repetition.”
ED HARCOURT (‘Villain’)
“We go way back. I was asked to judge
the Ivor Novello Awards and Ed was also
on the panel. We just clicked. It turned
out he’s friends with Flood, so when I
needed a male vocal I thought of him.
It was a proper collaborative affair. He
came up with something and me and
Flood loved the chorus, but for the verse
we thought it should be something like
the Witchfinder General wringing his
hands, sat in his little cottage, wondering
in worry and shame, ‘Should I be burning
these women? Am I doing the right
thing? Help me, God!’. When we put that
to Ed, he ran away with it and rewrote
the lyrics to match that idea.”
THE VERY BEST
IN ELECTRONIC MUSIC
AVAILABLE ON ALL
SMARTPHONES & TABLETS
DOWNLOAD THE
ELECTRONIC SOUND APP
FOR FREE AT
www.electronicsound.co.uk
PORTICO
From lauded jazz hopefuls
to immersive electronica trailblazers,
the release of their ‘Living
Fields’ album means PORTICO's
remarkable transformation is
finally complete
Words: VELIMIR ILIC
Pictures: PHIL SHARP
PORTICO
“When I was getting into sampling the hang drum, I remember
figuring out loads of shit, putting it on a drum pad and showing
it to Nick as a sort of sound that could be really cool. On
reflection, I guess that was...”
Turkeys voting for Christmas? Portico's Duncan Bellamy trails
off and you can almost hear the penny drop.
Coming to prominence in 2007 with their Mercury Prizenominated future-jazz debut album ‘Knee-Deep In The North
Sea’, London-based Portico Quartet were quite the prospect.
Almost overnight, Duncan Bellamy, Milo Fitzpatrick, Jack Wyllie
and the aforementioned Nick Mulvey were hailed as the next
big thing in contemporary jazz, their status cemented by two
further critically acclaimed albums, 2009’s ‘Isla’ and 2012's
self-titled offering.
“There were definitely some points after we’d finished making
'Isla' where we started getting interested in how far we could
take the band’s sound,” says Milo Fitzpatrick. “A lot of that
involved being more electronic and I think Nick literally felt
drowned out. He was first and foremost a singer-songwriter. He
was always practising and bringing his guitar on tour, honing
his own thing all along. So when he told us he was leaving, we
weren’t really surprised.”
Wind forward to 2015 and Portico are the embodiment of
change, of what it means to genuinely evolve. By the time Keir
Vine, Nick Mulvey’s successor, decided to move on last year,
the remaining trio were increasingly dissatisfied by the music
they were making. These days, reinvented and rejuvenated,
they find themselves freshly signed to visionary independent
Ninja Tune with a new album, ‘Living Fields’, under their belts.
Much like Ninja Tune, which has cannily morphed into a
mélange of 21st century post-rap splinters and offshoots,
Portico’s own dramatic metamorphosis finds them a world,nay
a universe, away from their previous work as Portico Quartet.
Jazz of any form this most definitely is not.
“We said that if we were going to do another album, we should
do it differently from the outset,” says Fitzpatrick. “From how
we react to each other, to how we go into a room and start
listening to each other’s ideas, even those very basic ideas of
just communicating about music. We said, ‘Let’s just flip it all
on its head and see what happens’.”
There was also a crucial change of identity that saw them drop
the “Quartet” from their name – to do away with the old and
symbolise new beginnings – while retaining “Portico” as what
Fitzpatrick calls an “acknowledgment of our chemistry”.
“It’s the first album we’ve completely produced ourselves,”
says Bellamy. “We bought more gear for the studio and started
layering things up, making sketches, then fleshing them
out. Barely any of it was recorded live, so the process was
completely different.”
“The production suite was like an instrument in itself and we
all had to learn to play it together,” says Fitzpatrick. “We
would be editing each other’s parts, drastically changing each
"We would be editing each other's
parts, drastically changing each
other's work, then someone would
come back and go, What the fuck have
you done?"
other’s work, then someone would come back and go, ‘What
the fuck have you done?’. We were really critical of how the
music would be received and wanted to make it interesting and
cinematic, to have stuff that swirled around you like a 3D audio
film.”
The result is an astonishing volte-face. ‘Living Fields’ is an
atmospheric, intimate and immersive record, steeped in a
woozy fusion of the ethereal and celestial, of shimmering
synth arpeggios and spectral textures, teetering somewhere
between nearly-pop and beatific ambient decay. Both achingly
melancholic and blissfully euphoric, the band have described
the album as “existing on the point of breaking up and falling
apart”. Inspiration for the change has evidently come from
some interesting sources.
“There are lots of ambient influences on there – Brian Eno,
William Basinski and Tim Hecker – and also sound artists like
Oneohtrix Point Never’s Dan Lopatin,” says Fitzpatrick. “My
friend Matt Hayward [drummer for Band Of Skulls] doesn’t
listen to anything while they’re writing, he puts his record
collection away. It makes sense, as it can stifle your playing or
influence it too much, so you kind of starve yourself.”
“I went through a bit of a black hole with music while we were
making the album,” admits Bellamy. “In some ways it was
nice, but I feel like I missed out a bit – nothing really stands
out from last year. Since we finished the record, I have started
listening to music again.” The big difference between then and
now is the addition of vocalists across the board.
“Jack [Wyllie] would probably say we’ve always tried to write
pop music,” notes Fitzpatrick. “I believe we still use the same
constructs, but we started thinking about doing something with
vocals. We felt we had to have something that binds everything
together, otherwise it would be too loose and it wouldn’t be
strong enough a statement from us to do a massive U-turn and
come out with a vocal album.”
The Portico guys share personal connections with the three
distinctive vocal collaborators on ‘Living Fields’: alt-J’s Joe
Newman, a childhood friend of Wyllie’s; Jamie Woon, who the
band used to share a house with in East London; and Jono
McCleery, who has previously supported Portico Quartet on
tour and was originally introduced to them by Woon. All of
them are shoo-ins for the album’s keening electronic timbres,
with sweet, florid voices that swoop and soar over the top of
the undulating, opiate-like music.
“We would essentially write a backing track, then break it
down and strip it back, and give each singer really basic stuff
to work with,” explains Fitzpatrick. “Sometimes it was just a
chord sequence with no drums or bass. We learnt that you get
a lot more from people that way. If you’re too prescriptive with
the track, singers start to feel cornered, and they’re not as
expressive. Sometimes we’d send a track to all three of them
and none of them would like it!”
Capitalising on those personal links, ‘Living Fields’ feels like
a very intimate record. Lyrically, it’s bound by a concept that
PORTICO
centres around life and death. The band sent poems and
pictures to the three vocalists and asked them to get into the
zone by watching an award-winning Chilean documentary
entitled ‘Nostalgia For The Light’ before writing their lyrics.
“Arranging it wasn’t that difficult,” says Fitzpatrick. “What was
hard was the whole idea of the weight that words have on
something you make. We just thought the film had so much
in it, and we loved the themes, so we just sent it to them.
There were bits about the search for identity, the significance
of memory, staring death in the face – all topics we’d been
thinking about for the album.”
The result is heartfelt and profoundly emotional, a testament
to Portico’s successful working process. But is ‘Living Fields’
the album they envisaged?
“The reason for doing this album was because we wanted to
do something different and we didn’t want to feel shackled,”
declares Bellamy. “We are the same band, but we’re also not.
Maybe it’s just that the anchor points have changed.”
“It takes a while to find your sonic identity with each new
record,” says Fitzpatrick. “You experiment with different styles
– things sound derivative, they sound like your old stuff, you go
through highs and lows, and you think, ‘Shit, are we going to
be able to strike it again?’. And then you just find a corner and
– bazoom! – it’s ‘go, go, go’ while it’s feeling good. Even now,
it’s still crystallising, we’re still trying to figure out what it is.
But more than any other record we’ve made, this one feels like
an album to be really listened to and taken on board.”
“We spent a year pretty much just fucking around,” admits
Bellamy. “We had a year of false starts, trying to arrive
somewhere, but not quite getting there. Having that time
where we let things stew and digest, I think we worked out a
lot of the stuff we didn’t want to do, which kind of pushed us
forward.”
So was there a moment where they felt they’d nailed it?
“You maybe have one or two songs that you’re vaguely happy
with, then suddenly you get some momentum and you’re
happy with four or five and it starts to coalesce a bit,” says
Bellamy. “You start to get more of a glimpse of what it could
be and that gives you a real sense of purpose.”
“I think the title track was where we thought, ‘There’s a certain
depth here’,” muses Fitzpatrick. “It meanders around and feels
like you’ve actually been somewhere. That was the point
where we thought, ‘There’s something in here, we should keep
digging’.”
‘Living Fields’ hangs together wonderfully well. As a result, it
feels special, a rare thing of unadulterated beauty. Which kind
of begs an obvious question – why didn’t they do this sooner?
“I think we could have probably done it before,” says Fitzpatrick.
“I think if you’d just thrown us in there and said, ‘Do a vocal
album’, we could have pulled something out, but I don’t think
it would have been thought out enough.”
“We still haven’t worked out the extent to which we’re not the
same band anymore,” adds Bellamy. “People who don’t like
it are confused because they just think we’ve changed a lot,
whereas in some ways it’s like more of a debut.”
So what of the future? Is there a plan or a vision for how
Portico might evolve further?
“In terms of the music, we’ve got a good template now,” says
Bellamy. “This album has given us a lot of confidence, and the
capacity to know that, not only can we come up with ideas and
use the equipment, but also to lay it down, mix it and deliver
it right to the end. I think having that control over the music is
really important.”
Did they ever feel like they were taking a gamble by changing
their sound?
“We’re still in that frame of mind where we’re wondering, ‘Is it
gonna work?’,” admits Fitzpatrick.
‘Living Fields’ is out now on Ninja Tune.
Read the review
HANG THE DJ
Sounding not unlike a steel pan, a hang is a UFO-looking drum made up of
two half shells of steel sheeting, joined to make a hollow construction and
played with the hands. As they had one, it quickly became the centrepiece
of every Portico Quartet interview and review.
“And we’re still talking about it!” laughs Duncan Bellamy. “What’s easy to
forget is that we started the band eight or nine years ago. It was a really
long time ago. We’d all just moved to London and we were totally different
people. When I look back on it, it feels like a distant memory. Your tastes
and your views change over time, and the things that interest you and
inspire change too. We’re immensely proud of those early Portico Quartet
albums, but I don’t feel that attached to them. Where we’re at now feels
very different.”
