Electronic Sound issue 05

05
FACTORY FLOOR
Turning up the
sound of 2014
VINCE CLARKE
Exclusive video interview
by Jason Bradbury
30 YEARS OF R&S RECORDS
CABARET VOLTAIRE
From A(phex) to B(elgium)
Richard Kirk talks electronic legacy
RADIOPHONIC WORKSHOP
Coming to a town near you shortly
NEW OLD KRAFTWERK!
The masters reimagined
A year in the life of
.
.
.
KARL BARTOS CHVRCHES
MARTYN WARE DAVE CLARKE
PERC GARY NUMAN METAMONO
.
. NINA KRAVIZ
. LUKE SLATER
. JESSY LANZA
WELCOME
Editor: Push
Deputy Editor: Mark Roland
Art Editor: Anthony Bliss
Artworker: Jordan Bezants
Contributing Editor: Bill Bruce
Assistant Designer: Ryan Birse
Contributors: Andrew Holmes, Andy Thomas, Bebe Barron, Bethan Cole,
Chi Ming Lai, Danny Turner, Dave Mothersole, David Stubbs, Fat Roland, Gary Smith,
George Bass, Grace Lake, Heideggar Smith, Jack Dangers, Jason Bradbury,
Johnny Mobius, Jus Forrest, Kieran Wyatt, Laurie Tuffrey, Mark Baker, Martin James,
Neil Mason, Ngaire Ruth, Nix Lowrey, Patrick Nicholson, Paul Browne, Paul Connolly,
Rob Fitzpatrick, Sam Smith, Steve Appleton, Tom Violence, Vader Evader, Vik Shirley
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 05
2013 was quite a year. It was our first and it’s been a blast.
In the spirit of Christmas past and all that, we got in touch with some of the people
we’ve featured in the magazine this year, plus one or two we haven’t, and asked
them how the last 12 months have been for them and what they think is coming
down the pipe. We had some fascinating responses. Karl Bartos, for example, is
rooting for Stravinsky.
We’re especially pleased to have Factory Floor on the cover of this issue. We’ve
been chasing them for ages and finally our schedules matched up. Their storming
debut is certainly a candidate for the album of 2013. In many ways, Factory Floor
are carrying the flag first waved in the 1970s by the likes of Cabaret Voltaire
and Throbbing Gristle, and it just so happens we also have a hefty interview with
Cabaret Voltaire’s Richard H Kirk to get your teeth into.
When we launched Electronic Sound, we had the splendid ruse of getting ‘Gadget
Show’ presenter Jason Bradbury together with Martyn Ware. British
TV’s ultra-geek in a room with one of British electronic music’s big
daddies seemed like a good idea. And indeed it was. At the time, Jason
mentioned that he’d like to fly to New York and geek out with Vince
Clarke in his studio. ‘Sure, Jason, great idea!’ we said. ‘That’ll never
happen,’ we added when he was out of earshot. Except it did. Erasure
announced they were doing a Christmas album, Jason announced he
was getting on a aeroplane to New York, and here we are. Elsewhere this issue, you’ll also find interviews with all five members
of the newly reconvened BBC Radiophonic Workshop, Renaat
Vandepapeliere from top techno tabel R&S Records, and J Peter
Schwalm, the man behind Kraftwerk Reimagined, the latest Icebreaker
project. Plus, we’ve been chatting to Blancmange’s Neil Arthur, Alter
8’s Mark Archer, Lesley Rankine from Ruby, actress/singer Jane
Horrocks and… oh, just dive in and find out for yourself.
And sorry for the alarming pictures of some of the contributors in our
Writers’ Picks feature. It seemed like a good idea at the time…
Electronically yours,
Push and Mark
WHAT’S
INSIDE
FEATURES
FACTORY FLOOR
Their new single, ‘Turn It Up’,
is a typically hallucinogenic
electronic workout. And after
their ace debut album, Factory
Floor are clearly destined for
big things in 2014
13/14: THE
ARTISTS
A year in the life of KARL
BARTOS, MARTYN WARE,
NINA KRAVIZ, DAVE
CLARKE, GARY NUMAN,
PERC, CHVRCHES,
METAMONO,
JESSY LANZA and LUKE
SLATER
R&S RECORDS
Label boss Renaat
Vandepapeliere reflects on
some of the artists who have
recorded for R&S during the
last 30 years, including Aphex
Twin, Juan Atkins and James
Blake
KRAFTWERK
UNCOVERED
Eno collaborator J Peter
Schwalm and totalist ensemble
Icebreaker team up for a
unique reworking of the
Kraftwerk back catalogue
VINCE CLARKE
and JASON
BRADBURY
The Erasure man and the
‘Gadget Show’ chap enjoy a
monster geek sesh at Vince’s
studio in New York. We’ve got
lots of it on video too
THE
RADIOPHONIC
WORKSHOP
They’re back! And they’re
heading your way in 2014.
We interview all five of today’s
Workshop crew, including
living legend Dick Mills
CABARET
VOLTAIRE
As a hefty chunk of Cabs
material gets a welcome
reissue, Richard H Kirk
discusses the band’s
1980s journey from agitexperimentalists to angular
dancefloor pioneers
13/14: THE
WRITERS
Our writers choose their
highlights of 2013 and come
over all Mystic Meg as they
pick the acts that they think are
going to be leading the way
during the next 12 months
UP THE FRONT
HEADLINES
TIME MACHINE
ROYKSOPP single, ZTT
reissues, GENESIS P
ORRIDGE book, SONAR
FESTIVAL heads north and
JAMES MURPHY unveils
a new sound system
We’re in a warehouse in the
Midlands in 1991 with an
air horn, a Vick’s inhaler and
MARK ARCHER from rave
techno heads ALTERN 8
ANATOMY
PULSE: RUBY
We exclusively reveal
how the cover artwork
of THE CHEMICAL
BROTHERS’ ‘We Are The
Night’ album is a
portal to another dimension
Lesley Rankine – noisenik,
electrohead and all-round
top girl – is set to release
her first album since 2001.
Well, she will be when she
gets out of bed
PULSE:
NORTHERN
KIND
SYNTH TOWN
It’s Christmas lunch at
the Kling Klang flat in
Synth Town. PHIL OAKEY
isn’t very happy with
RALF HÜTTER’s Yorkshire
puddings, though
JOHN CARPENTER
ACTRESS
HAROLD BUDD
KOSHEEN
She played Little Voice.
And Bubble. But what the
heck is JANE HORROCKS
doing covering songs by
Joy Division and Cabaret
Voltaire?
Another splurge of
seemingly random words
from El Fats. He’s banging
on about MILEY CYRUS
this time. Take cover
PULSE: FIJI
The Swiss synthpoppers
won the Electronic Sound
Wall vote in the last issue.
They’ve released four
albums, so there is a lot of
catching up to do
MENTAL OVERDRIVE
SHIFTED
LEE BANNON
CAN
The Meat Beat Manifesto
man talks us through his
stack of rare demonstration
discs from the likes of
MOOG and EMS
SPOTLIGHT
FAT ROLAND
COLUMN
It’s taken four years to
complete, but the Midlands
duo’s new album is sparkling
with creativity
JACK
DANGERS
SYNTH
JOURNEYS
He’s won countless
Grammys and he’s never
used the word “keytar”.
Top composer fella JAN
HAMMER is talking kit
LANDMARKS
BLANCMANGE singer
NEIL ARTHUR on the
making of the classic
‘Feel Me’. If you’ve ever
wondered what “There goes
a bannister!” was about...
SOUND OF BELGIUM
PAUL HAIG
TOUCHIN’ BASS
AKKORD
LARAAJI
SAADA BONAIRE
SCNTST
CONRAD SCHNITZLER AND LOADS MORE..
NEWS
HEADLINES
NEWS FROM THE WORLD OF ELECTRONICITY
ZTT 30TH ANNIVERSARY RELEASES
ZTT, the London-based record
company founded by NME
journalist Paul Morley, producer
Trevor Horn and Horn’s wife
and manager Jill Sinclair, will
celebrate its 30th anniversary with
a clutch of releases in February.
‘Frankie Said (Deluxe Edition)’ is
a collection of highlights from the
career of ZTT’s most iconic signing,
Frankie Goes To Hollywood,
and includes singles, remixes,
promo videos and footage of TV
appearances. ‘The Organisation Of
Pop (London Edition)’ is a double
CD retrospective of all the label’s
hit singles, plus a disc of special
projects and experiments from the
archives. ‘The Art Of The 12-Inch
Volume Three’ meanwhile features
rare and classic 12-inch remixes.
Lest we forget, as well as Frankie,
ZTT has been home to the likes of
Propaganda, Art Of Noise, 808
State, Grace Jones, Adamski,
Heights Of Abraham and Hoodlum
Priest among many others over the
years.
GENESIS P ORRIDGE BOOK
Throbbing Gristle founder and
Psychic TV main man Genesis
P Orridge is bringing out an
ambitious book project offering
“a collection of memories”
charting his “life as continuous
creativity”. The book, ‘Genesis
Breyer P Orridge’, is published
by First Third and comes in two
editions. The deluxe version is
a limited edition of 333 copies,
each numbered and signed by
Genesis. The package includes
a 96-page catalogue of the
artworks Genesis and his partner
Lady Jayne collaborated on
during her lifetime, three seveninch singles on coloured vinyl,
and a large poster of “intimate
Polaroids” which are ‘“suitable
for framing, but not for the easily
shocked”. The singles feature
four tracks written especially for
the project and conversations
with Genesis recorded by Mark
Paytress, whose essay introduces
the book. The deluxe edition is
priced £233 and the standard
edition is £99. For more info visit
www.firstthirdbooks.com.
