Electronic Sound issue 02

DEVO
THIS IS HARDCORE!
DEPECHE MODE
TOUR SCRAPBOOK
WHEN BOWIE MET
THE HUMAN LEAGUE
LITTLE BOOTS . BOMB THE BASS
DAFT PUNK . ALISON MOYET
THE BLACK DOG . JON HOPKINS
STEVE STRANGE . ADULT.
WELCOME
Editor: Push
Deputy Editor: Mark Roland
Art Editor: Anthony Bliss
Artworker: Jordan Bezants
Contributing Editor: Bill Bruce
Assistant Designer: Ruth Balnave
Contributors: Andrew Holmes, Bebe Barron, Bethan Cole, Chi Ming Lai, David
Stubbs, Fat Roland, George Bass, Heideggar Smith, Jack Dangers, Johnny Mobius,
Kieran Wyatt, Mark Baker, Martin James, Neil Mason, Ngaire Ruth, Nix Lowrey,
Patrick Nicholson, Rob Fitzpatrick, Sam Smith, Steve Appleton, Tom Violence,
Vader Evader
Sales and Marketing: Yvette Chivers
Published by Electonic Sound
© Electronic Sound 2013. 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.
WELCOME TO
ELECTRONIC
SOUND 02
There are so many subliminal strands connecting the people featured
in this month’s Electronic Sound, it’s uncanny. It’s almost as if there’s
some vast, unknowable circuit board joining them in voltage controlled
harmony.
Take our cover stars, Devo. We spoke to both chief architects of the
Devo project about their primal soup years, the evolution of deevolution in the 1970s. Jerry and Mark told us some amazing stories
in an epic interview that takes us up to 1978, when they recorded
their debut album with Brian Eno in Conny Plank’s studio in Cologne.
Of course, it was David Bowie who led the world to Devo’s door and
claimed that he was going to produce Devo himself. In the end, his pal
Eno took on the job, leaving Bowie to continue his hobby of collecting
post punk synthesiser pioneers, chief among whom was The Human
League. We’ve talked to Human League founding member Martyn
Ware about the night that Bowie showed up unannounced at one of
the group’s London shows in 1978 and Martyn has given us a neverbefore-seen photo of Bowie snapped backstage at the gig.
Martyn Ware and Vince Clarke’s close association goes back a long
way and we’ve got an interview with Vince’s former Yazoo partner
Alison Moyet in this issue too. We hardly need to remind anyone of
Alison Moyet’s links with Depeche Mode, and DM fans will enjoy our
unique scrapbook of fans’ reports, pictures and videos of the very first
show of the band’s Delta Machine world tour, which opened in Nice in
France. Keeping the connections going, we also have interviews with
Tim Simenon of Bomb The Bass, who produced Depeche Mode’s ‘Ultra’
album, and Jon Hopkins, a long-term Eno collaborator and DM fan. By
the time you realise that another of our big interviewees, Little Boots,
had her debut album produced by Greg Kurstin, and that Greg Kurstin
produced Devo’s 2009 album ‘Something For Everybody’, the circuit
is closed and the feedback loop will have sent you into an oscillation
from which you may never recover.
See you on the inside!
Electronically Yours,
Push and Mark
WHAT’S
INSIDE
FEATURES
Pic: Moshe Brakha
DEVO
DEPECHE MODE
LITTLE BOOTS
BOMB THE BASS
RODION GA
ALISON MOYET
JOHN HOPKINS
THE BLACK DOG
Spudtastico. Mark Mothersbaugh
and Jerry Casale remember the
earliest days of the group and tell
fascinating tales of sex, violence,
Eno, Bowie and Lennon
She’s back with a fab new
album after an absence of four
years. But is Victoria Hesketh
still a little too weird to be
pop and a little too pop to be
weird?
The incredible story of a
70s/80s electronic band from
behind the Iron Curtain. They
were signed to Romania’s only
record company – and that
was owned by the state
The electroscape composer
talks us through his influences –
from David Lynch and Douglas
Adams to strange car journeys
and a trip to the Grand
Canyon
A special report on the first
night of the group’s ‘Delta
Machine’ tour – with words,
pictures andvideos from the
fans themselves. It’s the best
DM scrapbook ever!
Tim Simenon released five
albums between 1988 and
2012. Now he has put out two
long players in the space of
two months. There’s something
funny going on here
Jazz? Here? In Electronic
Sound? Behave yourself. Her
latest album, ‘the minutes’,
marks a welcome return to
electronic music for the former
Yazoo singer
They’re one of the most
respected techno acts in the
world. Thanks to founder
member Ken Downie and his
boat, they’re also well placed
to survive the apocalypse
UP THE FRONT
HEADLINES
JACK
DANGERS
JOHN FOXX and BOYS
NOIZE remixes. THE
PRODIGY and CHIC live.
Plus a whole bunch of other
electronic music news stories
The man from MEAT
BEAT MANIFESTO digs
into his collection of early
electronica. This month:
PIERRE HENRY
LANDMARKS
We asked VISAGE man
STEVE STRANGE to give
us the lowdown on ‘Fade
To Grey’. He mainly talked
about elephants
Martyn Ware recalls the night
DAVID BOWIE turned up
in THE HUMAN LEAGUE’s
dressing room. He’s got a
snap to prove it too
PULSE: PAULA
TEMPLE
SYNTH
JOURNEYS
PULSE:
METAMONO
FAT ROLAND
COLUMN
ANATOMY
PULSE: ZOON
VAN SNOOK
She’s the first female solo
act to sign to R&S, the
famous techno label, and
she’s taking no prisoners
They have connections
with Can and they make
their music with something
called the instrumentarium
WHAT’S
GOING ON...
PULSE: OLD
APPARATUS
German electronic
megastar SCHILLER talks
about the records and
movies that are doing the
do for him
A peep into the shadowy
world of the London
collective who protect
their anonymity with code
names
TIME MACHINE
Previously unseen photos
of DEPECHE MODE’s first
trip to Europe – in a minibus
driven by Daniel Miller!
DAFT PUNK
BEF
LITTLE BOOTS
TRICKY
TIME MACHINE
MOUNT KIMBIE
THE ORB
THE CUTLER
BOMB THE BASS
We have a poke around
the BLANCMANGE
studio and find out what
Neil Arthur’s favourite bits
of kit are
Our Fats has something to
say about DAFT PUNK.
The morris dancing troupe,
that is, not those French
blokes
Everything you ever
wanted to know about
RECORD LABELS. You
are going to be utterly
amazed by some of this
stuff
A man with a passion
for Nordic sagas and
innovative soundscapes.
He’s huge in Iceland,
dontchaknow
PULSE: ADULT.
SYNTH TOWN
From Detroit with a
difference. Anxiety, art
and attrition all have parts
to play in the story of this
dark electro duo
KELLI ALI
JUAN & MORITZ
ANDY CATO
HUSKY RESCUE
JON HOPKINS
CLUB 8
ALISON MOYET
VISAGE
Meanwhile, out on the
mean streets of Synth
Town, GARY NUMAN is
wishing he had renewed
his AA membership
AND LOADS MORE...
NEWS
HEADLINES
NEWS FROM THE WORLD OF ELECTRONICITY
THE CHEMICALS AND JUSTICE REMIX BOYS NOIZE
Boysnoize Records are
commemorating their 100th
release with a special double
A-side package of two
tracks remixed by electronic
heavyweights The Chemical
Brothers and Justice. ‘XTC’ and
‘Ich R U’ originally appeared
on ‘Out Of The Black’, the third
album by Boys Noize, aka Berlin
tech wizard Alex Ridha. The
Chemicals have turned ‘XTC’ into
a seven-minute techno stomp,
while Justice have gone typically
dark and brooding with the
electro housey ‘Ich R U’.
Alex Ridha is meanwhile getting
set for several live shows over the
summer, including a Boys Noize
appearance at the SW4 Festival
on Clapham Common in London
on 25 August. He will also be
performing live with Dog Blood,
his side project with Skrillex, at
the Electric Daisy Carnival in Las
Vegas and Glastonbury Festival
in the UK. Both of these events
are already sold out.
‘I DREAM OF WIRES’ DOCUMENTARY
‘I Dream Of Wires’, a
documentary about modular
synthesisers and the men and
women who love them, is
shipping its hardcore, four-hour
collector’s edition in June, with
the shorter version due out later
in the summer. The documentary,
which was partly funded by a
successful Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign, features
interviews with Vince Clarke,
Trent Reznor, Carl Craig, John
Foxx, cEvin Key from Skinny
Puppy and Electronic Sound
contributor Jack Dangers,
among others. The documentary
explores the growing popularity
of modular synths (there are more
companies making modular synth
units now than there were in the
1960s and 70s), why having
patch bays and coloured wires
covering a wall is better than a
laptop, and how the soldering
iron is the new must-have for
modular synthesists. Hmm, we
love the smell of flux in the
morning. For more info, visit
idreamofwires.org.
JOHN FOXX’S ‘UNDERPASS’ REVISITED
John Foxx’s electronic classic
‘Underpass’ is available as a
limited edition 12-inch release on
Metamatic Records with remixes
from Dave Clarke & Mr Jones
and from John Doran & John
Tatlock. Just 500 copies of the
record have been pressed.
Dave Clarke says: “As a young
boy, John Foxx’s ‘Metamatic’
shaped my interest in electronic
music. For me, John Foxx
understood both electronic and
punk sensibilities, and managed
to blend them into something
so futuristic that even today it
sounds like it’s from another
planet.”
Elsewhere in Foxxland, John
Foxx And The Maths have
remixed Marc Houle & Miss
Kittin’s ‘Where Is Kittin?’. Foxx
supplies a vocal and Benge
adds some modular synth tones
to proceedings. The track is
released on Houle’s Item &
Things label.
And finally, Foxx also plays a
headline show at Concorde 2 in
Brighton on 7 June and appears
at the Playground Festival at
Brixton Academy in London on 8
June. The Brighton gig includes
a DJ set from former Cabaret
Voltaire conspirator Stephen
Mallinder too.
A PRODIGY HOLIDAY IN CROATIA
The Prodigy have just been
announced as headliners for the
2013 Terraneo Festival in Coatia
in August. Tickets are 65 euros
and, possibly more importantly,
the organisers promise “endless
sunshine and glistening seas”.
The bill also includes My Bloody
Valentine. The festival takes
place between 7 and 9 August
in a disused military facility
on the outskirts of Sibenik, an
Adriatic coastal town. There will
be three live music stages and
two DJ stages. Adventurous sunseeking festival goers who fancy
a trip to Croatia this summer to
catch some vintage Prodge might
want to investigate flights to Split
(90km from the festival site) or
Zadar (70km). The nearest train
station to the site is Mandalina,
which is, we are assured, a
10-minute walk from the venue.
NEWS
Al JOURGENSEN AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Al Jourgensen, whose journey
from synthpop to jack-hammer
metal via industrial (and also via
several near-death experiences)
has made him a legendary
figure responsible for placing
a different Chicago on the
electronic map, has a book out
in July called ‘The Lost Gospels
According To Al Jourgensen’.
Written with former Melody
Maker scribe Jon Wiederhorn,
the book promises to be a “highoctane, no-holds barred memoir
by the legendary godfather of
Industrial music”.
NEW PSB, MAPS, POLLY AND ROB HOOD ALBUMS
The summer release schedule is
starting to hot up, with lots of new
albums on the horizon. Among
those we’re especially looking
forward to getting our ears round
here at Electronic Sound Towers are
Gold Panda’s ‘Half Of Where You
Live’ (11 June), Polly Scattergood’s
‘Arrows’ (17 June), Floorplan’s
‘Paradise’ (1 July), Maps’
‘Vicissitude’ (8 July), The Pet Shop
Boys’ ‘Electric’ (15 July), Her Royal
Harnesses’ ‘The Hunting Room’
(also 15 July) and Fuck Buttons’
’Slow Focus’ (22 July). ‘Paradise’
is the first album as Floorplan for
ex-Underground Resistance man
Robert Hood (left), who has put out
several 12-inch records under this
name. Polly Scattergood releases
‘Arrows’ in the wake of her recent
collaboaration with Martyn Ware
on BEF’s ‘Dark’ album.
With all this release activity, we’re
wondering what on earth else
might be happening. A Boards Of
Canada album maybe?
Jourgensen’s Ministry started life
as a lightweight synthpop outfit
on Arista Records. In the late
1980s, his various side projects
included a stint with Front 242
as Revolting Cocks, Acid Horse
with Cabaret Voltaire, PTP with
former Fini Tribe member Chris
Connelly, and 1000 Homo DJs
with Trent Reznor. Braver souls
might also like to know that the
final Ministry album, ‘From Beer
To Eternity’, is due for release in
September.
NILE RODGERS PRESENTS CHIC LIVE
Nile Rodgers, who has collaborated with Daft
Punk on their ‘Random Access Memories’ album,
plays a live show at The Forum in London on 14
June. The evening, which runs from 9pm until 4am,
is billed as Nile Rodgers Presents Chic Live and
promises a “musical journey from 1970s New York
City disco through to the sounds of summer 2013”.
Also playing on the night are Seth Troxler, Derrick
Carter, DJ Pierre and Nicky Siano. Siano was a
resident DJ at New York’s Club 54, from which
Chic were famously turned away one night and
went back to their studio to pen their Club 54 diss
song. All together now, “Ah, fuck off! Le freak, c’est
chic!”. For more info and tickets (early bird tickets
are £18.50) go to mamacolive.com/theforum/.
HAC ALL FOLKS!
Peter Hook And The Light are
presenting what Barney Sumner
will be delighted to hear is called
a “New Order Electronic Set” at
the Coronet Club in London on 21
June. Dubbed “Haçienda London”,
the night promises to be a mix of
live music and DJ sets, recalling the
giddy heyday of the Manchester
club, which closed in 1997. Also
playing live are 808 State and
Super White Assassin, while the
authentic Haçienda experience
will be fleshed out by DJs Mike
Pickering, Graeme Park, Danny
Rampling, Jon Dasilva, Justin
Robertson, Allister Whitehead and
Bobby Langley. Hooky himself
will also be bothering the double
decks. Whether the Coronet Club
will have installed concrete pillars
painted yellow and black on the
dancefloor is not yet known. The
event runs from 8pm until 4am.
Advance tickets are £20 from all
the usual outlets.
TIME MACHINE
WHEN BOWIE
CAME TO SEE
THE HUMAN
LEAGUE
Back to
when thing
weren’t ho s
they are now
w
MARTYN WARE remembers when DAVID BOWIE
turned up backstage at a HUMAN LEAGUE gig in
London in 1978
Words: NEIL MASON
There are many extraordinary images
that stick in the mind from the world of
music, rare snapshots that capture a
moment in time you can only marvel at.
And now, courtesy of Human League
founder, BEF kingpin and Heaven 17
head honcho Martyn Ware, we have a
new, never-before-seen picture to add
to that collection.
This backstage snap of David Bowie
was taken in the dressing room
before The Human League’s show at
the Fulham Greyhound in London in
December 1978. At least Martyn thinks
it was the Greyhound. It was, as he
points out, a while ago.
DA VID
BOWI
E
AT THE
was rammed and it must
HUMAN BACKSTAGE
LONDO
have been a thousand
N IN 19 LEAGUE IN
78
degrees in there. About
six weeks ago, I heard
from somebody who went to
that show and they said that, while
they were waiting outside to go in,
they saw David Bowie and Iggy Pop,
He could have buggered off after the
both with their full entourages, getting
first song?
turned away by the door staff.”
“We knew it went down well and we
Even 30-odd years after the event, that were pleased with it, but you just don’t
sort of news must still come as a proper know,” offers Martyn. “And then there
blood-draining-from-face moment.
was Bowie in the NME the following
week, saying he had seen the future of
“Yeah, it could have been a disaster,”
pop music. You’ll never get a quote like
says Martyn. “That could have been
that again, will you? I’ll settle for
that. But then a couple of weeks later,
that. It’s a shame Iggy didn’t turn
They group had only played their first
we were in London again to play
up again, but we ended up touring
show as The Human League at the
the Fulham Greyhound, and about
round Europe with him the following
Psalter Lane Art School in Sheffield
20 minutes before we were due to
summer, probably because of Bowie’s
the previous June. But by September,
go on stage, David Bowie suddenly
recommendation I should think.”
momentum was building pretty quickly appeared in our dressing room, totally
and they had tucked support slots with unannounced. We were just four
In the picture, Ian Craig Marsh is in
Siouxsie And The Banshees and The
lads from Sheffield, and there was
the centre, his head slightly bowed as
Rezillos (featuring one Jo Callis, who
Bowie and his entourage, there were
he sits at a table, seemingly writing
went on to join The Human League
something like eight people, turning
something, and Martyn Ware is
after Martyn Ware and Ian Craig
up out of the blue in this tiny dressing
standing to the right of Bowie. What
Marsh left the band) under their belt.
room with no door on it, a room about did they talk about?
twice the size of your average toilet
“We played the original Marquee Club cubicle. Can you imagine?”
“Do you know, I can’t remember,” says
towards the end of 1978,” explains
Martyn. “It’s quite a long time ago,
Martyn.
What did he make of the show?
isn’t it? I do remember he was a lovely
“It was the hottest gig I think I’ve ever
played in my life. It was ridiculous. It
“We didn’t see him afterwards, so as
far as we knew…”
guy. He didn’t stay in touch, though.”
‘Future Days does not capture Krautrock so much as unleash
it. At long last, the definitive book on the ultimate music.’ Simon Reynolds
‘His book is so well researched and filled with
such enthusiasm for its subject that it absorbs
from start to finish.’ The Observer
books and music at the heart
of independent publishing
@FaberSocial | fabersocial.co.uk
PAULA TEMPLE
??????
TEMPLE
OF SOUND
Techno maven and self-proclaimed noisician PAULA
TEMPLE has just put out her first record on R&S –
and she’s taking no prisoners
Words: ANDREW HOLMES
P
aula Temple. Cut her, she bleeds
techno. Sure, she had to sell
her furniture, but she kept her
computer, her decks, her controllers
and her records. How else could
she have fashioned ‘Colonized’, a
tremendous, industrial-driven piledriver
of a record and her debut on R&S?
Incidentally, she’s also the first-ever solo
female signing to R&S, something she
greets with mixed feelings, but we’ll get
to that later.
At 36, Paula Temple is already a
techno veteran and a connoisseur’s
choice to boot. Prior to ‘Colonized’
came ‘The Speck Of The Future’,
which won praise from the likes of
Claude Young and Dave Clarke, as
well as making an appearance on
Jeff Mills’ ‘Exhibitionist’ mix. And if
you’re thinking, “Hang on, wasn’t
‘Exhibitionist’ released in January
2004, the same month MySpace was
launched?”, well, then you’d be right.
‘The Speck Of The Future’, in fact,
came out in 2002.
Not that Temple’s been kicking
back in the last decade or so, you
understand. She has qualified as the
only female Ableton trainer in the UK
and helped develop one of the first live
performance MIDI controllers. She’s set
up her own label, Noise Manifesto, a
politicised platform where, according
to the website, “Technology used as
an extension of ego is prohibited”
and “We declare that every release
and event through Noise Manifesto
will feature at least 50% female and
queer artists”. But although she has
also recorded as Fragile X, as Jaguar
Woman (indulging a love of all things
Detroitian), and as Spank Protest
(“My only collaboration so far, which
explores our fun side with clear feminist
purpose,” she says), it’s fair to say she
hasn’t exactly been prolific, releaseswise.
draining industrial tribunal for direct
discrimination, brought because of
homophobia targeted at herself and
her girlfriend. Next on the cards is a
move from her native Leeds to Berlin.
“I just feel calmer there,” she
explains. “The stress of living in the
UK right now, seeing how brutal the
Conservative government operates,
the corporate takeovers of education
and health, the excuses of ‘the business
model’ to rip off people and punish
the poor… In Berlin, there are so many
artists. The respect and support shared
among artists is the huge attraction.
I’m not made to feel like an alien there.
Techno music is everywhere.”
Temple is steeped in techno. She
thrilled to early Mills (“Oh, the
overdrive!”), played tunes to Dave
Angel when she worked in a record
shop, and pales at being asked to
Which brings us back to the sellingfurniture thing. For the fact is that, while choose between Detroit and Berlin,
even with a gun at her head. Okay,
a new and exciting phase of life lies
a pretend gun at her head. “I think
ahead, there are demons in need of
laying to rest. Events in her recent past I’ll have to take the bullet,” she says.
She describes herself as a “noisician”,
include an exhausting and financially
waxing lyrical about sources as
varied as Curve, LFO, PJ Harvey,
Laurie Spiegel and Daphne Oram,
inspirations that colonise ‘Colonized’,
which has a subterranean, fuzzy
feel. Tougher than ‘The Speck Of The
Future’, but with a similar dose of funk
and bounce.
She’s on a roll. A well-received mix
for Urb magazine, two more releases
planned before the year is out, and
now the might of R&S behind her.
Which brings us to that other thing.
The being-R&S’s-first-ever-solo-femalesigning thing. The Belgian label’s first
female solo artist in 30 years.
“I think everything I’ve made so far is
pretty intense and driven, but now I
feel like I’ve finally found my sound.
It takes pleasure in its own powerful
energy. When I made ‘Colonized’, I felt
a liberating rush of ‘Fucking yes!’ as it
was coming together.”
“To me, R&S is a label that has always
been defiant, and has broken many
moulds over the years, so I do not
know why it has taken 30 years for
this particular mould to break,” says
Temple. “I do understand it is not just
an R&S issue. The lack of visibility
Colonized is out now on R&S. Visit paulatemple.com
and noisemanifesto.com
PAULA’S ALL-TIME TOP FIVE
Suburban Knight – ‘Nocturbulous Behaviour’ (UR)
K Hand – ‘Global Warning’ (Warp)
Dark Comedy – ‘Clavia’s North’ (Art Of Dance)
Ken Ishii – ‘Extra’ (R&S)
Wladimir M – ‘Evil’ (Eevo Lute Muzique)
PAULA’S CURRENT TOP FIVE
Untold – ‘Stereo Freeze’ (R&S)
Barker & Baumecker – ‘Spur’ (Ostgut Ton)
Mary Velo – ‘Wavelength’ (Gynoid Audio)
The Knife – ‘Full Of Fire’ (Brille)
The Haxan Cloak – ‘The Mirror Reflecting (Part 2)’ (TriAngle)
and the automatic assumptions and
exclusions put on you if you’re not
male in this environment can be very
exhausting to keep coming up against.
“I do hope my presence helps to cause
a positive shake-up towards changing
the landscape. I hope to see more
diverse talent shining through and
being supported everywhere. But if I
get a hint of anything tokenistic from
anywhere, then they won’t get my
support.’
Believe it.
ANATOMY
Spiders use this as the
edge of a sumo circle
when fighting for vinyl
dominancy
Press this bit. It
squeaks!
Affix to bicycle
here. YOU ARE
NOW A RAD
HIPSTER
Record labels are a mystery, aren’t
they? They’ve got stuff like words and
numbers on them. Sometimes they’ve
got really small words and numbers on
them. Of course, if you download your
music, you won’t even know what they
are. Fucking downloads, what’s that all
about, then? Anyway, luckily,
FAT ROLAND knows everything there is
to know about record labels...
Press this for
an outside line
Good question. If
you hear any, let us
know
Spins anticlockwise north of the
Equator and clockwise south of
the Equator (except in Sheffield)
Typo of the legendary
Greek discoteque owned
by Vangelis (now closed).
Should read “Disco
Urses”
Adam Ant’s comeback single
When you back mask this
record, this is where the devil
lives
Giorgio Moroder’s robot
name on Tuesdays
The colour of Adamski’s
face when he realised
that he wasn’t a
keyboard wizard
Code phrase.
Mention this three
times and Deadmau5
appears in an actual
dead mouse costume.
Smells and all
Not so much a track title as a cry for help
Paul Hardcastle’s dad
P Diddy owns this
1,972 kilowatts, gas
marks or BPM, I can’t
quite remember
JACK DANGERS
JACK
DANGERS’
SCHOOL OF
ELECTRONIC
MUSIC
The Meat Beat Manifesto man digs through his
collection of early electronic music. This issue, he
talks about PIERRE HENRY and what he believes
to be the first ever instance of sampling
I
think Pierre Henry’s ‘Le Reine Verte’
is the best piece of musique concrete
ever made. It was released in 1963
and was the score for a ballet. He
uses sounds from other recordings,
but they’re very hard to spot. He
uses a huge chunk from a recording
of ‘Nirvana-Symphonia’ by Toshiro
Mayuzumi, a Japanese composer,
which came out a couple of years
before. Yoko Ono did the cover for
this album when she was in Japan. It’s
similar to the cover of the Plastic Ono
Band’s ‘Live Peace In Toronto 1969’.
The Toshiro Mayuzumi album is
classical music, it’s not electronic, but
it sounds very ethereal and cosmic.
It’s a really good piece of music and
Henry uses really interesting loops
from it, but none of it is disclosed. It’s
the earliest form I’ve found of straightahead sampling – someone taking
loops from another source and turning
it into something different. I don’t think
that’s ever been noted before. I can’t
find any reference to the fact that
Henry essentially sampled Mayuzumi,
so I might be the first with that. After
I noticed it, I did some comparisons,
ran A/B tests and, sure enough, it’s a
sample!
It would have been around 1951
when Pierre Henry’s first stuff came
out. He started with a collaboration
with Pierre Schaeffer. The Paris studio
where they worked was based around
tape manipulation and they had a
machine called a Phonogene, which
was basically the very first sampler.
It was like a Mellotron, with tape
loops attached to each key of a little
keyboard.
I got to meet Pierre Henry once. I
went to his house in Paris. His house is
amazing, it’s this four-storey place he’s
been living in since the 1960s and his
studio is on the middle floor. He was
actually doing a show there, organised
with the Pompidou Centre. They bussed
people over to his house.
As you walked in on the ground floor, there was
a big room full of magnetic tapes, the real deal,
the musique concrete homage. I got him to sign a
bunch of records! He is really up there as far as
I’m concerned.
You know, this whole scene stemmed from a
demonstration of the vocoder in Germany in
1948. Homer Dudley, an American, invented
the vocoder in the 1930s, and he came over to
Europe in the 40s to demonstrate it. And in the
audience were all these guys – Henry, Schaeffer
and Eimert, who ran the Cologne studio.
Stockhausen worked at the Paris studio briefly,
then at the Cologne studio, and these two studios
became the hubs for a lot of the development of
modern electronic music. Kraftwerk came under
the Cologne school’s influence.
When you talk about the vocoder, people
think it’s just the robot voice. It’s 40 years since
Kraftwerk first used a vocoder. They put a drum
machine through it and the voice. It’s all over
‘Radio-Activity’. You can see their vocoder on
the back cover of ‘Ralf And Florian’. That was the
one that went up for sale about six years ago
and was bought by Daniel Miller from Mute.
LISTEN
AND
COMPARE
IS THIS THE FIRST EVER USE OF SAMPLING ON A RECORD?
Toshiro Mayuzumi’s ‘Campanology II’, from ‘Nirvana-Symphonia’
w(listen at 1:35 and 1:58)
Pierre Henry’s ‘Eblouissement De La Reine’, from ‘Le Reine Verte’
(listen at 0.35)
OLD APPARATUS
Lifting the veil on the dark, intense and
ever-decaying world of the shadowy
collective known as OLD APPARATUS
Words: GEORGE BASS
“
There are no set rules,” writes
one member of Old Apparatus.
It’s not clear which one: other
than the fact there are four of them,
the London electronic collective, who
favour codenames and anonymity, are
a secretive force on the edge of the
dubstep community. Since their 2011
debut, ‘Zebulon’, they’ve specialised
in blending white noise, industrial
effects and fragments of melody into
a warped reflection of the brickwork
around them. They’ve also set up Sullen
Tone, a label as cryptic as the group
themselves, whose website features
minimal info bar some Boomkat links
and brass-rubbing artwork.
Like other anonymous artists with high
quality output, the rumour mill is in
overdrive. Is it true Old Apparatus
turned down Constellation and Kranky
Records to launch their own label?
“No,” comes the response. “The label
was conceived specifically as a vehicle
for releasing the wealth of material we
had amassed over the previous year.
From the outset, we had a very clear
idea of the differing shades that were
going to be released.”