TECH
KORG MS-20M KIT
READERS SYNTHS
SYNTHESISER DAVE
DAVID FANSHAWE REVIEW
UVI BEATHAWK REVIEW
TECH
N
O U
C R N
ST O E
TI M
C TI
?
m
or r
t f ve
ki co
in dis e, ry
20 nd ak ve ith
S- a m 's
M on to e it d w
n
RG ds sy on u
o
a
r
d
KO han ly e 're y a
D
g
N
bi et n u la
g
LA
t o yo o p
A
e
o
t
e
RO
W n c g
n
s
n
K
it' o i
d
t
r
AR
bu wa
:M
re
ds
or
W
A
G
A
N
I
TECH
Korg’s decision to reissue their legendary MS-20 Mini in
January 2013 as an all-new, scaled-down, mini-jacked, MIDIenabled 21st century fun machine was a stroke of genius.
Someone at Korg clearly had their eye on eBay, saw the huge
prices the old synths were fetching, and thought they might get
a chunk of that retromania action with a reboot. The price was
right (currently retailing for around £399) and it proved to be
a hit. The kit version upped the ante by enabling enthusiasts
to build a full-sized replica of the original. And now Korg have
made a module version of the kit, which is easier to build – no
keyboard! – but still comes with the attention to detail that the
MS-20 kit had.
The main advantages are the inclusion of the two filter types
(you get the old slightly hissy one and the revision, which is
beefier and quieter, and there’s a switch to flick between them
rather than the circuit board jumper pin you had to move on
the MS-20 kit), the full-size patchbay cords for grown-up hands
(making for a less fiddly patching experience), and the larger
panel that is easier to navigate. The kit also comes with Korg’s
nifty new SQ-1 sequencer, and packaging the two together
is a nod to the original late 1970s pairing of the MS-20 and
the SQ-10 sequencer, a technological breakthrough that was
responsible for a lot of the hard-edged rhythmic precision that
Deutsch Amerikanische Freundschaft brought to electronic
proceedings (DAF famously used the two Korg machines and
an ARP Odyssey to create their music). The fact that the SQ-1
retails for £100, and that it gives you MIDI, Little Bits and CV/
Gate synching, makes it a very powerful, not to mention hugely
desirable, little beast. You can hook it up to your DAW too.
On the downside, this kit isn’t cheap, coming in at around
£900 at most retailers, and building a synth yourself is perhaps
not everyone’s idea of a good time, especially not when you’ve
forked out the best part of a grand for it. Just getting a sound
out of the MS-20 has never been the most straightforward
route into electronic music, never mind putting the thing
together yourself in the first place, so this is certainly not
recommended for the impatient. But if you do enjoy tinkering
about with bits and pieces, and in a pretty foolproof way
(there’s no soldering involved, just screws, nuts and plugin wire looms), building the MS-20M is a pleasurable and
rewarding experience.
I put this one together in a few hours and I am terrified of
electrical innards of any kind. Once I got my head around a few
vagaries of the SQ-1, in particular its apparently sluggish top
speed, solved by discovering the global parameter mode, and
shifted the thing from quarter notes to eighth notes (check out
the separate video to see how it’s done), the combination of
the two machines quickly became an addictive electronic sonic
laboratory. It offers huge potential both for playing live and for
writing material in the studio. As I type, we’ve just attached
the SQ-1 to our MS-20 Mini and the MS-20M – the sequencer
is capable of triggering both at the same time – and things are
getting truly out of hand.
watch the videos
constructing the ms-20m
www.youtube.com/embed/begrnRf1Sak
tempo explained
www.youtube.com/embed/YckRQXhVg_k
TECH
READERS'
SYNTHS
Old, new, quirky, handmade, rare
as hen’s teeth or common as muck,
classic and collectable or a dime a
dozen and a heap of fun. Synths
come in all shapes and sizes and
so do the stories behind them. If
you’d like us to feature your pride
and joy, drop us a line at info@
electronicsound.co.uk with Readers’
Synth as the subject. Consider the
floodgates open...
ROLAND SH-09
Owner: Richard Thompson
Where: Ipswich, UK
Year Purchased: 1995
Amount paid: £100
“It cost me £100 and I thought I was
paying too much for it at the time, but
if you want one now they’re going for
at least £500. Some go for really silly
money. I still sometimes see the guy who
sold it to me and he really regrets parting
with it. I love it because it’s so simple and
the sounds it makes have a certain quality
that totally hits the spot. I particularly
like the modulation, setting it on the
random sample/hold and letting it play
away. It’s also great for basslines. The
other good thing is the font Roland used
for “Synthesizer 09” on the panel. It’s like
‘Rollerball’ or ‘Space 1999’. That’s a proper
synth typeface, that is. The only problem
with it is I never want it to leave the
studio. I would hate for it to get stolen
or have beer poured all over it. Or maybe
just get dropped.”
Vintage synths… the older they get,
the more we love them. But the
older they get, the crankier they
become. And then they start to lose
their faculties. We pretend it’s not
happening, but we know it is. We
gaze sadly at the machine as it starts
to stutter and blurt and perhaps even
just play the same note, no matter
which key we press.
That’s when we call Synthesiser Dave.
He’s a busy man because he is, in a
very real way, a synthesiser wizard.
Dave
watch the video
www.youtube.com/embed/pGwBB01srYo
In our latest visit to his Shed of
Synthesis, Dave shows us around
the business end of a JEN SX 2000,
a machine that was once the go-to
starter synth for many an electronic
hopeful because they were a) cheap
and b) mostly sold through your
friend’s mum’s Kay’s Catalogue.
TECH
DAVID
FANSHAWE:
EARTH
ENCOUNTERS
VOLUME 1
SPITFIRE
AUDIO
A great sample library of field recordings
from the archives of ethnomusicologist
DAVID FANSHAWE
Words: LUKE SANGER
UK sampling connoisseurs Spitfire Audio have been knocking it out of
the park recently. You might have seen me getting all excited over the
new Hans Zimmer percussion library in the last issue of Electronic Sound,
so you can imagine my glee when their latest product dropped into my
inbox.
‘Earth Encounters Volume 1’ is a collection of field recordings taken from
the extensive sound archives of British composer and ethnomusicologist
David Fanshawe, who died in 2010 at the age of 68. As a keen field
recordist myself, I was chomping at the bit to get this loaded up.
‘Earth Encounters’ is in Spitfire’s Signature range, so once installed it
appears proudly among the list of products in your Kontakt library (and
if you don’t own Kontakt, you can use the free Kontakt 5 player from
Native Instruments). The samples are arranged into four main categories
– atmos, edna, loops and single hits. These are then further split down
into folders named after the geographical location of the recordings,
which illustrate how far Fanshawe travelled to capture such a wide range
of languages, instruments and music, many of the languages having since
become extinct.
The sounds themselves are really something special. In fact, this is one
of the most unique sample libraries I have ever used. It’s actually a great
privilege to be able to access such beautifully recorded sounds so easily
and have the freedom to manipulate them with looping, pitching, time
stretching and so on. The samples range from subtle percussive loops
that could add an interesting layer to a composition, to rich location
recordings that deserve to be listened to as musical pieces in their own
right.
My only minor gripe with this product is the bizarre decision to use
two different interfaces for some of the library. The “standard” view,
used for the majority of sounds, is lovely and complements the overall
feel of the pack, which includes a picture of Fanshawe himself. Then,
strangely, Spitfire have chosen a totally different interface for some of
the other sounds. Yes, it provides more manipulation options over the
samples, but visually it’s a really ugly red and black that’s reminiscent of
Winamp skins from the Windows XP days and it seems quite out of place
alongside the other view.
That shouldn’t distract from what is a fantastic, intriguing and unique
collection of field recordings, though. There’s no doubt that it will
inspire many current day producers to include these sounds in their own
compositions and it might even encourage some of them to try out some
field recording themselves.
‘Earth Encounters Volume 1’ RRP £199 (plus VAT)
www.spitfireaudio.com
BEATHAWK
UVI
UVI enters the portable beat-making foray with its
new MPC-inspired iPad app
Words: LUKE SANGER
On first impressions, UVI's BeatHawk app clearly takes its
cues from the MPC/Maschine traditions. Based around pattern
sequencing played in from the 16 virtual pads, all the expected
compositional features are present and correct, like note repeat
for those "machine gun" hi-hats and snare rushes or for simply
adding swing to a groove.
If you are familiar with the MPC way of working, you will pick
up BeatHawk and get moving in no time. The sounds can be
panned, levelled, filtered and sent to the built-in reverb and
delay, which are functional if a bit artificial sounding. One big
omission is that these controls cannot be automated. I felt
limited when loading up a synth sound and not being able
to record my filter changes, resulting in much more static
sounding patterns than I'd hoped for.
Once you have recorded some beats into a pattern, it's really
easy to switch out the samples from BeatHawk’s included
library. Having used many drum libraries before, the sounds
that come packaged don't jump out as being anything amazing,
but they do a decent job, with lots of big EDM processed hits
and urban drums. It's just a shame that there aren't more
real recorded drumkits and a wider range of different types of
percussion in there.
What I really like about this app, however, is the speed at
which you can get something going. Everything is where you
expect it to be and works as it should. Recording your own
sample with the built-in mic is very simple and effective,
for example. I was happy to discover you can easily turn off
quantise for making beats "off grid" too.
Overall, I'd recommend BeatHawk as a nice travel beat
maker (I'm writing this review on a plane back from a gig
in Milan) and UVI have certainly succeeded in producing a
very functional app. That said, I feel there has been a missed
opportunity to make something that could have stood apart
from all the other MPC-style apps out there. A really decent
original library with unique drums and parameter automation
would be my first recommendations to the developers.
BeatHawk RRP £4.99 via iTunes
www.uvi.net
ALBUM
REVIEWS
MARTIN GORE
MG
MUTE
The Depeche Mode man delivers a solo
instrumental album from his Santa
Barbara home studio
Instrumental music isn’t exactly a new
thing for Depeche Mode’s Martin Gore.
For a start, there’s the small matter of
‘Ssss’, his 2012 collaboration with Vince
Clarke that reunited the two school
friends and Mode founders after almost
30 years. Beyond that, instrumental
interludes have been a feature of Mode
albums going right back to their 1981
debut. One of the two Gore tracks that
appeared on the mostly Clarke-penned
‘Speak & Spell’ was his instrumental
‘Big Muff’, with other tracks also making
appearances as either B-sides or short
connecting pieces on other albums.
‘Big Muff’ or ‘Oberkorn’ this isn’t. Neither
is it a techno album, which seemed an
obvious area of interest given Gore’s
minimalist stylings with Clarke, his DJ
sets, and the music he chooses to have
played before Depeche Mode’s stadium
shows. The closest that ‘MG’ gets to
techno is the dark buzz of ‘Brink’, a more
maximalist take on the type of track that
appeared on ‘Ssss’.