PANIC IN DETROIT
Detroit, the crucible of techno, is
having a spot of techno-based
controversy with three major
electronic music festivals hoving
into view in 2014, two of them
happening over the same July
weekend. The Movement Festival,
which took over from the Detroit
Electronic Music Festival (DEMF) in
2006, takes place in Hart Plaza
on Memorial Day weekend (24-26
May). But the founder of the original
DEMF event, Carol Marvin, has
announced that DEMF is coming
back and will take the form of a
free festival at Campus Martius Park
on the Fourth of July weekend (4-6
July). Marvin was joined by techno
pioneer Juan Atkins to announce
the return of the event. On the same
weekend as DEMF, however, is
the newly launched Federation Of
Electronic Music Technology Festival
(FEMT) at the Detroit Lions football
stadium. Movement, incidentally, is
often still called DEMF, so the battle
lines are between DEMF, the other
DEMF, and FEMT. Confused much?
JAMES MURPHY AND 2MANYDJS SOUND SYSTEM
True to his erstwhile band’s name,
James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem
has collaborated with 2ManyDJs
and audio designer John Klett to
create a bespoke, one-off sound
system designed to deliver the
perfect clubbing experience. The
system, which recently had its first
outing in Manchester, is called
Despacio. It comprises seven 3.5
metre-tall stacks powering 50,000
watts of sound so precisely
engineered that you can have a
conversation even as Despacio is
cranking out at top volume. The
idea apparently evolved from a
desire to present a club experience
in Ibiza recalling the original spirit
of Balearic beat, with eclectic DJ
sets played through a system that
would match the experience of
listening on a high-end audiophile
system in someone’s home.
Despacio with James Murphy and
2ManyDJs will be at Hammersmith
Town Hall in London on 19, 20
and 21 December. Tickets are
£31.35 from the usual outlets.
OUTKAST REUNITED
Twenty years after their
debut album, 1994’s
‘Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik’,
it looks like hip hoppers turned
pop sensations OutKast are
getting back together. Rumours of
a reunion surfaced early in 2013
and reached fever pitch when Big
Boi posted an image of himself
with Andre 3000 on Instagram.
The pair will be playing live dates
in 2014, including the US music
festival Coachella in April, but at
the time of going to press there
has been no announcement as to
whether they intend to release a
new OutKast album at any point
soon. Andre 3000 and Big Boi
haven’t recorded together since
2007 and the huge international
hit for which they’re probably best
known, ‘Hey Ya’ from the album
‘Speakerboxxx/The Love Below’
(which was essentially two solo
albums), was released 10 years
ago. OutKast’s last album was
‘Idlewild’, a companion piece to
their musical film of the same title,
released in 2006.
NEW RÖYKSOPP SINGLE
Norwegian electronic pop duo
Röyksopp have released a new single,
‘Running To The Sea’, their first since
2011. The song has already been a
Number One hit in their home country
and features vocals by the platinumselling Norwegian singer Susanne
Sundfør, who collaborated with M83
on the soundtrack for the Tom Cruise
post-apocalypse sci-fi epic ‘Oblivion’.
The B-side, ‘Something In My Heart’,
is sung by Jamie McDermott from
the British orchestral pop 10-piece
The Irrepressibles. “[The songs]
are in essence both expressions of
compulsion and its strong, often
uncontrollable, persisting pull,” explain
the duo. “Dependence is a returning
theme in our music.” ‘Running To
The Sea’ is out now on Dog Triumph
via Wall Of Sound and Cooking
Vinyl, with remixes by Villa and the
Pachanga Boys, among others. A new
Röyksopp album, the band’s fifth, will
follow later in 2014.
NEWS
SONAR HEADS NORTH
The electronic music festival Sonar, which has
been running in Barcelona since 1994 and hosts
events all over the world, has announced the
line-up for its February bash in Reykjavik and has
also added the Swedish capital Stockholm to the
2014 schedule. Sonar Reykjavik takes place on
13, 14 and 15 February and features Jon Hopkins,
Trentemøller, Diplo (with his Major Lazer project),
Gus Gus, Kölsch, Daphni (Caribou’s electronic
music vehicle), Bonobo, Sometime (which includes
Daniel Thorsteinsson, aka theDanni, who is also
performing), James Holden, Starwalker (a new
project from Air’s Jean-Benoit Dunckel – wherefore
art thou Tomorrow’s World?) and Icelandic
newcomers Vök. The Stockholm event, which runs
on 14 and 15 February, has many of the artists
who are playing Reykjavik, plus The Field, Clark
and many more Swedish artists, including Sandra
Mosh and Little Jinder. Ticket information and lineup news can be found at www.sonar.es.
Jon Hopkins
GARY NUMAN BOOK IN PDF VERSION
‘Gary Numan – Backstage’,
the lavish oral history hardback
book written by Stephen Roper
and published last year, is
now available as a PDF via the
Electronic Sound PDF shop. The
digital version features new
photographs and colour versions
of many of the black and white
images in the hardback, which
is almost sold out and is unlikely
to be reprinted. The book is a
collection of firsthand accounts
of Gary Numan’s 1978-1981
touring heyday from the people
who were there, including
band members Rrussell Bell,
Chris Payne and the late Ced
Sharpely, as well as luminaries
such as Jerry Casale of Devo,
Andy McCluskey of OMD
and Numan himself. The book
gives an intimate glimpse into
the eye of the electronic storm,
and includes sketches for stage
shows, tour itineraries and other
rare artefacts. You can purchase
the PDF version at www.
electronic-sound.dpdcart.com.
“
My advice to all Numanoids,
and anybody with an interest
in the history of modern music, is
”
BUY THIS BOOK...
Artrocker
NOW AVAILABLE IN EXPANDED EBOOK
SOLD OUT
IN PRINT
“A fascinating
account of
Gary Numan’s
‘79-’81 era...”
Artrocker
Download it now from:
http://electronic-sound.dpdcart.com
TIME MACHINE
TOP ONE,
NICE ONE,
GET SORTED
Back to
when thin
gs
weren’t ho
they are now
w
MARK ARCHER from 90s rave giants ALTERN 8 on
chemical suits, face masks and the campaign to get the
classic ‘Activ-8’ to Number One at Christmas
I
t’s crazy. It’s come out of nowhere.
Four or five weeks ago, I was sent a
link to a Facebook campaign page
to get ‘Activ-8’ to Number One at
Christmas. It’d been set up by an Altern
8 fan. There were a couple of photos
and a couple of videos and it had six
Likes. I thought it was funny, so I posted
it on my own page and people started
sharing it, then when I went back to
the campaign page a few days later it
had 10,000 Likes. And the best bit was
the track wasn’t even available to buy
anywhere. I had to get in touch with
Network Records, our old record label,
and ask them if we could get it put on
iTunes. They were very surprised. Well,
it’s not the most festive record ever, is
it?
Altern 8 weren’t around for long –
1990 to 1993 – and a lot of what
happened with the group was pretty
much by chance. Chris Peat and I had
put out a few records as Nexus 21 and
we had a pure Detroit techno sound.
But we were into a lot of other stuff
too – acid, new beat, the stuff Frankie
Bones was doing in New York – and at
one point we recorded a load of tracks
that didn’t fit in with the Nexus style.
Network Records said they wanted to
put these tracks out, but not as Nexus
21. Chris had been in a rock band at
school called Alien 8, so we decided
to use that name. But when we got the
first record pressed, they printed the
name wrong on the label. So we were
stuck with Altern 8 after that.
The chemical suits and face masks
were by chance too. We played
The Eclipse in Coventry as Nexus 21
around the time we were doing promos
of ‘Infiltrate 202’, the second Altern 8
single, and the promoter asked us to
come back and do an Altern 8 PA. I
was worried people would say, ‘Hang
on, we saw these geezers two weeks
ago, this is a con’, which was a bit daft
seeing as how 90 per cent of them
were completely off their barnets and
didn’t even know there was a band
up there at all. Anyway, my brother
was in the RAF at the time and I asked
him to get us a couple of chemical
suits, just so we looked different. You
look a right wally if you put the hood
up and pull the drawstrings, so we
added the masks to cover ourselves up
completely. I painted them flourescent
and put an A on them for Altern 8,
and that was it, really. It wasn’t part
of some grand plan. We didn’t think
about any of it, we just did it.
Some people thought we were taking
the piss, but we were just having fun.
The rave scene wasn’t a po-faced
movement, it was about escapism
and dancing and having a good
time. There were all these little scenes
all over the place, like at Shelleys
in Stoke-on-Trent. I loved Shelleys. I
went there all the time. We did the
video for ‘Activ-8’ in the car park at
Shelleys. When the club ended and
people came out, they’d turn on their
car stereos and start dancing around
because nobody wanted to go home,
so one night we pulled up in this big
truck with the side up and played the
song to everyone. We got the lights
going, got the cameras going, and
off we went. It was brilliant. Until the
police came along.
We played all kinds of clubs in all
kinds of places, driving up and down
the motorway in a Transit van from
Inverness in Scotland to Redruth in
Cornwall. Then there were the huge
outdoor raves with thousands of people
too. My favourite was an Amnesia gig
at Donington Park. It was one of the
first big gigs we’d done. You’re up on
stage and you’ve got 10,000 people
in front of you. I remember turning to
one of the lads who was with us and
saying, ‘Wooaah, what is going on
here?’. It was an immense feeling.
When you’re DJing and you see people
dancing, it’s a buzz to know that what
you’re doing is creating that reaction,
but when it’s 100 per cent your own
tunes, ohh, there’s really nothing like it.