Like a botched military operation,
each release on Sullen Tone seems
co-ordinated but broken, with the
band’s four EPs moving gradually from
beats to the apocalypse (with handdrawn artwork to match). Were Old
Apparatus going one better than a
concept album? Was this a concept
record label? “Each of the four Sullen
Tone EPs represent a snapshot in
time that reflects both the individual
and collective consciousness of Old
Apparatus,” they reply. “In this way,
the releases run the full spectrum of
human emotions. It’s a body of work
we are proud to have accomplished.”
You can forgive their pretentions as
soon as you press play. ‘Derren’,
their collective debut on Sullen Tone,
meshes woodblock, static and emotive
wailing; the LTO-authored ‘Realise’
drives harsh beats into delicate piano
scales; ‘Alfur’ is pushed into ambient
dub by A Levitas; ‘Harem’, named
after another member of the Old
Aparatus crew, brushes against the
edges of apocalyptic drone. Does
this degeneration of rhythm express a
belief in decay by the group?
“Decay is all around us, both in a
physical and metaphysical sense.
We’re born to die – what fills the
space in between is variable, but
the destination is always final. The
human psyche has provided inspiration
for millennia, and regardless of the
physical conditions we are subjected
to in our daily lives, there are
fundamental questions that will always
remain. Music and art is our conduit
for exploring these notions. The tools
for doing so are largely arbitrary; we’ll
use whatever means are available at
the time.”
As committed as they might sound,
those collective tools are currently on
pause while the four Old Apparatus
members work on their own projects
for Sullen Tone. First up is LTO,
debuting Khing Kang King with rapper
Mowgli, who caused a storm last year
with his spiky tribute to Mount Kimbie.
What drew LTO to work with him?
“His abstract lyricism coupled with the
intent he places on each word/phrase
he uses. It’s exact, precise and full of
subliminal imaging that’s hidden from a
casual or surface-level listen. An aural
puzzle.”
They’re not exaggerating. ‘Metal
On Oxtongue’, the lead track from
Khing Kang King’s ‘IAO’ EP, is tearing
up Soundcloud; an arrangement of
charged, mournful noises, ripping
fabric, bleak theremins and dark,
lunging beats. Mowgli narrates a
walk through the badlands with
the vocabulary of a ketamine user,
enunciating words like crossword clues
as LTO keeps the grime noises and
808 drum sounds coming. Fidgety,
stumbling but balletic, it’s one of the
most unique sounding rap tracks this
year.
Coming straight after the four Old
Apparatus EPs, ‘IAO’ appears to
share many of the collective’s traits:
the decay, the secrecy, the grim but
enlivening bass music arrangements.
But it’s the start of a new chapter for
Old Apparatus, one that will involve a
hand-picked compilation of the EPs to
be released as an album shortly, plus
“something in the pipeline, but you’ll
have to wait and see”. As elusive as
Burial and with as rabid a fan base
to match, whatever’s next brewing on
Sullen Tone looks set to meet the high
standard set by its founders. This is the
place to come for electronic music that
truly challenges you.
Khing Kang King’s ‘IAO’ EP is
out now on Sullen Tone. The Old
Apparatus compilation album
follows shortly
SYNTH JOURNEYS
SYNTH
JOURNEYS
Following the trail of classic kit as it
passes through the electronic music
ecosystem. This time round, we’re
picking through BLANCMANGE’s
favourite gear
F
or our first Synth Journey, we
spoke to Jez Willis from Utah
Saints, whose albums feature a
Roland TR-909 drum machine obtained
from synthpop legends Blancmange.
To join the dots of this story, it seemed
only appropriate to talk to Neil Arthur
of Blancmange, the original owner of
the Utahs’ 909.
“I’d love to say that a lot of the classic
gear I’ve owned over the years ended
up being passed on to bands who
used it on their records,” says Neil.
“Sadly, an awful lot of it just ended
up getting nicked. I‘ve lost tons of stuff
over the years.”
remembers Neil. “It’s dated now, but
it was a lovely creamy beige colour.
Stephen [Luscombe] and I purchased
one each and swapped floppy discs
to share ideas. In terms of timing, it
was incredibly accurate. We used it to
create every track on our third album,
‘Believe You Me’.”
“A Roland MKS-80 Super Jupiter
with its programmer,” he says
without hesitation. “I purchased the
programmer from Marius de Vries,
the session keyboard player and film
composer. I bought the synth new when
they first came out [1984] and I’ve used
it on everything I’ve done since.”
As technology moved on, the BBC
ended up gathering dust in a corner
of Blancmange’s studio. When Neil
moved house around 1999, he
investigated donating it to a museum.
So can we expect to hear any of that
classic gear on a new Blancmange
album soon?
Yes, we’ve decided that 26 years
between albums is too long,” he
“The Horniman Music Museum in South laughs. “The plan is for the next
London was close by and I offered it
record to be out in early 2014, if not
to them,” he says. “I recall them being
before. It’s our fifth album, although its
Oh dear. Despite frequently being the
utterly baffled. They kept asking, ‘Yes,
working title is ‘The Sixth’, which is just
victim of larceny, Neil has managed
but what is it?’. The majority of their
indicative of my sense of humour. I just
to donate one other critical bit of
exhibits were traditional instruments
like messing with people.”
equipment to posterity – a BBC B Micro dating back centuries and no one had
Computer, complete with UMI music
given them anything like this before.
BILL BRUCE
sequencer. The BBC Micro was one
They took it, but then I didn’t hear
of the first computers to be utilised by
anything else until, remarkably, the
professional musicians on a budget.
beginning of this year. They contacted
Erasure’s Vince Clarke was a confirmed me via our fan site wanting more
user, as were artists as diverse
details on the computer as they were
as Queen, A-ha and Steel Pulse.
adding it to their permanent collection.
Blancmange’s string arranger, Linton
In the meantime, I’d discovered some
Naiff, was involved in the development original floppy discs for it and the
of the UMI, a dedicated sequencer
original manual, which was so old
designed to sit on top of the BBC.
it had been printed on a dot matrix
“Expensive music computers like the
printer and stuck in a binder!”
Fairlight were beyond our means,
so we were blown away when we
Does Neil still have a favourite piece of
first saw what the BBC could do,”
vintage kit?
GARY
NUMAN
GETS
ELECTRONIC
SOUND
MAKE SURE
YOU DO TOO
JOIN THE MAILING LIST AT
www.electronicsound.co.uk/signup
METAMONO
They’ve got links with Can
and they make their music
with something called
the instrumentarium.
METAMONO are
something special
Words: DAVID STUBBS
There’s been a recent trend for new
electronic groups to opt for analogue over
digital recording methods, but no one
pursues this antique futurist philosophy with
such thoroughgoing, scrupulous rigour,
combined with joyful gusto, as Crystal
Palace trio Metamono. Comprising Paul
Conboy, Mark Hill and Jono Podmore, sonin-law of Can’s Irmin Schmidt and the man
co-responsible for the laborious editing
process that went into Can’s ‘The Lost
Tapes’ last year, Metamono have released
a series of EPs and singles on cassette and
vinyl, including the ‘Parcel Post’ EP and,
most recently, a fortuitously timely cover of
David Bowie’s ‘Warszawa’ from his album
‘Low’.
Metamamono’s modus operandi stems
from the Manifesto on their website, in
which they decry modern music as “a
flaccid shadow of the social power it once
was”. They vow never to use microphones,
samples or overdubs and never to
remix, confining themselves to analogue
sound recording on their own used and
customised instruments. “Paul and I were becoming jaded with the
work we were doing in the contemporary
digital sound world and both of us knew
how dynamic, exciting and expressive
proper analogue synths are,” say
Podmore. “So as Paul started making
modules, we decided to put our beliefs into
practice in such a way that we couldn’t
weaken and be dragged back into ‘the
box’ – the digital sound world of the pixel
jockeys and the timid.”
“Our restraints will be our liberties,” adds
Hill. “This, in respect of creativity, seems to
work well for Metamono.”
“Plus, it avoids so much argument and
discussion,” says Conboy. “There’s no
option but to just get on with the music
and obey The Word.”
Metamono have between them
accumulated their visually impressive
collection of equipment, known as
the “instrumentarium”, since their
schooldays – picked up at secondhand
stores, built to order, with Podmore’s
most recent addition a 1980s Mu-Tron
III+. Hill purchased a Korg MS-20 25
years ago “and then just waited to
intersect the space-time continuum with
the other operatives! I found my trusty
valve radio in a skip covered in snow,
left it in front of a radiator for a few
days, switched it on – no problemo.” The group’s music crackles and bleeps
with resonances of futures past –
Leon Theremin, Karlheinz Stockhausen,
Joe Meek, Raymond Scott, Herbie
Hancock in his electric phase, right
through to the infectious squiggle
of acid house. “One of the aims of
Metamono is to open new channels
and pathways in the minds of our
audience,” says Hill. “It’s always
interesting to see the people who
‘know they won’t dance to this kind of
weird music’ end up doing precisely
that.” and direct of melodic and rhythmic
content – bringing a funkiness that the
same content would never achieve if
generated in that frozen little world in the
digital ‘box’.”
Metamono are a particularly brilliant
live proposition, all mad-hatted up,
the instrumentarium assembled at
audience level, the analogue sounds
pinging about the venue like shiny ball
bearings, immaculate when pumped
through a contemporary PA system. Plus,
there’s the sheer manual spontaneity
For all their avant garde connotations
of their playing. As Podmore says, “It’s
and strict procedures, Metamono are
enthralling for an audience to see the
gleefully free of the downbeat, ominous gesture in performance relate directly to
tendencies of much electronica, while
what they hear – something that became
evading also the obvious upbeat,
lost when the hardware was abandoned
crowd-pleasing devices of EDM. It’s
in favour of the software.” All a good
serious fun.
deal more exciting than staring at the
back of a laptop, in other words.
“After our first few sessions, we
noticed that most of our output had
With their insistence on formats once
this dour, atonal, rhythmically irregular considered obsolete and their rejection
character,” recalls Podmore. “There
of the compressed, commercial
was no reason why just a choice of
methods of modern studios, Metamono
instrumentation and technique should
might be considered the free range
dictate expressive quality, so we
option, as opposed to the batterymade a conscious decision to try to
farmed, mainstream norm. But will this
write some happy tunes. What we
resonate with kids accustomed to the
discovered was that the flexibility
convenience of mp3s?
and unpredictability of our sound
lent a complexity to the most simple
“Yes, for one simple reason – it sounds
better,” says Podmore. “The technology
may date back to the 1920s in some
cases, but it has been developing
ever since. It retains an audio quality
far in advance of the paltry trickle
of normalised data dribbling out of
the headphone socket of the generic
laptop which is masquerading as a
musical instrument on stage right now
in cities all over the globe.”
“There are young boys and girls
out there who are captured by vinyl
because they love the sound of it and
how it makes them feel to own it,” adds
Conboy. “The senses evoked by vinyl
are the same as books and will always
ring through for some. And some is
enough to keep us going.”
‘Warszawa’ is available as a limited
edition seven-inch on Instrumentarium.
Visit www.metamono.co.uk
FAT ROLAND
FAT
ROLAND
BANGS ON
Our resident columnist celebrates the
return of DAFT PUNK by drinking too
much fizzy pop
S
port is not my strongest subject,
but I’m pretty sure Coachella is an
American contest where the West
Indies race horses down a narrow
tunnel in Monaco while shouting
“Fore!” before biting each other and
being sent off. Or it might be a music
festival.
Anyway, at this great Coachella bakeoff or whatever it is they do there,
there was a commercial for Daft Punk’s
first studio album for eight years. It
contained 90 seconds of music, with
Robbie Williams’ more successful
brother Pharrell singing in his come-tobed voice. He was accompanied by
Mr Punk 1, Mr Punk 2 and a deliriously
happy Nile Rodgers. Nile, who once
played with ‘Sesame Street’ muppets,
was bopping so merrily, I’m sure he
was being operated by a couple of
rods from underneath the stage. That’s
“rods” with a small R.
The footage was a sensation and the
internet frothed at its multiple mouths.
Have Daft Punk gone disco? What the
hell is a Daft Punk? Who’s that happy
guy with the rods up his bum? Is it
fake or gay or both? What does Justin
Biebpipe think? Would Ann Frank
have been a Daft Punk fan and, if so,
would the title of their second album,
‘Discovery’, have made her nervous?
We need to know. The whole internet
needs to know.
Then came the supposed leak of the
full ‘Get Lucky’ single. There were
“real” versions and “definitely real”
versions and “ignore the others this is
the real one shut up” versions. All of
them were cobbled-together loops of
the commercial, repeating incessantly
like a one-track iPod on the saddest
shuffle in the world.
When a radio station run by
hedgehogs called SONiC played a
version that was “pretty damn close” to
the real thing (it was the real thing), the
frothing went seismic and threatened
to drown us all. As a big fan of
‘Homework’ and the ‘Tron Legacy’
soundtrack, I couldn’t work out what
was real anymore. Does the single
exist? Have Daft Punk ever existed? Is
their mask gimmick some sort of trick
and they don’t have real heads? Are
heads real? What does Justin Biebpipe
think?
By the time the Coachella morrisdancing jamboree was a fading
memory, the world had seen the best
PR coup for any electronic band for
ages. A short ad, fakes and fights
and then, a week later, the biggest hit
single of their career. And don’t even
start me on the album. Or Boards Of
Canada. Gooooaaal!
FAT ROLAND
Illustration: STEVE APPLETON
BORIS
BLANC
GETS
ELECTRONIC
SOUND
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LANDMARKS
FADE TO GREY
As VISAGE release their long-awaited comeback album,
STEVE STRANGE remembers the making of ‘Fade To Grey’. Sort of.
It’s more about elephants, really
“I
was in a band called The
Photons. The revolutionary idea
the manager had to break
away from punk, was for us to
play power pop and have us all dress
in different coloured suits. Mine was
bright blue, the drummer’s was green,
the guitarist’s was red, and the bass
player’s was yellow. We did about 10
UK dates and when it came to the big
London show, it was like a who’s who of
punk – Sex Pistols, The Clash, Don Letts
were all there.
“I’d got bored with the coloured suit,
so I made this outfit, with ruffles and
slashed trousers that had alluring seethrough patches in the arse, so you
could see I had no underwear. Midge
Ure came up, who I already knew,
and he knew it was over for the Rich
Kids [Ure’s pre-Ultravox band], and he
said to me, ‘I want to use this studio
time, will you come and sing on some
tracks?’. So I did. I remember I got into
it so much, when we did that cover
of ‘In The Year 2525’, I was literally
acting as if the world was coming to
an end. I was holding on to the vocal
booth, bellowing it out. All the tracks
we were recording, we would play
them at Billy’s, and later at the Blitz
Club, and that’s when the hordes of
record companies started coming to
the club. We were getting a lot of kids
from St Martin’s, not just bands and
musicians, but all these designers and
milliners, people like Stephen Jones,
John Galliano, John Linard and Melissa
Caplan, who did the costumes for the
‘Fade To Grey’ video and went on to do
costumes for Toyah. “I knew we had something with the
album. In the studio, Midge taught
me that Bowie technique to create
lyrics by cutting up newspapers, and
shuffle those cards like Eno, ‘Oblique
Strategies’, that sort of thing. But when
the album came out, I was like, ‘Why
haven’t I got a credit on ‘Fade To
Grey’?’, and they were like, ‘Because
Chris Payne wrote it’. But it was my
idea to put the French girl in and it was
supposed to be a five-way split. Our first
pay cheque from that was £350,000,
every one of us. And that was because
of me getting out of bed and going to
five countries in a day, and all they did
was moan about me going to too many
fucking parties [laughs].
“I was pissed off. I was the only one
not signed to a record contract, I
didn’t know how these things worked,
I was pretty naive. But I was the one
going to five fucking countries in one
day while everyone else got to lay in
bed. Nobody did anything to help
me promote the album. The thing is, I
would never have dreamed of telling
Midge how he should play or anything
like that, and once my vocals were
recorded, done and dusted, it made
much more sense to me to be out at a
party. I mean, why should I be locked
in a fucking studio, when I can be
photographed out and about? Midge
would be like, ‘Oh, you’ve done your
vocals now, I suppose you’re fucking off
to a party’. I went, ‘Yeah, I am actually,
to get us more press, to sell us more
records!’.
“What really blew it with Midge was
when we were in New York. We
were going to this event, and loads of
cool people were going to be there
– Andy Warhol, Talking Heads, The
B-52s, Blondie – and I thought, ‘Right,
I’ve got make an impact at this super
cool party’. So I decided I wanted to
come in on an elephant. I said to the
record company, ‘I want an elephant!’.
‘What?!’ they said. ‘I’ve got to blow all
these people away, I want an elephant!’
I said. ‘Where the hell are we going
to get a elephant?’ they asked. ‘Well,
there must be zoos in New York,’ I
said. Later on I get a call: ‘We can’t get
an elephant, but we’ve got a camel,’
they said. Anyway, it did the trick, it
was on every TV station and in every
newspaper! But Midge blew his top.
He said, ‘I’m getting on Concorde if
you come in on a bloody elephant!’. So
I said, ‘Oh, get on fucking Concorde
then, they can’t get an elephant
anyway, I’m on a camel’, and I put the
phone down. “It’s great that people like Goldfrapp,
Fischerspooner, La Roux and Little Boots
all say Visage were important, that if
it wasn’t for us there wouldn’t be this
electronic scene now. ‘Pleasure Boy’
and ‘Frequency 7’, those have been
sampled so many times. It blows me
away. But then Kelly Osbourne did that
‘One Word’ song and claimed she’d
never heard ‘Fade To Grey’! I can sing
‘Fade To Grey’ along to fucking ‘One
Word’! There’s even a French bit, for
fuck’s sake!”
The new Visage album, ‘Hearts
And Knives’,is released on
Blitz Club Records
ADULT MATERIAL
ADULT
MATERIAL
Their music makes you feel like
both dancing and hiding behind
the sofa. ADULT. talk the politics
of anxiety, art and attrition
Words: NIX LOWREY
Detroit duo ADULT. are – relatively
speaking – electro veterans. Not in the
Kraftwerk sense, but having released
five albums and more than a dozen EPs
and singles since 1998, they certainly
qualify as post-modern Electronic
Establishment.
Concocting vivid visual and sonic
compositions heavily influenced
by their art school backgrounds,
existentialism, Philip K Dick and JG
Ballard, Nicola Kuperus and Adam Lee
Miller’s work cleverly balances crisp
pop melodies with the most dystopian
of subject matter – amputations,
claustrophobia, violence and paranoia
run like threads of bright mercury
through their often highly danceable
back catalogue. The new ADULT.
album, ‘The Way Things Fall’, is no
exception.
“We realised recently that every
album we’ve made has addressed the
concept of fear,” says Miller. “Our first
album, ‘Anxiety Always’, was about the
fear of the outside world. And we’ve
always explored the idea of fear of
relationships – what can go wrong,
what can go well, the fear of opening
up your heart and someone destroying
it.” helpful, actually. But there are a lot of
different types of relationships. Like a
failed relationship between long-time
friends, or even a relationship you have
with yourself or your life.”
“A relationship with your own life is full
of frustrations,” Miller chimes in. “Like
that feeling when you’re so beat down,
you’re spending your time just trying to
figure out how to get yourself back up.
We’re very much the kind of people
who have some good weeks, where
everything goes really well, and other
weeks you just think, ‘What’s the point?
Why do I care? Why am I trying so
hard?’. I think a lot of people can relate
to that.”
Miller admits he’s no stranger to angst.
It seems an amusing contradiction,
then, that ‘The Way Things Fall’ was
both unexpectedly and welcomingly
free of the over-analysis which plagued
the band when making their last
album, ‘Why Bother?’, in 2007.
“When we wrote ‘Why Bother?’, we
tried to incorporate so many parts of
ourselves that we negated the process
of making music,” explains Miller.
“We took some time off to make a film
[‘Decampment’, a silent horror film set
to their own score] and this allowed us
Kuperus and Miller are long-term
to express our ideas in other media.
partners and are way past that nervous Since then, our music has become
first date, so this isn’t just a story of new more pure. It doesn’t have to fulfil six
love’s tribulations. purposes for us, so we can concentrate
on the songs.” “It doesn’t have to be about us,”
Kuperus challenges. “It’s true that we
“That’s why we wrote this new album
started working on these songs under
so quickly, quite frantically, and really
the loose umbrella of writing love
enjoyed making it,” agrees Kuperus.
songs, even though they’re mutant love “We had just one specific goal, which
songs. It was almost like an exorcism
was to write great music. With ‘Why
at times, getting it all out. It was very
Bother?’, we had very fixed ideas and
specific stories, whereas this album
feels a lot more energised and free. It’s
more open but also very personal.”
After spending electro pop’s postmillennial heights in the spotlight,
Kuperus and Miller found stepping
away to make a film therapeutic. Miller
says he’d been adversely affected by
the expectations of the music industry,
to the extent that he didn’t know if he
wanted ADULT. to continue to exist.
“Sometimes you get to a point where
you feel like you’re pleasing a lot of
other people and doing things because
that’s the way the system works, the
way you’re expected to work. I think
we’ve realised we’re not that kind of
band. To be part of that world, it just
doesn’t work for us. We really are
more visual artists [he’s a painter,
Kuperus is a photographer] and we
weren’t even sure we’d make another
album at all.”
Although their visual work is very
dramatic and styled, ADULT.’s live
show surprisingly contains no grand
visual themes. “We don’t try to blend theatre or
performance art into our shows,” says
Kuperus. “That’s not how we operate.
If we could play in the dark and
everyone else was in the dark, I think
that would be ideal.” “For me, audience feedback is
very important – that’s why I’m up
there,” says Miller. “Maybe we could
compromise and have very dark
lighting?”
‘The Way Things Fall’ is out now
on Ghostly International
WHAT'S GOING ON...
WHAT’S
GOING
ON...
…your iPad?
German megastar DJ SCHILLER has a poke around his
various entertainment systems and reports back on
what he’s currently using them for
…your iPod?
‘The North Borders’ by Bonobo.
Really nice sounds. I like the
blend of electronica and acoustic
sounds, it feels really natural
on this album. My all-time
favourite is still Burial’s ‘Untrue’.
Unmatched intensity and depth,
it still triggers a zillion pictures
in my head. I hope there will be
more from this inspiring project
soon.
…your DVD Player?
A real trip: ‘Enter The Void’
directed by Gaspar Noé. It is a
mind-blowing and dazzling thrill
ride. Visually groundbreaking
pictures and jaw-dropping
montages make it one of my
all-time favourites. At nearly four
hours long, it is quite demanding,
but it’s still a defining piece of
cinema. The other great film in
my library is Michael Mann’s
‘Heat’, with Al Pacino. I nearly
know the dialogue by heart.
Great music too!
It’s filled with music apps,
although I have to say that
the ‘perfect’ app has not been
invented yet. I’m still waiting
for the ultimate iPad music tool.
Other than that, I use it to check
my mails, surf the web or watch
a movie when I’m on the road.
…your TV?
I cancelled my cable TV
connection recently. Too much
visual nonsense to handle for
me. But I really love some of
the light American TV series,
which I watch via iTunes. I am
not depending on any airing
schedule, but rather I can watch
something whenever I feel the
need for some “lightness”.
…your games console?
I do have a PlayStation, but I
use it as a Blu-ray player most of
the time. Real gaming requires
loads of time and I am a little
too impatient for that, I have to
admit. There is always something
more exciting or creative to do
than getting lost in the world of
pixels.
…your bedside table?
White and empty.
Schiller's new album, 'Sun', is out soon on
Sleeping Room/7Star/Rough Trade
ZOON VAN SNOOK
Instrumental music
should tell a story says
ZOON VAN SNOOK,
a man with a passion
for Nordic sagas and
innovative soundscapes
Words: BETHAN COLE
The first thing to say about Zoon van
snooK, aka 34-year-old Bristolianturned-Barcelona-dweller Alec Snook,
is that he wants to revive the concept
album. His second long player, ‘The
Bridge Between Life And Death’, takes
the form of 11 tracks which cohere
around the theme of birth and death
and what lies betwixt. The title comes
from a bridge in an Icelandic place
called Kopavagur, where there is
a nursing home on one side and a
cemetery on the other.
From ‘From The Cradle’, with its lulling
melody, twinkling chimes and harplike sounds (appropriately taken from
an instrument called a sound cradle)
to ‘Tjornin Side’, a cut that sounds
pensive and on the brink – as though
it is pulsing towards a finish line – and
with a cumulative emotional swell that
suggests denouement, the resulting
tracks are delightfully expressive of the
theme.
The whole thing is a lot more consistent
and systematic than Snook’s first LP
‘(Falling From) The Nutty Tree’, which
was charming, particularly in its
use of sonic timbre and texture, but
nevertheless disparate. On this album,
it goes without saying that Snook
(whose ‘Zoon van’ moniker comes from
what’s printed on his Belgian birth
certificate) is adept at imbuing word
and vocal-free tracks with a captivating
narrative drive. “I do think it’s
important that instrumental music tells a
story,” he reckons. “I suppose you use
minors and diminished chords to create
tension and sadness, and major chords
to evoke positivity.”
The second thing to say is that Zoon
van snooK is heavily invested in
Iceland. To the extent that the album
is filled with found sounds, field
recordings and glitch beats sourced
from the island (even the sound
cradle was purchased in an Reykjavik
instrument store). He made a specific
trip there in 2009 to make recordings
for the album. “Obviously I knew of
Björk, she is a genius, but the real
breakthrough came when I heard the
second Sigur Rós album in 1998,”
he enthuses. “I was working in a
record store in Bristol and I’d never
heard anything like it. It changed me
completely.”
After that, Snook discovered the
gorgeously orchestral and ethereal
Múm, who became his favourite
band. “It grew from there,” he
says. “Everything I’ve listened to
subsequently, I’ve loved.” Now it’s
at the point where he’s created an
hour-long Icelandic mix for Ninja
Tunes’ Solid Steel Radio, featuring 30
different Icelandic bands, and he’s
worked with some of his favourite
Icelandic musicians – Amiina, Sin Fang
and Benni Hemm Hemm – on his new
album.
So what areas struck him most when
he travelled to Iceland? “I liked the
National Parks,” he says. “There’s a
place called the Mid-Atlantic Ridge,
where the tectonic plates meet. You
can touch two continents at the same
time. It’s on the site of the country’s first
parliament. We went there to see the
Northern Lights.”
Snook’s interest in Iceland extends
to its epic poetry. Indeed, he has an
interest in epic poetry generally, with
several tracks on the album indebted
to sagas and verses from the Greek
and Nordic canons. “I’d been reading
Homer and Virgil and ‘Egil’s Saga’,
which is an Icelandic saga, before
making this album,” says the former
music teacher, who now teaches
English in Barcelona. “The third track
is called ‘Snorri’s Saga’ and there’s a
sonic pun because it features the sound
of someone snoring. Snorri famously
wrote ‘Egil’s Saga’, which is about Egil,
who was a farmer and a murderer. I
became quite hooked on the stories
and the vengeances and the feuds in
these writings.” Likewise the track ‘Lyre!
Lyre!’, which features Snook’s selftaught lyre playing, is also a nod to the
lyre of Orpheus. “He tried to rescue his
wife from the underworld by playing
beautiful lyre music,” notes Snook.
I wonder if Snook would ever
collaborate with a vocalist – his
melodies are so sweet and insistent
they are strong enough without, but it’s
easy to imagine some kind of ethereal
Liz Fraser or Múm-type singing over the
top of his highly textured electronica.
“If I heard the right voice that inspired
me, then yes,” he says. “But what I’d
probably do is write the songs and
then chop the vocal around it. I’d use
the voice like an instrument rather than
have verses and choruses.”
And thus ‘The Bridge Between Life And
Death’ has a strong sense of place. You
can literally hear the sparkling icicles
Now why doesn’t that surprise me?
and drifting snow, the crusts of glaciers
and burbling hot springs on this record:
‘The Bridge Between Life And Death’
it sings with geographical resonances.
is out now on Lo Recordings
Snook collected recordings from
the centre, port and outskirts of
Reykjavik and also the surrounding
South Western area, which formed
atmospheric samples and tracts as well
as the glitchy beats.
COMPETITION
WIN KARL BARTOS!!