Though some among his main band’s
Black Swarm of hardcore fans will
inevitably be disappointed that this
isn’t a third volume in Gore’s sporadic
‘Counterfeit’ series of covers albums, the
parallel with his vocal work is there in
what is a generally sensitive, brooding
collection of 16 tracks. On the epic ‘Elk’
and ‘Europa Hymn’, you can almost
imagine the tortured themes of religious
introspection, disappointment and soul
searching that accompanying lines of
lyrics might provide, most likely delivered
with Gore’s latter-day penchant for gutsy
Weimar Republic cabaret grandiosity.
Perhaps the greatest achievement
of ‘MG’ is to capture the essence of
what makes Depeche Mode music so
immediately recognisable, but without
vocals from Dave Gahan or Martin Gore,
or indeed Gore’s guitar playing, as part of
the equation.
There are segments here that feel like
they are offcuts from the Blackwing
or Hansa studio sessions way back in
the 1980s, carrying the same noisy
inventiveness of a long-lost era when
Gore, Alan Wilder, Daniel Miller and
Gareth Jones used the technology of
the day like some massive science
experiment. Other pieces owe a debt to
the clanking post-industrial soundscapes
of Autechre or Aphex Twin, all detuned
beats, hiss and hum, while the likes of
‘Islet’ have the same sawtooth melodic
edge that more recent Mode synth work
has embraced.
It’s inevitably shadowy and cloying, as a
lot of Gore’s material has tended to be
over the years, and the tracks that share
that style have a very distinctive Gore
sound to them. Elsewhere, the skyscraping atmospherics of ‘Hum’ take his
oeuvre off into exciting new dimensions,
having more in common with an astral,
almost proggy ambience than anything
he’s done before.
Martin Gore has said he finds himself
heading into his studio to fiddle with
songs and concepts most days, which
gives rise to perhaps the only criticism
that can be levelled at ‘MG’. Like a
number of side project albums, some
of these pieces do occasionally feel like
home experiments, private sketches
even, ideas that should perhaps have
been allowed to develop more fully
before being released.
That said, ‘MG’ is generally a very
engaging instrumental electronic record.
If you’re a member of the Black Swarm,
you’ll no doubt consider it to be the best
release of its kind since Alan Wilder’s
last Recoil album. With the thrilling,
mechanistic, jerky ministrations of
‘Spiral’ and ‘Stealth’ or the Kraftwerky
melodic hook on ‘Crowly’, it’s hard to
argue with that view.
MAT SMITH
ALBUM REVIEWS
While the first East India Youth album
was an assured unfurling of Doyle’s
electronic canvas, ‘Culture Of Volume’
finds said canvas covered with a thrilling
sonic assault. Chaotic in places and
often nudging on the brink of overload
in others, underpinning it all is a deft
melodic pop sensibility. It’s quite a ride.
EAST INDIA
YOUTH
Culture Of Volume
XL RECORDINGS
South coast indie kid turned electronic
champion returns with a stunner
of a second album
If, as our guitar toting friends would have
it, the end of the world as we know it
starts with an earthquake, you’d better
brace yourself.
The speakers crackle. A helicopter thudthud-thud kicks in from somewhere over
there and swirls around you. Then the
noise starts, an insistent, white, bright
fuzz. You’re under attack. A siren wails.
And then from nowhere, rich, soothing
chords slowly begin to rise and fall, as if
sounding the all-clear.
This is ‘The Juddering’, the opening
track on William Doyle’s sophomore
offering as East India Youth, a record that
laughs in the face of the difficult second
album adage. Yet it should have been
difficult. How do you follow a debut like
last year’s highly acclaimed, Mercurynominated ‘Total Strife Forever’? Who
even knew the former frontman of indie
almost-rans Doyle & The Fourfathers had
this in him in? You almost fear for him.
There are some unusual influences at
work too. ‘End Result’, ‘Turn Away’ and
the epic 10-minuter ‘Manner Of Words’
all have distinctly folky vibes, or perhaps
it’s flecks of prog. There’s some early
Genesis in Mr Doyle’s collection, we’ll
wager. And if that sounds odd, you’d
be right, because this is an odd record.
Gloriously so.
Sat alongside the onslaught of the
opener and the folk/prog leanings, there
are tracks such as ‘Beaming White’,
which arches its back in an uplifting
Pet Shop Boys kind of way, the happy
champagne tinkles of ‘Heart That Never’,
and the insistent four-to-the-four banger
‘Entirety’. The big difference between
this album and East India Youth’s debut
is that where vocals were lacking
on the latter, ‘Culture Of Volume’ is
predominantly vocal-led, with pride
of place taken by ‘Carousel’. Blimey.
Quivering and churchy and haunting, like
tears rolling down soft cheeks, it slowly
builds to a huge, satisfying wall of sound.
It is the most affecting six minutes and
24 seconds you’ll hear for some time.
There was always a danger that ‘Total
Strife Forever’ was a one-off, that
William Doyle got lucky. ‘Culture Of
Volume’ very much says otherwise.
NEIL MASON
become a recreational element that
millions are immersed in.
SQUAREPUSHER
Damogen Furies
WARP
Album number 14 sees Mr Jenkinson
stripping down the kit list and ferociously
nailing tracks in one take
Apart from last year’s ‘Music For Robots’
EP (an EP of music, as you may have
guessed, written for and performed by
three robots), all has been quiet from
Tom Jenkinson, aka Squarepusher, since
2012’s ‘Ufabulum’. That said, three years
is no time at all these days; technology
has upgraded, but there have been no
vaulting new developments in terms of
electronic content.
So perhaps it’s of no great historical and
cultural consequence that Jenkinson
has made an album crammed full of
the usual Warp tropes of fast-cut beep
’n’ glitch with a few additional knobs
on, one which occupies a space station
farther out than most electronica,
but nonetheless remains somewhat
stationary. It’s a record that satisfies
rather than confounds, consolidates
rather than expands.
Still, ‘Damogen Furies’ is packed with
blistering drama, each of the eight tracks
a battle scenario in keeping with a world
in which virtual technological strife has
Opener ‘Stor Eiglass’ is arched by a
sanguine, air-punching melody that is
reminiscent of The Cure in their heyday.
It mutates, quickly, as is Squarepusher’s
wont, mutant bleeps and shapeshifts
giving way to a joyful dance of the
dentist’s drills, 1000bpm pneumatic
emissions. The ambient, Apollo-like
solemnity of ‘Baltang Ort’ is disrupted
by a recurring robo-blah-blah utterance,
then a jamboree of acid misshapes,
increasingly scuffed and distressed. By
its end, the track is buried beneath a
hundredweight of sculpted shards and
wrought detritus.
‘Rayc Fire 2’ is a stuttering series of
interference gobbets that persist until
you realise they aren’t interventions but
the snaking content of the track. The
rotating saucers of blips in ‘Kontenjaz’,
deliciously funky in provenance,
resemble fragments of some old
Funkadelic spacecraft or flying Moroder
machine. ‘Exjag Nives’ fans out like a
synth symphony of yore, before turning
nasty and spitting bullets.
‘Baltang Arg’ is Squarepusher at his
most relentless and obstreperous –
imagine coming under attack from some
monstrous, multi-headed cyber-Rick
Wakeman sent in a reverse Terminator
action from the 70s to destroy mankind.
You can’t dance to it, merely dodge
its rapid, indiscriminate fire from all
angles. An army of Space Invaders
joins the assault, culminating in a
final repetitive stab of keyboard as if
stomping on humanity’s grave. Next up
is ‘Kwang Bass’, whose hyper-metabolic,
voracious acid squiggles are flanked by
the mournful motions of a cosmos and
distant explosions. Suddenly the violence
becomes foreground as giant robotic
limbs crush stationary cars and cinematic
carnage ensues, from which not even
Will Smith can save us.
Finally, ‘D Frozent Aac’ features a fleet
of heavy bombers droning and hoving
waywardly into view, looking winged,
only to issue a final formidable broadside
of laser fire as anti-aircraft units are
reduced to craters. From the chaos,
however, arise mauve plumes of rare
beauty.
All in all then, another day in the
Squarepusher office. Nonetheless,
this is an exhilarating, pulverising
experience which places Squarepusher
light years ahead of the pack and makes
his contemporaries feel lethargic by
comparison.
DAVID STUBBS
ALBUM REVIEWS
LAURENT
GARNIER
The Home Box
F COMMUNICATIONS
French legend returns to banish the
curse of jazz techno. World celebrates
All hail the renaissance of Laurent
Garnier. Beginning last year with a series
of EPs in homage to routes to and from
his home – the ‘A0490 EP’, an Air France
flight, for example, or the ‘A13 EP’, which
corresponds to the French Highway 13
– it culminates, gloriously, triumphantly,
here, in a box set featuring key tracks
from the 12s as well as new material, all
of it spread across four 12-inches and
a CD. The good news? It finds Garnier
on peak form, perhaps the best of a
glittering 20-plus year career. The bad?
‘The Home Box’ is limited to just 1,000
copies. Don’t sleep.
Choosing where to start presents
problems of its own, so we’ll go with
CD opener ‘Enchanté (UNER Club Gleam
Remix)’, a tremendous 10-minute epic
of immersive and glassy progressive
house. Next up, ‘LOL Cat’ comes on like
Vangelis grooving at Studio 54 and we’re
already deep in sit-up-and-take-notice
territory. But it gets better. Thanks to a
similar vocal line, ‘Beat Da Boxx’ – here
given the Marc Romboy mix treatment –
is reminiscent of 69’s techno classic ‘Jam
The Box’, and is the cue for Garnier to
shift his gaze to the Windy Motor cities,
where the majority of the album resides.
Highlight follows highlight. From ‘Boom’
to ‘Bang’ to ‘MILF’, Garnier’s command
of jacking house and chunky techno is
a potent reminder of his place among
non-US producers of the early 90s.
While David Holmes tilted towards soul
and movie soundtracks, and Andrew
Weatherall to dub and post-punk, Garnier
always had Detroit and Chicago in his
sights. His skill in bringing them together
reaped seminal techno in tracks like
‘Crispy Bacon’ and ‘Acid Eiffel’.