When ‘Activ-8’ came out in 1991, it
went to Number Three. It was kept off
the top by Michael Jackson and Vic
Reeves & The Wonderstuff. It’s strange
to think that was more than 20 years
ago. It doesn’t feel that long and it’s
nice to know there’s still some interest
in the track and what we were doing
back then. I’m still DJing, playing old
skool stuff, and I have occasionally
played out wearing the chemical suit.
I had a guy come up to me once and
say, “Hey man, give us your suit”, so
I said, “No mate, I’ve only got the
one – and how old are you anyway?”,
and he said, “I’m 18”, so I said, “This
bloody suit’s older than you are, mate”.
We’ve had some remixes of ‘Activ-8’
done – a dubstep mix, an acid mix,
DJ Phantasy has done a drum ’n’ bass
mix and Tommie Sunshine has done
a powerful EDM-y track – and it’s
been great to hear different people’s
interpretations of the tune. And if
the reissue managed to get into the
charts, that would be fantastic. I’m
certainly not expecting a Number
One or anything near it, though. To be
honest, just seeing 10,000 Likes on that
Facebook page was enough for me.
Anything else will be a bonus.
‘Activ-8’ is out now on Network
Records. At the time of publication,
the number of Likes on the Facebook
campaign page has gone up to
25,000 has gone up to 25,000
JACK DANGERS
JACK
DANGERS’
SCHOOL OF
ELECTRONIC
MUSIC
The Meat Beat Manifesto man pulls out more treasures
from his electronic music archive. This issue, it’s the turn of
DEMONSTRATION DISCS from synthesiser manufacturers
such as Moog and EMS, and recordings made with an East
German machine that may have influenced Kraftwerk
M
y favourite things to collect are records from synthesiser
manufacturers. I think I’ve got most of them. The synth
companies made them to send out to the stores that were
selling their machines, so they never made it to record shops and
they would have been pressed in very limited amounts.
These are some of my favourites:
EMS
The EMS record is very hard to find. It
has lots of cool people on it, including
the Radiophonic Workshop people, Delia
Derbyshire, Harrison Birtwistle (an English
composer who was becoming well known
at the time) and Peter Zinovieff (the owner
of EMS). The record is very English and
eccentric, just like the company itself.
In fact, EMS were the most eccentric
company, bar none. Just look at the
designs! They made the most portable
ANS
The ANS is a Russian synthesiser from
the late 50s, early 60s. It used a really
unusual way of creating sounds. It had
a large glass panel painted black with
a special, non-drying, thick ink which
you’d scratch away. Optical readers
would then read the waveforms that were
created by the scratches in the glass and
the synthesiser would produce a tone. As
a side note, it’s similar in concept to the
Oramics system that Daphne Oram of the
Radiophonic Workshop created. She
synth on the market, the Portabella Synthi
A, which has a suitcase cover and a
handle. I’ve taken mine on a plane and
watched it go through the X-Ray machine
to see whether the reverb plate is in it.
They go from that end of the spectrum,
from being totally portable, to the Synthi
100, which is completely not portable.
I’m actually moving house soon and we’re
going to have to knock a wall down to get
mine out.
called it sound pictures. She drew them on
film, which was a good idea because film
had sprockets, so it was like a sequencer,
locked in time. Coil did an album on ANS
about 10 years ago. It’s an interesting
machine because it’s Russian, which made
it mysterious, and the system of how it
worked is very arty. I mean, drawing
sound, how much more arty can you be?
Of course, now we do it all the time with
computers, drawing waveforms with a
mouse on a screen.
MOOG
The Moog disc is a 10-inch and one my
favourite records made for a synthesiser
company. This was done by Walter
Carlos and it’s brilliant. It was released
in the 1960s, around the same time as
‘Switched On Bach’. I got my copy signed
by Bob Moog about 10 years
‘EXPERIMENTELLE MUSIK’
Another interesting record I’ve dug out is
something called ‘Experimentelle Musik’,
which is from East Germany. There’s not
much information about this online, if
any. I don’t think it’s on YouTube. It’s that
obscure. It came out of an East Berlin
studio and is music created for animated
ago. I queued up like fan boy. It’s got all
this Musique Concrete stuff on it, like a
“how to”, and if you were using a Moog
modular how you could incorporate it. It’s
sort of a representation of how electronic
music was being used at that time.
films and radio plays on some special
East German synth, which is described in
detail, in German, in the liner notes. It’s
the only weird East German electronic
music album I know of. I’m sure Kraftwerk
heard it, because there’s a track on there
that sounds just like them.
SYNCLAVIER
The Synclavier demo in blue vinyl is really good. It has all the factory sounds on there
that you’ll recognise from Michael Jackson records. SOUTH AMERICAN DEMOS
The hardest synth demos to find are from Chile. I’ve only got one from there and I’ve
only ever seen one other on eBay. I was outbid by a guy in Japan. They didn’t put their
records in covers, just white sleeves. These would have been private pressings of very
few copies and they’re not particularly good pressings either. There was a whole scene
in South America, mainly Uruguay and Argentina, because of the German connection.
Maybe I’ll dig those ones out for next time…
RUBY
RED ALERT
Lesley Rankine –
noisenik, electrohead
and the girl behind RUBY
– is all set to release her
first album for 13 years.
Well, she will be when
she gets out of bed
Words: NGAIRE RUTH
Y
ou can listen to Ruby’s
downtempo trip hop for hours.
You don’t have to have the
volume pumping. You don’t even need
to be in the right mood for it. The SAS
could storm your house, the flat below
could burst into flames, your partner
could pack their bags to leave you
and be waiting in the hallway for the
final showdown, and yet you’d still be
enveloped in Ruby’s world.
Lesley Rankine, the Ruby girl, has
scarlet lips and a charming Scottish
accent. She also has a dare-you stare
and a unique turn of phrase. She is
articulate, perceptive and witty. She
talks about past, present and future
recordings, about how she is “a dogate-my-homework person”, and about
“not beating myself up about stuff…
because the job always gets done”.
Her character is mirrored in her lyrics
and musicality. It’s there in ‘Type 2.0’,
her new EP, which sizzles, pouts and
pumps. The tracks are positively evil
remixes (in a good way) of material on
her ‘Revert To Type’ EP from mid-2013,
taking her sound from the personal to
the dancefloor.
As we speak, Lesley is lazing around
in bed at her mum’s B&B in Scotland,
somewhere near Dumfries, yet she’s
working diligently on her laptop,
putting the finishing touches to her next
album, ‘Waiting For Light’. It will be
her third Ruby album, but the first for
13 years. It’ll be with us any day now,
released on her own Fireweed label.
She’s doing the artwork too, as she
has done for all her Fireweed releases.
Lesley is visually motivated, drawn to
computers because she can see the
waveforms of the sounds and use the
shapes to decide which way she’s
going to go.
renowned for making up and drawing
fantastical inventions].
“That’s how I think about music, with
sounds moving in and out of each
other,” she says. “I want to see the
music as well as hear it.”
“You work with instruments or
equipment the way you’re supposed
to and you get stuck into that way
of working. I make noises with my
mouth and I bang my coal bucket and
I use toys… I’m just doing something
now with an old Stylophone. I love to
record silly wee noises and fart about
with them. Even when I’m recording my
vocals. I can actually write and record
music in my bed, on my laptop, and
email tracks to myself on my phone.”
Lesley Rankine has history. She was
the singer in alternative noise band
Silverfish, who achieved critical
acclaim for their wild live shows and
their ‘Fat Axl’ and ‘Organ Fan’ albums
in the early 1990s. They toured the UK
in a big, old, exhaust fumes-filled silver
bus that gave her scabies. She later
got involved in Pigface, the loose-knit
industrial music outfit formed by PiL
and Ministry man Martin Atkins, whose
line-up also included Trent Reznor.
After that, she moved to Seattle and
joined forces with producer Mark
Walk, a former bandmate in Pigface,
to create Ruby. They called the project
that because it was the name shared
by their grandmothers.
Ruby was an electronic enterprise from
the start. The acclaimed debut album,
‘Salt Peter’, which came out in 1995,
was largely crafted using computers
instead of musicians, although Lesley
did perform with a band when she
played live. She says that working in
electronic music has helped bring her
freedom and independence.
“Electronic sounds are the polar
opposite to acoustic. You can combine
both of them to create something that’s
very earthy and make it sound space
age. I love that variety. I’ve never been
into loads of synths, though. I follow
the same way of thinking as Heath
Robinson [the Victorian illustrator
So where has Lesley been since the last
Ruby album, 2001’s ‘Short Staffed At
The Gene Pool’? In Scotland, raising
her son (who is now 10) and, as
always, messing about with music and
art (she went to Wimbledon College of
Art). She argues that while technology
has moved forward since 2001, it
has mostly changed in relation to its
size, its weight and, consequently, its
portability, which is good for Lesley.
“I hate studios,” she says. “I always
have done. They’re like boys’ clubs. At
home, I have a table at the window,
with my speakers and my laptop on
there, and my phone attached to that,
and I’ll be looking out at the valley at
the front of my house, and then I’ll see
the postie come along and, well, life
goes on...”
And there’s definitely a truth in that.
The ‘Revert To Type’ and ‘Type
2.0’ EPs are available on Fireweed
Recordings. Ruby’s ‘Waiting For
Light’ album will be out at the end of
January
ANATOMY
The distant planet that
stores all the old big beat
records. Turn left and carry
on 20 light years for Planet
Madchester
That’s right, little
Timmy, there’s
no star on top of
the tree this year
because those
nasty techno men
stole it
This little piggy
went to market
This little piggy
stayed home
This little piggy
had a dangerous
cocktail of
pills and is
now getting its
stomach pumped
This little piggy
would rather be
on a Rihanna
cover
Where the rest of
the body is buried
Where all the onestar reviews end up
“Yeah, we’ll get
Patrick Moore
to design the
astronomical
chart bit. It’ll
make total sense”
Who say “Ni”
Professor Fat Roland (MDMA) of the University of Please
Yourself, Salford, continues his deconstruction of the semantics
of album covers. This time, it’s THE CHEMICAL BROTHERS’
‘We Are The Night’
Listings for the
evening of 23
January 2014.