Well, a specially made, only-one-in-the-world LEGO Karl Bartos anyway!!
W
oooaaahhh!! This is big, this is. Massive. Immense. Humongous. Well, OK,
what we’re talking about here is actually quite small, but it’s a heavyweight
piece of electronic music memorabilia and no mistake.
As you probaby know (and if you don’t know, you should be ashamed of yourself), the
first issue of Electronic Sound had one-time Kraftwerk stalwart Karl Bartos on the cover.
And what a lovely cover it was too, with a fascinating interview with Herr Karl inside
the magazine. If you haven’t got that issue, you can still get it from the Electronic Sound
app store, by the way.
We’re cockahoop about the launch of Electronic Sound, so to celebrate we asked top
LEGO artist Warren Elsmore to build us a one-off model of Karl Bartos. Warren is the
author of the best-selling book ‘Brick City: LEGO for Grown Ups’ and chairman of The
Brickish Association, a UK-based community of self-styled AFOLs (Adult Fans of LEGO).
We swear we’re not making this up. Anyway, as you can see, Warren has done a
fantastic job with LEGO Karl, who is dressed in his red shirt and black tie, and comes
complete with a synth and a microphone stand. It may be little, but it’s an amazing
creation and we are talking about a one-of-a-kind artefact here.
Now, being generous sorts here at Electronic Sound Towers, we thought one of you
guys might like to have LEGO Karl, so we’re putting him up for grabs in this special
competition. Yes, that’s right, LEGO Karl could be yours, all yours. For keeps. For ever.
Just imagine, eh? To win LEGO Karl, all you have to do is answer this easy-peasy
question:
What is the title of the new Karl Bartos album?
Is it:
A. Off The Wall
B. Off The Record
C. Off The Booze
Please email us your answer by clicking on the little orange envelope icon at the
bottom of the page and LEGO Karl could be on its way to you faster than you can say
something really long and complicated in German.
In the event of more than one person getting the answer right, the names of all the
correct
entrants will be put into the editor’s bowler hat, given a right good swirl around, and a
winner
drawn at random.
The closing date for entries is Friday 21 June and the winner will be notified shortly
after this date.
The editor’s decision is final and no correspondance will be entered into. So there.
SYNTH TOWN
By STEVE APPLETON and
BEBE BARRON
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T
he opening of ‘Hardcore Volume
1’, a collection of hissy, lo-fi
basement recordings made
by Devo between 1974 and 1977,
features a nervous synth intro, filled
with foreboding and tension. It creates
just the right level of discomfort to
prepare you for what comes next: 40
minutes of undiluted de-evolutionary
theory set to jagged and primitive
electronic noise, mutated blues,
and an angular oddness which
is simultaneously frightening and
hilarious, alluring and repulsive.
Originally released over two decades
ago and unavailable for a very long
time, ‘Hardcore Volume 1’ and the
accompanying ‘Volume 2’ are about
to be reissued as lavish vinyl sets on
the Superior Viaduct label, with CDs
following later in the summer. If your
idea of Devo has something to do with
cartoonish wackiness and upturned
flowerpots, the ‘Hardcore’ albums
will serve as an intense lesson in the
genesis of one of the most enduring
and influential pop art/performance art
projects of the last 40 years.
“That’s right, 40 years!” laughs Devo
co-founder and chief strategist Gerald
V Casale. “I love the ‘Hardcore’ stuff
because it’s so raw and so real. It’s
like listening to another version of old
recordings from early country or rural
blues records – you have these twisted,
tortured white guys in the 70s, with
a four-track TEAC and beat-up old
guitars and two synthesisers, an early
Mini Moog and an Arp Odyssey. It’s
such a snapshot of our culture then and
our position in it and what Akron was
like. I have vivid memories of what was
going on and where we were, and
how it felt to be doing that then. It was
certainly heartfelt.”
The ‘Hardcore’ recordings are heartfelt
for good reason. In 1974, when these
sessions started, Jerry and Mark
Mothersbaugh had known each other
for four years. They’d met at Kent
State University, a few miles north of
Akron in Ohio, when the place was
erupting with anti-Vietnam War rallies.
In April 1970, the SDS (Students for a
Democratic Society) had organised a
publicity stunt on campus.
DEVO
They’d distributed a leaflet saying, “At
lunchtime, come and watch us napalm
a dog”. The event drew a huge crowd,
which included art student Mark
Mothersbaugh, future co-founder of
Devo, then 19 years old, long hair,
already known in a small circle at the
college, including fellow art student
Jerry, for making transgressive art.
“There were hundreds and hundreds
of kids there, and there was this dog
shivering on this table, a pathetic
looking mutt,” Mark remembers. “They
had a box with their napalm in it, and
they started talking about what napalm
was and they said they wanted us to
see what it looks like when it touches
the flesh of a living creature. It’s very
effective, they said, because if you get
hit with a piece of napalm, it keeps
burning, it burrows into your body,
and they wanted to show us what
happened.
“The cops were there and the animal
protection league were there, and
they said, ‘Who here would stop
us?’, and everybody said, ‘I will, I
won’t let you do that to a dog.’ Then
they showed pictures of children, this
little girl running down the street, her
clothes have been burned off and
she’s covered in napalm burns – it’s the
famous shot – and she’s screaming in
agony. And they said, ‘We’re doing
this every day, to human beings, in
your name, in Vietnam.’ So I joined.
I signed up on the spot and I started
marching in the demonstrations.”
A week later, on 4 May, the National
Guard were called onto the Kent State
campus to contain another demo
and, in a few seconds of murderous
madness, they shot live rounds into a
crowd of students. Four were killed,
two of whom were walking to class,
not involved with the protest. In that
moment, although they didn’t know
it yet, Devo was born. Following the
killings, the college was shut down,
and when it reopened six weeks
later, the students’ urge to protest had
evaporated. Jerry and Mark, now
starting to collaborate on art projects
and trying to make sense of what was
going on around them, were horrified.
“We really thought that we were
going to double down, but there was
no longer a forum for free thought
and discussion,” says Mark. “It was
just like everyone had gone to sleep.
We realised the rebellion had been
successfully put down.”
“The curtain came down on the 60s,”
says Jerry. “It was grim, especially
in Akron. We never benefited from
the summer of love, all we saw were
years of hate. Certainly at Kent State,
the 100 or so students who didn’t
fit in could pick each other out. We
were hated by all the straight students
and all the frat boys and most of the
professors. Anybody who protested the
Vietnam War was targeted, because
this was Ohio, which was pretty much
a red [Republican] state, so everybody
supported that Vietnam War. Once
you joined SDS, you may as well have
been a murder suspect. That’s the way
you were treated.” L
ife beyond university wasn’t much
better. Akron had been at the heart
of the American rubber industry,
supplying tyres for the huge Detroit car
factories in the boom years of the
1950s and 60s, and was home to
Jerry and Mark (together with their
brothers, Bob 1 and Bob 2, plus a
third Mothersbaugh brother, Jim, who
played the primitive electronic drums
on some of the ‘Hardcore’ sessions).
Pic: Bobbie Watson
“At lunchtime,
come and watch
us napalm a dog”
But in the early 1970s, the captains of
the rubber industry realised they could
cut costs by shifting manufacturing to
Malaysia and Akron’s rubber factories
started to close down. An area that
was already severely traumatised by
the Kent State shootings was now home
to thousands of pissed off Vietnam vets
who had expected to come home from
the war, from “serving their country”, to
safe jobs in the rubber factories, only to
join thousands more unemployed rubber
workers. The city was decaying, a “postindustrial wasteland” as Devo later put it.
This was the environment in which Jerry
and Mark found themselves trying to
establish their own art movement.
“We loved the idea that we had the
missing link between creationism and
science, between religion and Darwin’s
theory,” says Mark. “‘We have the
missing link! De-evolution, it all comes
together!’ I would start letting Jehovah’s
Witnesses into my apartment because
they brought along these pamphlets
called ‘Awake!’ and ‘Watchtower’. One
of the goals of these was to debunk the
myth of evolution, so I got all this great
de-evolutionary material off them. They
would pick apart the laws of thermodynamics to prove that evolution was
impossible. I liked all that stuff because
we liked the idea of creating our own
political/religious/art movement, that was
on the surface nutty and crazy, but at
“We thought what we were doing was an the same time would plant these seeds in
art movement from the very beginning,”
our artwork and give people the chance
says Mark. They called it Devo, the
to think, ’Maybe McDonalds isn’t right…
emphasis on the second syllable, like
Maybe because something’s being sold to
Art Nouveau, consciously aping and
me by a smiling person on television, it’s
satirising the European art movements
wrong…’”
they were enthralled by at college,
particularly Futurism, Suprematism and
The Devo de-evolution theory stated that
Dada. Art Devo was created from a
mankind was going backwards and was
hodge-podge of crackpot theories, from
becoming more stupid, more venal and
vintage religious pamphlets produced
more dangerous, that progression had
by evangelist preachers that were trying
become regression. They only had to look
to debunk the theory of evolution (one
around them to find the evidence.
was called ‘Jocko Homo’) and books like
Oscar Kiss Maerth’s ‘In The Beginning
“Vietnam, Nixon, televeangelists, the
Was The End’, a pseudo-science
music on the radio… By then we had
tract which claimed that humans are
been beaten down and twisted,” says
descended from brain-eating cannibalistic Jerry. “By the time the early 70s rolled
apes whose brains swelled inside their
around, we were just reeling in shock at
small skulls, leading to congenital insanity the direction culture was heading, where
in the entire human race, all wrapped
things were going from bad to worse.
up in a satire of American mass-culture,
We were seeing an idiotic culture. It was
using the techniques and tropes of TV
overwhelming. So there was a lot of
advertising and of rock ’n’ roll itself. It was sadness. We were amusing ourselves in
both smart-ass and dumb-ass; a highthose first recordings, but we were pretty
minded intellectual critique of American
beaten down.”
society enacted with primal beats, lewd
lyrics, chanting, and bizarre costumes
and masks.
Devo’s theme tune, ‘Jocko Homo’,
crystallises the theory of de-evolution
in three minutes of discordant mutant
electronic music, the like of which had
never been heard before. The band
applied the same anti-rock formula to
create an uptight staccato cover of the
Rolling Stones’ ‘Satisfaction’ and another
of Johnny Rivers’ ‘Secret Agent Man’,
which sounded like it had crawled out of
a Martian swamp in a 1950s B-movie.
Harsh metallic noises, rhythms seemingly
made by malfunctioning electricity lines,
howling voices, thin distorted guitars
running through frequency analysers,
it was all designed to create an
atmosphere of discomfort and unease, a
confrontational art school prank run wild.
Despite all the desperation and fear in
this early Devo, there are also plenty
of laughs on ‘Hardcore’. Some great
tunes too. ‘Uglatto’ for example, a
jaunty, angular slice of silliness which
has Jerry singing, “You a bad tomato /
Speak Esperanto / So desperato / And
constipato / This Roman nose / You’re
uglatto!”, and the filthy blues of ‘I Need
A Chick’ (“I need a chick / To suck my
dick / I need a dog /To lick my hog!”).
Numbers like ‘Be Stiff’, which later turned
into a riffing powerhouse, have their
origins in these lo-fi recordings.
“It was totally what we would call
politically incorrect now,” says Jerry. “We
knew were taking on the personae of
offensive people and we were satirising
racism, sexism, all the songs about
getting laid. We thought we were joking
on that level, it was an intellectual joke.
Ourselves, we weren’t like that at all, you
know, we were art wimps. We never
got in fights… Well, not until we started
playing live.”
DEVO
Pic: Janet Macoska
A
round the time Devo started
making music, they also started
making films. They featured
characters like Booji Boy, “the infantile
spirit of Devo”, which was Mark in a
baby mask, and Booji’s dad, General
Boy, a military man who would
address the camera to outline the
band’s latest strategy in their fight to
spread the truth about de-evolution.
Mark: “We thought we were going
to be so busy with our own Akron
version of Andy Warhol’s Factory,
which we were really impressed with;
the idea of a think tank in Manhattan
where the best artists would come
and congregate and work with Andy
Warhol and make films. We thought
we would be more reflective of the
people, it’d be more middle America
and had the hallmarks for having a
worldwide base. We represented the
potatoes of the world, not the fancy
vegetables, not the asparagus people,
not the aristocrats of the vegetable
kingdom. We represented the dirty,
asymmetric tubers that were often
maligned, but everyone ate potatoes
every day in America, so we felt like
we had a broader appeal.”
And so the hunble spud became a
recurring theme in the Devo universe,
part of the theory of de-evolution.
Jerry: “The plan was to create music-
driven short films and put them on laser
discs, which we had been reading
about back then. We were convinced
it was all going to happen right away.
We bought the hype. But of course,
Machiavellian business practices
triumphed over technology once again.
There were three competing laser disc
technologies, and each of them had
their own libraries. They were way too
expensive and it killed it in the market
place. So our big dream of becoming
hi-tech Three Stooges just died there.
So we lowered our expectations and
became more oriented towards just
being able to perform.”
Mark: “There’d be these unemployed
Vietnam vets, long-haired, bummedout, and blue collar guys sitting at the
bar just trying to kill some time before
they go home and beat their wives,
they’d be there to hear some music
they liked, and these guys would come
out on stage and they’ve got fireman
jumpsuits on and plastic masks…
They’re be like, ‘What the hell is this?’
and we were like, ‘Here’s another
song by Mott The Hoople!’, then we’d
do something like ‘Can U Take It?’.
When we played that one live, I had
this siren, a World War Two, herecome-the-Luftwaffe, head-for-the-cellars
siren, and we’d stop playing and the
Mark: “We referred to them as resiren would keep going. It would take
education movies and we thought
a couple of minutes before the song
about having our own De-evolution
would start up again. Then we’d go
channel, just like the [Ohio televangelist into ‘Jocko Homo’ and we’d do the
shows] ‘Ernest Ainsley Hour’ and ‘Rex
‘Are We Not Men? We Are Devo!’
Humbard Cathedral of Tomorrow
chant for, ohh, we could do it for 10
Hour’. We wanted to have the Deor 15 minutes. We’d do it knowing that
Evolution Education Station, where
people would slam their beer down
instead of people disco dancing
and go, ‘Right! That’s it!’, and they’d
to the music, they would be doing
come up and they’d be ripping the
callisthenics in time, getting in shape in masks off us, pushing us down, taking
this pseudo paramilitary fashion.”
a swing.”
Devo was thoroughly market
researched in bars and at occasional
art events around Akron and nearby
Cleveland, where the band were
attacked by angry audiences on more
than one occasion.
LIVE AT THE CRYPT IN 1977
An early Devo performance at the
Crypt, a venue in Akron, Ohio. Filmed
in early 1977, the tempos were yet to
achieve the breakneck punk speeds
that they would later in the year and
the audiences were modest, to say the
least. Six months later, the band were
the toast of New York.
Mark: “There’d be these unemployed
Vietnam vets, long-haired, bummedout, and blue collar guys sitting at the
bar just trying to kill some time before
they go home and beat their wives,
they’d be there to hear some music
they liked, and these guys would come
out on stage and they’ve got fireman
jumpsuits on and plastic masks…
They’re be like, ‘What the hell is this?’
and we were like, ‘Here’s another
song by Mott The Hoople!’, then we’d
do something like ‘Can U Take It?’.
When we played that one live, I had
this siren, a World War Two, herecome-the-Luftwaffe, head-for-the-cellars
siren, and we’d stop playing and the
siren would keep going. It would take
a couple of minutes before the song
would start up again. Then we’d go
into ‘Jocko Homo’ and we’d do the
‘Are We Not Men? We Are Devo!’
chant for, ohh, we could do it for 10
or 15 minutes. We’d do it knowing that
people would slam their beer down
and go, ‘Right! That’s it!’, and they’d
come up and they’d be ripping the
masks off us, pushing us down, taking
a swing.”
DEVO
THE DEVO DOCUMENTARY
The first Devo documentary, ‘Are We Not
Men?’, will be out in August. Funded by
a wildly successful Kickstarter campaign,
director Tony Pemberton told Filmmaker
Magazine, “I’m not the super-super fan like
the ones I met – they kinda scared me. I saw
in Devo this kind of politicised energy… but
it’s a bizarre group.”
A
ll this feverish, intense creativity
finally bore fruit in 1977, when
the Devo concept coagulated
and was ready for proper public
consumption. Punk, coincidentally,
had created a New York music scene
hungry for outré performances and new
ideas, and the band headed for venues
like Max’s Kansas City and CBGBs,
an eight-hour drive from Akron, where
they quickly became a hot ticket, with
celebrities showing up to catch the Devo
virus.
“I was sitting in the van, waiting for
Max’s Kansas City to close, and I saw
Ian Hunter and John Lennon walking
towards me,” remembers Mark. “They
were both really drunk and they came
out of the club as it was closing down.
So I’m just sitting in the passenger seat
of this van, and John Lennon looked
over and stuck his head in the window,
and from about three inches away, in
a very loud and drunk voice, he sang
‘Uncontrollable Urge’ at me. That was
the ultimate connection, because I started
off our first album with the chords from
‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand’. That’s how
‘Uncontrollable Urge’ starts. ‘I Wanna
Hold Your Hand’ was actually the song
that made me want to be in a band.”
A month or two earlier, in March 1977,
a tape of several Devo songs had been
pressed into the palm of David Bowie.
He’d been playing keyboards on the
Iggy Pop ‘Idiot’ tour, which included
three nights at Cleveland’s Agora
Ballroom.
“How unlikely is that?” chuckles Jerry.
“But we know what happens to those
tapes, right? They get left in the hotel
room or tossed in the bin and no one
ever hears them. So that was amazing.
Bowie didn’t really do anything for
us, other than introduce us on stage
at Max’s Kansas City. His publishing
company, Bewlay Brothers, offered us a
very bad deal. Luckily, I knew was a bad
deal, and then Brian Eno stepped in. All
these things were necessary, they added
up to a critical mass.”
Also in 1977, Devo self-pressed their
debut single, ‘Jocko Homo’, with the
equally unsettling ‘Mongoloid’ on the flip
side, and hawked it around local record
shops. They sent a few copies to London,
where it was picked up for distribution by
Stiff Records, and Devo hype suddenly
hit the UK. Major labels, most notably
Warner Brothers, started to pursue the
band and Brian Eno flew Devo to Conny
Plank’s studio in Cologne, where he
produced the first Devo album on his
own coin.
“Eno was confident he wouldn’t just get
his money back, he knew that he would
make money,” says Jerry. “He knew
Warners were interested in us and that I
had held out on them. So then Warners
offered to fly us over to Cologne in return
for the right of first refusal. They sent us
a deal memo and it was actually the
best deal we had gotten at that point. So
Brian knew that, if they liked what they
heard, they had right of first refusal. He
was confident they would sign us, and
that if they didn’t, someone else would.”
What happened next isn’t entirely clear,
but by the time Devo returned home,
they had signed a European deal with
Branson’s Virgin Records. Warner
Brothers went ballistic and there followed
an inter-label catfight between Warners
and Virgin in the law courts. Warners
also sued the band, although they
later signed them for America. It was
a disastrous start to their international
career.
Jerry: “Yeah, the beginning was the end.
No one listened to me. So then Warners
enter into a deal with us for America and
they’re pissed off. That was great. The
rest is history.”
Despite these difficulties, Devo went on
to release five albums over the next five
years and have a huge hit in 1980 with
‘Whip It’. By this time, they had infiltrated
the mainstream of pop culture with
their yellow boiler suits and red ‘energy
dome’ hats, known to most as upturned
flowerpots, and they gave the past a slip.
“It just transformed into the next phase,”
says Jerry. “No one was rehashing the
debacle of 1978. March 1978, to be
exact, is when we got sued. Our music
had changed and I found the change
exciting. The ‘Freedom Of Choice’ album
is a great turning point, where all our
early underground art punk influences
get synthesised with a new idea, with
On the way back from Germany, the
R&B beats – admittedly stiff, electronic
band stopped off in London to play some R&B beats – and progressions that
shows at the request of Stiff Records.
were more influenced by American
black music. I love ‘Freedom Of Choice’
Mark: “Richard Branson descended on
because it’s the old and the new coming
us at the Roundhouse. The Roundhouse
together in a good combination.”
gig turned out to be one of those industry
gang rapes where everyone shows up.
We weren’t even aware of how far we
had penetrated. Every label was there,
all the press, and Branson came on
strong.”
SOMETHING FOR EVERYBODY’ PROMO
Devo released their eight studio album,
‘Something For Everybody’, in 2010 and had
the hip marketing agency Mother create a promo
campaign for it. Warner Brothers hated the ads,
the irony was lost and the album failed to make
the impact they’d hoped for. “I’ve never seen so
little made of so much,’ Jerry said about Warners’
support of the release. The promo films are,
predictably, hilarious and prescient.
DEVO
D
evo have never gone away,
but the project started to fall
apart creatively as the 1980s
progressed and much of the 1990s
saw them in an unannounced hiatus.
Mark Mothersbaugh found success
as a composer for the Hollywood
film industry, notably for many of
Wes Anderson’s films, and continued
undermining mainstream America with
subliminal messages inserted in his
TV advert music. His studio, Mutato,
still does a lot of TV advertising work
today. He also carried on making
visual art, obsessively creating
postcard art every day, and then
enlarging pieces for exhibition. A
major retrospective of his art is slated
for 2014. Jerry Casale, meanwhile,
took to directing promo videos for
bands.
During the late 90s and into the
2000s, one-off Devo shows here and
there gradually became small tours,
and as interest in the new wave and
synthesiser music of the 80s gathered
pace, the band found themselves back
in demand. They toured Europe and
Japan and were part of Jarvis Cocker’s
2007 Meltdown at the Royal Festival
Hall in London. In 2010, they re-signed
to Warner Brothers and made a new
and well-received album, ‘Something
For Everybody’, their first for 20 years,
and embarked on more solid tour
schedules around the world.
Right now, Jerry is re-writing the script
for a Devo feature film. “It’s a Spinal
Tap with brains script,” he says. “It’s
the first time you see a band that isn’t
a group of stupid, hapless individuals.
It’s intensely funny and sad at the
same time.” He also mentions that
there’s a Devo musical is in the works.
But whereas Jerry is still batting for
Devo’s future, Mark sounds a little more
wistful.
“Don’t you wish you could just go back
in time?” he sighs, trying to sum up his
feelings about Devo’s early days. “It’s
one of the rotten tricks of this part of
the universe that the ribbon of time just
goes in one direction. I’d love to be in
a part where it was in a bow, so you
could take off down one loop and start
over again in another one, hop over
to this or that, or go back into your
past, do things again differently. In
1977, when Eno said, ‘I’m gonna pay
for you guys to record in Germany’,
I remember lying in bed one night
thinking, ‘I’ve got to remember this,
because it’ll never ever be this good
again.’ In a way, I was kind of right.
I’m just glad I wasn’t drunk and missed
out on it.”
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1
0
1
DEPECHE MODE
(SLIGHT
)
N
R
RETU
on the
A special report
DEPECHE
opening night of
Machine’
MODE’s ‘Delta
iquely
tour by eight un
pondents –
qualified corres
because
uniquely qualified
ard DM
they are all dieh
fans!
Words and Pictures:
BIANCA ADLER
CRISTIAN FLUERARU
DALILA SAOUDI
GUNNAR WOLLSCHLÄGER
MALC SOUTHALL
MICHAELA FASTENOW
THOMAS FINK
ZOUINA SAOUDI
D
epeche Mode kicked off their ‘Delta Machine’ tour – over 80
dates covering Europe and North America – at the Palais Nikaia
in Nice, France, on 4 May. After a four-year absence, this was
always going to be a celebratory moment for fans, who at times have
wondered if the band would ever release another album, never mind set
out on the road again.
To mark the occasion, Electronic Sound decided to eschew a traditional
review of the event, and instead we handed over the coverage to
Depeche Mode’s followers. A homage, if you like, to DA Pennebaker’s
legendary ‘101’ movie, chronicling the journey of a group of Depeche
Mode devotees to the band’s triumphant gig at the Pasadena Rose Bowl
in 1989.
Featuring a mixture of songs from the band’s new album and a few
surprise classics, the Nice gig was greeted with feverish anticipation by
fans around the world, eager to know if Depeche Mode still lived up to
their reputation as arguably the greatest live electronic band ever. Using
photos, videos and the written word, our special correspondents – a
cross-section of fans from across Europe – offer a unique insight into the
phenomenon that is Depeche Mode.
DEPECHE MODE
Name: Cristian Flueraru
Home: Bucharest,
Romania
Favourite Depeche
Mode album: This
is one of the toughest
questions ever. I think I
would say both ‘Black
Celebration’ and ‘Ultra’
The song you most wanted
them to play in Nice: After their warm-up gig
in LA, I had my hopes for ‘But Not Tonight’. Still
holding out my hopes for ‘Here Is The House’
“My love started in the early 1990s, after the
Communist regime in Romania fell. It was the
‘Violator’ era and Depeche Mode were one of the
first bands I extensively listened to. I immediately
loved their image and sound. Later I discovered
their earlier albums, because before 1989 it was
rather hard accessing Western music and culture.”
Name: Bianca Adler
Home: Hamburg, Germany
Favourite Depeche Mode album:
‘Songs Of Faith And Devotion’
The song you most wanted
them to play in Nice:
‘Broken’ – and they played it!
“Depeche Mode have been part of
my life since I can remember. At the
beginning, it was only the sound,
then the style of the band, and at
the age of 13 I began to listen to
the lyrics and I tried to understand
the meanings. Depeche Mode have
created the sound of my life and the
music supports me in good times
and in bad times. My favourite band
member is Dave, but I also like the
voice of Martin very much. I can
lose myself in his voice the same
way I can in Dave’s performances
on stage. My best Depeche Mode
experience was seeing them at the
Royal Albert Hall in London in 2010.”
Bianca Adler talks Nice
First of all, I’ve got to say that the
journey to Nice wasn’t only to see the
first gig of the ‘Delta Machine’ tour,
it was also to have a wonderful party
with my friends from all over Europe –
the Depeche Mode Family. I arrived in
Nice on Friday. I had an appointment
with my lovely friends from Germany
and one very nice guy from Oslo. We
were a group of seven people. The
day of the gig was a wonderful sunny
day and we arrived at the venue at
6pm, after a short and hot trip by
bus. We were so excited about the
look of the stage, the merchandising
and, of course, the set list. The
atmosphere was very energetic. The
support group F.O.X. didn’t fulfill my
expectations (sorry), but after a short
break the audience started singing
and clapping hands. It felt like coming
home. When Depeche Mode came
on stage, everybody was freaking
out. ‘Welcome To My World’ was the
perfect start. I loved ‘Higher Love’ and
the Goldfrapp version of ‘Halo’ was
so fantastic. The light show and the
video screens were amazing – I was
so impressed – and it seems like the
guys are getting younger and younger.
“Dave’s voice and appearance is
like from the successful days of the
80s,” was what Terje Vangbo (the
singer of Substaat from Norway) said
after the concert. We all were so in
love with the boys from Basildon!
Dave, Martin and Fletch created
the perfect first show and we are all
looking forward to the next gigs.
DEPECHE MODE
Names: Dalila Saoudi
and Zouina Saoudi
Home: France
Favourite Depeche Mode album:
Dalila: ‘Violator’
Zouina: ‘Ultra’
Song you most wanted
them to play in Nice:
Dalila: ‘But Not Tonight’ or ‘Insight’
Zouina: ‘But Not Tonight’, because they played it at
the Troubadour in LA the week before. I still hope
they will sing it during the tour. Maybe in Nîmes
Dalila: “I’m a Depeche Mode fan since I’m 14. My
first vinyl was ‘Some Great Reward’. My first DM gig
was Tuesday 17 November 1987, in Paris Bercy for
the ‘Music For The Masses’ tour. I can still remember
the day I heard ‘Violator’ for the first time. I knew that
they were and will be my favourite band EVER!”
Zouina: “As far back as I can remember I was
always a fan of Depeche Mode. My sister Dalila
is 10 years older than me and has been a fan for
almost 30 years. So I can say that she transmitted to
me some of her passion for the band. Being in Nice
was amazing and sharing this wonderful moment with
my sister and my friends was just magical. I am going
to attend 13 gigs of the ‘Delta Machine’ tour – in the
UK, Germany, France, Switzerland, Italy and Austria.