In 2000, however, when his
‘Unreasonable Behaviour’ album gave
us the ubiquitous ‘The Man With The
Red Face’, it also signalled the dreaded
jazz direction beloved of so many of his
contemporaries (Dave Angel, Ian O’Brien,
Russ Gabriel, Stacey Pullen). Yes, the
album was his commercial high point
and helped define an era in which no hip
young kiddie was seen without a copy of
Straight No Chaser under their arm, but
it also marked the point at which Garnier
began to lose his way. When 2009’s
‘Tales Of A Kleptomaniac’ appeared,
bogged down by a plethora of disparate
styles, it looked like the writing was on
the wall.
Which is why it’s so gratifying that
‘The Home Box’ finds him excelling at
what he does best – for the most part
crafting wondrous house and techno, and
elsewhere moving gracefully from the
harsh siren call of ‘The Rise And Fall Of
The Donkey Dog’ to smoother and more
downtempo cuts like ‘Psyche Delia’, and
even a couple of straight-up sex tracks.
Laurent Garnier’s back, back, back, and
the title of this set fits perfectly, not just
because of the travel theme that runs
throughout, but because for the first time
in, oh, at least a decade, you sense he
feels right at home.
ANDREW HOLMES
ballad, ‘Bloody Hell Fire’ (and I hope you
get the ‘Paradise Lost’ link now), Neil
Arthur drags us further down into himself
as the underground imagery and the
introspective lyrics intensify.
BLANCMANGE
Semi Detached
CHERRY RED
Following his reappearance in 2011, Neil
Arthur’s music just gets better and better
the second time around
The words “Blancmange”, “deep” and
“dark” aren’t seen together all that
often, not even in cook books. But
there are few better ways to describe
Blancmange’s newest release, ‘Semi
Detached’.
Neil Arthur’s first album without original
bandmate Stephen Luscombe finds a
totally “now” version of Blancmange
offering up new possibilities for
interpretation with every listen. Its
depths – not in a Proust, roll-neck
sweater, cigarette kind of way – will have
you thinking about it for days. There’s
just so much here.
‘Semi Detached’ is a journey downwards,
both through the earth and through a
psyche. This is an album of subterranean
spaces, dark caverns hollowed out
beneath the surface in which London’s
Central Line becomes inextricably
intertwined with a John Milton-esque
landscape of Biblical reference, eternal
damnation, and existential crisis. As
we move from the funky eight-minute
opener, ‘The Fall’, to the closing epic
That’s not to say Blancmange have
forgotten how to have a good time, and
there are some great pop moments.
There’s a brilliantly vibrant cover of Can’s
‘I Want More’ which, if we’re running with
the ‘Paradise Lost’ thing, sounds pretty
sinister coming straight after ‘The Fall’.
There’s ‘Useless’, a tongue-in-cheek love
song, and ‘Paddington’, the first single
from the album, a track that manages
to evoke ‘Living On The Ceiling’ and its
Eastern synth riffs while being a totally
different kind of hit.
And if it’s a record that’s hard to stop
talking about, it’s really, really hard
to stop dancing to it. It’s so perfectly
structured – essentially a vinyl album
with an A-side and a B-side – that once
you reach the end of the last song you
will immediatly want to start playing the
album from the beginning again. But give
in to that temptation and let yourself
listen over and over. It’ll sound even
deeper, even darker, and even more fun
every time, I promise.
ROSIE MORGAN
ALBUM REVIEWS
pot of sounds. Drawing on elements of
house, techno, krautrock, ambient, drone
and beyond, all bleeding and merging
into each other, it drifts between vast
stretches of darkness and light. It’s
beautiful, intricate stuff.
WALLS
Urals
ECSTATIC RECORDINGS
The last offering in an album trilogy, but
is it the end or a new beginning for the
accomplished London duo?
The final part of a sort of three-album
holy trinity that began with the fluid,
oscillating textures of Walls’ self-titled
2010 debut (which, quite rightly, ended
up as the electronic album of choice on
various end-of-year lists) and continued
with the mesmeric kosmische bliss-out of
2011’s ‘Coracle’, ‘Urals’ is the culmination
of a four-year journey for London-based
soundscapers Alessio Natalizia and Sam
Willis.
That’s how long the duo have been in the
studio, painstakingly crafting, enhancing
and tweaking their signature sound into
futuristic synth-led vistas that lean more
towards the dancefloor than ever before.
The time spent twiddling knobs and
hunkering down behind the console has
evidently been put to good use because
‘Urals’, arguably Walls’ most rounded
and defined release to date, is a hugely
rewarding listen.
As with the first two albums, it’s an
expansive and immersive experience,
unashamedly seductive as it first entices
then pulls you into its alluring melting
Natalizia and Willis are musical sponges,
absorbing the eclectic electronic sounds
around them. Their burgeoning Ecstatic
Recordings imprint has seen them
release music by kindred spirits such
as Pye Corner Audio, Axel Willner (The
Field) and L/F/D/M, as well as their
own individual work (Natalizia’s woozy
synth-led workouts as Not Waving and
Willis’ ritualistic techno as Primitive
World). And let’s not forget last year’s
otherworldly ‘Sound Houses’ album,
which saw them rework the archive of
BBC Radiophonic Workshop founder
Daphne Oram. Being exposed to such a
wealth of groundbreaking, creative music
seems to have evolved their sound into
even more widescreen realms, as ‘Urals’
so admirably attests.
The goosebump moments keep coming
thick and fast. There’s the bassy
motorik groove and analogue bleeps of
the title track, and the probing, early
Human League-like pulses of ‘Altai’,
given incredible sheen and depth by
Sonic Boom’s mastering. ‘I Can’t Give
You Anything But Love’ is an intense
Moroder-esque blast riven through with
glorious arpeggiated riffs, while the
sublime, drone-hued drift of ‘Radiance’
in some small way feels kind of inspired
by Eno’s ambient work, particularly
1983’s wonderful ‘Apollo’ album. Just like
that record, there’s a rare, authoritative
artistry to ‘Urals’ that hints at long-term
durability.
Natalizia and Willis would appear to be
cutting loose at the perfect moment,
the very top of their game. This isn’t
strictly goodbye, of course, as there are
countless other great Natalizia/Willis side
projects to discover and cherish instead.
But if this is truly to be Walls’ epilogue,
it’s a darned fine legacy to leave behind.
VELIMIR ILIC
comments coming and maintain their
reputation for unexpected yet delightful
twists and turns within the songs. See
‘Evolve And Expand’ and ‘She’. But don’t
With ‘Not Real’, the trio show themselves equate references to female harmonies
and psychedelia to images of rainbows
to be more focused on electropop than
previously, reinventing ways to use all
and unicorns. Feel free instead to
things electronic and recycling everything, visualise sun-dappled fields with wild
flowers of yellow, purple, pink and blue,
don’t yer know. Listen hard and you’ll
hidden in the green; the deep heat
hear the elements that come together to
beneath a pile of autumn leaves; the sky
create a single swell – a squeeze box and
as a storm begins to brew; riding on a
a kettledrum coaxing along a keyboard
cloud without a saddle. There’s ‘Sunk’,
melody, for example.
‘This Time’, ‘Greed’, right there.
‘Deadlock’ could be sharpened up and
There’s no attempt here to create visualreleased as a single, a bright spark DJ/
theatre-with-sound in the old-school
producer should pick up ‘Apparition’ for a
Orbital or Ultramarine way, which once
remix, and the album’s title track has a
rightly had me so hooked. This is entirely
strong 80s echo, the repetitive keyboard
fresh and challenging. Is it electronic
hook hanging onto the driving beat like
music? Is it pop? Indie? Folk? Does it
a ribbon in the wind. And while it’s the
matter if we’re dancing? The fact that
same for many of these songs (they are
Stealing Sheep are signed to Heavenly,
songs, not tracks), that would never be
also home to St Etienne, makes perfect
enough for 21st century ears, which is
sense now.
why Stealing Sheep make the most of
every possibility. They have clearly learnt
NGAIRE RUTH
the rules so they can break them.
for a couple of years seems perfectly
feasible. But no, they were busy writing
and recording this aptly-titled delight.
STEALING SHEEP
Not Real
HEAVENLY RECORDINGS
Liverpool outfit make good on their
debut album promise with an inventive
follow-up
It was in the summer of 2012 that
Stealing Sheep – a trio of singercomposers from Liverpool – released
their debut album, ‘Into The Diamond
Sun’. Becky Hawley, Emily Lansley and
Lucy Mercer showed a daring, maverick
attitude to songwriting right from the
off and they had the skill set to carry
it off. Integrating analogue and digital
electronics with their already established
strong vocal melodies and harmonies
(see Dum Dum Girls) and DIY punk
guitars (see The Raincoats), everything
about them said, “This is our time, our
place”.
And for all the comments about
their girly quirkiness and psychedelic
tendencies, my, they grafted like a hard
rock band, headlining venues across
the UK, hosting club nights, and ending
2012 with the support slot on tour with
Mercury Prize winners alt-J. So nobody
would have been surprised if they’d
have decided to take it easy for a while.
Such is the world Stealing Sheep create
with their music that imagining them as
fairytale heroines merrily snoozing away
There is enough wandering off the path
(fairytales again) to keep the psych-folk
ALBUM REVIEWS
entirely independently.
BIOSPHERE/
DEATHPROD
Stator
TOUCH
Ambient music as background? Not a bit
of it, as this well-matched split album
proves
Geir Jenssen, better known as Biosphere,
and Helge Sten, who operates under
the charming name Deathprod, are
no strangers to working together or
with other artists. They previously
collaborated on a tribute to Arne
Nordheim and both are well known for
their improvised live sessions with sundry
like-minded individuals, so they’re
clearly receptive to the challenges and
opportunities that arise from creative
alliances.
For ‘Stator’, the pair have chosen to
produce a split album, so this is only a
partnership in the loosest sense of the
word. Nevertheless, the seven tracks
here underline how fundamentally
sympatico Jenssen and Sten are, as the
pieces seem to build out of the same
elemental constructs as each other,
whether that be grainy static blocks, tiny
melodic sprinkles or urgent synth pulses.
The effect is a uniform feel, a consistent
atmosphere, even though the ideas have
come from two different minds working
Jenssen is best known for producing
electronic music that carries an Arctic
chill. No musician, with the possible
exception of Thomas Köner, has evoked
the sound of icy tundra like Jenssen,
every note and texture carrying a sort of
delicate, frozen quality that forever links
his music to that environment. Sten,
working out of units like Supersilent,
similarly fashions music that reflects a
sonic landscape, but one more akin to
the gritty, post-industrial soundworld
of The Hafler Trio. His methods include
using something he calls “Audio Virus”,
a Heath Robinson collection of old kit,
homemade electronics and sundry bits of
sound-making detritus.