For the rest of
BBC4’s schedule,
please visit our
website
Pile of cash
made from
‘Block Rockin’
Beats’ The lyrics.
Not great, but
a significant
improvement
on “Hey boy,
hey girl” and/
or whatever
Noel Gallagher
was banging on
about
This is not an
instruction.
Put the tin opener
down, you idiot
White text
on a white
background. Can
only be read by
snowmen
Scan here to
project 3D
holographic
dancing Chemical
Brothers in your
living room
The Chemical
Brothers’ studio.
Hot and cold
running water,
log fire, photo of
Fatboy Slim on
the dartboard
Where your
chuffing GPS
sends you to
when trying to
find the Chemical
Brothers’ studio
Looks like a face.
In 2032, Graham
Norton will show
this on his telly
programme.
Some people
will laugh. Many
won’t
SPOTLIGHT
IN THE
SPOTLIGHT
JANE HORROCKS
Actress and singer JANE HORROCKS talks about her
splendid version of Joy Division’s ‘Isolation’ and her
plans for some other surprising covers
Words: PUSH
Picture: DYLAN VIVIAN
You’ll be forgiven for wondering what
Jane Horrocks is doing in Electronic
Sound. She’s first and foremost an
actress, of course, and is perhaps
best known for the title role of the
1998 film ‘Little Voice’ (which saw her
nominated for both a BAFTA and a
Golden Globe) and for playing the
one and only Bubble in ‘Absolutely
Fabulous’ for 20 years. She’s also
an in-demand voiceover artist for
animated films, her credits including
‘Chicken Run’ and ‘Corpse Bride’, and
she starred in the most recent Radio 4
adaptation of ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide
To The Galaxy’. But as well as being
an actress, Jane is a terrific singer, as
demonstrated by her impersonations
of musical grand dames such as Judy
Garland and Marilyn Monroe in
‘Little Voice’ and of Gracie Fields in
the 2009 biopic ‘Gracie!’, and she’s
recently embarked on a surprising new
direction by releasing a cracking cover
of Joy Division’s ‘Isolation’. Jane’s got
more surprises in store over the next
few months too, including a version of
Cabaret Voltaire’s ‘Nag Nag Nag’.
‘Isolation’ is a radical departure from
your previous singing work. Why the
change in direction?
“I don’t want to ostracise the people
who really like the ‘Little Voice’ stuff,
the Great American Songbook stuff,
but I feel I’ve done that. I also don’t
want to carry on impersonating
singers, so this is me singing as me
and doing what I want to do with
music, without any interference. I don’t
want people to put me in a box and
pigeonhole me. I want to do something
that’s unexpected and unlikely and a
bit challenging.”
Why did you choose to cover
‘Isolation’?
“I’m a huge Joy Division fan and I
wanted to do something that was close
to my heart. Plus, I already had a small
connection with New Order because
I had the lead part in their video for
‘1963’. I never got to meet the band,
though, which was a bit sickening.”
You’re a Lancashire lass, so did the
1980s Manchester music scene have a
big impact on you?
buddy of my chap Nick. As well as
‘Isolation’, we’ve just done a dance
version of Morrissey’s ‘Life Is A Pigsty’.”
You’re not planning on giving up
acting, though?
“Yeah, it did. A lot of it was through
my brother. I was too young to have
seen Joy Division play live, but my
brother saw them. He was massively
into his music and I jumped on his
coat-tails, really. Whatever he liked,
I liked. The main idea for this current
project is to cover songs that I grew
up with, particularly songs by northern
male artists, northern male bands. It’s
about a part of my life that I felt very
passionate about at the time – and I
still do.”
A dance version?
“No, no, I love acting, but I do get
really excited about being in a
recording studio, whether it’s singing
or doing voiceovers, character work
for animations. When we did ‘Little
Voice’, I enjoyed going into the studio
and recording the songs more than the
acting side of it. It’s probably because
it’s unknown territory to me. I’m not a
musician, I don’t read music, which is
why it’s been especially good to work
with Kipper and Rat and Scott.”
‘Isolation’ is produced by former
Gary Numan cohort Mark Eldridge,
aka Kipper, and you’re backed by PiL
bassist Scott Frith and punk drumming
legend Rat Scabies. How did you hook
up with them?
Any other tracks on the horizon?
“I worked with Kipper on a film called
‘Bring Me The Head Of Mavis Davis’
in the 90s and we’d stayed in touch
since then. When I first had this idea,
I called him and asked him to produce
it. He came round to my house and we
sat in what we call our Cold Christmas
Room, which is the living room we
never heat, and I went through the
tracks I liked, and he was looking at
me dumbfounded. He kept saying,
‘No? Really?’. And then, ‘No? Really?
How’s this going to work?’. But as we
gradually started on the project, he
was marvellous. I wanted a heavy,
upfront bass sound, so Kipper got Scott
from PiL in and then Rat Scabies got
involved because he’s an old drinking
“It’s a kind of techno thing. I love
techno. I love Aphex Twin, I love The
Chemical Brothers. ‘Pigsty’ starts off
very similar to the original, but then
goes into completely different territory,
which is what’s exciting about it. I don’t
see any point in doing an exact cover
version of a song, it’s more interesting
to do something radical, to find ways
of reinventing these songs and also
feminising the lyrics.”
“I really want to do ‘Nag Nag Nag’,
the Cabaret Voltaire song. The lyrics
are completely out there. They’re
incredibly strange. It’s all vocodered
and you can’t really tell what he’s
singing, so it might be good to do
something where you can hear the
lyrics properly. It’s quite hard to hear
what Ian Curtis is singing in ‘Isolation’,
so with my version I wanted there
to be a real clarity in the lyrics and
I think that works well. Joy Division
and Cabaret Voltaire are very similar,
actually. The long-term plan for all this
stuff is to do an album with a theme of
the north. I’d have to have something
by The Fall on there. ‘Hit The North’
would be good.”
A lot of people will probably know
you best for your role as Bubble in
‘Absolutely Fabulous’. Do you get
strangers quoting lines from ‘Ab Fab’
at you?
“Sometimes, yeah, but they’re usually
lines I can’t remember myself. They’ll
quote something and I’ll be thinking,
‘I’ve no idea what that’s all about’.”
Oh heck. There’s every chance this
last question could fall flat on its arse,
then… Is it a dwarf?
“Minnie Driver! Hahahaha! Yes, I do
actually remember that one. Which is
lucky for you, eh?”
Jane Horrocks’ ‘Isolation’ is available
on iTunes. Her version of ‘Life Is A
Pigsty’ follows shortly
NORTHERN KIND
IT’S
GRIM
UP
NORTH
With their third album under their belts,
synthpop duo NORTHERN KIND explain
how the soundtrack to a smack den can be
an attractive experience
Words: CHI MING LAI
M
idlands-based duo Northern
Kind released their first
album, ‘53 Degrees North’,
in 2007, at the start of a classic
synthpop renaissance that coincided
with the live returns of OMD and
Yazoo. Neither dance music nor dark
industrial, they have been a key part
of the UK’s independent electronic
scene ever since. The duo – vivacious
vocalist Sarah Heeley and moody
instrumentalist Matt Culpin – claim
Yazoo in particular as part of their
synth DNA, along with The Human
League and mid-period Depeche
Mode.
It was Northern Kind’s immediacy
that made their debut so attractive,
but their 2009 follow-up, ‘Wired’,
seemed to have somehow lost that. It
was a shame, because the anticipated
breakthrough during the synthpop
reinvigoration spearheaded by the
likes of La Roux and Little Boots passed
them by. Slightly disillusioned, it’s
taken four years for that “difficult” third
album to be finished. But the end result,
‘Credible Sexy Unit’, has been worth
the fine tuning and the wait.
“This feels more organic and driven
by creativity rather than expectation,”
says Sarah. “It’s four years of our lives
played out in the tracks and this really
comes across. I suppose time is one of
the luxuries of being truly independent
– we can work at our own pace and
there’s no pressure to churn out substandard music.”
‘Credible Sexy Unit’ – the title initially
came up during a conversation Matt
had with Mute’s Daniel Miller about
the ideal synthpop act – balances
that immediacy of ‘53 Degrees North’
and the weightier outlook of ‘Wired’.
The latter featured ‘Dirty Youth’, a
commentary on the seedier side of
WAG culture. The new album includes
‘Free Prescriptions’, an electronic
rallying call to save the NHS. These
seem unusual subjects for a synthpop
group to tackle.
“If I’m instantly inspired, the words and
melody come quickly,” notes Sarah.
“It always feels really easy, which
I suppose is the sign of any good
creative partnership. Occasionally, a
track will originate with me, although
as I don’t play any musical instruments
and can’t read music, I often have to
explain an idea by saying, ‘It goes like
this… dum-de-dum-de-dum’. The synth
line to ‘Crash’ started out in this way”.
‘Credible Sexy Unit’ is bursting with the
kind of bouncy electronic pop people
have come to expect from Northern
Kind. ‘Yours’ is probably what The
Human League would sound like if
Susanne Sulley had singing lessons.