So now I can’t wait for the next 12 gigs to come.”
Name: Gunnar Wollschläger
Home: Switzerland
Favourite Depeche
Mode album: It’s
difficult to say… a mix
from ‘Songs Of Faith And
Devotion’, ‘Violator’ and
‘Music For The Masses’
Song you most
wanted them to play in Nice:
‘Black Celebration’. I was very surprised when
they played this at Nice… I love this song
“I’ve been a fan since 1986 and my first concert
was in Munich in 1990. I find the music very
meaningful and timeless. Their music still sounds
as fresh to me as the first time I heard it.”
DEPECHE MODE
Name: Michaela Fastenow
Home: Hamburg, Germany
Favourite Depeche Mode album: ‘Violator’
The song you most wanted them to play
in Nice: ‘Only When I Lose Myself’
“I became a fan in the mid 1980s through ‘People Are People’
and attended my first gig in Hamburg in 1986. That was the
‘Black Celebration’ tour. Having been a bit out of touch in the
90s, I found my love for the band again after the release of
‘Playing The Angel’. The moment when Alan Wilder joined
Depeche Mode on stage for ‘Somebody’ during the gig at the
Royal Albert Hall on 17 February 2010 was something truly
special. I have to also say that I’m an absolute Dave girl!”
Michaela talks Nice
I arrived at the venue at around 6.30pm. The doors were already
open, so I went straight to the standing area to find a place with a
good view. Palais Nikaia is a lovely venue and was just the right
size for this warm-up gig. It was very hot inside right from the start
and waiting seemed forever, but then it was time for the support
act F.O.X., who played a quite decent set. And then, soon
after, the long wait of more than three years was over and
Depeche Mode finally hit the stage again. Oh, what a sight!
The sound, the light show and the video installations were just
perfect and the band were in a very good mood, playing a
set of 23 songs for over two hours. Although there are always
some songs I rather wish they had replaced by others, I was
very pleased with the set list, which included eight songs from
‘Delta Machine’ and some absolutely wonderful surprises
like ‘Black Celebration’, ‘Halo’ and ‘Higher Love’, which
was sung by Martin Gore. See you next time in Istanbul!
Name: Malc Southall
Home: Kent, England
Favourite Depeche
Mode album: ‘Ultra’
Song you most wanted them to
play in Nice: ‘Here Is The House’
“I’ve been a Depeche Mode
fan since seeing them play
‘New Life’ on ‘Top Of The
Pops’ in 1981. The first time I saw them live
was at Hammersmith in London in 1982.”
DEPECHE MODE
Name: Thomas Fink
(from www.depechemode.ch)
Home: Basel, Switzerland
Favourite Depeche Mode album:
‘Music For The Masses’
Song you most wanted them to play
in Nice: ‘Blasphemous Rumours’
“Depeche Mode are my passion.
They are the soundtrack of my life…”
Tommy talks Nice
On a very early Saturday morning, my wife and I travelled
together with some of the other fans from www.depechemode.ch
from Basel to Nice by plane. This was my first visit to Nice and we
stayed at the hotel swimming pool, enjoying the good weather,
while more and more fans arrived in the city. We went to the
venue at 6pm, where already fans were queuing for 30 metres in
front of the futuristic Palais Nikaia. Some of them had reportedly
been there since early in the morning. At 8.45pm, the lights went off
and there were the first sounds of ‘Welcome To My World’, along with
letters on the huge stage screen. We were seated beside the mixer and
could spot band manager Jonathan Kessler and stage designer Anton
Corbijn there. The atmosphere was fantastic and so was the crowd, with
almost everybody on the tiers standing up. Most surprisingly, Depeche
Mode performed the classic ‘Black Celebration’. ‘Higher Love’ and the
Goldfrapp version of ‘Halo’ were even more wowing. The set list was
pleasantly surprising, and the song versions and video projections were
simply stunning. I haven’t been so convinced since 1993 in this regard
and I’m looking forward to seeing the band again in Munich, Milan,
Berne, Locarno, Manchester, Oberhausen, Strasbourg and Vienna.
S
U
B
A
T
L
THE DE
A
mong the fans following Depeche
Mode on the European leg of their ‘Delta Machine’
tour is Markus Raebiger and his friends from Romania. In a scene that
could have come straight from the Depeche Mode video for the song ‘Stripped’, this plucky group
found themselves stuck in the middle of nowhere, at night, in front of what was left of their burning tour van.
Markus explains what happened:
“We decided it would be a good idea to have our own specially-designed tour van, to take us from
Bucharest to Budapest via Sofia and Belgrade as we followed Depeche Mode. So we hired a minibus
and used ‘non-permanent’ paints to decorate it with Depeche Mode logos. Four of us – Lena, Lee,
Jarby and myself – flew straight to Sofia a day in advance and expected the others – Karen, Oli,
Andrei, Viviana and Cristian – to join us later, bringing the minibus from Bucharest to Sofia.
“The second group left Bucharest at around 7pm on Saturday 11 May on what
was supposed to be a six-hour drive south. Everything was going according to
plan and we waited patiently in Sofia knowing the ‘Delta Bus’ was on its way. But
approximately 75km into Bulgaria, Viviana suddenly smelt smoke. At the same
time, Andrei saw a low oil warning message briefly appear and then go off again.
In fact, it was an electrical failure and suddenly every indicator light went off.
Wisely, the group stopped and decided to quickly get out. They ran away as fast
as they could, taking nothing with them, and while they stood a short distance
away, the van burst into flames. Within seconds it was completely alight.
“A passing bus stopped and those onboard tried to help put out the
fire with extinguishers, while our group tried to rescue as much of their
possessions as they could from the trunk. The flames had already engulfed
Karen’s stuff, as she had kept it in the minibus itself, and she lost all her
money, credit cards, her phone, medicine, sunglasses, her wedding jewellery, cosmetics… Cristian lost his
beloved professional camera, his passport and his Depeche Mode CD collection. Unfortunately none of the
lost items were covered by insurance and it has taken time and money to replace Karen’s lost papers.
“However, despite all that we have been through, we are determined to carry on, and the hire company has
already sent us a replacement van, which we immediately began decorating to make it look like its predecessor.
We have christened it ‘Delta Bus 2.0’.”
To find out how the Delta Bus crew are getting on as they continue
their trip around Europe, follow #DeltaBus on Twitter, or via the
Electronic Sound Twitter feed @electronicmaguk
LITTLE BOOTS
PUTTING
THE
BOOTS
IN
Too weird to be pop, too pop to be weird,
LITTLE BOOTS is back after an absence of
four years – and she’s got some rage on
Words and Pictures:
MARK ROLAND
LITTLE BOOTS
L
ondon is unexpectedly baking in
the hot sun after a long and ghastly
winter that managed to outstay its
welcome by a month or two. Dalston
High Street, not the most salubrious of
districts, is full of energy and life and
joy. It all feels at odds with the subject
at hand, which is the new album from
pop’s outsider princess, Little Boots,
known by her mum in Blackpool as
Victoria Hesketh.
Her new album, ‘Nocturnes’, you
see, is a soundtrack of the night-time,
of motorway ennui, of nightclubs, of
break-ups and breakdowns. The music
is a clever collision of pop – and decent
pop is a very slippery beast to tame,
subject to wilful and capricious changes
of heart – and slick 90s house music
(there are crunching great piano chords
chopped out over 909 beats more
than once) and 70s disco, both the
dark pulse of the Moroder variety and
the funky good-times Chic genus, all
being constantly bothered by a restless
electronic experimental urge.
It’s an album that was all but finished
last year, but then derailed and was
abandoned, as was Little Boots herself
by her record company (or vice versa,
or both – where to place the blame for
break-ups is hard, isn’t it? But let’s blame
the label, it’s a safe bet). She says her
split with Warners offshoot 679 Artists
came about partly because, if it wasn’t
already clear, she wasn’t going to turn
out to be the British Lady Gaga, not in
terms of aesthetics, sound or, crucially,
sales.
So here she is, sipping water in a café,
unnoticed by the other customers,
talking about where she’s at four
years after her debut, four years spent
consolidating respectable international
success as the tension in the relationship
with her label, for whom respectable
success wasn’t enough, reached its
natural conclusion. On the street
outside, the constant thrum of traffic
and howl of sirens provides a suitable
ambience for her story.
“So many people said, ‘Well, you were
a disaster because you didn’t turn into
Lady Gaga’, but I’ve got a gold record
on my wall, thank you very much, and
I don’t consider anything I did to have
been unsuccessful,” she says with some
justification. “I never said I wanted to be
Lady Gaga,” she adds with a careworn
sigh. “That’s what everybody else said.
They put that on me, that I was the
British version of her. And I wasn’t. If
you look at those original videos of me
playing piano in my bedroom, it’s quite
clear I’m not.”
She played along, she says, wore
the dresses and chased the sound,
because her label told her that’s what
she would have to do if she wanted to
be successful, that was the name of the
game. And Victoria Hesketh certainly
wanted to be successful.
“I wanted to be a pop star more than
anything,” she states bluntly about her
early teenage years in Blackpool. She
needed to escape life in what she then
saw as a dead-end seaside town in
the north of England, where the only
bands she encountered were playing
covers in pubs and where she had been
dutifully focused on classical musical
study, playing the piano, the flute and
the harp. Until, that is, she discovered
synthesisers.
“I wanted to be in a band, it was all I
wanted to do,” she says. “My friends
were in a prog rock band that I couldn’t
get into because I didn’t play guitar
or take drugs. I was pretty nerdy, but
I’d always played piano. I remember
watching this DVD of Yes playing live
and everyone going, ‘This is so cool…’,
all stoned, with me sober in the corner,
and I remember thinking, ‘Well, that
guy’s playing a keyboard and he’s cool,
he’s in a band!’. So I sold my harp and
bought a synthesiser.”
Whether Rick Wakeman could be
considered cool is debatable, but the
little Little Boots was on the way with
her first synth, the virtual analogue
beast, the Korg MS-2000.
“I got a bad deal, I lost a lot of money
on that,” says Victoria about the harp/
synth transaction. “My grandma was
so upset! It’s OK now, it all worked out,
didn’t it? I remember getting it home
and pressing the keys and thinking, ‘It’s
not like a normal keyboard, it’s got way
more buttons and sometimes it doesn’t
make any noise at all’. I spent a lot of
time trying to work it out. So I have
been into synths from an early age, but
I’m by no means a genius at it. I’ve just
been trying to turn my classical piano
skills into something more interesting for
me. More interesting and weirder.”
Did you have an immediate connection
to the sound a synth made?
“I think I was quite traumatised! I didn’t
really understand it. It had all these
drawings on it that looked intriguing
but didn’t mean anything to me. I tried
reading the manual, but didn’t get any
further. Now I know that all you can do
is experiment and hope there are no
rules.”
LITTLE BOOTS
I thought I’d
liked cool stuff,
but when I look
back now I
realise that all
the bands I liked
were massive
pop bands
H
er escape, when it did come, was
initially to Leeds University, synth
under her arm, where she started
a band called Dead Disco. “We wanted
to be Blondie meets Brandon Flowers,”
she says. After a while, they started to
get some attention, crucially from Greg
Kurstin, the American super-producer
known for his work with, among others,
Kylie Minogue, Lily Allen and Devo.
“When things didn’t work out with Dead
Disco, Greg said to me, ‘You’re really
good at pop writing, so even if you don’t
want to do this any more, you should do
it for other artists’. I didn’t think what I
was doing was writing pop, I just thought
I was writing songs. I didn’t know it was
pop that was attracting me, I thought
I liked cool stuff, but when I look back
I realise that all the bands I liked were
massive pop bands. So we started doing
stuff together and the record label really
liked it, so they kept me on, doing my own
thing, and that’s how it came about.’
“It” being ‘Hands’, the 2009 album
which catapulted Little Boots into the
mainstream. The album featured a
duet with Phil Oakey, achieved the
aforementioned gold disc, produced a
couple of decent hits. The hype kicked in.
But behind the scenes, the cracks were
already running up the walls.
In the hectic schedule that became her
life as a nascent pop star burdened with
huge expectations, there wasn’t very much
time for writing new songs. Not properly.
She tried to hothouse them with big-shot
producers in short bursts in studios, but
the pressure to come up with hits ended
with stilted outcomes and increasing
frustration. Victoria was also, as she puts
it, “a guinea pig” for the music industry’s
response to collapsing record sales, the
so-called “360 deal”, where labels no
longer able to turn a profit on selling the
music itself started cannibalising artists’
other income streams, most notably from
live performances and merchandising.
“It was a nightmare,” she says. “It felt
like you weren’t in control of you’re own
business, even though they billed it like
they were in business with you.”
It all came to a head last year, with
Victoria’s decision that she didn’t want to
release the album that had been patched
together and was slated for release in the
autumn. The result? No more record deal.
So when she repeats over and over in
the break-up song ‘Confusion’ on the new
album, “never lie to me again,” and that
she’s been “caught up in a lie” it’s not a
lover that she’s addressing.
“A lot of the relationship stuff on the album
is not that personal, or rather, the ‘other
half’ in those songs isn’t another person,
it’s my old record label,” she says.
“That’s what I hear when I listen to it. It’s
me ranting about them. There’s been some
angry times these last few years. But I love
making things ambiguous and everyone
I speak to in interviews has got different
interpretations for songs’ meanings. I
really like that. I try to put lots of levels in
there.”
One level on which you might take the
album’s opener, ‘Motorway’, is as a
Kraftwerk homage. It doesn’t sound like
Kraftwerk, but an electronic artist invoking
the poetry of the motorway as an image
in a song is rather like a blues artist
talking about, y’know, the crossroads.
“I saw Kraftwerk at the Tate Modern
doing ‘Tour De France’,” she enthuses.
“They played loads of other stuff, and
the 3D car that came out in ‘Autobahn’
was incredible. I know those records,
and I love them, but it wasn’t a deliberate
reference, but at the same time the seeds
were there. I love Kraftwerk, and Moroder
as well, both of those artists give this
feeling of movement and of travelling,
this energy that keeps their songs going
and propels them. Even if the song
is peaking and troughing and doing
different things, that momentum is always
there. But ‘Motorway’ is also about the
glamorisation of the mundane, which is
something I love. A lot of my songs find
something amazing in simple things. It’s a
good way to live your life.”
As is perhaps, finding glamour to be
mundane. This duality seems to be at the
heart of the still-developing aesthetic of
Little Boots, one which perhaps explains
her too-pop-to-be-weird, too-weird-tobe-pop status. She may or may not have
made a pact with Ralf and Florian on
the autobahn, but her soundtrack of
motorway travel is more reminiscent of
the solitary melancholy induced by a cup
of bad service station coffee spewed out
of a machine in the middle of the night,
rather than the sunny images of optimistic
futurism the Düsseldorf Beach Boys gave
us.
“‘Motorway’ is about being a teenager
and spending my time driving about on
dark northern motorways, mainly the
M62, in an attempt to escape Blackpool
because I thought it was this terrible place
where I’d never be able to be a pop star,”
she says. “All I wanted to do was move
to London, so as soon as I could drive
I would drive to gigs in Manchester or
Leeds or to London for the weekend.
“I was also in jazz bands at the time, so I
would drive to the gigs myself and home
again afterwards. I spent a lot of time at
two in the morning on these motorways.
So that song is about growing up in a
small town, escaping to the big city, and
realising that this place which is supposed
to the answer to all your problems is
actually the start of a whole set of new
ones. That’s the darker undertone of it.”
A lot of my songs
find something
amazing in
simple things.
It’s a good way
to live your life.
LITTLE BOOTS
I tried to spread
things about,
so it wasn’t all
concentrated
at the start. I’ve
got a terrible
attention span
and I often tail
off at the end
of albums
L
ittle Boots also talks about The
Beatles’ ‘She’s Leaving Home’ and
St Etienne’s ‘Like A Motorway’, and
you don’t have to listen too hard to
‘Nocturnes’ to discern snippets of other
pop classics floating around. There’s
a melody from a verse of Bowie’s
‘Ashes To Ashes’ in one of the album’s
more euphoric cuts, ‘Crescendo’, and
another from Kate Bush’s ‘Running Up
That Hill’. ‘Beat Beat’ has a jangling
ambience reminiscent of that which
memorably runs through Talking
Heads’ ‘Once In A Lifetime’, while
‘Every Night I Say A Prayer’ is a
shameless Madonna cop if ever there
was one. The fact that pop scholars
James Ford of Simian Mobile Disco
and Tim Goldsworthy of DFA Records
(the label he formed with pop culture
snatcher supreme James Murphy) are
lurking behind the scenes of this album
makes sense. But then as Little Boots
herself puts it with a smile, “all pop
writers are magpies.”
the start. I’ve got a terrible attention
span and I often tail off at the end of
albums. I’ll get six songs into an album
and then fall off. People have asked
why I put this big song at the end and,
well, you just have to keep going to get
there.”
She’s been able to make the album
the way she wanted to because she
has her own record label now, On
Repeat, which is enabled by Kobalt,
the company who have devised a new
model for established artists to release
their own music and have so far
attracted the likes of the Pet Shop Boys,
Nick Cave and Beck.
“I should have been more decisive
about what I wanted and who I
wanted to work with,” she says of the
time leading up to her break with 679
Artists. “But I was still very influenced
by the label, trying to please them and
give them what they wanted. I wish I’d
just said, ‘You know what, I’m going to
Unusually for a pop outing, ‘Nocturnes’ do this record with Tim Goldsworthy,
gets more interesting as it progresses,
it’s going to be ace, you’re going
particularly with ‘Crescendo’, the
to put it out, and that’s it’. But for
Massive Attack-esque ‘Strangers’
some reason, I didn’t find my proper
(which also sounds like little-known
confidence until I decided to part ways
Australian electronic cult band Single
with them.
Gun Theory) and the closing number,
‘Satellite’, a thumping great electro pop “Working with Kobalt is a new way
bubbler.
of doing it,” she says. “They don’t
A&R you, so you want and how to
“Yeah, other people have said that,”
make it. They provide marketing and
she nods. “I tried to spread things
distribution, all the things you need a
about, so it wasn’t all concentrated at
label to do, without butting in on the
creative stuff. They do give their take
on things and they’re a useful sounding
board, but they’re not going to
interfere. You keep all your rights and
control, it’s artist friendly, and I think a
lot more people are going to be going
with them. It seems like a no-brainer,
it’s incomparable to another normal
record deal. Plus, I could release
other artists, which is an amazing
opportunity.”
Little Boots is planning a few festival
appearances over the summer and
a full UK tour in the autumn. She’s
about to head out on a sold-out US
tour and she’s also involved with a
Tokyo University project designing a
new interface for music creation called
PocoPoco, which has to be seen to be
believed.
“And I’m determined not to fall off
the writing wagon again,” she says.
“I need to keep that part of my head
going.”
With that, she has to leave, headed
for Argos to buy a suitcase for a
synthesiser to take on tour, an activity
that is the very definition of the
glamorisation of the mundane. Or is it
the other way around? Sometimes, it’s
just too hard to tell.
‘Nocturnes’ is out now on On Repeat
THE POCOPOCO SYNTH
Little Boots has been working with Tokyo Metropolitan
University on the PocoPoco. She has always been interested
in exploring new interfaces for making electronic music and
the PocoPoco is certainly that, although the urge to bash the
little colourful columns back down with a rubber mallet a la
Wack-A-Mole must be strong. “It’s still in prototype at the
moment,” she says. “It keeps breaking.”
‘MOTORWAY’ VIDEO
The first single to be taken from
‘Nocturnes’ is this haunting pop gem
about escaping one life and starting
another.
‘NOCTURNES’ TEASER VIDEO
Little Boots talks about the ‘Nocturnes’
album when it was still in progress.
Them’s some mighty serious synth
porn right there.
BEDROOM VIDEO OF ‘MEDDLE’ FROM 2009
Little Boots began her career with a series of webcam vids she shot
in her bedroom, where people saw that not only could she sing, but
she could also play. Who knew what the flashy screen thing was?
And is the Stylophone the acoustic guitar of electronic music? The
instrument that gets an outing when the artist needs to connect with
the humble origins of the music? No? Thought not…
BOMB THE BASS
SUN
ARISE
The new BOMB THE BASS album, ‘In The Sun’,
is a stunning return to form for Tim Simenon – and it
comes as a result of big changes in the BTB set-up
Words: PUSH
BOMB THE BASS
“I started because I’m interested in
self-sufficiency. Doing as much as you
can for yourself. I also wanted to try to
“I have, yeah, but I think I need to
do more with bread first. That’s the
do less with machines and technology,
foundation for me. Get the bread right to get back to basics, to do something
and then everything else will follow.
more tactile. With baking bread, you
That’s your beats, right there. I’ve learnt just need a few basic ingredients and
to do croissants, baguettes, brioches… you can make something really special.
I’m working
There’s so much for me to still
on making a good piece of sourdough learn but I’m loving it.”
now.
That’s my main aim at the moment.”
And I’m loving the idea of seeing a
Tim Simenon bakery on my high street.
I’m not sure how we got onto this, but
What would you call it?
Tim Simenon is visibly excited by the
subject.
Have you thought about cakes?
“Bomb The Bread!” he says, quick as
a flash.
He laughs at this – a long, hearty,
infectious laugh – and I laugh too. Yes,
that would be a good name. But what
I’m finding especially entertaining is
that Tim appears to have actually
thought about
this, perhaps even at some length.
Greggs had better watch out.
B
efore we started talking about
baking bread, we’d been talking
about the new Bomb The Bass
album, ‘In The Sun’. It’s Tim Simenon’s
sixth Bomb The Bass long player and
it’s an addictive collection of tracks.
The opener, ‘Wandering Star’, is a
twinkling arc of noises and beats.
‘Where Better’ is warm and cosy
and snuggled up. ‘Time Falls Apart’
has some lovely synthy horns and
the layered vocal harmonies of ‘The
Fallen’ are gorgeous. The repetitive
lullaby
that is ‘Cold Outside’, the closing
track, just makes you want to hear
‘Wandering Star’ again.
‘In The Sun’ is a very cohesive record,
perhaps the most rounded Bomb
The Bass set yet, and there’s a good
reason for that. Tim has been a serial
collaborator for pretty much his entire
career, with previous BTB records
boasting contributions from scores of
guest singers and musicians – Sinéad
O’Connor, Justin Warfield, Fujiya
& Miyagi, Mark Lanegan, and the
boys from Tackhead, to name just
a few – but this new album features
just two others. One is top session
drummer Christian Eigner, who has
been Depeche Mode’s sticksman since
1997. The other is Paul Conboy, exA.P.E. and sometime Metamono man,
who first worked with Tim on ‘Future
Chaos’, the 2008 album that marked
the return of BTB after a 13-year
break. Paul Conboy was also heavily
involved with ‘Back To Light’, the
follow-up to ‘Future Chaos’. He is not
simply a contributor to ‘In The Sun’,
though.
“I wanted to see what could be done
with just two of us,” notes Tim. “It’s
been great, it’s working really well. I
mean, yeah, I’d say Bomb The Bass
was a partnership now.”
Listening to ‘In The Sun’ and hearing
Paul’s vocals on every track, I did
suspect this was probably the case,
but I’m still a bit surprised to hear Tim
come out with it. BTB has been Tim’s
baby for 25 years. Tim Simenon is
Bomb The Bass. Bomb The Bass is Tim
Simenon. And now it’s not. That must
feel odd, doesn’t it?
“Not at all. That’s really how I want
it to be now. I felt the collaboration
thing had been done and I wanted
to try something else. I wanted to be
able to take it out on the road too and
that’s a pain in the arse when you’re
working with four or five different
singers. So it’s only Paul and me, a
couple of laptops, a couple of synths,
some visual stuff we use behind us,
and that’s it. We keep it light and
mobile and we’re very self-sufficient.”
I’m guessing Christian Eigner isn’t
involved because he’s pretty busy just
now, right?
“Yes, he’s on the road for the next
little while with his hobby band. I do
know that he’d much rather play with
us, though.”
Tim and Paul have actually been
playing selected low-key gigs around
Europe for a good couple of years.
They’ve been able to test several of
the tracks on ‘In The Sun’ in the live
environment, which is something
Tim had never done before as BTB.
He says it’s helped them to fine
tune the album to what it is now
and the experience of performing
live reminded him of his early days
as a DJ in the mid-1980s, when he
first started to figure out what made
certain records work while others
flopped.
Tim has also gone back to his roots
in terms of some of the sounds on
the new album. His musical starting
point was hip hop and there are lots
of breakbeats on ‘In The Sun’, the
rhythms chunkier, funkier and more
playful than on the last two BTB
outings. At the same time, there’s a
dreamy, spacey, gently wibbly-wobbly
psychedelia to many of the tracks too.
It’s a very intricate balance between
heaviness and lightness.
“It did make me think of early BTB in
terms of me looping up breakbeat
stuff again, which I haven’t done for
many, many years,” acknowledges
Tim. “Paul and I were also talking
about bands like A Certain Ratio and
the other early Factory stuff, so there
are those elements creeping in there.
It is quite psychedelic in some ways
too, and some of the harmonies have
a hint of The Beach Boys, who Paul is
really into.”
The Beach Boys reference makes
sense, especially thinking about the
way they used vocal harmonies as
part of their overall instrumentation.
Paul’s vocals on ‘In The Sun’ are
stitched into the fabric of the mix,
sometimes slightly under the line, so
it’s not possible to clearly hear the
lyrics. It makes for a deep listen. But
does Tim know what Paul is singing?
Does he know what the songs are
about?
“One or two of them,” he answers
with a grin. “Paul doesn’t like talking
about his lyrics. They’re very personal
to him. He keeps them close to his
heart. I know that ‘Where Better’,
where he sings about his ‘two best
girls’, he’s talking about his two girls
there and it’s like an echo of ‘Boy/
Girl’ on the last album, which he
wrote after he’d found out his partner
was pregnant and they didn’t know if
they were having a boy or a girl.
“We opted for a quieter vocal level
on this album and Paul’s voice is
perfect for that. It blends in so well
and it’s interesting because his
timing is so unusual. He has a good
understanding of how his voice works
and how a lot of the harmony stuff
is about layers and textures, which
he’s great at doing. The aim was to
have a wash of different sounds and
atmospheres, for the vocals to be part
of the sonic mess of it all, and I think
we’ve achieved that quite well.”
BOMB THE BASS
I
met Tim Simenon for the first time in
1987, through S’Express man Mark
Moore. It was a short while before
the release of the debut Bomb The Bass
single, ‘Beat Dis’. I can still remember
Mark telling me ‘Beat Dis’ was going
to be a Number One record (it fell
short by one place) and urging me to
interview the fresh-faced, furry-hatted
young DJ. So I did.
I must have interviewed Tim five or
six times since then and I’ve always
found him to be good company. The
time last we spoke, however, which
was in 2007, he seemed nervous and
distracted. He’d gone through a lot of
personal turmoil in the two or three
years prior to that and I think he was
also anxious about the forthcoming
release of ‘Future Chaos’, the first BTB
album since ‘Clear’ in 1995. So I’m
pleased to find him in a bouyant mood
today. In fact, I don’t believe I’ve ever
seen him so relaxed.
“I did go through quite a long period
of really
not enjoying what I was doing,” he
says. “The last three or four years,
though, I’ve been working
very hard and been getting a lot of
satisfaction
out of music again. Things are
definitely brighter than they were.”
Part of the reason for this might be
down to Vienna, where Tim has been
living for the last two years. They
call it the City of Music and the list of
musicians associated with the place
– Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, Brahms,
Mahler, Kruder, Dorfmeister – goes on
and on. Tim is renting an apartment
in the suburbs – starter dough in one
room, fermenting dough in another –
and says he feels completely at home
here. He first came to Vienna to play
some BTB gigs.
“I have an aunt here, she’s been here
for years, and she asked me to stay
with her after the gigs. So I camped
with her for a couple of weeks and
ended up falling in love with the
place. I’d lived in Amsterdam for about
10 years before that, but there was
nothing keeping me there, I don’t have
a family or anything, so it was easy
to up sticks and leave. And I think it
was totally the right thing to do. I’ve
no regrets at all. There’s a really good
energy here. I’m very happy here. It’s a
great city.”