‘Stator’, named after a stationary
element within rotating machinery, is an
exercise in extreme reductionism, taking
both musicians’ distinctive approach and
paring it right back. These are tracks that
exist in a fragile state of minimalism,
from the pretty timbres and carefully
controlled distortion of Biosphere’s
opening ‘Muses-C’ to Deathprod’s
harrowing static soundbed on his closing
‘Optical’. At times, the effect of all these
tracks feels like being trapped within a
vast machine, stuck to the mechanism
and hearing the engine from the point of
view of being inside rather than in the
external world.
Biosphere’s contributions are quite
subtle, quite delicate, quite melodic,
although that melody is itself reduced
to mere traces of tones or bubbling
sequences. Deathprod’s pieces are more
immediately arresting, in the sense that
they are noisy blasts, albeit discreetly
managed, full of reverb and suppressed in
the volume department. They have the
same sort of urgency that Can captured
with the detonation that opened their
seminal ‘Oh Yeah’.
Although this is an album best digested
as a linear, single work, Biosphere’s
‘Baud’ stands out for no other reason
than it sounds like a malfunctioning
transmitter pushing out bursts of data
into a barren, foggy, post-apocalyptic
wasteland. Taken as a whole, ‘Stator’
is far from the background music often
associated with the ambient genre.
This is a dynamic, many-layered suite
of tracks that deserves the listener’s
complete, undivided attention.
MAT SMITH
DEATHPROD
were a group who’d made their Mercurynominated name in precision-pitched
instrumentals, with the notable exception
of ‘Steepless’, featuring Swedish singer
Cornelia Dahlgren. What’s surprising is
that this new devotion to vocals doesn’t
go in the Cinematic Orchestra-esque
direction that ‘Steepless’ suggested.
On tracks like ‘101’ and ‘Bright Luck’,
arpeggiated chords merge and entwine
like curling cigarette smoke. In terms of
mood, Burial and James Blake are clearly
touchstones, but the urban, neon-lit
panoramas of Portico are in thrall to
neither.
PORTICO
Living Fields
NINJA TUNE
From jazz mags to Electronic Sound,
it’s been a strange trip for the group
formerly known as Portico Quartet
So that’s it then. Portico Quartet really
are no more. This may come as no
surprise to anyone who followed their
evolution from acoustic jazz through to
the merging of electronic minimalism
and real percussion on their self-titled
third album. But it didn’t take a genius to
notice that this path was unsustainable:
something had to give. Or someone. And
it transpired that someone was hang
player and percussionist Keir Vine.
Judging by the echoing soundscapes
and mournful vocals of ‘Living Fields’,
severing ties makes complete sense.
This is less of an evolution and more
of a creative leap. It’s not compatible
with the past that contained treasures
like ‘Knee-Deep In The North Sea’ and
‘Window Seat’, and Portico are adamant
about that. You could also read much
into the fact that their last album was on
Real World and this one is on Ninja Tune.
This, they clearly state, is not album
number four, it’s the debut.
Perhaps the most obvious change is that
‘Living Fields’ has vocals on eight of the
nine tracks. Previously, Portico Quartet
So well-wrought are these songs that,
despite the contrasting styles of the three
vocalists used – mannered Joe Newman
of alt-J, the expressive Jono McCleery,
and the R&B stylings of Jamie Woon –
they sit on the album together perfectly,
each illustrating and illuminating
contrasting aspects of the Portico vision.
What they all have in common is an
intimacy that’s in stark contrast to the
icy synths and permafrost percussion.
On ‘Brittle’, the reverb drenched setting
and stuttering drum machines allow the
vocals of alt-J’s Joe Newman to blossom,
achieving an emotional impact of a kind
that will surprise alt-J watchers. But the
star here is ‘Bright Luck’. Jono McCleery’s
enveloping vocals spiral off to infinity, as
synths fizz and fall apart in a different
room. It’s a breathtaking achievement,
a piece of such staggering beauty that it
could bring a stone to tears.
Goodbye Portico Quartet and hello
Portico. Welcome to a light-night haze of
haunted 4am cab rides and untethered
emotions. Welcome to a melancholic
world dappled with moments of
euphoria. Welcome to one of the finest
records of the year so far.
ANTHONY THORNTON
ALBUM REVIEWS
the moments where you catch yourself
holding your breath as the quietness
sucks the air out of the room, then a
switch flicks and the track explodes.
So in Hartnoll’s take on The Cure’s ‘A
Forest’, which features The Unthanks,
when they get to the line, “Suddenly I
stop…”, guess what? They stop, pause,
crikey. You can take the man off the
dancefloor...
8:58
8:58
ACP
If it looks like Orbital and sounds like
Orbital, is it actually Orbital?
The Cure crop up again later on, with
Robert Smith offering a second tilt at
‘Please’, a track that first appeared on
Hartnoll’s 2007 solo album, ‘The Ideal
Condition’. With the addition of Brighton
belle Lianne Hall, it’s a thumpingly
enjoyable romp. Other tracks, including
the title cut, ‘The Clock’, ‘Broken Up’
and ‘Nearly There’, the first two of
these featuring actor Cillian Murphy’s
monologue, are Orbital in all but name.
‘Nearly There’ is trademark stuff. There’s
a passage, about a minute in, that comes
on a bit Euro, like ‘Cotton Eye Joe’ meets
Yello, which only serves to remind us
why we love Orbital so much.
It’s the ghosts in the machine, the
cheeky references, the nods (a personal
favourite being the John Baker/‘John
Craven’s Newsround’ lift on 1999’s ‘Spare
Parts Express’), and there are a few here
that would have us asking loudly for fish
if we were seals. The OMD ‘Telegraph’isms in ‘The Past Now’, in particular.
When the Hartnoll brothers stood side
by side, headlights flickering, something
special happened. That trick, whatever
twisted wizard shizz was at work, rarely
let you down. So if it’s just one of them,
does the magic diminish? Nope, but it is
a different kind of magic.
NEIL MASON
It strikes me that making music isn’t so
much a choice as a pre-shaped blueprint
that’s as unique as your handwriting. If
you didn’t know that 8:58 was Orbital’s
Paul Hartnoll, one listen and you’ll be in
little doubt.
Paul Hartnoll has often talked about
techno’s hidden pagan undertow and
recently he’s been using the word
“witchy” a lot. Unchecked by his brother
Phil, it seems 8:58 is an esoteric version
of the Orbital master plan.
The twist is a raft of guest vocalists. As a
result, the record feels much more earthy
than anything Orbital ever produced.
Lisa Knapp’s contribution to the haunting
‘The Past Now’, Ed Harcourt’s bellowingly
good turn on ‘Villain’, and newcomer
Fable (an Electronic Sound tip for 2015)
on ‘Cemetery’ do take a little adjusting
to, but Hartnoll skillfully handles
proceedings, ramping things up until the
tracks teeter on the brink of bursting
before, well, bursting.
At times, it’s more about the silence
than the sound. Those little pauses,
Pic: Steve Double
but both sides of the album are stoked
by the melodic texture of high quality
electropop.
The thudding, siren-filled trance of ‘Black
Return’ and the brutal ‘Broadsword’
have a dark, dubby intensity, while the
rapturous ascent of ‘Oh Yeah, Oh Yeah’
could have easily featured on Spooky’s
debut album if only Vince Clarke had
produced it. ‘Love And Death’ has a
haunting quality, offset by bone-rattling
beats, while the wittily-titled ‘The
Monophonic Spree’ takes those same
rhythms and fuses them with chiming,
crystalline melodic shapes.
MONO LIFE
Phrenology
ADVANCED
A dance music memento mori from the
self-styled Skull From Hull
Phrenology was a 19th century form
of neuroscience which sought to make
sense of the brain by analysing the shape
and dimensions of the cranium. For Mark
Osborne, an artist who dubs himself
“The Skull From Hull”, ‘Phrenology’ is
the logical title for his first full album as
Mono Life. Between the idea of prestereo music suggested by the name
Mono Life and the primitive form of
medical science referenced in the album
title, it would be easy to read the shape
of this skull and consider it another
attempt to capture the pioneering early
spirit of electronic music.
And it’s true, there is a retro dimension
to a lot of the sounds here, but
‘Phrenology’ doesn’t fit neatly into any
particular genre. It’s too pop for your
average dancefloor and way too blunt
and out-there for pop itself – in a good
way. Osborne attributes his singular
sound in part to the attitude of the Hull
electronic scene, where he says a doyour-own-thing mentality prevails. At
times, there’s a clear influence of harderedged dance music, at others Osborne
presents a reflective ambient warmth,
In between are tracks like the towering
‘Dark Star Theory’, deploying snatches
of movie dialogue and linking this back
to the early sampladelic dance records
of Coldcut and S’Express, back when
you could stock your Akai with all sorts
of purloined loot without fear of legal
repercussions. “All I’ve ever seen is
a bunch of notes from an electronic
hunk of metal,” runs one snippet, a wry
observation that’s often still made by
disbelievers in electronic music.
‘Phrenology’ is the kind of sleek
electronic trip that should really be
accompanied by 3D images of fractal
landscapes, shiny glass cityscapes and
spiralling star fields. The combination of
Osborne’s skull imagery with his artist
name reminds the listener that you only
get one shot at life – and listened to
from that perspective, ‘Phrenology’ could
be viewed as a vivid journey through the
unknown to an inevitable destination.
MAT SMITH
ALBUM REVIEWS
Cloud’ melded with the new psych of
White Fence or Wooden Shjips and you’ll
get the idea.
The lead track, ‘Electric’, opens with the
weightiest of synth thrums, conjuring
underground rumblings of tectonic
proportions. A juddering melody
immediately hooks you in, before the
propulsive bass guitar of Juan Pablo
Rodrigues pairs with Diego Lorca’s
motorik percussion to form an uptempo
locomotive groove that’s hard to resist
– and which pretty much sets the tone
throughout.
FÖLLAKZOID
III
SACRED BONES
Proof that we all need a touch of Chilean
kraut-psych in our lives
In a previous issue of Electronic Sound,
Faust’s legendary keyboard man Jochen
Irmler urged young musicians to follow
his band’s credo and aim to compose a
cinema of the imagination. He’d no doubt
approve of this lot, who’ve surely crafted
the perfect soundtrack for a fictitious
epic drive along some ancient Atacama
autobahn.
‘III’ is the follow-up to Föllakzoid’s 2013
breakthrough album ‘II’, which opened
up many a third eye to the Chilean krautpsych group’s intense take on infinite,
groove-laden sonic exploration. It’s hewn
from similarly dense cosmic matter to its
predecessor, though this time the focus
– heavy on monochord and steadily built
reiteration – is more clearly defined and
consistent.