The lovely detuned chimes of ‘Piece
Of Me’ provide one of the highlights,
with synthetic counterpoints that echo
classic Yazoo and Erasure. ‘Out Of
Time’ and ‘The River’ also drink from
the Vince Clarke well. The album does have plenty of
variation, though. The instrumental
‘The Bridge’ takes a more obscure
approach, with its violin and cimbalom
[that’s a large Hungarian dulcimer
to you and me – Ed] samples, while
‘Heat’ strips the sound, slows the pace
and allows some multi-layered Sarahs
to shine. It provides an interesting
diversion, as the singer recalls.
“I actually cringe about how revealing
‘Heat’ is,” she says. “It was originated
by me, and maybe Matt picked up on
the rawness of the mood and created
the dark sounds and space around it.
When I first heard his interpretation
of the track, I think I described it as ‘a
soundtrack to a smack den… but in a
really good way’. It’s good to get dark
sometimes.” ‘Credible Sexy Unit’ is out now on
Northern Kind.
Visit www.northernkind.co.uk
FAT ROLAND
FAT
ROLAND
BANGS ON
It’s THE END OF THE YEAR AS WE KNOW IT and our
resident columnist feels fine. Or does he?
T
here’s an ‘End of the World is Nigh’ bloke who hangs
round my local shops. He dresses like Johnny Cash but
has this mop of blonde hair: he looks like a Belisha
beacon drawn by Michael Gove. He often eats crisps.
For the last few months, every time I’ve nipped out for
toothpaste or bread, he’s warned me that 2013 will bring
about the apocalypse.
I always tell him it’s been a great year for music and music
will save the world, but I’m lying through my stupid face
because 2013 has made me weep big lardy tears of regret.
It was going so well, with Daft Punk, Boards Of Canada
and the Pet Shop Boys dusting themselves down with some
success. We even had a totally rad 1990s revival led by
Rudimental and Disclosure. No, not even PJ & Duncan
hitting Number One could careen 2013 into a cavern of
crapness. But then, but then…
Robin Thicke’s ‘Blurred Lines’ was a song so regressive
towards women, I half-expected his follow-up single to be
actual 16th century witch trials with actual dunking and
actual burning and actual pointy hats. If someone can be
cautioned for an offensive tweet, Thicko deserved to be
clamped in the stocks and pelted to a pulp with Chvrches
and Icona Pop mp3s. If mp3s were a physical thing, of
course, which they’re not.
And then there was Thicko’s twerk partner Miley Cyrus,
whose wallpaper-bland power-cack ‘Wrecking Ball’ was
only enlivened by a ridiculous video in which she got
naked on a pretend construction site just so she could lick a
sledgehammer. Animate that, Peter Gabriel.
These two blistering berks were not so much a taint on the
year as a hefty brown splash of sonic sewage. Do you
know how I dealt with it? I took up DIY as a hobby. Every
time those musical morons did something stupid, I built
myself a shelf. I can’t see my walls anymore. I don’t know
where my rooms end.
The other day, I was walking out of B&Q with a bag of
hacksaws because I’d decided to saw off my own head,
and there’s crisp-eating Belisha beacon guy. He’s hovering
outside the entrance like some bad vampire. He asks me
what I’ve bought and I gawp at him because I’m afraid.
And do you know what he says next?
“I like to lick hammers.”
Thank you, Miley Cyrus. It truly is the apoca-flipping-lypse.
Words: FAT ROLAND
Illustration: STEVE APPLETON
BORIS
BLANC
GETS
ELECTRONIC
SOUND
MAKE SURE
YOU DO TOO
JOIN THE MAILING LIST AT
www.electronicsound.co.uk/signup
SYNTH JOURNEYS
SYNTH
JOURNEYS
You’ll never catch him using the word “keytar”, yet
JAN HAMMER is a pioneer who took electronic keyboards out
of the shadows and gave guitar legends a run for their money
Words: BILL BRUCE
Jan Hammer is a multiple Grammy
Award winning composer and keyboard
player. He first came to prominence
in the early 1970s, as the original
keyboardist with the Mahavishnu
Orchestra, John McLaughlin’s jazzfusion group. He has collaborated with
some of the biggest names in jazz and
rock, including Sarah Vaughan, Stanley
Clarke, Mick Jagger, Jeff Beck, Carlos
Santana and Neal Schon.
He continues to work from Red Gate,
his long-time studio at his farmhouse
in upstate New York, and remains a
passionate advocate of both analogue
and digital electronic instruments.
When Jan first encountered the Moog
synthesiser, he instinctively knew this
would give him the sound he had been
looking for.
“I’d been working in various studios
in New York in the late 60s and I
was immediately drawn to the Moog
synthesisers, which at this stage were
still huge modular machines,” he
recalls. “I loved the sound and what
they were capable of, but they were
completely unsuitable for live work. I
mean, there were people who would
take these large modular synths out
on the road, but for me it just wasn’t
feasible. However, as soon as the
MiniMoog appeared, I bought one
and it instantly became my ‘voice’. I
remember I took it home and sat there
with headphones on for two or three
weeks, just experimenting with what I
could get out of it.”
Jan was one of the first artists to be
closely associated with the MiniMoog
and the synth was to become a
defining part of his sound.
“I finally had an instrument that
allowed me to make the kind of music
and performances that I envisaged in
my head,” he says. “It could do more
than a conventional keyboard could
do. I’d tried adapting various organs
and keyboards – I used a frequency
shifter on a Fender Rhodes piano, for
example – but until the MiniMoog there
had been no way to make the sound
more… liquid.”
The MiniMoog’s creator, Dr Robert
Moog, cited Jan Hammer as one
of his favourite artists and among a
select group of musicians who truly
understood what he was trying to
achieve with his creations.
“We were very good friends and I
met him many times,” says Jan. “In
fact, he came up here and stayed at
the farmhouse. There was definitely a
mutual respect between us. He actually
built his patented filter into some of my
other instruments, including some string
synthesisers, because I loved the sound
of it so much.”
Jan was one of the first keyboardists
to sling the instrument around his neck
and play at the front of the stage,
rather than in the traditional keyboard
player’s spot hidden away at the back
or at the side. In the intervening years,
the “keytar” has become a byword
for 80s synthpop naffness, but Jan
maintains that the basic principle was
sound.
“First of all, I have never used the
word ‘keytar’,” he explains with a
smile, totally aware of the ridicule the
instrument has received over the years.
Far from cringing at being associated
with the concept, Jan is proud to have
been one of the pioneers of remote
keyboard playing. “I was really one of
the instigators. I was pushing for them
to make a keyboard like that, long
before they did.
“The problem is that it became an 80s
joke,” he continues with a sigh. “People
were using them to pose with and
to jump around, rather than actually
playing them and treating them as an
instrument in their own right. To get out
front on stage requires a different style
of playing, it’s really a whole other
kettle of fish.
“The good thing is that I’m starting
to see newer artists emerging who
are using these remote keyboards
again, and they’re using them in a
really interesting and musical way,
which is how they should have been
approached in the first place.”
A precocious musical talent from an
early age, Jan Hammer composed his
first soundtrack when he was just 19,
for a movie entitled ‘The Incredibly Sad
Princess’ while he was still living in his
native Czechoslovakia (now the Czech
Republic). So when Oscar-winning film
director Michael Mann met Jan, he
knew he was the right person to write
the music for his seminal 80s cop show
‘Miami Vice’.
Mann has used electronic artists to
score many of his most memorable
movies, including ‘Heat’ and
‘Manhunter’, so does Jan think the
director has a particular passion for
electronic music?
“I don’t think it is just electronic music,”
muses Jan. “He has a voracious
appetite for anything that sounds new.
I met him through a mutual friend in
1984, when he was planning ‘Miami
Vice’, and I played him some things.
He knew instantly that my music
wouldn’t sound like anything else out
there, or anything that had been done
before with that kind of show, and that
was what really appealed to him.”
Constantly in demand as both a
composer and a producer, Jan has
recently been collaborating again with
ex-Journey and Bad English guitarist
Neil Schon, as well as working on
a new album by prolific British jazz
keyboard player and drummer Gary
Husband. We’re going to be hearing
a lot more from Jan, from behind the
desk and from the front of the stage,
for a good while to come.
For more information about
Jan Hammer’s latest projects,
go to www.janhammer.com
FIJI
SWISS
MOVEMENT
Swiss electro-pop duo FIJI, the inaugural
winners of our Electronic Sound Wall
vote, are largely unknown in the UK
despite their career spanning a decade.
Say hello to your new favourite band
Words: BILL BRUCE
F
iji’s music mixes energetic beats
with a deep, dark lyricism. It’s
like a spine-tingling amalgam
of the shadowy sensuousness of
Grace Jones or Goldfrapp and the
proto-new wave spunk of Blondie.
Initially a trio made up of singer/
songwriter Simone De Lorenzi, a
self-styled multilingual vamp halfway
between Iggy Pop and Amanda
Lear, and brothers Simon Schüttel
(synths) and Menk Schüttel (bass), the
group formed in their native Berne,
Switzerland, in 2003. Maybe it’s the
insular nature of the country itself, but
being in a band in Switzerland is not
the easiest way to gain worldwide
recognition.
“Here, making music is seen as a
hobby not a real job,” says Simone.
“We don’t have the music industry
that bands have in, say, London, so
that is maybe why it has taken us so
long to find an audience elsewhere.”
All of Fiji’s releases to date have been
on their own Smartship label and
their one excursion into working with
an outside producer, Ian Little (Roxy
Music, OMD, Duran Duran), looked
great on paper but proved something
of a disaster. The production on their
‘Fun Factory’ album was subsequently
credited to the band, with Little’s
contributions abandoned.
“We actually got on well with Ian
and we had a very nice time socially,
but musically we had totally different
approaches,” explains Simone.
“Ultimately, his ideas didn’t really fit
with ours.”