It didn’t take Tim long to immerse
himself into the Vienna music scene.
He’d barely unpacked before he’d
started putting tracks together with a
musician called Georg Lichtenauer,
who he’d met at one of the BTB gigs.
A little further down the line, Tim
launched an electronic music night
called We Are The Robots at Fluc
Wanne, a club in the city centre.
Further still down the line, Tim and
Georg hooked up with singer Laura
Gomez and drummer Roman Lugmayr
(who had played at the opening night
of We Are The Robots with their band
Haiku Dandy) in a new outfit called
Ghost Capsules. The group’s self-titled
debut, an album of 4/4-driven dark
electro grooves, came out a few weeks
ago.
“As soon as Laura started singing
over the stuff Georg and I had been
working on, we realised we had
something that made sense,” says
Tim. “She has a fantastic voice and
we recorded the album in a couple
of months. It’s very different to BTB
musically, so I’m able to explore other
music that I love, like techno and
house. It’s very organic, nothing’s really
been planned, but people are picking
up on it. My name’s sometimes not
even mentioned in reviews and I love
that. I’m just one of the guys in the
band.”
Tim’s not just one of the guys in the
band, though, because he’s also one of
the guys at the record company. Both
‘Ghost Capsules’ and BTB’s ‘In
The Sun’ appear on O*Solo Records,
a label he has set up with Daryl
Bamonte, Depeche Mode’s former tour
manager and auxiliary member,
who Tim knows from back when he
produced
DM’s ‘Ultra’ album.
“I had a little vinyl label called Electric
Tones about 10 years ago and I
said I’d never do it again, it was a
nightmare, but having Daryl on board
is key because he actually knows
what he’s doing with the business end
of things. The idea isn’t to sign loads
of other bands, it’s just there for BTB
and Ghost Capsules and that’s it. But
it makes me feel good. I’m proud that
we’re doing it for ourselves this time
round. And if it doesn’t work out, well,
there’s nobody else to blame.”
TIM ON THE FIRST SIX BTB ALBUMS
SIX OF THE BEST
Tim Simenon assesses each of the Bomb The Bass albums
‘INTO THE DRAGON’
‘CLEAR’
‘BACK TO LIGHT’
(Rhythm King, 1988)
(Fourth & Broadway, 1995)
“Beginner’s spirit. I think I can sum
it up best like that. It was a little bit
naive in a lot of ways.”
“Well, ‘Bug Powder Dust’ is the track
that leaps out when I think of that
album. ‘If You Reach The Border’
with Lesley Winer too. I like the more
spoken word stuff on there and the
wilder aspects of ‘Clear’.”
“I think it’s more up and a little bit
brighter than ‘Future Chaos’. For
me, ‘Boy/Girl’ is one of my all-time
favourite BTB tracks. I really love that
song. It’s a beautiful poem.”
‘FUTURE CHAOS’
(O*Solo, 2013)
‘UNKNOWN TERRITORY’
(Rhythm King, 1991)
“I like that album a lot. It’s exciting
for me. I felt it was an interesting
melange of samples and singing, like
Loretta Heywood singing ‘Winter In
July’. I’ve got very fond memories of
knowing that I was doing something
quite different at that point. We
recorded it in 1990, 1991, and house
music had really taken off by then, but
‘Unknown Territory’ was pretty much
the opposite of what was happening
out there.”
I
t’s time to wrap things up, but there’s
one thing I need to ask Tim first. It
isn’t really 25 years since ‘Beat Dis’,
is it?
“It’s tough, right? But I do know that it
is 25 years, because Paul and I have
just finished working on a special
anniversary edition of it. We’re going
to put it out on vinyl shortly, hopefully
towards the end of the summer.
We’re going to have ‘Beat Dis’ and
‘Megablast’ on the A-side, then a
reworking of ‘Bug Powder Dust’ on the
other side. So, yeah, 25 years. It is
unbelievable.’
(!K7, 2008)
“This came after the long gap of me
trying to get things together again.
It was BTB version two, I guess. Paul
and I really like this album, but it was
quite dark and a lot of people say it
doesn’t sound like BTB. I think it does,
but it was a new interpretation of BTB,
with Paul beginning his involvement.”
How did it feel to go back and revisit
those tracks?
“It was a lot of fun. They’re pretty
mashed up now, they’re very different
versions. Also, we mixed ‘Beat Dis’ and
‘Megablast’ together into one track.
We’re calling it ‘Megadis’. The two
tracks were the same BPM, so when
the penny dropped on that I decided
to put them together and turn them into
one extended mix. It’s nine minutes
long and it’s great!”
(!K7, 2010)
‘IN THE SUN’
“It’s sounding different again to all the
other albums. Paul and I are very
proud of it. I think it’s our most
accomplished and most focussed
record, because it’s just Paul and me,
so it’s been really reduced, with all the
ideas bounced between us. To me, it
sounds like the most complete of
all the Bomb The Bass albums.”
It certainly sounds like a good way to
kick off the next 25 years of Bomb The
Bass.
“Hey, why not? Let’s keep it going.
Look, as far as I’m concerned it’s a
simple choice. It’s either that or making
bread.”
‘In The Sun’ and ‘Ghost Capsules’
are both out now on O*Solo
RODION GA
The remarkable story of Rodian
Rosca and RODIAN GA, an
electronic band from behind
the Iron Curtain whose late 70s
and early 80s recordings have
just been released in the West
for the very first time
Words: PATRICK NICHOLSON
R
omania, 1975. Food rationing,
blackouts, labour camps for
“enemies of the regime”, singlechannel state TV two hours a day.
The government maintains a list of
banned books and authors, and all
radio stations outside the capital
Bucharest are closed. East European
communism has found an ardent
practitioner in President Nicolae
Ceausescu.
After visiting the leaders of
China and North Korea, Nicolae
Ceausescu has instigated his own
personality cult, with the sanctioned
media dubbing him “a visionary
architect of the nation’s future”, “the
genius of the Carpathians”, and
“Prince Charming”. His wife Elena is
duly named “Mother of the Nation”.
Ahead of them, Nicolae and Elena
have 14 years of adulation, starving
the population and building vast
presidential palaces, before the
people and the firing squad finally
catch up with them.
on the continent, is using what
equipment he can find to develop
a music-construction technique
which will be echoed two decades
later with digital technology. A 60s
childhood coinciding with Romania’s
“liberalisation” period exposed him
to Western rock and pop on the
radio, but Ceausescu’s 1971 ‘July
Theses’ have put a stop to that.
From inside what is now one of the
Eastern Bloc’s most insular states,
Rodion is coming up with his own
Also in 1975, 22-year-old Rodion
Rosca, lacking money for and access powerful and idiosyncratic response.
to the new electronic instruments
that are freely available elsewhere
RODION GA
N
early 40 years later, a set of
recordings gathered as ‘The
Lost Tapes’ documents the music
Rodion Rosca made in the late 70s and
80s with his band, Rodion GA, “GA”
comprising his fellow band members
Gicu Fărcaș and Adrian Căpraru.
During the band’s active period, the
only record company in Romania was
the state owned Electrecord. Rodion
GA recorded a total of seven tracks at
the label’s studios, but only two of these
were released at the time, appearing on
a 1981 compilation album.
On first hearing, Rodion GA sound
familiar enough for their period.
Phasing synth notes, electronic horns,
pop/rock rhythms via drums and drum
machines. But the more you listen,
the stranger it sounds. It’s meticulous,
melody-led music, not the rhythmdependent repetition or minimalism
of the group’s West German or US
contemporaries. Nor is it by any means
meandering prog. Speaking today,
Rodion Rosca explains his processes,
his admiration for classic pop structures,
and the importance of original tunes.
“Since my childhood, I’ve listened to
lots of music – Rolling Stones, Beatles,
Bee Gees, Kinks. It’s important to have
nice structure and presentation, to show
the listener what you want to explain to
them.
“In my life, I’ve met many composers
who think their music is good, who are
very satisfied with what they’re making.
For me, this means nothing if it’s not
original, if it’s nothing new. When you
listen to a lot of music, you hear another
song and you say, ‘I remember that’.
When I compose, from my instinct, I am
not doing what other people do – in
melody lines, I mean. I heard a lot of
music, but not something like my music.”
This is borne out as you listen
through ‘The Lost Tapes’. Though the
recognisable rock details are there,
they seem to have been re-ordered.
Beatlesque pop lines turn into Eastern
folk dances with Arabic hints, and
voices and instruments unexpectedly
swap the tune. Then the details reveal
themselves: sudden intrusions of
groaning voices, stray drilling notes, the
fact that the surging groove under the
Eastern melody lodging in your head
is the bossa nova setting of a Casio VL
Tone mini keyboard.
“I made all this without synthesisers,”
explains Rodian. “I had no money for
them. But I discovered how to make
synth sounds with a simple organ.
Not even an organ, it was just a toy.
I put it through distortion, pitch-shifter
and echo-generator. This was my
synthesiser.”
But it seems the real secret of the Rodion
GA sound lies in a Czech-built stereo
reel-to-reel tape recorder, the Tesla
Magnetofon. Or rather, two of them.
“There are songs there that have
guitar and voices only. We had no
multi-track recording. I recorded with
tape recorders. I recorded the guitar
on one track, then on the other track
I put the voices. Then I recorded the
two tracks onto one track of another
Magnetofon. Now I had one track free.
Then I recorded the second voice or
the background voices. Working in this
way, I became very skilled.”
So the songs on ‘The Lost Tapes’ are
at least a masterclass in “bouncing”,
with all the disciplined decision-making
that requires. It partly accounts for the
compressed, surging sound of the music.
But there’s more to Rodion’s Magnetofon
technique. By punching in and out of
recordings, catching
short sections of sound, he generated
samples and sequenced them manually,
playing them back onto the next tape.
“In many of the recordings, you’ll hear
the guitar. The tape recorder was set
to record, but with the stop button
pressed. I got the guitarist to play a
chord, then I released the stop button.
Then I had many sounds, which I
put alongside each other. This was
a way I could make melodies. But
listeners will think it’s a synthesiser.”
He pauses for a moment. “I’m not a
good instrumentalist,” he adds. “My
instrument is my mind. I like to work with
sequencers, step by step, note by note.”
As he developed his pre-digital
overdubbing, sampling and sequencing
techniques, Rodion took the approach
further, cutting up sections of songs
to create several more pieces without
recording more sounds.
“Five years ago, I discovered that, in
that time, I was making what is now
DJ nu-school breaks, cutting parts of
a song and putting it with another
part and making a brand new song.
In 1978, I recorded the song ‘Ore’
(‘Hours’). From that song, I made five
more songs with no other sounds.”
And the more he worked, the faster he
worked.
“In 10 days, I made 17 songs, all
completely electronic. If I came to your
studio, I could do a lot of songs for you.
You’d be very happy with my work!”
O
ne of the highlights of ‘The
Lost Tapes’ is ‘Caravane’, a
song which is hewn from ‘Ore’.
The cut-up technique is evident, as
a bassline straight out of ‘5 To 1’ by
The Doors is curtailed by a keyboard
cascade, returns as a march, is overrun
by Keith Moon kit flourishes, and
surges on under heraldic phasing lead
lines and great blasts of low notes and
drums.
The martial feel recurs on the album,
perhaps most darkly on ‘Citadela’,
where that Latin beat preset somehow
sounds stentorian under the triumphal
key-swirls, disembodied voices and
plunging bass runs. Which begs the
obvious question. How much is this
music a product of the state it was
made in?
“‘Citadela’ is a march,” agrees Rodion.
“When the military come into your
country, the orchestra plays a march.
You can feel anger in this song.”
turned up at one of Rodion GA’s
soundchecks. Despite singing their
songs in Romanian, he pulled them up
for slipping “yeah, yeah, yeah” into the
chorus of one song.
“But I am not a guilty person, someone
to be hunted because I had my hair
long,” says Rodion. “My childhood was
destroyed by Ceaucescu. My only thing
in life was to travel, in Czechoslovakia,
Hungary, East Germany, to see what
people made.”
Now 60 years old, Rodion Rosca is
suffering physical health problems and
he lacks the finances to be able to deal
with them properly. But as he prepares
to tour ‘The Lost Tapes’ around Europe
this summer, he is eager to work,
and offers a tantalising invitation to
musicians.
“If you send me a recording with only
piano, I will send it back, and I will
dress it with clarinet, effects, crowd
noises,” he says. “You’ll be very happy
to hear it. I have a good imagination.”
One of the things he discovered people
And there’s certainly no denying that.
made, was records. Rodion’s travels
enabled him to discover vinyl and he
‘The Lost Tapes’ is
still cherishes many of his acquisitions
released on Strut Records
from that time. His friends called him
“The King of Records”.
“I am a sick man, in that I used to keep
everything, throw away nothing. I am
a collector. It’s an illness. I want to tell
you why. Because I appreciate very
much the things that people make.
For me, it’s a shame to drop it. I feel
The effects of the oppression that he
suffered haven’t gone away for Rodion, something from my soul for each thing
made by people.”
which is only to be expected. He
remembers when a government official
ALISON MOYET
With ‘the minutes’,
her first album in six
years, ALISON MOYET
has released her most
overtly electronic set
since her time with
Vince Clarke in Yazoo
Words: CHI MING LAI
ALISON MOYET
I
t’s been 30 years since Yazoo’s ‘You And
Me Both’ and Alison Moyet – the famed
voice of the duo – has made a return to
electronic music with a new album called
‘the minutes’.
“I’ve wanted to work in electronica again
for a long, long time, but it’s been about
meeting the right person,” she explains.
“What you have to remember with me
and electronica is that it was reported for
a long time that I left Yazoo… But I didn’t
leave Yazoo… Vince split the band!”
Moyet’s Yazoo partner Vince Clarke
had done this before, of course, having
departed Depeche Mode after their ‘Speak
And Spell’ debut, and he would continue to
be commitment shy until he found musical
wedded bliss with Andy Bell in Erasure.
The girl born Genevieve meanwhile found
herself in the middle of a bidding war
between Virgin and Columbia Records – a
war that Columbia won because “they
had tidy offices” (and this despite Virgin
offering more money). ‘Alf’, Alison Moyet’s
first solo album, followed soon after and
sold hugely on the back of the hits ‘Love
Resurrection’, ‘All Cried Out’ and ‘Invisible’,
so the label wanted to lift a fourth single
from it. Moyet, however, was having
none of it – “ENOUGH!” as she puts it,
fearing her fans were being ripped off –
and instead suggested recording a track
she’d been performing live, largely out of
necessity.
“Of course, when you make your first solo
album, you’re limited by how much material
you’ve got, so you have to pull in some
songs you didn’t write,” she says. The track
in question was Billie Holliday’s ‘That Ole
Devil Called Love’ and it became Moyet’s
biggest selling single. But the success of this
record caused problems with the public’s
perception of her.
“In retrospect, it looked like I’d done a very
safe thing. So what has been a millstone
around my neck is that one little thing that
was actually, for the time, quite leftfield, but
it has ended up being quite mainstream.
People think of me as a jazz singer... But
I don’t listen to jazz and I don’t own any
jazz records!”
“So Mute Records said,
‘OK, let’s do an album…
Have you got
any songs?’.”
I
t’s back to basics for Alison Moyet’s
forthcoming tour, with a minimal
electronic set-up and a promise of
“no jazz covers”! There will be songs
from her Yazoo period, ‘Alf’ and
‘Hometime’, but the set will naturally
centre on ‘the minutes’, which she
describes as having “no skippers”.
Launched with the blistering dubstep
soul of ‘Changeling’, the album has
been recorded in partnership with
producer Guy Sigsworth, best known
for his work with Madonna and Björk.
“He learnt to play harpsichord at
Cambridge University, so his musicality
is sublime,” says Moyet. “And yet as
a techie, he really knows his stuff and
is quite brilliant. So he brings these
two things together and that makes the
perfect bed for me. I’ve been looking
for someone like him that kind of spoke
the same English as me for a long
time.”
following the collapse of punk’s ideals,
Moyet could not help but notice what
was going on with the band that her
former classmates Martin Gore and
Andy Fletcher were in. Their name was
Depeche Mode and they were getting
attention around Essex’s futurist scene.
“When they got Depeche away, my
first thought was ‘What the fuck?’!”
she remembers. “But this was also
balanced with ‘Oh, how interesting’
and ‘Fair play, you got it away’!”
Ironically though, when Vince Clarke
came calling, she hadn’t been too
impressed with ‘Speak And Spell’.
She had known Clarke from attending
Saturday Music School when they were
11 years old. She says she had no
expectations from starting to work with
Clarke. Her only thought was “Great,
I’m going to have a demo now”.
This has certainly been an important
aspect of her synthetic reawakening,
having previously been disillusioned
by what she calls “techies in the 90s
who grew from previous techies”.
This is very different from the total
respect she still bestows on Vince
Clarke. “He taught himself electronica
but came from a musical enough
background where he was listening
to well constructed music like Simon &
Garfunkel,” says Moyet.
Piling on the irony, the song Clarke
presented to her was ‘Only You’, which
messrs Gahan, Gore and Fletcher
hadn’t been too enamoured with
during a rehearsal just before Clarke’s
departure from Depeche Mode. “So
I didn’t think anything of it or that it
was going anywhere,” says Moyet. A
week later, Clarke called to ask her
to record it with him and ‘Only You’
subsequently reached Number Two in
the UK charts. “So Mute Records said,
‘OK, let’s do an album… Have you got
any songs?’.”
With all these electronic aspirations,
the subject of Yazoo is inevitable.
Despite being part of the Delta Estuary
blues scene around Canvey Island
The resultant album, ‘Upstairs At Eric’s’,
was a big success, but Moyet and
Clarke wrote individually and had very
different personalities.
Despite this, Moyet was very happy in
Yazoo and the last thing she wanted
to be was a solo artist. After signing to
Columbia, she worked with Tony Swain
and Steve Jolley, who were known for
applying their programmed synthesised
gloss to acts like Imagination,
Bananarama and Spandau Ballet, but
she ran into the politics of publishing
and recalls when she wanted to record
a song she had written on her own.
“No, you can’t record that, you’ve got
to record it with us,” came the swift
reply from her new collaborators. The
label didn’t back her either.
This sort of thing hadn’t happened
when she was at Mute Records. She’d
considered staying at Mute as a solo
artist but the label was also home
to Depeche Mode and she’d sensed
tensions between Clarke and his former
bandmates so she wasn’t keen to stay
when Yazoo disbanded.
“I just thought to myself, ‘Well, OK,
Vince is not in a good place with me,
I’m not in a good place with him’,” she
says. “If I’d stayed, there were going to
be three acts at loggerheads with one
another. It just didn’t feel right.”
She would later come to regret her
decision, though. She finally extracted
herself from Columbia after a lengthy
legal wrangle with the label following
the release of her ‘Essex’ long player
in 1994. The dispute meant it would
be several years before she released
another album.
ALISON MOYET
W
orking with Guy Sigsworth,
Alison Moyet appears to
have found a similar musical
partnership to that which she had with
Vince Clarke. She talks enthusiastically
of the creative dynamic she felt with
Sigsworth when they were composing
‘Changeling’.
“Me and Guy worked separately.
He sent me an eight bar loop and I
then wrote the melody, verse, bridge
and chorus to that loop. I taped them
together to form the song structure.
I then sent it back to him, and he
removed everything he’d written and
re-did his music underneath. In general,
that’s the way that we worked. Only in
two cases did he send me whole tracks
that I then wrote the top line to.”
Moyet has clearly been frustrated
by the unwillingness of past studio
partners to let her contribute to the
overall musicality.
‘the minutes’, I’m singing on it, but it’s
not about me showboating or using the
album as a platform for me to sit above
everything because I’m the vocalist.
In some ways, the lyrics are more
important… And the whole sound… It’s
a music album.”
It would seem that Yazoo’s 2008
‘Reconnected’ reunion tour was a key
part in the genesis of ‘the minutes’. It
helped exorcise her artistic demons
and put the idea that Yazoo was
unfinished business to bed in her mind.
“Oh, I loved it, loved it, loved it! I had
a brilliant time! The very fact that ‘You
And Me Both’ had never been played
live meant it could never have been
a finished project for me. You have
to sing a song live to actually find out
what you would and wouldn’t have
kept.”
And with ‘the minutes’, the seed of
those Mute years may have finally
“When you’re known as a good singer, come to full fruition. The album is
people don’t expect you to fuck with
perhaps her most definitive artistic
your voice. I found it really difficult
statement.
working with producers where I’d say,
‘C’mon, let’s play with this’, and they
“I was offered loads of record deals,
feel like there’s some kind of sacrilege. but they wanted me to make covers
People miss that point with me. So with albums. Whilst I don’t have any issue
with singing other people’s songs, at
this time I want to be a creative artist.
My hopes are that it’s well received. I
have no expectation as to how it will
perform. I tend to be someone that
expects the worst, but in a cheerful
way. So if you expect the worse but
don’t expect the worst to upset you,
that’s a very god place to start. It’s very
possible it will come and go without
notice, but I’d be prepared for that
and not be devastated. On the other
hand, it would be a real joy if it was
recognised as the great piece of work
that it is.”
As to any further work with Vince
Clarke, their three song set at
Mute Records’ celebrations at The
Roundhouse in London in 2011
appears to have been their swansong
– for the moment at least.
“Never say never, but I would say that
I doubt it would happen again,” notes
Moyet. “Which is not to say that I
would not do it again,” she adds.
‘the minutes’ is out now on Cooking
Vinyl. Alison Moyet will be touring the
UK in the autumn
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UNDER THE INFLUENCE
under
the
influence
To mark the release of his
new album, ‘Immunity’,
electroscape composer
and Eno collaborator
JON HOPKINS talks
about the sounds and
experiences that feed into
his creative process
Pictures: STEVE GULLICK
UNDER THE INFLUENCE
MUSIC
I
encountered the Seefeel album
‘Quique’ about 10 years ago, when
I was in a club. The DJ played
this track, ‘Climatic Phase 3’, and it
stole over me gradually. I was talking
to someone, but by the end of the
conversation I wasn’t listening to what
they were saying. I just stood there
staring at the speakers. I’d never heard
anything like it.
There’s this chordal rhythmic sound
throughout the track, which I later
found out they made using guitars
through pedals and looping tiny bits
of sound. It has two chords, and it
just goes between them, but it does
so really gracefully. It’s about eight
minutes long and the drums come in
after three or four minutes, then this
almost dubby bassline comes in when
you think it can’t get any better, and
then it drifts along. What blew me
away was how it was more a place
to live than a piece of music to listen
to. It envelops you. ‘Quique’ has many
tracks on it like that. I was trying to do
things that worked like that, but I just
couldn’t do it. It took me years to find
my own equivalent, to make music that
has that sort of effect on me. It wasn’t
an easy thing to do.
Another album that has influenced
me is Smog’s ‘A River Ain’t Too Much
To Love’. It lulls you into this amazing
place. The lyrics are very funny and
there’s this really lazy quality to it. It
makes you feel as if you’re in the place
where he wrote it, or where he grew
up. Every track is downtempo, so it’s
not about energy, and then there’s
this song called ‘Running The Loping’,
which takes it down even further, just
when you think it can’t go any lower.
It’s very slow triplets, and he’s singing
about moving out of the city into the
country, and you feel like you’re doing
that when you’re listening to it. It
inspired me in making ‘Diamond Mine’
with King Creosote. I realised you don’t
have to have a big, bouncy, sprightly
number in the middle, you can be bold
about that and put in heavy stuff.
Finally, I must mention Talk Talk’s ‘Spirit
Of Eden’ album. I should imagine it’s
something that must be cited frequently,
but the track ‘I Believe In You’ is quite
simply my favourite piece of music of
all time. It’s so sublime, it’s beyond
words. In fact, I don’t really need to
talk about it any more for that reason.
THE MORNING AFTER
In a lot of ways, this is probably more
of an influence on me than music. It’s
the state of mind, that hungover state
or maybe the day after an amazing
gig, when I just get ridiculous amounts
of inspiration. ‘Immunity’, my new
album, was written in that mode, to
the point that I would schedule a night
out in the middle of the week to get
the “day after” effect. Then I could do
14 hours of amazing work on a track,
because my brain didn’t get in the way
any more. I don’t really know what
it is. Your thoughts just get left at the
door and it’s like a barrier has been
removed, the distraction of the brain is
always present otherwise.
It’s heavily responsible for a lot of the
moods on the new album.
‘Immunity’ is also inspired by
experiences I had when I was a
teenager and I first started smoking
weed. I’ve not touched it for about 10
years now, but when I first had weed
it was the most magical experience I
could ever imagine. I’ve almost spent
the rest of my life trying to recreate that
feeling through music. It’s not possible
to describe it. I was exposed to it at
too young an age, but it changed the
course of my life because it sent my
music down a much more escapist
route. I wasn’t having a great life at
the time – teenage life is pretty bad
anyway, there was a divorce going
on and school was awful – so at night
we’d have a joint and off I’d go for a
few hours. In any creative profession,
you find people harking back to
childhood things, you get chefs talking
about the food their mothers cooked,
and they’ll spend their whole lives
trying to recreate the feelings and
experiences they had when they were
kids.
I’ve got it slightly today, to be honest.
I had a show last night in New York
and I had a few technical hitches
on stage – I was actually rewiring
the mixer during one of the tracks
– and afterwards I had a few drinks
to decompress, and today I’ve been
firing off all kinds of creative thoughts.
I don’t often meet anyone else who has
experienced that. I don’t know what
it is about my brain, but it’s definitely
getting more intense as I get older.
BOOKS
Paul Auster’s ‘Moon Palace’ has had
a very big impact on me. It’s hard to
be clear exactly where and how, but
I know that it’s always been a central
element in my life. There’s a contrast
between disturbing events and beautiful
landscapes and slight insanity. It’s about
a guy having some kind of breakdown.
It’s set over a number of years and is
also about the American landscape.
He ends up on a huge desert
pilgrimage and lives in a cave.
I haven’t re-read in about nine
years now, but it’s always
present inside me.
‘So Long And Thanks For All
The Fish’ by Douglas Adams is
another very important book for
me. ‘The Hitchhikers Guide To
The Galaxy’ is a fairly ridiculous
series – surreal, over the top,
all over the place – but this, the
fourth book, has this incredible calm
about it. The previous books are totally
crazy, and then this one becomes all
meditative. I’m surprised that it never
seems to be discussed how different it
is to the rest of the series. You can read
it without reading any of the others.
Arthur Dent, the main character, gets
back to Earth finally and meets the girl.
He learns to fly, by convincing gravity to
look the other way when he’s falling. It’s
very well written. It’s very funny, but also
amazingly calm and beautiful. Douglas
Adams was a very forward thinking
person.
UNDER THE INFLUENCE
,
,
DAVID LYNCH S FIRE WALK WITH ME
T
he influence of David Lynch on my
work is so undeniable that I can’t
possibly ignore him. I got to meet
him because I did a remix for him. It
was a track called ‘I Know’. It was a
dark, jazzy, bluesy track. Lynch always
has that dark side, that dirty side, and it
was pretty amazing to meet the person
whose films I’d been watching since I
was 15. I met him at his club in Paris.
I was a huge fan of ‘Twin Peaks’, the TV
series, but what I loved most was the
dark stuff, and that side fell off a bit as
it went on and it became like a weird
soap opera. The episodes he directed
had such power and such strangeness,
and the ‘Fire Walk With Me’ film was
an exploration of all the aspects of the
series that I loved. It’s a proper David
Lynch film, so dark and so terrifying,
contrasted with moments of beauty, like
Julee Cruise singing with red drapes
behind her and lit in pale blue.
There’s this recurrent theme in Lynch’s
films of people being moved to tears by
music and you know that it happens to
him. It’s such a simple idea. He places
so much importance on
soundtracks and sound
design. The idea of
getting lost in music is
one of my central ideas.
‘Fire Walk With Me’ also
deals with extremes in
contrast, which is another
element I’m interested in
with my music.
The extremes of horror and beauty next
to each other, how darkness makes
the beautiful sound more beautiful and
vice versa. I love that. There’s a lot of
power in that binary approach. It’s
such an intense ride. Even if it doesn’t
make traditional sense, it works with an
internal logic.