There are just four tracks in total, each
with an average length of just over 11
minutes. Devotees will dig this and
the newly acquainted shouldn’t take
much persuading, particularly if they’re
conversant in the language of the
kosmische pioneers of yore. Think Neu!’s
‘Hallogallo’ or La Dusseldorf’s ‘Silver
There are many welcome and well-judged
switches of pace and texture to enjoy,
though, particularly on the outstanding
‘Earth’. It’s led by Domingo GarciaHuidobro’s guitar, which chugs along
nicely in the background until its sudden
crescendos break out beautifully from
the disciplined momentum. Elsewhere,
particularly on ‘Piure’, his playing
transforms the initial Teutonic emphasis
into something else entirely, hinting
at the inward-looking explorations of
The Doors or Explosions In The Sky.
On ‘Feuerzeug’, his delicate, sparingly
reverbed noodlings even bring to mind
Vini Reilly from The Durutti Column.
And then there are the keyboards. In
what could be one of the album’s
masterstrokes, the band have partnered
with German electronic master Atom TM
to flesh out Alfredo Thiermann’s synth
parts and provide added texture. Used
with great subtlety and bringing depth
and complexity at key moments, the
synths are what sets ‘III’ apart from its
forebear, embellishing with understated
washes of elan without ever dominating.
Lyrical content is minimal on this album,
by the way. Only the merest of blank,
mumbled incantations from Juan Pablo
Rodrigues here and there. But they work.
Importantly, however indebted to
its obvious references it might be,
Föllakzoid’s sound is rooted in something
more. Hypno-narcotic and heavy on the
one hand, there are also refracted echoes
of meditative Andean ritual, all of which
makes it feel not only substantial, but
startlingly new too.
CARL GRIFFIN
we now find ourselves – one where the
very term “dubstep” is largely redundant,
and where noses are gleefully thumbed
at the restrictions of either the 4/4
format of the dancefloor or indeed any
real notion of genre.
From such fertile soil springs ALSO. The
project began four years ago with the
‘Lipsmacker’ EP, credited to Appleblim
& Al Tourettes. Since then, the pair
have reconvened as ALSO to refine and
recalibrate their sound, releasing two EPs
with a third on the way – all of which
are compiled on this album, along with a
new track, ‘Blyford Bass’.
ALSO
ALSO
R&S
Bass men Appleblim and Second Storey
break beats, boundaries, the mould,
everything…
Though you may be unfamiliar with
ALSO, the chances are you’ll have come
across the two chaps whose initials make
up the name, Appleblim (Laurie Osborne)
and Second Storey (Alec Storey). See
what they did there?
Befitting its creators’ penchant for
zipped-up jackets and flat-peaked
baseball caps, there’s no shortage of
restless, shuffling beats and boinging
bass here. Many a breakbeat was harmed
in its production. Beyond that, however,
the bets are off. Techno, house, bass,
broken beat – all tags apply as every
track shimmers with idiosyncrasy – each
one like the curveball tune thrown in
to shake up a DJ set. And such is the
stylistic breadth that it could shake up
almost any DJ set, from the dark arches
of London to the big rigs of Ibiza.
Hardly a surprise then, when the
arpeggiated chords of the first track,
As Al Tourettes, Storey releases largely
‘Arpegmonger’, put you in mind of
experimental excursions into whatever
electronic genre takes his fancy, while in
his Second Storey guise he delivered a
much-fancied IDM album on label du jour
Houndstooth last year. Bristolian Osborne,
meanwhile, comes from a dubstep
background. A resident DJ at genre hub
FWD>>, he ran the revered Skull Disco
label with Shackleton, where he issued
a series of collaborative EPs, including
‘Soundboy’s Bones Get Buried In The
Dirt’, ‘Soundboy’s Ashes Get Chopped Up
And Snorted’ and ‘Soundboy’s Ashes Get
Hacked Up And Spat Out In Disgust’.
Skull Disco closed in 2008, sadly before
the phlegm of Soundboy’s ashes could be
licked up by the dog. But the label was
instrumental in suggesting new paths for
dubstep, signposting the future in which
something Sasha might use as a palette
cleanser, while the aquatic wash of
‘Formation’ evokes a kind of comedown
euphoria. Indeed, the best tracks here
have an otherworldly sense quite at odds
with their urban roots. They explode into
psychedelic, intergalactic splinters that
recall the highs of house, both deep and
progressive.
‘Sid’s Conundrum’, for example, is a
rumbling, scattershot beast of a thing
that builds and peaks before building
again. Elsewhere, in keeping with the
album’s genre-busting, grid-destroying
qualities, there’s a loose, jammed feel to
proceedings which is especially evident
in the lengthy ‘Rant Check Parts 1 &
2’. When even the more predictable
offerings such as ‘Dive Prophets’ and
‘Blyford Bass’ offer up secret moments of
surprise and beauty, you know you’re in
the presence of something rather special.
True, by conjoining three EPs, Osborne
and Storey forego a cohesiveness that
might have propelled the album from
very good to great, but if they can
maintain this kind of form – and if
they can resist doing a Beta Band and
sacrificing the quality of their three EPs
on the altar of a tepid follow-up – then
we’re in for a treat.
ANDREW HOLMES
ALBUM REVIEWS
‘Rise Up’ could be a refracted take on
what we used to call progressive house.
Sleek tracks such as ‘Feature Length’
sound like a mythical collaboration
between Dave Angel and Orbital circa
their brown period. There are also
mysterious, brooding moments that draw
heavily on 1980s horror themes. The
biggest jolt comes with the closer, ‘To
The Limit’, which is akin to an offcut
from ‘Power, Corruption And Lies’ era
New Order, more of an eclectic Haçienda
rocker than anything else on the album.
IN FIELDS
Phantoms
DESIRE
Forging a new union of man and
machine – with a little help from some
ghosts
“We like the open-ended meaning of
it,” says Ed Cox, one half of In Fields,
explaining the ambiguous name that
he and Raoul Marks adopted for their
band. “Raoul was interested in those
videos where sound creates shapes with
real-life materials, like iron shavings
on top of a speaker, but the name
also has connotations of being out in
the wilderness. It’s a link between
technology and nature, which is what
we’re trying to achieve with our music.
Something made with machines that also
feels real, made by something alive.”
In Fields’ debut album, ‘Phantoms’, is a
record that is intentionally and rigorously
faceless. Inspired by nights out in sweaty
clubs where you have no idea who is
DJing and no idea what they are playing,
there’s a sense of venturing into the
unknown and no telling where the music
might go next. The result is something
deftly nuanced with a relentless focus
on trying to evoke a mood of being
surprised.
Throbbing, urgent, low-slung cuts like
Repetition is key, as with most
instrumental electronic music, but
Cox and Marks keep things fresh by
adding little twists and turns, tiny sonic
events and interstitial developments.
Dance music has often been criticised
as nothing more than repeated
loops and while it’s true that part of
‘Phantoms’ is skewed towards basic
linear arrangements of sounds, there is
also that aspiration towards a supposed
organic quality which Ed Cox speaks of.
It’s an elusive ingredient, as many
electronic musicians have discovered, but
it’s something that In Fields bestow upon
‘Phantoms’ principally through actively
leaving in mistakes and imperfections.
Sometimes it’s a note in the wrong place,
or elements not gelling quite as they
should do, or just a feeling that the duo
are trying to wrestle the tracks under
control. The bass wobbles, the percussion
is a little out of sync, melodies start
in slightly curious places. The effect is
subtle enough to seem natural, rather
than anything like the “forced error”
approach favoured by the likes of RasterNoton. It’s the work of ghosts in the
machines, not gremlins.
There’s a lot of dystopian hyperbole
around at the moment about how
artificial intelligence will ultimately
destroy us all, ‘Terminator’-style. With
‘Phantoms’, In Fields offer an alternative
vision of the future, where mankind and
technology co-exist harmoniously, and
where electronic music doesn’t feel like
blocks of sound being pushed around on
a grid.
MAT SMITH
‘Harvest Home’, despite its organic
moniker, gets a radical overhaul from
Magnus that sees it transformed into the
arena of a smoky German transgender
club. Together with ‘Sad Lover’, it
represents the biggest departure from
the original track. On ‘Sad Lover’, Mikey
Young takes a fairly standard four-to-thefloor rhythm and turns it into new wave
synthpop, almost echoing Lanegan’s
recent audio curve.
MARK LANEGAN
BAND
A Thousand Miles Of Midnight
HEAVENLY RECORDINGS
Lending tunes from his ‘Phantom Radio’
album to some remixing pals reaps
rewards for the ever-inventive stalwart
Coming across as such a sweet and
tender confessional, ‘Torn Red Heart’
could have been written by Burt
Bacharach. It’s the man who looks like
an intellectual pebble – Moby – who’s
on knob twiddling duty here. While he
might be well practised in providing an
electronic backdrop to a gut-punching
vocal, not enough of the initial recording
remains to keep it in any way emotive.
The highlight, aside from UNKLE’s
exquisite lesson in how to layer sound
on ‘The Killing Season’, is when Lanegan
invites his old Gutter Twins compadre
Greg Dulli to orchestrate his gambit.
What the ‘I Am A Wolf’ reworking lacks
in the exposed desolation of the original,
it makes up for in its uneasy, trip hoppy
back and forth. Dulli lends his tortured
falsetto to the track, lest you forget that
these were voices born out of the lay-itbare grunge era.
Lanegan’s voice is exactly the kind of
weapon that all electronic artists wish
they had in their arsenal. Blisteringly
real, wretched and honest, it has a
fidelity that can’t be recreated with
synthesised instruments. It’s exactly this,
however, that has made them interesting
bedfellows on ‘A Thousand Miles Of
Midnight’. With this episode in artistic
play, Lanegan has given as much to those
remixing as to himself. May this era of
discovery continue.
EMMA R GARWOOD
After 31 years in the game, far from
being kaput, Mark Lanegan has spent
the last few years licking the musical
battery. The one-time Screaming Trees
frontman ushered in his own electronic
explorations on his 2012 album, ‘Blues
Train’, and the 2014 follow-up, ‘Phantom
Radio’. Now he’s exercised controlled
artistic abandon by opening up ‘Phantom
Radio’ to a platform of remixes. This
electro diversion is proving itself to be
no passing fancy or mid-life crisis; this
signals a full-blown, goddamned love
affair.
If the manifesto is to be believed,
Lanegan handpicked his collaborators
for ‘A Thousand Miles Of Midnight’, like
former bandmate Greg Dulli and recent
collaborators Soulsavers and Moby.