Operating as a duo since the
departure of Menk, Fiji are
occasionally augmented by Austrian
bass player Philipp Moll when they
play live. Simone and Simon are now
a couple and they both work day jobs
to fund their music, which takes up all
of the time they spend together. She’s
a translator for the Swiss government,
while he’s a music teacher.
Fiji’s debut album, ‘Rosy’ (2005),
won them a degree of recognition in
Switzerland and was followed by the
French language ‘Le Loup’ (2006).
Their third album was ‘Fun Factory’,
which as well as the production
difficulties outlined above, also ran into
a problem with a German company
using the same name, leading to the
album being released internationally as
‘Fijical’ and with a slightly revised track
listing. The artwork is the same on
both versions, though, with the sleeve
showing a pair of panties draped
around feet in black high heels. Ooh
la la. The message is clear; this isn’t
music to put on while you’re doing the
ironing.
‘Spell On Me’, the title track of their
most recent album, was the song that
won over Electronic Sound readers,
much to the delight of Simone. “It’s
wonderful,” she enthuses, with a flush
of pride. Fiji are now working on the
follow-up, which they hope to release
towards the end of 2014, and Simone
stresses that getting the logistics of the
next album right is more important than
the need to rush the record out.
“In the past when we released albums,
everything has been out of sync and
we haven’t had everything ready to go
at the same time. This is the problem
when it is just the two of us trying to do
everything on our own. So for our next
record, it will be important to get not
just the music right, but also the look
of the stage show and the artwork. I
want to have a strong concept to back
up the music. I really want the songs to
work live, in a band situation.”
And live is perhaps a good way to
experience Fiji’s exquisite electronic
noir sound for the first time. They have
supported the likes of Goldfrapp,
Santigold, Kosheen and DAF at
some of Europe’s most prestigious
venues. They clearly relish performing,
confounding the stereotypes of
electronic music as aloof and
mechanical, with Simone De Lorenzi
stalking the stage like a panther. They
already have a strong visual identity,
with the team at Electronic Sound
being particularly impressed by the
singer’s trademark hat.
“Ah, I love my hat,” she laughs. “We
undertook a small tour of Germany in
2007 and I found it in an army surplus
shop. It’s not actually a military hat,
it’s a majorette’s hat. Since I bought it,
I’ve carried it with me to every gig. You
could say it’s my lucky charm.”
For more info, check out
www.fijiband.ch
SYNTH TOWN
By STEVE APPLETON and
BEBE BARRON
Welcom
e
Twinne to Synth Tow
d with
Moog v n
Popula
ille
Mayor: tion 303
D
Please aniel Miller
drive c
arefully
LANDMARKS
FEEL ME
NEIL ARTHUR talks about the
making of BLANCMANGE’s dark
and emotional dancefloor builder.
There goes a bannister!
In about 1981, I had just left college
and was working around London
Bridge. I had a friend around the
corner, Tony White, who had a big,
open-plan studio, and he liked some
of the music Stephen Luscombe and
I were making. He let us practice
there and Stephen came round with
a cassette that had this rhythm on it,
which was the backing of ‘Feel Me’.
It was a great bassline and as we
blasted it in Tony’s studio through the
big speakers, I did this kind of adlib vocal. I had this idea that went,
“Feel me now, feel the pain, feel the
strain…”. Simple rhyming, repetitive
words.
We recorded the four-track demo
and took it out on tour with Grace
Jones and Depeche Mode. I always
remember me and Stephen caught
ourselves dancing to it in this massive
studio space. It was always a good
test; if we could dance to it, then it
would stand a chance as a club track.
We did four demos with Martyn Ware,
including ‘I’ve Seen The Word’ and
‘Blind Vision’, but I’m not sure we did
‘Feel Me’ with him. Of course, it didn’t
have David Rhodes’ great guitar riff on
it at the time, which counterpoints the
bass part and holds it together.
The ‘Happy Families’ version of ‘Feel
Me’, produced by Mike Howlett, was
started at Battery Studios. It was very
different from our first release, the
‘Irene & Mavis’ EP. Everything then
had been recorded on a Sony cassette
machine. We had another cassette
machine with decent speakers on it
and that was purely for playback.
We would take a line-out, feed it into
a mono input, and do the other track
live at the same time. Or we would
overdub by playing in the room and
having the backing track playing from
the extension. We combined that and
a borrowed four-track machine with
Varispeed on it. ‘Overspreading Art
Genius’ was recorded at half time. I
played guitar and bass, and we both
played percussion on Tupperware,
while some of the other parts were on
tape loops using Melos echo units.
On ‘Holiday Camp’, we had a cheap
organ and there was my £18 guitar,
using a battery-powered amp I’d made
at school.
We didn’t own any of the synths we
used for ‘Happy Families’. We hired
a Roland Jupiter 8, an ARP sequencer
and a Korg MS20, plus a Linn LM-1
which Stephen and I programmed up.
The catch on the bassline of ‘Feel Me’
is having that pick-up on the sixteenth
beat coming into the one… That was
the thing that got me when Stephen
first came in with the track. It was put
together with a TR-808, initially using
the cowbell as the trigger to the synth.
That was replicated using the Linn, with
the bass part being the Jupiter and the
Korg. David Rhodes’ E-bowed guitar
melody is doubled with a keyboard. I
play guitar and I was happy to come
up with a few ideas, but it’s David’s
part. He’s a far better player than me.
When we did the vocals, we set some
mics at different distances and just
found our way through it. I nearly blew
the engineer’s ears out the first time I
got to the third verse. Fortunately for
us, ‘Feel Me’ was big in the clubs, all
thanks to a remix by John Luongo. We
liked American dance stuff and Tracy
Bennett from London Records played
us this remix John had done just as we
were finishing the album. It had Bashiri
Johnson on percussion and it was such
a significant moment for us, so much
so that we wanted to record with John,
which is why did ‘Blind Vision’ with
him. John told us that when he was
running the 24-track ready to do the
remix, they got to the bit where I went
“STOP! STOP!”, and he stopped the
tape machine because they thought
it was somebody in the studio. So at
least it was convincing!
It’s not exactly a very melodic vocal
line, so the intensity has to build
throughout. On reflection, I always
thought it was more David Byrne
than Ian Curtis, but there was never
any intention behind it. With the line,
“Your hand’s in the pocket, pocket
of a friend”, it was just to get people
thinking that the song was going one
way, but then to ask “What do you
feel?”. For me, it’s a song you can
interpret or misinterpret any number
of ways. It’s like, “Here comes a love
song, there goes a bannister”… I
mean, what could that be? It could
be a sexual reference, it could be a
reference to relationship intensity.
‘Feel Me’ did better than ‘God’s
Kitchen’. It made the lower 40s of
the UK charts and did very well on
the dancefloor. If we’d only ever had
those records out and nothing else, I’d
have been quite happy, but ‘Feel Me’
has had its longevity. Faithless did a
reworking in 2010 using the original
vocal, although they shifted it a few
steps back. Greg Wilson has done a
remix now for ‘Happy Families Too…’,
the re-imagined ‘Happy Families’
album, and it’s really lovely. He’s
moved the position of a couple of the
lines, which is interesting.
There’s also my own new version of
the track and that is more stripped
down. I tried to remember what it was
like in Tony White’s studio, when I first
heard that rhythm Stephen had put
together. David Rhodes came in to
play his great guitar on it again. The
vocals are my daughter, myself and
a vocoder. I wanted to keep it really
simple. Hopefully it still works. At least
I wasn’t going to tear myself apart over
the songs when doing ‘Happy Families
Too...’. They are written as they are
written, for better or for worse.
The deluxe version of ‘Happy Families
Too...’ is released on Cherry Red
in February and will include remixes
by Greg Wilson and Vince Clarke.
The ‘Irene & Mavis’ EP has been
reissued on 10-inch vinyl via Minimal
Wave
FACTORY FLOOR
THE
INDUSTRIAL
REVOLUTION
FACTORY FLOOR are the band for 2014. They’ve taken
the electronic groove of techno and bent it out of shape
in a series of mind-altering live shows, splicing their
heavily improvised sets with the visuals of collaborator
Dan Tombs, who created the images for this feature.
They produced one of the best albums of 2013 with
their self-titled debut and their new single, ‘Turn It Up’,
is a protean and arid dancefloor workout, all beats
and half-murmured vocals over an hallucinogenic four
minutes.
In the spirit of improvised creation, we wrote down 15
questions and invited Factory Floor workers Nik Colk
Void (vocals, guitar, samples), Dom Butler (electronics,
synths) and Gabe Gurnsey (drums and drum machines)
to answer 10 of them by choosing numbers at random.
Get pressing those buttons…
Words: MARK ROLAND
Pictures: DAN TOMBS
FACTORY FLOOR
TENSE AND INTENSE
Please choose a number…
Dom: “Six.”
6) Tension and release. Factory
Floor tracks rarely release,
they’re all about building
tension. Are you tense people?
Gabe: “No. We’re very childish. The
music can be tense, but we’re not…”
Dom: “We’re not tense, but we can
be intense in our creativity, in how
we work. We just get into things and
explore them and do them, and it can
be very good fun, but it can be intense
as a sound or as a performance or as a
creative process.” Nik: “It’s like a blueprint for the live
show. When you see it live, then it will
definitely have a release.”
Gabe: “It makes you think about dance
music in a different way. It’s good to
experiment with things inside a normal
dance structure.”
Nik: “There are no chord changes or
step-ups or step-downs in the tracks.
We make changes by putting a different
sound in, or a drum hit. Small changes
that make the shape of the track move
forward.” ELECTRONICS
Please choose another number…
Nik: “Two!”
2) How important is the sound
of electronics themselves to the
Factory Floor process?
Gabe: “Very.”