THE GRAND CANYON
O
ne experience that had a big
impact on me was walking
down the Grand Canyon
with my brother at the age of 18. We
marched down there with no forethought
whatsoever, armed only with a couple of
doughnuts and a bottle of water. When
all the wardens started walking back up
at 3pm, advising everyone to turn round
and walk back, we decided they were
being overly cautious and shrugged it
off, thinking ourselves to be fitter than the
average tourist.
At around 8pm, we got to a place
which, from the top, looked like the
bottom and hence where the river would
be. But on arrival, we found that over
the ledge, it was actually as far down
again to the river as we’d already come.
From that point, I remember looking back
up and discovering that the enormous
section of the canyon we’d spent all day
climbing down – and it had filled the
entire view from the top – was in fact
just one in an endless series of equally
enormous sections of the same shape
that stretched to the horizon in every
direction. It was like spending all day
examining every aspect of one flower
in microscopic detail, then looking up
to find you were in an endless field of
similar flowers. Overwhelming.
It was silent down there, with ravens
soaring above, deer and coyotes
wandering around. The sun was red
and low, and we could see the fires of
a camp miles away. The glare of the
sizeable tourist centre back at the top
was reduced to the smallest dot. The
climate was noticeably warmer, tropical
almost, and the whole world felt sacred.
That sense of space and the feeling of
being so gloriously insignificant in such
an expanse created a desire in me to
build space into my music, to leave air
around melodies, and to try and pull the
listener away from their thoughts into a
space like that.
I’m not going to describe what the walk
back up was like, apart from to say
that clambering solidly uphill along tiny,
treacherous paths in total darkness for
seven hours with no food is not a whole
lot of fun.
A CAR JOURNEY IN THE RAIN
M
y brain tends to respond to a
beautiful experience, whether
epic or tiny, by storing it up
and trying to recreate it in music. This
happens whether I am aware of it or
not.
On the opposite end of the scale to the
Grand Canyon experience, I remember
when I was about 20, and in the car
with a friend being driven back home
after a day of studio shopping. It
was dark, and winter, and raining its
arse off. It had been a long day and
I started to fall asleep. We had some
unfinished Frou Frou tracks we’d been
sent by Imogen Heap playing on the
car stereo. One track in particular,
one that didn’t make it to the album
in fact, had this kind of deep, looping
chord pattern that floated in and out
every few seconds, and it so happened
that the windscreen wipers in the car
had drifted into total synchronisation
with this pattern. At this point I was
neither awake nor asleep, I was in
that beautiful in-between place where
you are aware of where you are, and
particularly aware of music, but your
mind is at rest and you are simply not
thinking. It’s a meditative state and one
in which your mind is truly open, and
you can disappear into music.
The title of my track ‘We Disappear’
comes from experiences I’ve had in this
mind state. In the car that day, I got lost
in the slow rhythm, with the rain on the
roof and the pulsing of the windscreen
wipers and the chord sequence all
combining to hypnotise me, slow my
thoughts down and envelope me in
warmth. I look back at tracks I’ve
written since and realise that, on many
occasions, combinations of rhythms
and sounds that I’ve used are direct
attempts to recreate this experience.
The idea of capturing and including
real-world sounds, being open to the
idea of things syncing up by accident,
and most importantly the power of
repetition, all came from this random,
rain-soaked drive home.
‘Immunity’ is released on Domino
THE END OF THE WORLD
THE
END
OF THE WORLD
AS WE KNOW IT
THE BLACK DOG
Techno past, present and future with THE BLACK DOG,
who discuss grandma’s living room, how to survive the
apocalypse and why Ken Downie lives on a boat
Words: ANDREW HOLMES
THE END OF THE WORLD
It’s well over a decade since Martin and Richard Dust joined
original dog Ken Downie to form the current incarnation of
The Black Dog. Since then, the Sheffield-based trio have
consolidated their position as the elder statesmen of UK
electronica. Their bruising 12-inch releases have helped
British techno to its current state of rude health, while long
players such as their new ‘Tranklements’ album have seen
them build on their intelligent techno foundations. All in all,
these are good days to be a Black Dog, so what better time
to ask Ken and Martin about the future? And they turn out
to be much friendlier and more approachable than their
reputation suggests…
You’ve been quite prolific of late…
The new album is called 'Tranklements'.
What's a "tranklement"?
Martin: “Have we? Compared to what?”
Martin: “It’s a Sheffield and Birmingham word. It
came about because we were talking about when
you used to go round to your grandparents, and
the living room was only used twice a year for
some crazy reason. Everyone was in the kitchen.
Like, the living room was only opened up on
Christmas Day and Boxing Day, and there was
always a cupboard in the corner with tranklements
– things that had been collected from different
times by different people – and we were kind of
saying how there were all these songs that we had,
ideas that were unfinished and meant different
things, and we wanted to collect them all together
and put them in that cupboard.”
Compared to you, usually...
Martin: “There did used to be the odd five-year gap,
I suppose… It’s not a conscious thing. I think as you
get faster at creating and enjoying it more, that side
of it just becomes a little bit easier, because you settle
down into different roles. Me and Ken tend to make
a terrible mess of some files and Richard comes in
and sorts them out for us.”
Ken: “We’re not exactly pumping them out, but we
seem to be in a kind of phase where we’re happy
with what we’re doing. And our wastage is pretty
low at the moment.”
You seem to have drawn a clear dividing
line between club releases and more home
listening material. What's the thinking behind
that?
Martin: “Well, there’s a conscious effort to make the
12-inch releases aimed more at the dancefloor. That’s
been done deliberately, simply because we don’t
think as many home users are buying vinyl, apart
from collectors and real vinyl heads. Also, we kind
of went off on a path where we wanted to do really
stripped-down dance music. We’d previously done
‘Radio Scarecrow’, which is quite a slow album,
and so was ‘Further Vexations’, so it’s kind of, let’s
do some stuff that we enjoy that’s less risky, really.
Publish and be damned, I guess.”
You're not saying what they mean, though,
are you?
Martin: “No, we want to move away from having
hooks to hang songs on. It’s that kind of thing when
people talk about 50 Cent. They can’t tell you
anything about his music, but they know he’s been
shot a dozen times.”
That's not you being difficult, then?
Martin: “It’s not contrived, no. We just didn’t want
the back story to be propping everything up. We
didn’t want hooks, because you paint yourself into
a corner.”
The Black Dog does have quite a gloomy
image, though, don't you?
Martin: “Do we?”
Well, there's the name...
Martin: “Yeah, I guess there’s a dark side to what
we do. We live in Sheffield, where it’s always
raining, it’s always grey. There’s not much to do
and people make their own entertainment, but
it’s a good crowd and, as a working artist, you’re
pretty much free to do what you want.”
THE END OF THE WORLD
Okay, so let's talk about the future.
Something you mentioned earlier was
that you're becoming faster at creating.
Is that something that developments in
music technology have allowed you to
do?
Martin: “Not really.”
Ah...
Martin: “Sorry. I mean, technology is great but
we’ve never got into Mac versus PC, analogue
versus digital kind of thing. I think as you get older,
the creative process becomes clearer and you get
better at being wrong quicker.”
Ken: “Technology evolves and the toys we’ve got
now you could never have imagined 10 years ago.
There are pieces of software which sound just as
good as hardware. You’ve got emulators for all the
classic Roland kit. I know people say they don’t
sound as good, but if you pump them up I can’t tell
the difference myself.”
Has technology changed your sound?
Ken: “I guess to the extent that we have more toys
to play with now.”
Martin: “It just offers more freedom. It makes things
easier, but it’s not the be-all and end-all. We
quite often spend our time getting influenced by
other things – going up in the Peak District, taking
photographs, video shoots, doing broadcasts.
Me and Ken are the least technologically minded,
simply because we’d rather get the idea down than
worrying about whether it’s technically correct,
whereas Richard is the one who’s got ears like a
bat.”
Outside of music, where do you think we're
heading as a society?
Martin: “The world seems to be going more and
more right wing. We seem to be handing over
more and more responsibility and allowing more
things to happen. It’s quite frustrating. That’s one of
the reasons Ken lives on a boat.”
Ken: “Yeah, I’ve withdrawn from society. The
smoking ban was the final straw. And before
that it was just Blair and Brown and their fucking
thumping fists, which just completely sickened me.”
So what steps did you take to withdraw,
Ken?
Ken: “I bought a boat and moved off land. If we
get neighbours we don’t like, we can just pull the
pins and fuck off. No tax. No television licence.
No letterbox. No more junk mail.”
Do you have internet?
Ken: “Yeah, mobile broadband, just hang it out the
window, get good speeds.”
TV?
Ken: “Yeah, my wife watches it, but I can’t be
arsed with it.”
So you'd be well placed to survive the
apocalypse then?
Ken: “Well, I know where fresh water is and there’s
enough crayfish in the river, so I could survive for
a while.”
Do you fear for the future?
Ken: “I think the future will unfold in its own good
time. Nothing is going to happen in the next two
weeks. I’m not paranoid about it.”
What do you think the world will be like
in 100 years' time?
Ken: “Overpopulated. We need another colony for
the survival of the species.”
Martin: “With population growth, we have to find
better ways to feed people. Cheaper and quicker.”
Would you like to live forever?
Martin: “Um, no. There’s a point where you’ve had
enough.”
Ken: “No, definitely not. Well, perhaps if everybody
else did as well, because the most painful part is
losing loved ones. But living forever would be rather
dull and they just tax you to the fucking hilt all your
life.”
You really hate taxes, don't you?
Ken: “Oh yes.”
‘Tranklements’ is out now on Dust Science
ALBUM REVIEWS
DAFT PUNK
Random Access Memories
Columbia
Electronic disco kings
confound expectations with
loopy concept album
‘Random Access Memories’ is a love
letter to the 1970s, to disco, to electronic
music, to progressive rock, to jazz funk,
to West Coast rock, to Broadway even.
If Daft Punk’s debut ‘Homework’, that blessed
high water mark of the 1990s, perfectly
captured and defined its own end-of-themillennium dancefloor euphoria, then ‘Random
Access Memories’, by avoiding referencing
its own age through a series of 1970s sonic
eulogies, perversely does the same for 2013
– because there is no defining genre, or
even set of dominant genres, for the 2010s.
Everything is available, it’s all allowed, and
there is little cultural distinction now between
high and low art, the mainstream and the
leftfield, the acoustic and the electronic. So
while it’s fun to make your listening choices
based on the latest YouTube link you clicked
on Facebook, there’s a part of any serious
music fan that pines for a time when the idea
of genre developments in pop was new and
exciting and important and hadn’t splintered
into the crushed glass carpet we all now walk
on. And Daft Punk are nothing if not serious
music fans, which is why this album sounds like
an attempt to will the feeling of a long-gone
musical epoch into a modern context.
From its big opening, the first track of the
album, ‘Give Life Back To Music’, does rather
set the tone. Before it settles into its disco funk
stylings, the explosive start is the sort of thing
you might expect in some imaginary musical
about the New York of 1977 set mostly in
Studio 54. Look! There’s Bianca Jagger in
the nip, clopping around the dancefloor on a
white horse, clouds of high quality Peruvian
chang billowing out of the booths. ‘Random
Access Memories’ is tightly clad in cameltoe satin leggings, you see. It also wears
a beard, because when those disco dudes
and ladies got themselves home, they would
reach for a Fleetwood Mac or Eagles album,
skin up on the sleeve, and kick back to the
smooth tones and blissful, pain-free melodies. When Giorgio Moroder suddenly starts
talking (the track is called ‘Giorgio By
Moroder’), a party ambience giving way
to another restrained funk workout, if we
weren’t on top of the “concept” that Daft
Punk are working on, we should be now.
It’s a fucking documentary. Moroder freely
uses expressions like “click track” and
“patched to the Moog modular”, which will
surely leave the hand-dance aficionados
of ‘Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger’ (12
years ago, time travel fans) scratching their
heads. It develops, suitably, into a Moroderesque/‘Magic Fly’ sequenced dancefloor
bubbler and then bursts into a frenetic
prog-rock-for-theatre climax. Which makes
it sound almost sane, which it really isn’t.
‘Within’ has the utterly ubiquitous robo-voice
whining over an electric piano torch song.
Sounds like the robot’s lost, wandering
about on some planet or other, probably all
robot-sad. “There are so many things I don’t
understand / There’s a world within me that I
cannot explain,” it warbles. It’s faintly risible
first time around, in the way those overblown
emotional rock operas of the 70s were, with
their earnestness spilling out everywhere.
But then it nags away at your memory and
gets under your skin. Next up is ‘Instant
Crush’, featuring Julian Casablancas, him
off of The Strokes, getting his ass autotuned
to buggery fronting some robot lover’s
pop. By this point, the autotune slathered
across everything is either making you want
to throw yourself out of a window, or you
are listening to it in isolation, on shuffle, or
on the radio, or in a club, or because you
cherry picked the album to bits and are just
listening track-by-79p-track. Or you are also
a robot and so you like robot voices a lot.
It comes as quite some relief to hear Pharrell
Williams singing unadorned, no autotune,
just a guy singing, on ‘Lose Yourself To
Dance’. However, the album’s building up a
head of downtempo steam by this point, the
thrills and weirdness of ‘Giorgio By Moroder’
swamped by a wave of melancholy. It’s the
sound of a forlorn nostalgia, a yearning
for a time you were never a part of that’s
never going to come back, no matter
how hard you close your eyes and wish.
‘Contact’, whose main collaborator is
NASA, seems like it’s just waiting for some
Tim Rice lyrics. Until the drums come in
and Daft Punk deliver an organ-pumping
(Rick Wakeman organ, that is) six-minute
climax that will lift the lid of any venue you
care to mention, indoor or otherwise.
Gone are the compressed, heart-stopping
kick drums, ramped up are the autotuned
robot guys and the ancestor worship. What
we have here is a mirrorball image of a
decade which birthed pretty much everything
Daft Punk hold dear. It’s fractured and
goofy, slick and mad. It’s also an album
which will, I suspect, grow in stature as the
general bewilderment at it dies down.
MARK ROLAND
ALBUM REVIEWS
LITTLE BOOTS
Nocturnes
On Repeat
An after-dark mix of electro pop,
disco and house – and the influence
of a certain Material Girl
Having followed the approach (and, on
the track ‘Strangers’ at least, the sound)
of her heroine Robyn by establishing her
own record label, Victoria Hesketh, aka
Little Boots, has returned to the fray four
years after her much-hyped debut album,
‘Hands’. The follow up, ‘Nocturnes’, is
pitched as a late-night, in-the-wee-small-hours
collection that sounds like someone playing
their favourite records ’til dawn to a group
of strangers they’ve just met and brought
back to their flat. We’ve all been there.
The title suggests a string of chilledout, atmospheric numbers, as does the
moody techno-throb of the opening track,
‘Motorway’, but unlike other examples
of after-dark electronic introspection, like
the Pet Shop Boys’ ‘Nightlife’ and Moby’s
‘Destroyed’, ‘Nocturnes’ is more Studio
54 than last tube to Tooting. Way back in
2011, the teaser track ‘Shake’ horrified
some of her fan base with the suggestion that
Little Boots might have gone, God forbid,
“dance”. Well, if tracks such as ‘Every Night
I Say A Prayer’ and ‘Satellites’ are anything
to go by, she probably has, but only as
much as Madonna has ever gone dance.
In fact, the influence of Madge hangs heavy
over the entire album, which also knowingly
references the likes of New Order, St Etienne,
Giorgio Moroder, Kylie Minogue and other
electro-poppers with one foot in the charts
and the other on the dancefloor. From an
artist less inclined to wear their influences on
their sleeve, this would sound irredeemably
derivative, but a clear joy for this type of
music just about prevents ‘Nocturnes’ coming
off as a shameless pastiche. Little Boots is
adept at trying on a variety of different hats
from the musical dressing-up box, even if
she still lacks a definitive sound of her own.
She comes closest here on ‘Broken
Record’ and ‘Crescendo’, but like her
much-loved mixtapes, ‘Nocturnes’ sounds
more like a mash-up of influences than
their distillation into something unique.
Even the production, by the likes of
Andy Butler (Hercules And Love Affair)
and James Ford (Simian Mobile Disco),
will have 80s music nerds trainspotting
references to Arthur Baker, Shep Pettibone,
William Orbit and Jellybean Benitez.
‘Nocturnes’ may see Little Boots spending
too much time gazing over her shoulder in
pursuit of her vision, but at least you are
never in any doubt that this is an album
bursting at the seams with reverential love.
BILL BRUCE
BRITISH ELECTRIC
FOUNDATION
Music Of Quality And
Distinction
Volume 3: Dark
Wall Of Sound
A third volume of electronica meets
the cover version from the hands of
the undisputed master
In a world where ‘The X Factor’ has made the
thrill of a cover version look like a lost sock
in a washing machine of identikit singers
honking one out as their 15 minutes tick-tocks
to nothingness, we should be very grateful for
people like Martyn Ware.
When the original Human League
imploded, splitting the band in two, the
smart money was on Ware and Ian Craig
Marsh becoming the hit machine. With the
success of ‘Dare’, it didn’t quite pan out
that way, and Ware and Marsh were left to
quietly go about their business. The pair’s
impact was anything but quiet, though.
Forming Heaven 17 and its British Electric
Foundation production wing, their first fruit
came in the shape of BEF’s 1981 ‘Songs
For Stowaways’, a cassette-only outing that
nodded in the direction of a new-fangled
pocketable tape player called the Sony
Stowaway in the UK, the second generation
of which was renamed the Walkman.
The very idea of listening to music on the
move made the Walkman the most coveted
item of the early 80s teenage world and
BEF were riding on its coattails. Smart
move. While there’s little doubting the
genius of ‘Dare’, its total acceptance into
the mainstream left Heaven 17 looking
like a much cooler leftfield bet. I can still
recall hearing H17’s edgy ‘Fascist Groove
Thang’ for the first time and thinking
what the heck is this. That Radio One
thought the sentiment too controversial for
daytime play only served to fuel our fire.
So when BEF’s ‘Music Of Quality And
Distinction Volume 1’ dropped in 1982, we
were primed for something a bit special.
Classic songs covered by contemporary
artists was at the time groundbreaking
stuff – and it was only made more so
with new-fangled machines providing the
backing tracks. Not only that, but it revived
a couple of careers with unlikely turns from
fading stars Tina Turner and Sandie Shaw.
But that was then. So where does an
album of cover versions sit in 2013? The
idea of ‘Music Of Quality And Distinction
Volume 3’ is a simple one – to reinterpret a
collection of classic tracks by giving them
a dark edge. With Martyn Ware at the
controls, it’s a gimme that the production is
going to be pretty special. The real trick is
how you marry that to a dizzying variety
of vocal performances and have the whole
thing work nicely as album. It’s a tricky
act to pull off, but BEF have form. And
across these 15 tracks, pull it off they do.
Hats off in particular to former Long Blonde
Kate Jackson and her gorgeous take on
Blondie’s ‘Picture This’, which has such a
sinister sheen it should be reported to the
police immediately. The line “If it wasn’t for
your job in the garage” sung by a Brit does
conjure up a strange vision of the old boy
in the local Esso petrol station, though. The
Communards’ Sarah Jane Morris turns in
a storming showdown with John Martyn’s
‘Don’t Want To Know’, Erasure’s Andy Bell is
a revelation serving up an understated treat
with Kate Bush’s ‘Breathing’, complete with
the original, terrifying Cold War commentary
mid-song, while everyone’s favourite 80s pop
kitten Kim Wilde turns in a hugely enjoyable
romp through Stevie Wonder’s ‘Every Time I
See You I Go Wild’. The Wilde/Wild thing
is a nice touch too. I’m imagining Volume
4 pairing singers with song namesakes.
The star turn? Could well be Boy George,
who reinvents himself over two tracks.
Pick two tunes for George to cover and
you’d still be guessing next Christmas.
The Stooges’ ‘I Wanna Be Your Dog’ and
Lou Reed’s ‘Make Up’, anyone? With
the former, George is unrecognisable in
a furious, snarling blast, while the latter
seems to forget the dark theme, being a
delightfully gravelly bucket of joy. The most
poignant moment meanwhile goes to Glenn
Gregory’s reprise of The Associates’ ‘Party
Fears Two’, which Heaven 17 fans will be
familiar with from 2008’s album of reworks,
‘Naked As Advertised’. With a piano and
the slightest whisper of strings for backing,
it’s so glorious it fair stops you in your tracks.
That the late, very great Billy MacKenzie
– who featured on the two previous
collections – appears posthumously through
one of his own songs is a lovely tribute.
More than anything, ‘Songs Of Quality
And Distinction Volume 3’ weaves a
magic you don’t often find these days. It’s
a captivating, thoughtful collection that
makes ‘The X Factor’ look like what it is.
Soulless guffage. For that, we are very
grateful for people like Martyn Ware.
NEIL MASON
JON HOPKINS
Immunity
Domino
The Eno collaborator captures
modern club culture in a bell jar
The latest solo opus from Jon Hopkins sees
him taking his signature ambient techno-ish
sound into newer, more human territories.
The four years since his last solo work,
‘Insides’, have been marked by production
and keyboard contributions, most notably
with Brian Eno on ‘Small Craft On A Milk
Sea’, with Eno again as an assistant on
Coldplay’s ‘Viva La Vida’ album, and on
‘Diamond Mine’, which he wryly describes
as his Mercury-losing production partnership
with King Creosote. King Creosote appears
here too, as it goes, conjuring up some
typically fragile vocals for the title track.
The influence of Eno is so widespread in
modern music that it’s probably unfair to
describe Jon Hopkins as a protege, but
listening to ‘Immunity’ you do sense that
working with one of electronic music’s
fiercest intellects has left its mark. Like Eno,
Hopkins seems capable of wringing a
huge degree of sonic inventiveness from
what is a relatively modest rig. The dreamy
cinematic soundscapes of his earlier work
are still present, but less prevalent, with a
greater emphasis on organic sounds, not
quite musique concrete but certainly the
manipulation of found sounds into something
hypnotic and sensual. At the same time,
ALBUM REVIEWS
sound from its cultural past and is gorged
on in the immediate present. It’s a period of
history collapsing rather than repeating.
the electronic inputs are more aggressive,
more in your face. Hopkins understands
the dynamics of the dancefloor and there
is a trance-like intensity to how sounds
ripple and hiss, building slowly to form rich
rhythmic textures that undulate and bubble.
‘Immunity’ also seems to be part of that
odd, but seemingly unconnected, current
trend for releasing albums influenced by
a night on the town and taking in all the
peaks and troughs that this entails – from
the thunderous techno of ‘Collider’ to the
more reflective melancholia of ‘Breathe
This Air’ and ‘Form By Firelight’, the latter
constructed from the sonic guts of Hopkins’
childhood piano. Here again you could
point to an Eno-like fascination, not just with
the mechanics of sound, but also with how
sound behaves, its environment and what
else is allowed to bleed in. As an album, this
is modern club culture captured in a bell jar,
from boudoir to dancefloor to pavement.
‘Immunity’ pulls off the tricky feat of being
emotional and cerebral. It demands
your attention much more than the aural
wallpaper that often sneaks out tagged as
ambient music. Hopkins has put his life,
sonically and literally, into this album, and
has once more proved he is a distinctive
voice at the forefront of electronic music.
BILL BRUCE
MOUNT KIMBIE
Cold Spring Fault Less Youth
Warp
Post-dubstep ghost-soul from the
very edge of collapsed history
Welcome to a quiet revolution, an electronic
music sea change which has been gaining
momentum in the years since dubstep went
stadium.
Mount Kimbie are at the forefront of this
quiet revolution. They’re inspired as much
by Drake and Alt J as Benga and Bon
Iver, re-imagined through a James Blake
mixtape. They call themselves post-dubstep,
but they owe as much to 2-step garage and
alternative hip hop as ambient soul and
minimal electronica, reconstructed through
the twisted filters of Massive Attack.
Don’t be fooled by the post-dubstep
moniker, though. Its relation to dubstep is
more through the use of understatement
and space. It also relates to the personal
history of the Mount Kimbie duo – Kai
Campos and Dom Maker – and their initial
emergence into the experimental 2-step
arena of revolutionaries like Kode9. The
‘post’ prefix suggests they’re following on
from something. But this is where Mount
Kimbie and their ilk (contemporaries include
Cholombian, Joy Orbison, Sangam and
Morgan Hislop) represent a very interesting
moment in time, in that they come at a point
when music consumption has separated
This idea of history collapsing has been
linked to the post-modernists of sampledelia
and the art of plunderphonics. But there
is a difference here. Where previous
sonic collaging was built around an ironic
reverence for historical significance,
Mount Kimbie and their friends are part
of a generation which has grown up
being able to access all music online –
instantly and removed from any historical
markers. Significance is irrelevant.
So imagine the impact of hearing Bowie’s
‘Warzawa’ just as music, without the
baggage of visuals and significance. Or
New Order’s ‘ICB’ without the Saville
imagery and the Curtis history? What if
your entire musical education was through
the immediacy of sounds downloaded. No
album artwork, no biographical detail, no
hype or intrigue, no canon, no inferred
meaning – just music, for the love and desire
for music. This is the quiet revolution.
‘Cold Spring Fault Less Youth’ is post-history
then. It wields its influences without any sense
of irony or hidden meaning. It is entirely from
the “what you see is what you get” now-ness
of internet consumption. Its sense of its own
historical significance is limited to the short
period of its own existence.
So let’s dig in. The opener, ‘Homs
Recording’, fuses church organ and sax
with rolling beats and the restrained sound
of soulful vocals with the showboating riffs
and flips removed. It’s a trick that’s repeated
on ‘Blood And Form’, which feels like jazz
funk dragged backwards through the brutal
circuits of lo-fi glitch. This tortured soul
ambience features again through ‘Break
Well’, which builds around a series of muted
arpeggios and somnambulist sequences
before erupting into a post-punk flow of
picked guitar and upfront, driving bass.
‘So Many Times, So Many Ways’ takes
a roughly similar line, downloading the
spirit of 1979 through 2013’s filters.
With ‘In The Sun’, they move it on again by
making a proper album, just like the olden
days. In this age of instant gratification,
where you can fill your ears with pretty
much whatever you like when you like, it’s
a real treat to not only find a record worth
listening to from start to finish but, as the
tracks melt into each other, something that
was meant to be heard that way. What’s
more, ‘In The Sun’ adds to the thrill by being
one of those rare delights that leaves you
feeling a little lost as the last track fades.
The four-to-the-floor kick and jittering 2-step
beats of ‘Made To Stray’ most closely
resembles Mount Kimbie’s debut album,
‘Crooks And Lovers’, until another ghostsoul vocal performance reveals new depths.
Among the standouts, ‘You Took Your
Time’ and ‘Meter, Pale, Tone’ boast guest
vocals from the always interesting King
Krule, which ache with a combination of
disillusion and anger to minimal backdrops.
‘Cold Spring Fault Less Youth’ is the sound of
immediacy
in an avalanche of filtered information. It’s
the here and now disappearing into the
recent past. And it might just
be one of the finest albums so far that is fully
inspired
and expressed via the experiential
culture of the internet.
MARTIN JAMES
BOMB THE BASS
In The Sun
O*Solo Recordings
‘Beat Dis’ supremo Tim Simenon
just gets better and better, as
the new BTB set shows
There are some people who have made such
a sizeable dent on the music landscape that
mere mention of their name will have you
dribbling with anticipation. Utter
the words “Bomb The Bass” and do
we not dribble? We do. We do.
The dent BTB big chief Tim Simenon has
made since his ‘Beat Dis’ debut in 1988 is
crater-like. You’d think that, by the time he’d
got to 2013, the making music urge may
well have diminished in the wake of his top
dog producer credentials and the like. But
we’ll forgive you for that thought because ‘In
The Sun’, the sixth BTB album in a quarter of
century, is every inch as good as you’d hope.
Settling as a two-piece, Simenon and his
singing cohort Paul Conboy have really hit
their stride after re-engaging following the
13-year hiatus that led to 2008’s ‘Future
Chaos’ and the 2010 follow-up, ‘Back
To Light’. Both albums showed off a new
approach. Gone were the trademark samples
and frantic hip hop breaks, and in came
a more straightforward tunemongering
with analogue electronica at its heart.
The whole lot really is a work of beauty.