However, it’s some of the lesser known
artists that provide the more interesting
deviations. When Pye Corner Audio’s
take on ‘Floor Of The Ocean’ really kicks
in, the edgy beat persists like a heavy
pulse after a long night on the uppers.
Pic: Steve Gullick
ALBUM REVIEWS
series, a standalone music production
controller originally designed by Roger
Linn (of Linn Drum fame). Although
initially intended to function as a drum
machine, the unit allows you to assign
samples to its large rubber pads and
make tracks intuitively using its in-built
MIDI sequencer.
PREFUSE 73
Rivington Não Rio
TEMPORARY RESIDENCE LTD
Chaotic samples and enveloping beats –
Prefuse 73 is at it again
With previous aliases including Ahmad
Szabo, Piano Overlord, Delarosa & Asora
and Savath & Savalas, American producer
Guillermo Scott Herren has worn more
hats than a coat rack. But the name
missing from that list is the one he’s best
known for – Prefuse 73.
‘Rivington Não Rio’ is the first Prefuse 73
album to appear on a label other than
Warp Records, who released Herren’s
debut way back in 2001. The reason for
his flight from Warp remains a mystery,
with nothing on ‘Rivington Não Rio’
inducing the type of revolutionary mood
shift that might make a record company
think twice. In fact, despite it being
four years since the previous Prefuse 73
album, ‘The Only She Chapters’, there
seems to be little distinction between
Herren’s latest outing and ‘Security
Screenings’, a peak release from 2006.
For those unfamiliar with his work,
Herren packs a lot into his productions,
which are sometimes crudely, yet always
fascinatingly, stitched together via a
colourful palette of found sounds. His
instrument of choice is the Akai MPC
The results may occasionally sound rather
chaotically produced, but perseverance
usually rewards, as the mesh of sampled
vocals and field recordings settle into
a fragile amalgamation of abstract
melancholic tones. On ‘Rivington Não
Rio’, this technique appears as prevalent
as ever, albeit certainly more refined.
The 11 tracks here feature sustained
musical passages – the short, dark intro
‘Senora 95’, for example.
‘Applauded Assumptions’ is less typical
of Herren’s approach, featuring an often
uneasy juxtaposition of rapid-fire sounds
and spliced beats. Throughout the album,
few notes seem to hold themselves
beyond a couple of seconds and vocal
samples are integrated in much the same
way. There are exceptions, however:
the more traditionally sung ‘Quiet One’
(featuring Rob Crow), ‘Infrared’ (featuring
Sam Dew), and Milo & Busdriver’s
motivating twin rap on ‘140 Jabs
Interlude’.
‘Rivington Não Rio’ is another interesting
release from Prefuse 73, riddled with
unfathomable electronic expressions
that combine to create some genuinely
explorative patterns. That said, it’s
nothing we’ve not heard from Guillermo
Scott Herron before. In itself, his unique
method of sound creation has perhaps
become rather self-indulgent and
repetitious, but for those new to Prefuse
73, he’s still capable of providing sublime
moments.
DANNY TURNER
like holding hands. This is followed by
‘SPS’, on which Anna Wise’s smooth,
pitch-perfect vocals continue to build
over a loose, slow beat. Sonnymoon
know how to romance the listener but
it’s not long before a darker sub-text
looms, with ‘Grains Of Friends’ stripping
away the colourful textures.
SONNYMOON
The Courage Of Present Times
GLOW365
A third collection of intricate and
beautiful music from the innovative
New Englanders
Surely the earth spun a little faster and
the sun winked when Anna Wise and
Dane Orr, otherwise known Sonnymoon,
met at the esteemed Berklee College
Of Music in Boston, Massachusetts, all
those years ago. It’s no surprise that the
duo’s first two albums, each a heady and
irresistible mix of electronica, jazz, r&b
and avant-garde, thrilled and intrigued
critics on both sides of the pond.
With ‘The Courage Of Present Times’,
Sonnymoon have developed into
something a lot more accessible but
no less clever. It’s something that is
influenced by the character of the
different musical genres that make up
their sound, but the overall vibe here
is definitely electronic, particularly in
terms of the production and the artful
composition – and that includes the order
of the songs.
The opener, ‘Blue’, breaks like clouds
on a suddenly sunny day. Baby bunnies
poke their heads out of their burrows and
bounce across grassy green meadows,
birds sing sweetly, and everyone feels
Every track thereafter takes you a step
further into Sonnymoon’s world, and
more and more the songs become a
living art, a comment on Our Times,
although not in a concrete lyrical way.
Instead, it comes from the intricacy
of Dane Orr’s instrumentations, giving
Wise’s words a fascinating context, most
notably on ‘Pop Music’ and on ‘For Right
Now’, which is busy, loud, and then
disappears, just like that.
The exception is ‘Sex For Clicks’, Wise
singing quietly and mindfully, verse by
verse, two lines always repeated: “And
they’re all falling for it / No one is really
listening at all”. It’s a comment on
internet pornography and it is painful
to hear the words, which are laid bare
by the accompaniment of a solitary
piano. The musical restraint emphasises
what is clearly a burning passion to
communicate. By contrast, ‘Only Face’
gives Wise a chance to sing her heart
out in a traditional sense – and it’s a
wonderful thing.
Sonnymoon’s previous albums were
capricious yet amusing and charming
house guests, but ‘The Courage Of
Present Times’ is less trippy and more
of a journey. The witty twists and wrong
turns are not just there to check you
are listening, they also contribute to
an unfolding narrative. Whatever Dane
Orr’s treatment, it is never over-egged or
unreasonably unusual and Anna Wise’s
voice always has a warm, welcoming
tone, although she uses it differently in
every track.
This duo will never be predictable as
artists, but the odds are they will always
produce beautiful music.
NGAIRE RUTH
ALBUM REVIEWS
Troy Pierce left M-nus to form the quirky,
experimental Items & Things label. Talk
of exploring a fuller, more melodic sound
implied a sense of being constrained by
the aesthetic of their former home, but if
there were any hard feelings from Hawtin
then none were aired. Indeed, this
revisit to Houle’s ‘Restore’, each track
remixed by a different artist, is a M-nus
release. And it’s certainly more “full” and
“melodic” than anything you’d readily
associate with Hawtin’s label.
MARC HOULE
Restored
M-NUS
A-list remixers undertake a makeover of
Houle’s minimal classic ‘Restore’ – and
it ain’t minimal no more
Like his mentor Richie Hawtin, Marc
Houle was born on the other side of the
river. In Ontario, in other words, crossing
the water to Detroit to soak up the sine
waves of techno’s second generation in
the mid-90s. Encouraged by Detroit-born
DJ Magda, Houle went from promoting
a night at Hawtin’s Windsor club, 13
Below, to making his own tunes, and in
short order all three – Hawtin, Houle and
Magda – had set up the M-nus label.
M-nus, of course, was a home (maybe
even the home) to minimal techno,
a millennial sub-genre that quickly
moved from the power of Robert Hood’s
stripped-back vision and the dark artistry
of early M-nus to a precious, styled-out
parody of itself. In the few years between
came some great records, though, and
Houle’s ‘Restore’ album was one of them.
Broody and atmospheric, it’s only the
lack of low-end, as well as that infernal
drum sound (like someone flicking the lid
of a tube of Pringles) that date it. They
do, however, really date it.
Meanwhile, in 2011, Magda, Houle and
So out goes the Pringles lid tapping
and in comes the bass. Plus, in many
instances, a big-room sensibility. Monkey
Safari’s rework of ‘Pepper’ takes the
original (a rather by-numbers bit of
minimal hiss) and teases out plangent
chords that make it an epic yet lowkey masterpiece. Remixing ‘Borrowed
Gear’, one of the tracks least affected by
the passage of time and a favourite of
the Pet Shop Boys no less, Joris Voorn
boosts the low frequencies as well as the
melody, turning it into something of a
peak-time monster.
Monoloc dubs up ‘Sheep’, while the
‘Danny Daze Doom Dub Remix’ of ‘Talk
To Me Baby’ opts for a darker, more
abstract sound. In the main, however, the
remixers aim straight for the dancefloor,
picking out previously underused melody
and adding much-needed oomph. Popof’s
take on ‘Late For Work’ and M.A.N.D.Y’s
opening re-rub of ‘Business’ being cases
in point, both morphing into chunky
tech-housers in the interim.
Overall, the results are strong. It’s a
much more enjoyably future-proof
album than its parent and if a lack of
stylistic risk prevents it from marching
into greatness, well, it is a M-nus record.
Baby steps and all that.
ANDREW HOLMES
TWIN SHADOW
Eclipse
WARNER BROTHERS
If it’s powerful 80s style synthpop you’re
after, George Lewis Jr delivers
With two albums in the bag for 4AD
Records, a few months back George
Lewis Jr announced that he was putting
the skids on his planned tour and
the release of his next long player to
“reconsider where Twin Shadow was
headed”. That reconsideration resulted in
him swapping 4AD for Warner Brothers
and “hopefully a coffee with Prince”.
Indeed, one might imagine that a hot
beverage with Prince would be right up
Lewis’ street, as the New Yorker’s new
album is heavily inspired by everything
80s.
Lewis’ journey is hardly the typical
rock star story of a lost childhood in
a grimy inner city. Before hotfooting
it to New York, he was brought up in
sunny suburban Florida, where his dad
worked as a hairdresser. Born in 1983,
and therefore just about old enough to
remember the big synthpop and soft rock
tunes that defined an era, he admits to
nomadic trips to Copenhagen and Berlin
in search of the source of Bowie’s divine
inspiration.
‘Eclipse’ roadmaps those allusions to the
past, but while George Lewis Jr wears
his heart on his sleeve and doesn’t
hide his influences, he rarely resorts to
pickpocketing ideas from the pin-ups
of his youth. So although this album
is nostalgic, it is unashamedly free of
pretension, and that’s no more evident
than on the opening ‘Flatliners’, its lonely
piano and curling synth refrains drawing
you in before Lewis’ rich, earthy vocal
delivers a sucker punch power ballad.
What follows is a record packed with
expressive three-and-a-half-minute pop
statements (almost any of which could
be plucked out as a single), a record that
harks back to a time when everything,
especially music, seemed rather more
simplistic.
This is pretty much the story of ‘Eclipse’
– bright, expansive keyboards and
stomping drums united by stuttering
guitar chords and meaningless lyrics,
which matter little when the album’s
melodies are so agreeably lavish. From
start to finish, it rarely diverges from this
template. The first bars of the closing
‘Locked And Loaded’ ooze with deep,
breathy synths and passionate vocals,
while tracks like ‘Back To The Top’ and
‘When The Lights Turn Down’ (the cheesy
titles say it all) foam with balladic drama.