Nik: “It’s good to use hardware in
combination with software. I try to make
a new language with the guitar by using
electronics and sampling. I’m really into
sampling and I need electronics. It does
shape the way my stuff sounds. I want
it to retain an organic feel too, so that
brings a warmth into it.”
Dom: “It’s important, but the mixture is
crucial. When Gabe is using a live drum
kit and a drum machine, it shifts it into a
different space, it’s more of a spectrum
of textures and sounds. Electronics are
fascinating and lend themselves to
experimentation. I think that’s why they
appeal to us as a band.”
A REFERENCE POINT
And another number…
Gabe: “Eleven.”
11) Now it’s out and the dust has settled, how do
you feel about the album as a document of the
band?
Gabe: “[Silence…] I don’t have to answer it!” Nik: “You asked for that number!” Gabe: “Anyone can answer! Can’t they? Alright… I think
that with all our releases, it’s a good snapshot of where we
were at, at that point, you know. We’re forever wanting to
progress with it and change and learn. We’ll look back and
reference it in the future, use it as a reference point. We’re
really happy with it. It’s a good milestone.”
Nik: “It only started to make a shape about three quarters
of the way through the recording. We decided we had time
to play about with processing the vocals to the extreme,
and analysing all our parts and really working them
independently. We’d be in the studio together, but there’d
be moments where one of us would be in there on our own
working on our part, and that was nice. If you work with an
engineer, you tend to lose creative accidents on the way,
because they know what they’re doing... and we didn’t
really.”
It seems to me that a band like Factory Floor should release
lots of albums, because of the nature of what you do. It
reminds me of people like Miles Davis, doing two or three
albums a year, always moving, never static, never wanting
to release some kind of ultimate statement. The Fall is
another band I’m reminded of, in that ever-shifting sense.
Gabe: “I think you’ve hit the nail on the head. That’s sadly
lacking in a lot of music nowadays. People go out with one
identity and get stuck in the same loop. What’s the point?
You’re not going to progress, you’re not going to learn, your
audience is going to get bored. We want longevity to the
band, we don’t want to say ‘this is our sound’ and stay like
that for 10 years.” Dom: “It’s about being inquisitive as well, as in creativity,
and I think it’s in our nature to be like that.”
THE POLITICS OF DANCING
And another number please…
Dom: “One.”
1) Are Factory Floor a political band?
Nik: “No! Next question…”
Dom: “Maybe as individuals, but not as a band.”
Gabe: “We’re not trying to make a political statement as a
band.”
But is there not an inevitability of subversive music like yours
having a political dimension?
Dom: “I don’t think there is anymore. I don’t think it has that
impact now. It’s really hard to be subversive with music.”
Nik: “Things don’t linger. If you make a statement, it’s
forgotten by the following day. I think we’re making a
political stance in the fact that we’ve carved our own niche
and we’re doing things our own way. We’re self-sufficient,
which is similar to TG [Throbbing Gristle] back in the day.
We want to create music where people can forget about
their day-to-day life and lose themselves. That’s why the live
side is so important to us. We want to be able to give an
experience, as opposed to just something to listen to.”
FACTORY FLOOR
ECSTASY
Another number… I’m starting to feel
like Rachel Riley from ‘Countdown’
here…
Gabe: “Thirteen.”
13) When you wake in the
morning do you feel happy
and eager, or otherwise?
Nik: “That’s one for Gabe! He
doesn’t wake up in the morning!”
Gabe: “I generally do feel good…
if I start drinking that early [laughs].
I don’t really wake up that early, in
all honesty. But if there’s something
motivating or exciting like doing a
remix or doing a new track, then I
do. I’m a very happy person. Ecstatic
at all times.”
Nik: “I’d say I’m generally a happy
person. Once I’ve had a coffee.
We’re pretty fortunate people to
be able to do what we love doing.
We’ve got nothing to grumble about.
Apart from the fact our warehouse
is going to be knocked down in
January.”
Gabe: “Nowhere is safe nowadays.
The grim reality of money.”
LET’S GET PHYSICAL
And another number…
Nik: “Seven?”
7) What do albums mean now that
digital recordings are abundant and
easily replicable, and it’s the live
performance that’s the rare and unique
aspect of a band’s existence?
Nik: “As a band, I think we’re all still into the
idea of vinyl. When we put the album together,
we did it conscious of the fact that it would be
coming out on vinyl, so the tracks were arranged
to anticipate the turning over of the record. We
have been asked that quite a lot, why would we
bother to put an album out, why don’t we just
keep releasing singles? It was just about putting
a body of work together. That’s how we view an
album, as a body of work.”
Gabe: “Everything’s so throwaway now, I think
it’s important for bands to have some kind of
physical evidence of themselves and putting a
record on is a physical experience of listening
to music. You enjoy it more when you put it on
a record player, you get more immersed in it,
you’re not just putting it on your Spotify. It feels
like you’re doing something rather than listening
to someone else’s bloody playlist, you know?”
Dom: “In time, I think people who are still
buying albums will still have relationships
with those albums. And in 10 years, 20 years
time, that relationship will develop. You won’t
have that with songs on an iPod. You won’t be
thinking, ‘Oh, I remember when I downloaded
that song’, but you do think like that with an
album because it imprints on your internal
calendar, your memory. I think people will still
enjoy that.”
BUZZING
And another number please…
Dom: “15.”
15) What is the most
dangerous thing you have
ever done?
Dom: “I can’t really tell you.
Honestly. I know what it is, but I can’t
tell you.”
Nik: “You were outside on that
ferry on the way to Ireland in gale
force winds with people throwing
up everywhere, but you were
determined to go outside and have a
cigarette. I was surprised to see you
walk back in again.”
Gabe: “The most dangerous thing
I’ve ever done was try and fix a drum
machine when the power was still
plugged in. I ended up electrocuting
myself. It can kill you. The buzz was
great. I didn’t fix my drum machine,
though.”
WHITE TROUSERS
Actually, I think I might be more
Carol Vorderman than Rachel
Riley… Anyway, er, another number
please…
Gabe: “Five?”
Dom: “Green. And blue!”
Nik: “Mine’s black really. I was just
saying yellow because our album’s
yellow.”
5) What’s your favourite
colour?
Gabe: “Bubblegum pink.”
Nik: “Isn’t it white? You like white
trousers…”
Nik: “Yellow [laughs].”
Dom: “Fourteen!”
FACTORY FLOOR
HITLER
Okay, 14 it is then…
14) Do you own a cat? If so,
what’s its name?
Nik: “No.”
Dom: “I did have a cat called
January. And my nan had a cat
called… I can’t say it, actually…
Oh, OK, she had a cat called Hitler,
because it had a mark on its top
lip that looked like a little Hitler
moustache. I thought she should have
called it Charlie Chaplin. She had
a budgerigar called Kelly as well.
Hitler ate Kelly.”
ELTON JOHN
CHOPPING SHALLOTS
Nine down, one to go... Last number please…
Nik: “Ten.”
10) Elton John said your album was
“punishing, in a good way”. Thoughts?
Dom: “We want him to do a remix.” Nik: “I’d rather he’d cover something than do a
remix.”
That would be mortgage-clearing work, wouldn’t
it?
Dom: “Yes!”
to get that feedback. My dad texted me saying,
‘Oh my God! You’ve made it!’. That’s the only
time he’s messaged me about the band. He didn’t
even message me to say congratulations on the
album.”
Nik: “I like to imagine what he was doing while
he was listening to it.”
Gabe: “I wondered where he was when he
listened to it. I think he was at his piano with a
big glass of champagne.” Nik: “In the kitchen.”
Nik: “Totally delighted.”
Gabe: “I expect he was chopping some shallots
or something. Do you think he chops shallots?
Maybe he was in the car. Burning around in his
massive car, listening to it.” Gabe: “We’re not snobby that way. We love the
record going in loads of different places. It’s great
Nik: “It was a definite compliment. I’m sure we’ll
be hooking with him soon.”
Were you surprised or horrified or delighted by
his comment?
TWO DIFFERENT WAYS
“The first video I contributed to, after a chance
meeting and collaboration for one of the Dollop
warehouse parties,” says Dan Tombs. “Factory Floor
asked me to record the wild tessellating patterns I
used with them live for the video. I recorded it in one
take and sent it to them overnight, so they could film
with the dancer.”
DAN TOMBS Dan Tombs is an artist who uses modified obsolete
game technology and video synthesisers to create
mind-scrambling digital feedback visuals for Factory
Floor, as well as for Jon Hopkins and Perc. Dan
produced the stills for this feature and the cover
imagery.
TWO DIFFERENT WAYS
(PERC REMIX)
“This is one of the most enjoyable videos I have
worked on. I had contributed the background visuals
to the original ‘Two Different Ways’ video and I’d then
made a video for Perc’s ‘A New Brutality’ just before
the Factory Floor remix EP came out. So I offered to
‘remix’ the original ‘Two Different Ways’ video using
techniques I had just employed while making the video
for Perc.”
TURN IT UP
“This is the culmination of the techniques I’ve
developed to use live with the band, using simple
video synthesisers to articulate the pulsing of the music
coupled with video feedback to expand the imagery.
This will be the starting point for future live shows.”
The ‘Factory Floor’ album and ‘Turn It Up’
single are available on DFA Records
VINCE CLARKE
WHEN JASON
MET VINCE
TV presenter and ‘Gadget Show Live’ veteran
JASON BRADBURY doesn’t really get nervous,
unless he’s flying to New York to meet his music
hero VINCE CLARKE, interview him for Electronic
Sound, and slap a piece of mind-bending virtual
reality kit on Vince’s head. We’ve got it all on
video too…
Words, pictures and video: JASON BRADBURY
VINCE CLARKE
VINCE ON DEPECHE MODE (PART 1)
I
grew up in Lincolnshire in the late
1970s, surrounded on all sides
by young farmers. The music that
dominated was rockabilly, with a bit
of heavy metal thrown in. It was like
growing up in Texas or something.