With a dubby undertow throughout,
it’s proper late night stuff. The opener,
‘Wandering Star’, sets the scene with its
at-ease deep groove underpinned by all
manner of squelches, and things really get
going with the brassy parping of ‘Time Falls
Apart’. The swirly ‘Where Better’ is a total
corker, perhaps even the standout with its
deliciously infectious singalong sentiment
(“Where better than to be with my two best
girls”), or maybe the standout is the pots
and pans stylings and grumbling bassline
of the hypnotic ‘All Alone’, or maybe… Oh
heck, who are we kidding, it’s all stand out.
In short, the kind of album turning the
lights down low was made for. That
crater? Just got bigger, didn’t it?
NEIL MASON
ALBUM REVIEWS
JUAN ATKINS &
MORITZ VON
OSWALD
Borderland
Tresor
Two techno heavyweights team up
for an album that could have done
with some pruning
Juan Atkins was an occasional third of Moritz
von Oswald’s 3MB project, sometimes
swapping that role with fellow Detroit
pioneer Eddie Fowlkes. Moritz von Oswald
tweaked at least 499 of Juan Atkins’ Model
500 knobs. Now Juan and Moritz have
pushed their partnership to the fore for the
first time with this collaborative album.
‘Borderland’ is a significant pairing, realising
much-needed new material from two superstars
of techno. The Moritz von Oswald Trio
delighted and frustrated in equal measure
on 2012’s ‘Fetch’, its subterranean gloom
sitting somewhere between a dancefloor
and a dungeon. Juan Atkins meanwhile
revived Tresor’s archive series with his
beautifully hypnotic Audiotech alias, but hasn’t
released an awful lot lately, besides some
Infiniti remixes and an all-too-brief although
fiercely impressive Model 500 revival.
‘Borderland’ is club-oriented, yes, and it was
recorded quickly – almost on the fly by the
sounds of it – and the results purport to be
organic and vibrant. Its central piece, the
original mix of ‘Electric Garden’ is impressive
enough, with mid-paced synth bites spiking
against robotic purrs. Tension builds as
the drums echo over each other, but about
halfway through, when the beat tries to
ground itself, there’s a nasty rhythmic clash.
It sounds like a wedding DJ in the middle of
a post-buffet carbohydrate crash. ‘Electric
Garden’ is preceded by a ‘Deep Jazz In
The Garden Mix’, which is a more urgent
version with the resonance turned up, and
with growls and momentary trumpet parps
spinning discordant echo right to the edges.
And look, there’s the track again as ‘Electric
Dub’, barely distinguishable from the original.
There it is yet again as ‘Mars Garden’, this
time with doom-laden zaps and sweeps.
‘Digital Forest’ thankfully takes us out of the
‘Garden’. It takes a bit too long to drop its busy
beat, but when it does, it layers quite nicely.
‘Footprints’ gives us clipped Detroit house with
chorus-laden synth punches. In fact, it’s so
clipped that the beat almost meets itself coming
back to disappear into a semi-quaver blip.
It’s a relief to get something more interesting
on the album. ‘Treehouse’ develops some of
the ‘Garden’ themes into a bouncy minimal
bassline that keeps things rooted while all the
interesting stuff happens at the higher end –
pitch bends, congas, woodblock and fat claps,
all while tinkling piano improvisation filters into
a distressed whistle. The short outro, ‘Afterlude’,
has an orchestra trying to arpeggiate itself out
of the depths of hell before ending the album
with an abrupt electronic shatter that’ll have
you hurling your headphones across the room.
A “borderland” isn’t just a geographical label.
It suggests something uncertain between two or
more states, something requiring negotiation,
something that may be a source of conflict.
On ‘Borderland’, however, it suggests a
meander in a garden. The scale is small and
so is the scope for creativity. Juan Atkins and
Moritz von Oswald have approached this
as DJs recording quickly and freely – and I
think this was a mistake. While it seems there
are more studio sessions in the can and the
project should be seen in the context of a
series of releases, including several 12-inch
singles, what we have with ‘Borderland’ is
a decent EP overgrown across eight tracks.
Some weeding might have been a good idea.
JOHNNY MOBIUS
THE CUTLER
Everything Is Touching
Everything Else
Steel Tiger
Downtempo electronica shot through
with dub, funk and a
little Zen philosophy
These two guys have a lot of history. A lot
of serious history. Steve Cobby was half of
Fila Brazillia, a highly successful and prolific
endeavour which racked up 12 albums,
provided music for numerous film soundtracks
and TV shows, and produced remixes for
everyone from Radiohead to The Orb. His
partner in The Cutler is David Brennand, aka
Porky, who co-founded the Hull-based Pork
Recordings with Cobby back in 1990 and
nurtured the label to rude health with a roster
that included Fila Brazillia, Baby Mammoth,
Bullitnuts, Heights Of Abraham (another
Cobby project) and The Solid Doctor (ditto).
Cobby and Brennand released their debut
album as The Cutler in 2008, but then fell
quiet until the appearance of last year’s
‘The Best Things In Life Aren’t Things’ long
player. The fact that ‘Everything Is Touching
Everything Else’ snaps so swiftly at the heels
of their 2012 set indicates that the creative
fires are burning brightly once more. And
some. The Cutler know few boundaries and
are as likely to develop musical notions
embodied by the Indian subcontinent as they
are to explore the outer edges of electronica,
something clearly demonstrated throughout
this album.
As a broad frame, what we’ve got here is
downtempo music with dubby and funky
slants. But that’s just the starting point. We’ve
also got a bassline supplied by an electricity
substation, the particles fizzing between
the strings and charging the surrounding
air, and a squelchy soundtrack of gas
bubbling up through thick liquid. We’ve
got flashes of electro and hints of disco.
We’ve got whispered vocals, bluesy guitars,
carnival percussion, alien harps, echoing
ticks, muffled hammerings on pipelines,
the whirrs and clangs of industry. We’ve
got a track called ‘Namaste’, which is a
traditional Hindu and Buddhist salutation,
and some philosophy from Zen master
Alan Watts (“The real you is not a puppet
which life pushes around… the real, deep
down you is the whole universe”). We’ve
got another track title taken from a Grateful
Dead lyric (‘Roll Those Laughing Bones’
from the song ‘Candyman’) and some
terrific guest vocals from folktronic outfit
Little Glitches and one-time No Ceremony
singer Isobel Helen. We’ve got positive
vibrations, sinister undertones, tap dancing,
haunted houses, submarine noises, diluted
sirens, chiming clocks. Oh yeah, we’ve got
bounce too. We mustn’t forget the bounce.
need to ask that then you haven’t been
reading this properly. Listen, if you’re stoned,
parts of this album might open up a portal
to another galaxy. You have been warned.
VADER EVADER
THE ORB
FEATURING LEE
“SCRATCH” PERRY
More Tales From The
Orbservatory
Cooking Vinyl
Frustrating second offering
compounds a lingering sense
of missed opportunity
There are a number of recurrent themes on
‘Everything Is Touching Everything Else’.
The twists and tangles of inter-connected
elements, technology viewed with contempt
until proven otherwise, new soundtracks for
old films, old theories for a new movement.
That Alan Watts quote is a big clue to what
is perhaps the most important theme of
all. The whole reduced to the singular, the
singular exploded to produce the whole.
Arriving at Part Two of what should really
have been a tantalising team-up, it’s
difficult not to recoil at the bittersweet taste
of What Might Have Been. On the one
hand, Lee “Scratch” Perry, a man who
needs no introduction. On the other, The
Orb, of whom introductions are equally
extraneous. News of their initial partnership
was followed by a brace of mixes on the
internet which, though unexceptional, were
at least weird – and that, after all, is what
you want from The Orb and Scratch. You
want weird. Low-end weird. Psychedelic,
galactic, chess-on-‘Top Of The Pops’ weird.
As for whether ‘Everything Is Touching
Everything Else’ is any good, well, if you
Sadly, long-time Orbservers know that
space cadet Orb has been absent from the
menu for some time, appearing only as
an occasional chef’s special. Their story is
one of creative push and pull, and while
Alex Paterson remains the figurehead, their
sound has for some time been dictated by
his musical partner Thomas Fehlmann, a
man who formed 3MB with Juan Atkins
and Moritz von Oswald; whose earlier
collaborations featured Wolfgang Voigt;
who once launched a label called Teutonic
Beats. Unsurprisingly, The Orb has become
steadily more disciplined and more minimal
under his stewardship, a progression that
reached its apogee during the group’s
mid-noughties tenure at Kompakt. While
disciplined and minimal may be nonemore-right for Rhythm & Sound, to whom
the Fehlmann-period Orb are indebted,
it’s not right for The Orb. How telling that
for ‘The Dream’ in 2007, a tragically
overlooked late-period classic, where they
seemed to rediscover that wide-eyed, loopy
magic that made them so great in the first
place, Fehlmann was mostly absent.
So which of those two Orbs – the more
exacting rumbling of Fehlmann or the big,
goofy space theatrics of Paterson – do you
want turning up for a collaboration with Lee
“Scratch” Perry, a man who’s never happier
than when he’s being interviewed with a
plate of fruit on his head? Don’t answer that.
At a guess, I’d say those earlier, encouraging
internet mixes were curated by Paterson; the
subsequent album, on the other hand, while
not nearly as sparse as The Orb on Kompakt,
was very much Fehlmann in execution.
Which meant that, for The Orb, and certainly
for The Orb collaborating with Scratch,
the album was sonically unadventurous,
resolutely earthbound. As well as an
unnecessary cover of ‘Police And Thieves’,
it also included a pedestrian version of ‘Little
Fluffy Clouds’ that sounded as though it
had never even looked at a Rizla. Instead
of being enlivened by the partnership, both
parties sounded restrained by it: The Orb,
not as comfortable with Scratch as they were
with Dave Gilmour; Scratch not as feisty with
The Orb as he had been with Mark Stewart.
ALBUM REVIEWS
It would be a delight to report that things
are put right for this sequel, but that’s far
from the case. There are pluses: five of the
11 tracks here are as good as anything
on the first album. ‘Making Love In Dub’ is
especially impressive, taking the Rhythm &
Sound-ish, stripped-back sound into even
more subterranean depths, while Scratch,
always a welcome vocal presence, toasts
over the top. Lyrically, it’s the usual stream
of word-association football for him – “No
madness, no sadness, no stress, no distress,”
he tells us on the gorgeously laconic ‘No
Ice Age’ – and sound-wise he gets more
creative on ‘Don’t Rush I’, where doubletracked vocals echo off into infinity. But of
the rest of the tracks, one is an interlude, and
– get this – the rest are instrumentals. Not
remixes or versions, mind, but instrumentals
of the preceding tracks. You remember that
disappointment you used to get when you
flipped your seven-inch, only to discover
the lazyband B-side? Imagine that times
five. The Orb long ago fell victim to the
idea that their every button press deserved
a release, and anybody who’s made a
practice of buying Lee “Scratch” Perry knows
you get a lot of chaff with your wheat.
But really? Five instrumental versions?
You know where we’re heading with this:
these two patchy albums should have
been combined to make one decent one.
These days, you can easily programme
your own, of course, and you’re advised
to do so. But even then you may be left
wishing for The Orb of ‘The Dream’ or
‘Metallic Spheres’, rather than The Orb
of ‘Bicycles And Tricycles’. Had these
two albums been primarily authored by
Paterson, a man with a notoriously slow
work-rate, there’s every chance we’d still be
waiting for them. Nevertheless, you can’t
help but feel they’d have been worth it.
ANDREW HOLMES
ANDY CATO
Times & Places
Apollo
The man from Groove Armada
is your tour guide on this roundthe-world musical jaunt
‘Times & Places’ is an album that’s been
20 years in the making – a rate of output
on a par with sluggish shoegazers My
Bloody Valentine – so Andy Cato can hardly
be accused of rush-releasing half-baked
material. Of course, it helps that for the past
couple of decades he’s also had another
creative outlet as one half of boombastic
ambient funksters Groove Armada. But this
solo effort had such a lengthy gestation
period that chunks of it were originally
recorded on C90 cassette tapes and floppy
discs (remember them?), often on the road
as Groove Armada criss-crossed the world
on their way to global dance music infamy.
So as well as being an exercise in sonic
archaeology, this is an album that’s part
biographical and part psychogeographical,
a musical tale of a globetrotting
DJ/producer flitting from illegal outdoor
raves in the damp English countryside to
big-name charity events in deepest, hottest
Africa. Indeed, ‘Back From Castlemorton’
and ‘Lake Of Stars’ were recorded within
days of their respective happenings.
Handily, there’s a digital scrapbook with
pictures and snippets from tour diaries
giving useful information about the songs.
In places it’s shot through with the fuzzy
comedown afterglow that characterised much
of Groove Armada’s debut album, ‘Northern
Star’. ‘Abbey Road Jam’ – recorded at the
world famous studios – swoons to a simple
piano riff and judicious vocal abstractions.
The pulsing Ibiza-flavoured chords of ‘Sunrise
Sant Agnes’ and the swooshing pads of
‘Moscow To St Petersburg By Train’ are
also made for horizontal listening, while
the mournful strings of ‘The Coastal Path’
provide a suitably dreamy background
for a nameless singer to wax lyrical about
‘‘The cards I never dealt before’’. It’s
deep without ever veering into the waters
of pretentiousness. It’s not all sideways
ambience though, as the bass-heavy deep
house licks of ‘7am Drop’ and the urgent
synth funk of ‘Florence To Rome’ testify. Sure,
there’s nothing as inyerface as, say, Groove
Armada’s ‘Superstylin’’ or ‘I See You Baby’,
but Cato knows how to get his groove on.
Despite being a largely instrumental
album, ‘Times & Places’ showcases Cato’s
storytelling powers. Close your eyes and
you too are on that train heading across
the Russian wilderness or packed into a car
chasing a golden sunset across the White
Isle. A few weeks crammed in a tour bus
with a bunch of sweaty roadies and guitar
techs has never sounded so appealing.
These tales from the road are evocative and
surreal in equal measure. Here’s hoping
there are further chapters to come.
KIERAN WYATT
TRICKY
False Idols
False Idols
The Trickster rediscovers his
youth and delivers his best
album in a long time
When Tricky headlined the Blissfields
Festival in the UK in 2011 with an industrial
metal-inspired set of electronic mayhem,
you’d have been forgiven for thinking the
wrong Tricky had turned up. The onslaught
of moshing, body surfing and stage
invasions erupted from as early as the
third song. Could this really be the skinny
Tricky Kid, the paranoid asthmatic with a
tongue that was way too sharp and spliffs
as hypertonic blunt as a blunt could be?
The Tricky I was hoping to see at Blissfields
was the pre-millennial wordsmith whose
beats dripped with suffocating tension and
whose rhymes gasped for air in end-ofdays pollution. The Tricky captured in time
as a definitive version. But this was Tricky
post-noughties and the difference couldn’t be
any more stark. The sinewy Tricky Kid who
had always seemed to be skating on the
edge of collapse had been replaced by a
muscular, taught Tricky Man with a masterful
control over his band that placed him in
the role of conductor, directing the chaos
of brutal sounds being created onstage.
Flash forward two years and Tricky is back,
but he’s no longer the flexing aggressor.
He’s returned to his frailer self, seemingly
trying to capture the essence of what it
was like to be Tricky Kid. Could this be
the Bristolian’s mid-life album? Certainly it
offers a reassessment of each part of his
career. But more than that, it also includes
continual musical references to his debut
album, a record that holds so strong in
our memories of him and has defined our
reading of all his subsequent releases. And
nothing he’s put out since has lived up to
the shock and awe of ‘Maxinquaye’.
But why would it? That first album was
riding high on the superhype of (ahem)
trip hop. When it landed, it seemed to
define the era – musically, ideologically
and atmospherically. ‘False Idols’, then, is
simply another album that will be viewed
through the prism of that debut. What’s
different about it, though, is that Tricky
seems to be viewing it this way too.
From the cover of Van Morrison’s ‘Somebody’s
Sins’ to the Japan-sampling ‘Hey Love’, he
evokes the memory of the paranoid Tricky
Kid, all sounds close up, air sucked out and
buried alive. Nowhere is this more evident
than on ‘Valentine’, which loops a smoky
vocal refrain over choking beats, while
‘Parenthesis’ takes the thrash guitars of his
post-Island Records output and relocates them
into a kind of ‘Island Years Remembered’
ambience. The effect is epic and fragile at
the same time. It’s a trick he pulls off again
on ‘Nothing’s Changed’, which fuses those
fidgety, wheezing vowels with gothic strings.
So far so good, but when the Trickster takes
his eyes off the nostalgia, ‘False Idols’ veers
into a directionless mess. The beautiful
vocals on ‘Nothing Matters’ are smothered
in slabs of 90s hands-in-the-air house and
an anthemic chorus that wouldn’t sound out
of place on a Florence And The Machine
song. In the context of the rest of the album,
it’s too damn straight. Similarly, ‘We Don’t
Die’ finds an over-obvious arrangement
rinsing the emotion out of what might
have been a classic Tricky moment.
‘False Idols’ is the sound of Tricky Man
rediscovering the honesty of Tricky
Kid after a few years in the creative
wilderness. Or it’s the product of a man
trying to recapture his youth. Either way,
it’s his best album in quite some time.
Even if it doesn’t match ‘Maxinquaye’.
MARTIN JAMES
ALBUM REVIEWS
a stop-start sparseness which builds by
way of laser farts and broken breaks. It
introduces an electro theme revisited by
‘Pray Crash’, where a throbbing two-note
bassline pulsates until a bubbling “ohwaaah” refrain explodes into reverb. 
THE BLACK DOG
Tranklements
Dust Science Recordings
The moody pups produce
their best album since ‘Radio
Scarecrow’ – bolt-ons included
The Black Dog have been in a bad mood
of late. ‘Further Vexations’ took on the
terror of constant surveillance, while
the brooding ‘Music For Real Airports’
expressed the existentialist monotony of
waiting for a suitcase on a conveyor belt.
And with track titles like ‘The Death Ov
The Black Sun’ and ‘Dark Wave Creeping’
on their last full-length outing, surely it’s
time for some happy hardcore, isn’t it?
The pups have been out of the basket
already in 2013 and they’ve been as
irascible as ever. ‘The Return Ov Bleep’
rasped and snarled, while the ‘Darkhaus’
EPs took Sheffield industry as their cue.
‘Tranklements’, The Black Dog’s 11th
studio album, is better than any of these.
It’s quite probably the group’s strongest
album since 2008’s ‘Radio Scarecrow’.
‘Tranklements’ means trinkets in some
parts of the UK. Maybe it’s a good way to
describe the numerous snippets of themes
The Black Dog pick up from their alliances
with the likes of the Electronic Supper Club
collective. Maybe that’s why this album
has them sounding as fresh as ever. After
a tranquil start, ‘Atavistic Resurgence’ has
On the downbeat tracks, there is true
emotion – prickling, slow and contemplative.
The wafer-thin melodies of ‘Internal Collapse’
(keep those motivational titles coming,
guys) flings low-level clattering way out into
deepest space, attached to Earth by the
thinnest of tethers. And ‘Death Bingo’ (now,
come on) has a crystalline staccato refrain
that delivers breathy 2-step. On the upbeat
tracks, The Black Dog are as smooth as ever.
‘Cult Mentality’ is crisp house encircled by
a spacious bass, the dark disco of ‘First Cut’
sneaks some haunting ambience into the
mix before spooking you with found-sound
taps, and the lightweight nu-breaks of ‘Mind
Object’ crumble into dusty distortion.
There is nothing here that quite matches
the old school techno clout of ‘Train
By The Autobahn’ or the desolation of
‘Riphead’ (both from ‘Radio Scarecrow’),
but ‘Tranklements’ is a solid collection,
bolstered with between-track “bolts”
that connect and separate the main
body of work. The repetitive interludes,
which sound like computers trying to
copulate but instead crashing horribly,
are an old fashioned yet neat trick to
emphasise the pace of the album.
‘Death Bingo’? True masters at work.
JOHNNY MOBIUS
VARIOUS ARTISTS
Grime 2.0
Big Dada
The Stepney sound goes global
but stays true to its untamed spirit
Much in the way that hardcore quickly
became an unloved, embarrassing younger
brother when drum ’n’ bass began winning
Mercury Music Prizes and was the toast of
the broadsheets, so grime occupies a slightly
uncomfortable relationship with its dubstep
progeny, navigating somewhat awkwardly
the increasingly narrow territory between
the reflective sound sculptures of the likes
of Burial on the one hand and the rapidly
encroaching brain sledgehammer blows of
bro-step churned out by Skrillex and his ilk.
Ten years on from the revolution that began in
east and south London, grime has gone global,
with the characteristic broken beats, chirping
8-bit synth riffs and bowel-shuddering bass
drops emerging from territories as far flung
as Japan, Australia and (ahem) Brighton. Big
Dada head honcho Will Ashon and journalist
Joe Muggs have taken on the unenviable
task of trying to document this increasingly
disparate and splintered scene in a coherent
way. ‘Grime 2.0’, then, represents a restating
of the case for the producer as king after the
MCs walked away with the fame and glory
from the sound’s initial London incarnation.
And while the formal constraints are fairly
rigid, this compilation goes to prove that there’s
no shortage of gutsy innovation out there.
Fittingly given its status as Jekyll to dubstep’s
Hyde, much of the material on here
personifies the macho braggadocio you
might expect from a scene birthed in some
of the most dilapidated and deprived areas
of London. Some elements, such as the
blingtastic grating of Tre Mission’s ‘Dollar
Bill’ and the gunshots spiralling out of
Chimpo’s ‘Codeine And Dragon Stout’, veer
perilously close to self parody. Elsewhere, the
likes Chaos & Order’s gritty ‘Logan’s Mind’
and Faze Miyake’s deep rolling ‘5000’
successfully capture the lurking paranoia,
edgy fatalism and apocalyptic street smarts
that typifies the best of the genre. Often, such
as with the contributions from Moony and Mr
SnoWman, the music manages to be both
darkly edgy and gloriously ridiculous within
the confines of a single track. It’s a chaotic,
heady mix that you suspect is intentional.
With 35 tracks spread over 140 minutes, if
‘Grime 2.0’ is somewhat indigestible as a
whole, then that seems to be the point. This is
music which disdains the consideration and
introspection required for long-form output,
and is designed instead for immediacy,
swagger and impact. True to its still happily
untamed spirit, it’s probably best served on
shuffle and played to the point of distortion
through a car stereo, preferably at night.
TOM VIOLENCE
Kalén comes in, she sings in a whisper.
By contast, the title track has her showing
off how strong her voice can be, dancing
along to the quick beat. She is a wonderful
addition to Husky Rescue and this album
wouldn’t have been as good without her.
HUSKY RESCUE
The Long Lost Friend
El Camino
Unpredictable and captivating
stuff from Finland’s finest
folksy electro popsters
It’s not been that long since Husky Rescue
released their last album of folksy electro
pop, 2010’s ‘Ship Of Light’, but ‘The
Long Lost Friend’ is a welcome return
for the Finnish group. In their short time
away, they’ve refined their sound, making
everything much more snappy and slightly
less weird, for better and worse. Admittedly,
after a record based around a UFO
sighting, it can’t be too hard to make a
less weird set, but the themes of friendship
and lost connections on ‘The Long Lost
Friend’ are easier to follow and relate to,
if sometimes a bit too straightforward.
In the past, Husky Rescue have often let
the vocals take a back seat to the clever
instrumentation, but with new singer
Johanna Kalén they take centre stage for a
number of songs. Her voice is reminiscent
of Ólöf Arnalds of Icelandic post-rock
group Múm – ghostly and captivating.
What’s more, she knows how to adapt
it to each individual track, bringing all
the elements together. The album opener,
‘Restless Feet’, is unpredictable. The
bumbling bass synth flips high and low,
violins come in whenever they please,
and odd bleeps echo infrequently. When
Although aliens aren’t the focus of this
album, the group still find themselves
drawn back into space for a while. Once
the heavy bass groove of ‘Under Friendly
Fire’ calms down, the song ends up
floating around in an interstellar break,
complete with wailing electronics like the
Starship Enterprise. Where most bands
would probably try to convey a sense
of space through simple, sparse sounds,
Husky Rescue continue to work the rhythm.
Dense hums make a bed for the spiralling
synthesiser melody, sparkling like stars and
completely eclipsing the rest of the track.
It’s the little details that bring Husky Rescue
songs alive and most of these spring
from the intricate percussion production
throughout. Often built out of static clicks
rather than actual drums, they’re sometimes
unnoticeable. But in tracks such as ‘Colors’,
these noises become something more. Snarelike rolls flutter lightly – imagine the wings of
a bug – and bassy booms burst, enveloping
everything in distortion. Not every song has
them, but when they’re needed, they bloom.
The highest moment comes with ‘Mountains
Only Know’, the poppiest song on the
album. Husky Rescue take the classic idea of
finding a simple, catchy melody and playing
it repeatedly, building a wall of sound
around it with innumerable instruments.
You can almost hear them running around
the studio, giddily trying to find another
way to replicate that exuberant sequence
of notes. Despite this, it doesn’t become
overwhelming because they keep it quite
restrained and don’t let the song go on too
long; it’s actually the shortest cut here. The
mood throughout the album isn’t exactly sad,
but compared to ‘Mountains Only Know’,
everything else could be funeral dirges.
ALBUM REVIEWS
Husky Rescue love a story. They’re like
authors without word processors. The loose
thread on ‘The Long Lost Friend’, however,
works much better through music than
pages in a book. The emotions here are
stronger and more heartfelt when carried
by Husky Rescue’s own brand of bard-like
narration. It’s good to have them back.
SAM SMITH
ALISON MOYET
the minutes
Cooking Vinyl
It’s billed as Alf’s return to
electronic pop, but is this a
reinvention or a retread?
There’s an irksome modern trend for critics
to describe any artist absent from the
public consciousness for more than 12
months to be attempting a “comeback”.
Alison Moyet has certainly been away
for quite a time – some of it spent in a
depressingly familiar cycle of creative
and contractual wrangling, with attendant
label hopping – but ‘the minutes’ isn’t so
much a comeback as a welcome back.
This album is a curious beast, though. At
times it’s distinctly schizoid. There’s the
exhilarating lightweight synthpop of ‘Love
Reign Supreme’ and ‘All Signs Of Life’ –
more A-ha than Yazoo admittedly – and
yet song-wise the former is the sort of thing
Paddy McAloon might have penned had he
ever tried his hand at electro pop. There’s
also much delight to be had in ‘Filigree’,
with its soft purring synth throb and sinewy
melody. It could have accidentally slipped
off ‘You And Me Both’. ‘When I Was Your
Girl’, on the other hand, a reasonable rock
belter that would have sat nicely on 1987’s
‘Raindancing’, all chugga-a-chugga guitar riff
and single foot planted firmly on the monitor,
here sounds like a giant step backwards.
The production by ex-Frou Frou member
Guy Sigsworth (Madonna, Bjork, Seal) is
sympathetic throughout, but the sound of
his atmospheric, post-trip hop electronica
has become so ubiquitous in recent years
that it now seems slightly old hat. It’s at
its worst on the slower, hand-wringing
ballads ‘Apple Kisses’, ‘A Place To Stay’
and ‘Remind Yourself’. They’re far from
bad songs, but the arrangements are
too pedestrian by half. ‘Right As Rain’
meanwhile sounds like it’s been farmed out
for a club mix and then slotted back in as
the requisite toe-tapper. Moyet’s on more
solid ground with ‘Horizon Flame’ and the
darkly windswept and brooding ‘Rung By
The Tide’, which bookend the album and
could have come from a West End stage
adaptation of a Daphne du Maurier novel.
‘the minutes’ has been billed as Alison
Moyet’s return to electronic pop. This is
true to an extent, but she too often plays
safe when you want her to cut loose. The
Everything But The Girl ‘Walking Wounded’style reinvention hinted at by the startling
‘Changeling’, the first song premiered
from the album, isn’t quite realised. It’s just
never that radical. It’s wonderful to hear
that glorious voice again, reaffirming to
the more strident Jessie J’s and Adeles that
Alf is still the one to beat, but from here on
it would great if Moyet’s next move were
to boldly go, all the way to the leftfield.