Ultimately, what’s most likeable about
‘Eclipse’ is that it is a real grower and the
songwriting delivers potent, memorable
powerpop. Of course, those attributes are
still exhibited today in the designer huff
of Lady GaGa or Katy Perry, but George
Lewis Jr couldn’t be any less cool – and
therein lays his authenticity and this
album’s charm.
DANNY TURNER
ALBUM REVIEWS
North and a commitment to the party,
and you’ve got some sense of what
makes ‘III, Part One’ a worthwhile listen.
There’s a plethora of riches to get stuck
into here, as was hinted at by last year’s
brilliant, out-of-nowhere, proto-Detroit
three-track banger, ‘The History Of
Techno’, and as will no doubt be further
explored on ‘III, Part Two’, which follows
in the next few months.
K-X-P
III, Part One
OM/SVART
Innovative Finnish post-kraut acid
stompers deliver a third set of irresistible
weirdosity
The Scandinavians rarely put a foot
wrong when it comes to music. From the
peerless bittersweet pop tones of Abba,
right up to the present with Miike Snow,
First Aid Kit and Lykke Li, as well as less
pop-oriented acts like The Knife and
Junip, the Nordics always seem to make
their mark.
K-X-P are perhaps the most adventurous
of the current bunch of boreal bands,
mixing a wild range of influences and
reference points with a lightness of touch.
They seem constantly at pains to eschew
the constraints of the conventional band
structure. Even their name hints at
something different, with the “K” being
lead vocalist and electronics whizz Timo
Kaukolampi, the “P” Tuomo Puranen,
who delivers bass and keyboards, and the
“X” a mysterious percussive element that
changes constantly.
Think pulsing acid house and technoflavoured drama fused with krautrock
discipline, glam rock playfulness and
West Coast psychedelia. Then throw
in the pagan abandon of the Magnetic
The first track, ‘Space Precious Time’, is a
chanted sing-a-long stomper. Heard in a
dark club in the small hours, the buzzing,
wheeling chords would be impossible to
resist. Even higher up the BPM register,
‘RA’ positively insists we join the revelry.
‘Obsolete And Beyond’ comes next and
is as a complete surprise, spinning us
back a few decades, giddily channelling
Joe Jackson’s ‘Steeping Out’ bassline
and Vangelis’ swirling synth patterns,
and pairing them with exhilaratingly
delivered, cave-echoed vocals. It’s a
high-octane nutcase of a track.
One minor criticism is that K-X-P’s
appetite for fluidity and innovation
means they fail to notice that little of
what they’ve done before needed fixing.
They sounded fully in their stride on
the poppily accessible ‘In The Valley’
(from ‘II’), for example, and the mindboggling ‘Pockets’ (from their self-titled
debut) demonstrated their alt-dance
prowess in no uncertain terms. But it’s
the sometimes prosaic nature of the
percussion here that lets this otherwise
excellent piece of work down slightly,
missing as it is the motorik adeptness of
the previous two albums.
Ultimately, though, we can probably
all live with that and doff our caps to
K-X-P’s desire for change. Particularly
as ‘Descend To Eternal’ hoves into view.
Breathtakingly cosmic and hypnotic but
boldly spacious, it really is quite a thing.
As with much of the rest of ‘III, Part One’,
it conveys a strong sense of communion
with matters higher, transporting us
somewhere deliciously between the
strobe blasted dancefloor and the starlit
frozen forest. And who would want to be
anywhere else?
CARL GRIFFIN
and inspired the ethos of ‘Insides’. His
impressive studio set-up has expanded
too. As well as the trusty DX7, the
arsenal of machinery this time around
includes a Moog Voyager, a Roland Juno
6 and a Korg 770, all of which are put to
good use.
FORT ROMEAU
Insides
GHOSTLY INTERNATIONAL
Luxurious, atmospheric house tunes for
clubbing and contemplation
Rather than restricting himself to fourminute bangers, the extended house
cuts here – undulating and considered,
deftly embroidered with rich detail and
electronic flourishes – are given ample
space to breathe and shine. Greene
embraces the dancefloor throughout,
as with the full-bodied ‘Folle’, which is
reminiscent of Spanish DJ/producer John
Talabot’s acclaimed album ‘ƒin’, and
the fat, resonant, spacey beats of ‘All
I Want’. Both are guaranteed to rattle
your bones. But for all its hip-shaking
moments, ‘Insides’ is also an eclectic
record that wears its obvious style and
broad influences on its sleeve.
big on atmosphere, pinging synths and
lustrous production, to the chugging,
jacked-up Vangelis beats of the title
track. There’s a temporary blip when
‘Lately’ veers perilously close to new
age filler territory, but order is quickly
restored with the majestic final track,
‘Cloche’, in which Greene channels sonic
guru Pantha du Prince, as brisk minimal
beats gently clatter and collide with a
gorgeous array of bells, billowing synths
and twinkles.
Although Mike Greene is keen to play
down any suggestion of his music being
derivative, ‘Insides’ is ostensibly rooted
in the signature tropes of Chicago house,
albeit redefined with a 21st century
patina, while dabbling in seminal genres
of decades gone by – kosmische, disco
and early electronica, for example. But
then you’d expect nothing less from a
self-confessed crate-digging obsessive.
VELIMIR ILIC
You get the sense that Fort Romeau –
the alter ego of London-based producer
and DJ Mike Greene – isn’t really a guy
who likes to rush things. As an advocate
of “slow listening”, enriching relationships
with music through careful attention and
focus, he most definitely practices what
he preaches.
It’s definitely an album dressed to kill
and thrill, from the opening ‘New Wave’,
The understated housey grooves on
‘Insides’ are inherently suited to the
hours after dark, be it via the dancefloor
or headphones: it’s a record that very
much spins out at its own pace and
on its own terms. It’s also one to fully
indulge and luxuriate in. After all, anyone
who manages to tease atmospheric,
shimmering house tunes out of just
a Yamaha DX7 and an old laptop,
as Greene did so brilliantly on Fort
Romeau’s 2012 debut album ‘Kingdoms’,
surely deserves your full attention.
With this second album, his sound has
evolved into something even more
abundant, honed over the last three
years through a spate of EPs and DJ
stints at some of Europe’s best clubs,
experiences that have directly fed into
Pic: Anthony Gerace
THE CLUB
JOIN THE
ELECTRONIC
SOUND
MUSIC
CLUB
If you’re not already a member of the Electronic Sound Music Club, we’d
love you to join. You get a whole pile of stuff for your annual subscription.
When you first sign up, you’ll receive a limited edition single, plus
download codes for two fascinating albums. Both the single and the two
downloads are only for Music Club members and will not be made available
to the general public.
We’ll be giving you lots of other music downloads throughout your
subscription year, plus a range of exclusive offers and competitions. Plus,
of course, you’ll receive the club edition of Electronic Sound magazine
delivered to your device every month for the next 12 months. Keep
scrolling to find our more about what you’ll get if you join the Electronic
Sound Music Club today...
THE MAG
Your annual membership will get you 12 issues of the club edition of Electronic Sound
magazine for the bargain price of £35, saving you a big pile of cash compared to
buying individual issues.
The Electronic Sound team includes some of the best writers and photographers
in the business, with many years of first-hand experience of electronic music’s
development under their collective belt.
We’ll be exploring and contributing to the cultural impact of electronic music, taking
a wide-angle view of its history, its present, and where it’s heading.
And we’ll be obsessing over synths quite a bit too.
Electronic Sound’s interactive design is re-defining the concept of magazines for a
new era, so you’ll getting the most informed and in-depth take on the music you
love, put together by people who share your passion.
THE CLUB
THE free
SINGLE
We asked Wolfgang Flür, formerly of Kraftwerk, and Jack Dangers of Meat Beat
Manifesto to collaborate and create a new piece of music especially for Electronic
Sound Music Club members. They worked on the piece between Düsseldorf and
San Francsico and delivered two fantastic mixes of their collaborative track to us in
February. We’re pressing these up as a limited edition of 750 on seven-inch clear
vinyl — and we’re giving them away free to the first 750 club members. The only way
you can get hold of a copy of this record is to become a member of the Electronic
Sound Music Club, and when they’re gone, they’re gone.
THE DOWNLOADS
If you’re a Music Club member, you’ll also get access to a number of special downloads sourced just for you.
These might be unusual electronic gems unearthed by the Electronic Sound team, or perhaps tracks from
well-known artists. Our first two downloads are albums by GLOBO and GIRL v1...
GLOBO –
‘MID-CENTURY
MODERN’
(MUSIC CLUB
EXCLUSIVE)
Globo released their first album, ‘Pro-War’, in 1995. They
wrote the theme tune for Stewart Lee and Richard Herring’s
BBC TV show ‘Fist Of Fun’ before landing in hot water with
a record called ’13’, which sampled a real police interview
tape of a murder suspect. The trio released two more albums,
‘This Time It’s Globo’ and ‘This Is London 1966’, followed by a
hiatus of several years before they returned with a seven-inch
cover of Devo’s ‘Whip It’ and a reworking of The Fall’s entire
‘This Nation’s Saving Grace’ album. ‘Mid-Century Modern’ is
the first album from this reclusive outfit since 2008 and this
Electronic Sound Music Club release is the pre-mastered and
“unadulterated” version as the band want it to be heard, before
it goes to their record label and “gets all the mess removed”.
GIRL V1 –
‘GIRL V1’
(DEMOS FOR
UNRELEASED
ALBUM)
Vikki Osborn and Natalie Ann Williams formed Girl v.1 in 2011
and spent a year writing songs together and demoing. They
were working towards an electronic pop with psychedelic
overtones, echoing the likes of Stereolab as well as classic
English synthpop of The Human League. They came to
attention of Sam Duckworth of Get Cape Wear Cape Fly, who
was enthusiastic about the duo, and he produced some more
demos with them, but the project fell apart in 2013 when
Natalie became ill and couldn’t continue. These recordings
were put together as a potential demo for what might have
been their debut album, and have never been publicly released
until now.
THE CLUB
AND MORE
Members of the Electronic Sound Music Club will also get discounts and automatic
entry into exclusive competitions to win records, tickets and other goodies throughout
the subscription year. We’re also going to be passing on special prices on gear, like
Teenage Engineering’s amazing Pocket Operator synths. With regular exclusive
downloads, early bird options on future exclusive Electronic Sound Music Club
vinyl releases we commission, and a great magazine put together by passionate and
experienced electronic music experts delivered to your device or computer every
month for 12 months, this may well be the best £35 you’ll ever spend...
Be a part of Electronic Sound – join the club!