BILL BRUCE
HOUSE OF BLACK
LANTERNS
Kill The Lights
Houndstooth
Former breakbeat mangler raids
his John Carpenter soundtracks –
with some truly stunning results
Berlin-based producer Dylan Richards has
previously found a home at both Warp and
Ninja Tune for his more breakbeat-oriented
guises King Cannibal and Zilla, with King
Cannibal in particular specialising in the
kind of dubstep used to scare small children
and animals. For House Of Black Lanterns,
however, as well as branching into more
techno-oriented territory, he’s chosen a more
restrained approach. “That threat of violence
is buried deep in texture, rather than worn
outwardly on my sleeve,” he explains.
It sure is. The opener, ‘Beg’, brims with
neurosis. In terms of mood, think an
especially paranoid Massive Attack. Like,
a really edgy Massive Attack. In terms of
music, imagine drum ’n’ bass repurposed as
low BPM techno, with flat-out creepy serial
killer vocals and poised strings awaiting a
release of tension that never quite comes.
For that you need to wait until the next
track, ‘Broken’, where the tempo rises
and bass stabs make the link to Richards’
King Cannibal guise more explicit. In the
transition between the two lies the key to
what makes ‘Kill The Lights’ not just a good
album but a great one, because even as it
shifts in style – techno, electro, post-dubstep,
all are welcome – its grasp of atmosphere
is so assured that it never feels like genre
hopping, never risks being simply “eclectic”.
‘Kill The Lights” has its own, dark character
and it remains constant throughout. Tracks
ebb and flow into one another and ‘Truth
& Loss’ is where Richards’ soundtracky
side makes its presence felt. Imagine the
creepy incidentals of ‘Escape From New
York’ set to a skittering breakbeat. The
dense, slowed-down wobble of ‘I’ll Wait For
You’ slides into the Linton Kwesi Johnsonesque vocal of ‘Juakali’, while ‘You, Me,
Metropolis’ begins with epic analogue
synths. It’s like a dystopian Moroder.
And we haven’t even mentioned two
tremendous turns from vocalist Leni
Ward – entries that, in a masterpiece
of sequencing, soften the mood of the
album, allowing it to breathe, making it
dark, but never oppressive, and eminently
listenable. In short, this is an addictive
and totally immersive experience, with
atmosphere to burn. Yes, there are plenty
of albums out there that demand your
attention. But this one really deserves it.
ANDREW HOLMES
RODION GA
The Lost Tapes
Strut
Vintage tapes from experimental
synthesists isolated behind
the Iron Curtain
Why the 21st century appetite for poorly
recorded and often unfocussed bedroom
music made years before the advent of
cheap and widely available recording
technology? There’s Veronika Vasicka’s
Minimal Wave label, re-releasing nuggets
of obscure electronic music to a voracious
fan base, a healthy following for online
projects like the Bedroom Masters series,
and a clutch of other uncovered gems
floating around the place. It has even
become a genre of its own, with people
recreating the sound in contemporary
recordings and making up back stories
for non-existent long-lost synth bands.
Perhaps it’s to do with the individuality of
this stuff and a nostalgia for a more innocent
time. A time before Fruity Loops and its legion
of drag ’n’ drop music-making software
equivalents made any laptop-wielding slackjaw able to create “tunes” between mouthfuls
of takeaway burgers and have them up on
Soundcloud before drinking the milkshake.
A time when making decent recordings
was flipping difficult and expensive, and
making DIY demos wasn’t much easier.
Imagine, then, how tough it was to make
experimental electronic music in Romania in
the 1970s, when Nicolae Ceausescu had
the nation in a vicious Stalinist grip, and
where getting access to both equipment
and an audience must have been a struggle
on so many levels. During the late 70s and
early 80s, Rodion GA were a band who
made a kind of electronic/psyche/prog
hybrid, infused with the melodic colours of
eastern European folk tunes. It’s the sort of
thing an isolated Romanian cosmonaut might
have listened to in a 1970s Tarkovsky sci-fi
film that was actually about an existential
crisis brought on by the death of God.
Hissing tape, a cheap drum machine, an
organ and piercing synth whistles mark out
‘Alpha Centauri’, the instrumental opener of
‘The Lost Tapes’. It’s muddy and weird, with
snippets of sound effects lurching in and
out, but is a remarkably disciplined and rich
piece, with a glorious melody in the middle.
‘Cantec Fulger’ features screaming crows (I
think) and the same hissing tape and drum
machine, plus singing, some bonkers soloing
and that dark Romanian folk campfire vibe.
‘Caravane’ sees the band in full psyche
rock mode, like heavy Can. And that pretty
much gives you the range of Rodion GA
– futurist synth experimentation, Can-style
space rock and Romanian gypsy intensity.
‘The Lost Tapes’ is strangely compelling,
both as an artefact of the creative urge
as expressed under an oppressive and
long-gone regime, and as the mutations
that 70s electronic rock went through out
there in the further reaches of Europe,
deep behind the Iron Curtain.
MARK ROLAND
ALBUM REVIEWS
The absences do expose ‘Hearts And
Knives’. The use of the iconic CompuRhythm
intro of ‘Fade To Grey’ on ‘She’s Electric’
doesn’t quite summon up past glories. The
first two Visage albums were notable for
their arrangements, counterpoints and
musicality, with layers of Ure’s backing
vocals bolstering Strange’s lead lines. But
like the third album, ‘Beat Boy’, which saw
Strange and Egan try to keep the Visage
name alive after the departure of the Ultravox
and Magazine crews, Strange’s voice is
laid bare and somehow lacks strength.
VISAGE
Hearts And Knives
Blitz Club
Steve Strange is back, but
unfortunately without the rest of his
early 80s New Romantic buddies
After the well-received returns of Ultravox
and Duran Duran, it was inevitable that
Visage would resurrect themselves. Originally
a synthesised collective comprising of
Rusty Egan, Midge Ure, Billy Currie, Dave
Formula and the late John McGeoch (all
of whom apart from Rusty Egan were in
either Ultravox or Magazine), Visage
were fronted by Steve Strange, the face
of the early 80s New Romantic scene.
For ‘Hearts And Knives’, however, only
Strange remains. Egan was involved in
the early stages of the album but departed
due to creative differences, and despite
Strange announcing on German TV that he
was working with Ure again, the Ultravox
singer has distanced himself from the
project (although he did apparently submit
a song on condition that it involved Egan).
‘Diaries Of A Madman’, which is co-written
by Dave Formula and is the one track to
emerge from an aborted attempt to revive
the brand as Visage II back in 2007, is the
only input from the musical driving forces
that gave the world ‘Fade To Grey’, ‘Mind
Of A Toy’ and ‘The Damned Don’t Cry’.
Despite all that, it is great to hear exUltravox guitarist Robin Simon again, even
if his interplay tends to be too dominant
in the mix. The high points are ‘Shameless
Fashion’, which is the obvious choice for
the single and could have come off ‘Beat
Boy’, and ‘Dreamer I Know’, a track
that unleashes lots of melodic potential.
Compared with Ultravox’s ‘Brilliant’ or Duran
Duran’s ‘All You Need Is Now’, however,
‘Hearts And Knives’ doesn’t quite cut it.
CHI MING LAI
THE THIRD MAN
Beyond The Heliosphere
EPM
London producer Toby
Leeming stretches his wings
on a tremendous debut
You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s
gone – and there was a period at the
beginning of the 90s when, God, we
had it good. Rave had burnt itself out and
was busy becoming jungle, while a new
wave of artists had wiped the blackboard
clean and written ‘dub’ on it, and ‘acid’
on it, and ‘ambient’ and ‘Detroit techno’
and ‘Chicago house’. And that movement
became progressive house and gave us
‘Leftism’ and ‘Dubnobasswithmyheadman’
and ‘Sabresonic’ and ‘Morning Dove White’
and ‘Delusions Of Grandeur’, and the seeds
of trance were sown. Before trance was
a dirty word, this was, when Carl Cox’s
debut ‘F.A.C.T.’ mix snuggled Jeff Mills up
to Union Jack and Sasha & Digweed’s first
‘Renaissance’ outing wrote its own rules.
All of which heady times are recalled by
the first two tracks – in fact, the entirety – of
Toby Leeming’s debut as The Third Man.
Epic synth stabs, pretty tinkles and the first
appearance of a deceptively tough 303
mark the opener, ‘Sleep It Off’, a track
reaching for the stars at the same time
as pointing the way to the dancefloor.
‘Double Dawn’, meanwhile, manages to be
reminiscent of both ‘Ahnongay’ and ‘Move
and offers another house-slanted bassline,
cowbell percussion and arpeggiatted synth
as the accoutrements. The crowning glory
of the album, however, is the collaboration
with Merche Blasco (aka Burbuja) on the
synthpop sympathiser ‘Weightless’. Opposite
ends of the spectrum are developed here, the
zesty electronic sprinklings combining with
rich bass tones to form the perfect platform
on which Blasco gently unreels the softest of
vocals. The beauty of this song is that it is so
open. ‘Weightless’ feels genuinely liberating.
Your Body’ at the same time, and next
track, ‘Rise And Fall’, plays like a distorted
Ulrich Schnauss. In other words, like an
even more shoegazey Ulrich Schnauss.
After this, ‘Beyond The Heliosphere’ settles
into a period of building on this rather fine
template: the melodies are accessible, the
influences varied and the mood always
evocative. ‘Beneath The Mine Chamber’
has a suitably cavernous feel, the sound of
dub techno given a more upbeat, uptempo
swing, while ‘A Hero Scene’ adds a touch
of step to the dub. Both are palette cleansers
for the penultimate track, an absolutely
storming ‘Pipes At Helios Canyon’, where
melodic but skyscraping chords recall the
Giorgio Moroder of ‘Midnight Express’
re-imagined by an especially refreshed Age
Of Love. Like that game where you have to
eat a jammy doughnut without licking your
lips, just try listening to this without at least
imagining your arms aloft. Can’t be done.
The ‘Twin Peaks’-ian ‘Free Man’ ends
things on a slightly less celebratory
note, but by then the mission is a
success, the overall impression of an
expansive, joyous experience, dance
music at its most expressive and hipshaking. A thrilling reminder of a time
when we were inspired by our record
collections, rather than slaves to them.
ANDREW HOLMES
LASERS
Exchange Levels
Irregular
Minimal house meets
sparkling synthpop under
endless Spanish skies
‘Exchange Levels’ conveys passion,
despite the often simplified approach to
production. From within its cool, clean
delineations, this is music that will attract
house aficionados to a suitably entranced
dancefloor, while reminding those with an
ear for subdued synthpop that Lasers have
a renewed enthusiasm for old friends.
VADER EVADER
Lasers made their debut with last year’s
‘Juno’ album on the Irregular label. It gave
hints that this Barcelona trio were shaking
the hand of dreampop and slapping the
back of experimental electro, but reserving
their warmest embrace for minimal house.
With the release of ‘Exchange Levels’,
an album full of music to wander around
and through, this is now a fait accompli.
The immersion may lie in the endless
Spanish skies and pourable sunshine
of the compulsive dance opener ‘…
Roof Down’, or it may be in the robust,
downtempo floor-destroyer ‘Bird Feeder’,
replete with flamenco-style percussive
clicks. In both instances, Lasers focus their
efforts on maximising the minimal.
The minimalism is probably best explored
by the heavily looped piano chords of ‘Alex
Eardrum’, the bouncy bassline of the house
party room-filler ‘Come Over’, and the
endlessly spiralling ‘Dimensions’, which is
laden with late 80s memorabilia, right down
to the female vocal sample admonishing us
to “Cooome On!”. ‘As You Want’ meanwhile
uses the sound of a sharp intake of breath
to depict a pupil-dilating pinpoint in time
ALBUM REVIEWS
ADULT.
The Way Things Fall
Ghostly International
Stern synth duo successfully
splice the ghosts of The Human
League and Suicide
Detroit synthesiser duo ADULT. (yes, all
capitals plus a full stop) have been dabbling
in the margins of haunted electro and
screeching synthpop for over a decade now.
They dramatically announced their presence
in 2001 with the leather-clad, robotic synth
march of ‘Hand To Phone’, a pulsing,
strident, castigating ricochet around student
halls of residence and serious techno clubs
alike. It was the sort of signature tune which
can be either a curse or a blessing – a sleek,
aerodynamic perfection of the standard
that many perfectly worthy acts spend
their entire careers trying to manufacture.
Twelve years on, for many people it’s still
the only thing they’ve heard by the band.
In fact, the boot-strapped, pulsating core
of ADULT.’s early material meant they were
initially lumped in with the electroclash sound,
whereas they actually always sounded more
distinct than that – as if they had accidentally
found themselves in a similar location as DJ
Hell and the International Deejay Gigolo
crew but via a completely separate and,
one suspects, rather more isolated route.
Moving forward to ‘The Way Things Fall’,
the band’s fifth (fifth!) album following a long
layover, we find ADULT. claiming this clutch
of tunes as the most traditional pop songs
that they’ve ever recorded. As so often,
this is all relative. Justin Bieber will likely
remain quite untroubled at the prospect of
any threat to his album sales. That said, it
is probably true that ‘The Way Things Fall’
is their slickest and glossiest proposition to
date. Ironically, by pulling together a more
hooky, catchy oeuvre, ADULT. now seem
to fit the electroclash description more than
ever, the duo expertly welding nagging
one-note riffs to an electro undercarriage.
In the more reflective and poppier moments,
such as ‘Love Lies’ and ‘Tonight, We Fall’, the
current single, the music resembles nothing
so much as a modernised version of The
Human League’s ‘The Golden Hour Of The
Future’ album, like an alternative Detroit
where European electronic pop had never
fused with disco, and with the confrontational
stylings of Suicide, or even electronic goths
Alien Sex Fiend, rather than the smooth
carapace of Kraftwerk as the defining
template. The resultant ‘New Frustration’ and
‘Nothing Lasts’ vent sugar-coated self-loathing
and introspection onto the dancefloor with a
queasy elan. This is a bleak and sometimes
depressing view of the future, the likes of ‘At
The End Of It All’ and the mournful ‘We Will
Rest’ a million miles away from the techno
utopianism of their hometown predecessors.
In that sense, then, it’s a vision in
keeping with the times, and one
that’s well worth investigating.
TOM VIOLENCE
THE
WOODENTOPS
Before During After
One Little Indian
Indie heroes who took the
Balearic masses by storm serve
up an impressive reissues set
There was always something a little different
about The Woodentops. Listening to this very
welcome collection doesn’t half make you
aware of why an essentially guitar-driven
1980s indie outfit caught the imagination
of dance music’s high and mighty.
When Rollo McGinty’s Woodentops popped
up in 1982 with their ‘Giant’ album stuff to
the gills with jaunty tunes, strumming guitars
and melodies to go, you would have been
forgiven for thinking that, if it looks like an
indie band and sounds like an indie band,
must be an indie band. But this three-volume
set serves up all you’d need if you had to
stand up in court and put the case for Rollo’s
dancing shoes credentials. We get the first
two albums lovingly remastered, a raft of
remixes and a bunch of rarities, including a
glimpse at the band’s unfinished third album.
Collected together and spread across 52
tracks, you really get an earful of why The
Woodentops were lauded by everyone from
David Bowie to Arthur Baker. Pleasingly,
pretty much everything is four-to-the-floor
pace, 150bpm+, and by the time ‘Giant’
gives way to 1986’s ‘Wooden Foot Cops
On The Highway’, Rollo’s forays into
Club 8 have long had an experimental
undertow, but they’re better known by
the mainstream for their trendy bossa
nova-style dance toons. They were
originally proclaimed an anorak indie
outfit and you can hear this purity and
quirkiness in the melodies of songs like
‘You Could Be Anybody’ and ‘Hot Sun’.
They make such pleasant company.
electronica began to blur the edges of
indie and dance for the very first time.
Groundbreaking? You betcha. Listen to
‘Travelling Man’ from ‘Giant’ and tell us
that’s not dance music. Drum machine,
303 bassline, Spanish guitar. It’s pure
White Isle. And in 1987, that’s exactly
where the whole thing went bonkers, with
Ibiza DJ Alfredo spinning ‘Why Why
Why’ in his wildly eclectic Amnesia sets.
By doing so, he caught the attention of
Oakenfold, Rampling, Holloway and
Walker, who legged it back to London with
a proper dose of the Balearics and The
Woodentops still ringing in their ears.
The rest is laid bare here for all to, erm,
hear. The remixers are not names to be trifled
with. A good rubdown from the always
excellent Adrian Sherwood, a previously
unheard Arthur Baker reworking of ‘Give It
Time’, and Bang The Party’s unsung hero Kid
Batchelor at the controls on ‘Tainted World’
(the very last cut to bear The Woodentops’
name in 1991) are particular highlights.
The only slight downside is that there aren’t
enough remixes featured. Legend has it
Oakenfold’s first ever remix was a bootleg
of ‘Why Why Why’, for example, and
that would have been good to hear. Minor
niggle aside, it’s a belting masterclass in how
reissues should be done – 52 tracks, all killer,
no filler, and that alone is no mean feat.
NEIL MASON
CLUB 8
Above The City
Labrador
Pop music with a sinister twist
from one of the pioneers
of Swedish electronica
Sometimes you just want to have your
cake and eat it – and make that with the
glossy shine of an authentic ganache
for the topping, none of that plain old
chocolate icing. Sometimes you don’t
want pained and personal artistic
expression, you want ABBA all over
again, albeit in its own time and place.
Club 8 are one of the pioneers of
Scandinavian electronica and ‘Above The
City’ is their eighth album. With this duo,
it’s ultimately always about a love affair
with pop music. Their songs aim to taste
the stars, full of light. They had a hit in the
1990s, ‘Missing You’, and that flavour
is here in the new single ‘I’m Not Gonna
Grow Old’, which unashamedly nods
to Madonna’s ‘Holiday’ in over-friendly
fashion, and also in the perky beat and the
huh-huh’s of ‘A Small Piece Of Heaven’.
Nonetheless, after all these years, Club 8
now have the confidence to let the weirdness
seep in. Try the eerie and brief ‘Interlude
#1’ and, further on into the album, ‘Interlude
#2’. These pieces are deliciously awkward
and jangly, melancholic pop pitched at
a slower pace than the other tracks.
That said, there’s also a sinister edge which
comes from the lyrical realism of vocalist
Karolina Komstedt. That’s admirable. We
need more of that please – especially from a
female perspective. OK, we’ve got Grimes
and we’ve got Lana Del Ray, but the main
similarity is their aversion to breathless
longing and songs about the glory of the
love of a good man. “I am a love abuser,
a user,” sings Komstedt in ‘Run’. “You’re
stealing my heart away / But not in a lovely
way,” she declares in ‘Stop Taking My Time’.
From the off, the opening ‘Kill Kill’, there
is the echo of a wicked woman character
favoured by feminist writer Fay Weldon here.
‘Above The City’ is a patchwork of moods
and musicality. It shows both the heart
of Club 8 and the group’s adventurous
spirit. They are bringing something fresh
to the table, in more ways than one.
NGAIRE RUTH
ALBUM REVIEWS
NATTEFROST
Futurized
Sireena
Quality electronica with a little help
from Telex frontman Michel Moers
Nattefrost is Danish musician Bjørn Jeppesen,
who started recording his brand of electronic
ambience back in 1995. The early Nattefrost
material was quite dark, but his music has
become increasingly melodic in recent times.
‘Futurized’, his 10th album, encompasses
many of the spacey elements of yesterday’s
tomorrow that fans of Jean Michel Jarre,
Tangerine Dream and Kraftwerk will enjoy.
The moody, gradually building opener,
‘Westhofen’, sets the tone for an album that
will keep both the dance and old school
crowds happy – which is no easy task.
Constructed using both software and vintage
gear, arpeggios and vocoders reign supreme
on the gently industrialised title track, while
‘Ghost Mind’ is doomy electro disco and,
it must be said, strangely attractive. Dorvo
helps out on vocals with that one. It’s not all
mechanised gloominess, though, and the
bouncy ‘Beware Of The Destiny’ sounds
like a Human League instrumental from the
‘Octopus’ era – frantic and tuneful, but with
some sci-fi voice stylings added. Designed
from a similar circuit diagram is ‘Electro
Shock’, which is more Kraftwerkian, especially
when the distinctive speech of a Votrax
kicks in. It wouldn’t sound out of place on
Metroland’s recent ‘Mind The Gap’ album.
One of the notable features of ‘Futurized’ is
the appearance of Michel Moers, vocalist
with Belgian synth subversives Telex,
who provides some Gallic nonchalance
to ‘Poliment’. It acts as a reminder of the
mischief that saw Telex score a UK Top 40
hit with a funereal robotic cover of ‘Rock
Around The Clock’ and enter Eurovision in
1980, performing a song lampooning the
contest with the sole intention of coming
last. Moers also contributes to ‘Will I Get
To Your Heart?’, a particularly good track
with sequenced percussive effects and
rich synth sweeps providing some classic
synthpop. ‘While Asleep’ is meanwhile more
downtempo, Moers filtered almost to the
point of being another electronic texture.
NAGAMATZU
Igniting The Corpse
Motorcade
‘Futurized’ probably won’t set the world on
fire, but it’s a good album. It will certainly
be appreciated by those who understand
their history of electronic music.
A welcome reissue for one of the
earliest pioneering bands of the
original 1980s darkwave scene
CHI MING LAI
Nagamatzu were among the first generation
of UK post-punk darkwave bands of the
1980s. Fiercely independent – to their cost
in many ways – all but one of their releases
were only available on cassette at the time,
including ‘Igniting The Corpse’, which was
their third and final album. I’ve still got my
cassette copy, but I’ve not heard it for years
because my iPod no likey, so I’m mighty
chuffed that it’s now reissued on lovely red
vinyl and as a download via Bandcamp.
‘Igniting The Corpse’ is an album very
much of its time. The melancholic, melodic
‘Quietus’ is so pre-acieed
New Order, you’ll never convince me that it
isn’t them. Listen, I’m telling you, it is them.
‘Corabella’ is militaristic and symphonic and
In The Nursery-ish, ‘Threshold’ is
23 Skidoo at an S&M party, ‘Firewalker’
is more rhythmic and urgent and edges
towards Clock DVA territory. With the
exception of ‘Quietus’, though, Nagamaztu
are ploughing their own furrow, using cutups and vocal samples long before most
folk, certainly in the UK at any rate, and
carrying on regardless when they were
criticised for making largely instrumental
music. The sound quality of these tracks
field recordings seeps into the music, like
memories of overheard conversations.
Instead of the old battle between elemental
and industrial, ‘The Bridge…’ brings
them together and harmonises them.
stands up really well too, despite the fact that
Andrew Lagowski and Stephen Jarvis crafted
much of their material in their separate
bedroom studios, sequencing on computers
with less memory than your average
goldfish. Take a bow, Atari Corporation.
The Nagamatzu guys parted company in
1991. Andrew Lagowski went on to record
as Legion, S.E.T.I. and plain old Lagowski,
forging a reputation as one of the most
prolific artists on the underground dark
ambient scene, while Stephen Jarvis took
a break from the music industry that has
so far lasted 22 years. There is, however,
a rumour that they might be getting back
together to record some new tracks. OK,
that’s a rumour that I’ve just started right
there but, hey, I couldn’t help myself.
PUSH
If we were to make an assumption about
Iceland from listening to ‘The Bridge…’, it
would be that nothing happens very quickly
up north. Zoon lets songs spin in circles,
growing slowly with each instrument added
until they either burst, like in the clattering
closer ‘The Gaits’, or leisurely fade away
into the mist, as in ‘The Verge Of Winter’.
ZOON VAN
SNOOK
The Bridge Between
Life And Death
Lo Recordings
A delicate and fascinating
balance of organic energy
and electronic precision
The gap between Bristol and Reykjavik
is fairly large, not just in distance, but
in spirit too. Zoon van snooK attempts
to bring them closer together with ‘The
Bridge Between Life And Death’, an album
inspired by Zoon’s fascination with Iceland
and the country’s music output, that of
Sigur Rós and Björk. These inspirations,
coupled with Zoon’s characteristic style of
wistful electronica and field recordings,
build a beautifully deep record.
‘The Bridge Between Life And Death’ is
a well measured album, with each track
finding a balance of organic energy
and electronic precision, something
unachievable by Mother Nature. ‘Thufur
Thoroughfare’, Zoon’s collaboration with
Icelandic artist Benni Hemm Hemm, matches
electric twinkles with woody violins and
footsteps in a forest, creating a night-time
waltz through dense thickets of trees. The
snoring that narrates ‘Snorri’s Saga’, a
drowsy piano lullaby, acts like a simple
bassline by keeping time with the music,
steady as a heartbeat. Speech from Zoon’s
More often than not, the tracks reach a
logical apex and don’t go much further.
However, a deliberately paced journey
has to be worth it. While it’s often the
best part, you’re sometimes left wanting
a bigger celebration at the finish line.
An album based around the progression
from birth to death, ‘The Bridge...’ is nothing
if not reflective. From the opening buzzing
hums of a sound cradle, a wooden throne
covered in tuned strings, to the swirling
violins and bubbling noises at the end
of ‘The Gaits’, Zoon lifts you out of your
body to let you think about your life. Your
trembling beginning and your inevitable
departure is soundtracked by orchestras
of pianos, traditional Icelandic instruments
and intricate electrical blips. All you can
do is hope that your story concludes as
revelatory as ‘The Bridge…’ does, with
a quiet cheer acting as the full stop.
SAM SMITH
ALBUM REVIEWS
and rock (her second solo album, ‘Psychic
Cat’, did both rather splendidly), and
folksy (2008’s ‘Rocking Horse’), but above
all there’s a sense that she’s wanted to
shake off that 90s cynicism and find a
positive voice – and it’s always about
her voice more than anything. If Kelli
Dayton (as was) of the Sneaker Pimps was
listlessly detached, Kelli Ali (she took her
father’s name) is seeking connection.
KELLI ALI
Band Of Angels
Kelli Ali Label
The one-time Sneaker Pimp embarks
on a heartfelt musical journey
It seems Kelli Ali has spent her solo career
atoning for her Sneaker Pimps period. That
first Sneaker Pimps album was quite a piece
of work, almost majestic in its psychological
disassociation, crystalline sounding with
strident trip hop soundscapes behind Kelli’s
chillingly blank persona. On the surface,
her voice sounded pretty and sweet, and
the music was often beautiful, but the lyrics
peddled a blankness, not even negativity
or nihilism, just numb refusal (or inability) to
engage. “Don’t think cos I understand, I care
/ Don’t think cos I’m talking, we’re friends,”
she sang in ‘Six Underground’, a deadened
creative response to the mid-90s cokedup glassiness of the London club scene.
I interviewed Sneaker Pimps when that
album came out and it was obvious that
Kelli was wrestling with an irresistible
urge to hit the self-destruct button. The
tension in the relationships between the
members was palpable. Sure enough,
she was ‘asked to leave’ (chucked out)
and the band lost their dark vortex of
energy and their momentum as a result.
On her own, Kelli Ali has skittered between
pop (her solo debut, ‘Tigermouth’, was an
excellent powerful pop outing), electronic
‘Band Of Angels’ combines elements of all
her output and some more textures for good
measure. There are moments of electronic
storm (the nervous, chugging ‘Cleopatra’)
and almost operatic melancholy (the opener,
‘The Art Of Love’, with its sweeping strings),
while ‘The Hunter’ has her pulling her finest
Kate Bush tribute out of the bag. She evokes
fairytale imagery of forests and hunters in
the song, which is driven by soft but urgent
rhythms and what sounds like a zither. Exotic
instrumentation and subject matter like a
scene from an Angela Carter novel? That’s
Bush territory right there, no doubt about it.
The strings are out again for ‘Falling’,
which has a breathy beauty and is the most
reminiscent of Sneaker Pimps, both sonically
and in that addictive moodiness at which
they were so adept. By contrast, ‘In The
House Of Love’ is an upbeat dancefloor
pop blast, but is really quite odd, with the
Kraftwerk ‘Uranium’ / New Order ‘Blue
Monday’ choir sample and Kelli’s voice
strangled through an effect. The album’s
title track, a piano ballad, is maybe the
most remarkable song here, entirely
because of the range and the emotion
communicated through the voice itself.
One thing’s for sure, it’s heartfelt. It might
not hang together quite as tightly as her
previous albums, but you get the feeling that
Kelli Ali has found meaning in her musical
journey and will be taking her voice to
new places in her quest for connection.
MARK ROLAND
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