The first time I heard Depeche Mode’s
‘Speak And Spell’ album, I was blown
away by how radically different it
was, firstly because of the way the
music sounded, but also because of
the band’s instrumentation and the
way they looked and the way they
were marketed. All of it was fresh.
And I was an empty vessel, living
in the countryside, oppressed by
rockabilly and metal, and open to this
incredible sound. I had missed the
very beginnings of the electronic music
scene, but I reacted profoundly to
Depeche Mode and also to The Human
League. This was when my love affair
with the music of Vince Clarke started.
In recent years, since I have had a bit
of success, earned a bit of money and
had the time to explore my passions,
I began to buy vintage electronic
instruments and get into them in more
depth, and I started to unlock the
genius and the methodology of how
the music that had inspired me had
been created. I was struck by both the
simplicity and the complexity of what
those young lads and lasses did back
in the 1980s. I’ve followed Vince’s
career from Depeche Mode to Yazoo
to Erasure with huge interest and I’ve
always felt that meeting him would be
like finding a long-lost brother. It was almost Christmas when the
opportunity to hook up with Vince
came up. I had three kids to consider,
a busy schedule of ‘Gadget Show’
filming, and literally only a 24-hour
window available to travel to New
York, where Vince has been living for
quite some time. But somehow it came
together. When I finally arrived at his
studio, I was really nervous, which is
very unusual for me. I present a TV
show and I’m used to doing things
like ‘The Gadget Show Live’ in front
of 100,000 people, so I shouldn’t be
feeling like this. I was hoping to get
Vince to “new best friend” status in
about 30 seconds…
V
ince is based in Brooklyn and his
home is beautiful. The basement
houses his Cabin Studio and
the room itself is very large, at least
40 feet long by 15 feet wide. The
walls and floors are wooden with
incandescent lighting housed in low
ceilings. There is a lot of light, but it
is low light. In fact, it is actually really
dim. It’s perfect for reading the LEDs
on keyboards but, as I discovered,
it makes for very difficult filming
conditions. At first I struggled to make
out Vince at all, he was just a dark
blur, so he went off to find me a desk
lamp to see if that would help.
My strategy was to travel light,
avoiding putting anything in the
hold of the aircraft. But even then, as
the “Gadget” guy, I felt compelled
to bring a few gizmos with me, so
I ended up carrying a broadcast
standard camera, a GoPro Hero Plus,
a Zoom audio recorder, an Oculus
Rift (a virtual reality headset – more
of which later), an Xbox Controller
and a huge spaghetti-like tangle of
wires, among other things. There
was simply no option of adding a
decent lighting rig to that little lot. Of
course, going through airport security
carrying £10,000 worth of high-tech
gear meant they took a great deal of
interest in me, no doubt imagining I
was planning to drop into New York
with the stuff, sell it and then fuck off
home again.
If you were creating a visual timeline
that represented the modern evolution
of the synthesiser from the 1970s to the
most modern interpretations, you could
do it all from Vince Clarke’s studio. Just
about every single seminal instrument
is here – from huge modular systems,
through a collection of drum machines,
sequencers, CV/Gate to MIDI
converters, monophonic, polyphonic,
modern takes on classic designs, to
the virtual ‘soft’ synths on his computer
workstation.
VINCE CLARKE
VINCE ON DEPECHE MODE (PART 1)
Something that struck me, which I
hadn’t expected, was that my own
home studio has a similar layout,
albeit completely unintentionally.
There are the same wooden floors and
walls, low ceiling lights and several
key classic pieces of kit: Vince has a
Roland System 100M, I have a System
100, and we both have a Sequential
Circuits Pro-1, a MoPho and a Roland
Jupiter 4. I hadn’t been trying to
emulate Vince’s set-up, it just seemed
to happen, perhaps led by my search
for a particular kind of atmosphere
and a particular kind of sound. It
seemed uncanny that it reflected the
studio of man I’ve always admired.
The one significant difference? Around
the outside edge of my studio snakes
a river of cables, but in Vince’s studio
there is not a single cable in sight. It is
the equivalent of a musical operating
theatre, almost completely clinical.
I think this tells you something quite
interesting about Vince Clarke; here is
a man who clearly values order. This
is a side of his personality that comes
across in the way he works, in his
structured and meticulous approach to
creating music.
I
wanted to try to dig deep in the
hope of finding something fresh
about Vince’s life in music. He split
from Depeche Mode after they’d made
just one album and I’m intrigued by
this, so I asked what was really at
the heart of the move. It’s telling that
in his answer – that the group was a
collection of egos, a group of young
men each convinced they were the
reason for the group’s success – he
includes himself quite unashamedly.
I was astonished by his matter-offactness when he said he was perfectly
prepared to go back to being a factory
worker or a labourer. It is a starkly
honest answer and seems very typical
of Vince.
When he talked about Alison Moyet,
he wasn’t given to embellishment.
I wondered if he’d got any kind of
emotional charge from first hearing her
sing, but his response was perfectly
business-like. “She’s a good singer,
but I knew she could sing,” he said.
When I pressed him, he conceded that
he thought her voice was amazing,
but it seems that Vince and Alison’s
musical pairing was essentially born
out of practical reasons. Alison, who
is the more demonstrative of the two,
said something similar in an interview
with Electronic Sound earlier in the
year, noting that she initially worked
with Vince because it would give her a
demo and be good for her CV.
Yet for all this, I am struck by the depth
of feelings expressed in Yazoo’s music
and, listening again to their ‘Upstairs
At Eric’s’ debut, how experimental
it still sounds for what is generally
considered a pop record. It is pop
in a very avant garde sense, playing
around with reverb, echo, vocal
samples and, on the track ‘I Before
E Except After C’, even just Vince
reciting the Lord’s Prayer as the mother
of co-producer Eric Radcliffe is heard
VINCE ON DEPECHE MODE (PART 2)
in the background reading from the
manual of a Fairlight music computer.
This playful ethic, this adventurous
spirit, has always been important
to how Vince works. The ‘Spectrum
Pursuit Vehicle’ album he recorded with
Martyn Ware in 2001, for example, is
very innovative and intriguing ambient
music.
A
s Vince showed me the Roland
Juno 60 synthesiser he used
on both Yazoo albums, he
remarked about what a big deal it
was having a keyboard that could
remember the sounds you had created.
When Vince began making music,
analogue synthesisers had to be tuned
up and warmed before you could use
them and they were very limited in
terms of memory. Compare that with
me turning on Ableton Live on my
computer, bringing up a collection of
soft synths, and creating the music for
these videos in about 15 minutes.
Vince still has the ARP 2600 synth he
used on the Depeche Mode and Yazoo
records, which also provided many of
the percussion sounds. The process is
a completely different reality to how
modern dance music is made. It’s the
equivalent of using a stick and a bow
to start a fire, compared to simply
turning the central heating on. As we
went around his studio, he talked about
how he crafted several songs that have
come to define a generation, and the
instruments that made those particular
recordings were sitting all around us.
I was surrounded by the holy relics of
synthpop.
Vince’s pragmatic disposition is
precisely what enables him to master
an instrument like the ARP 2600.
To manipulate the envelopes of a
particular sine wave to the point where
it becomes a convincing kick drum
requires a great deal of attention and
drive, and it takes a certain type of
personality to be bothered or to care
enough to do that. Yet Vince’s music
has never been robotic and there is
nothing remotely mechanical about
the reactions his records provoke.
What distinguishes his work is the
warmth, colour, brightness and humour
that he is able to draw out from his
instruments. It’s an unlikely partnership
of man and machine, but then Vince is
something of a Willy Wonka character,
an eccentric boffin who is knee-deep
in kit and all in the pursuit of joy. The
end product is something spiritual and
is diametrically opposed to the clinical
efficiency of the equipment he uses. To a large extent, I think this comes
from the way he employs technology,
using it to add orchestral flair to the
tracks. Erasure songs are composed
on guitar and captured on a series of
Olympus microcassette recorders – and
it’s an extraordinary way of working.
Vince will shape a lead melody
with Andy Bell singing on a micro
recorder, then he’ll bounce across to
a second micro recorder while adding
a bassline. He then gets a third micro
VINCE CLARKE
VINCE ON YAZOO
VINCE ON ERASUE (PART 1)
VINCE ON ERASURE (PART 2)
VINCE CLARKE
VINCE CLARKE
VINCE TRIES OCULUS RIFT
recorder and mixes the outputs from
the first two machines with additional
instrumental parts. Using this approach
and a whole series of micro recorders,
he builds up tracks a layer at a time.
I think this explains why Vince’s music
retains its humanity, even when it is
transferred to electronic instruments.
If you pick up an acoustic guitar and
start singing, you will tend to create
melodies. If you sit twiddling knobs,
you will end up making ambient house.
Maybe this is why so many of Erasure’s
songs stick in your head and never go
away; it’s all down to the way they
are written. The songs have to work
on acoustic instruments and that is the
critical difference.
mong the gadgets I took with
me to Vince’s studio was a
development kit version of the
Oculus Rift, a virtual reality headmounted display that is currently taking
the gaming world by storm. Forget all
the talk about new gaming consoles,
the real technological revolution begins
with this device. It certainly prompted
plenty of strange looks when I took it
through Customs.
A
I’d brought the Oculus Rift in the hope
of eliciting a different sort of reaction
from Vince than you might expect to
get in a traditional interview. He was
keen to try the headset, but he put
it on quite tentatively. I had loaded
up the game ‘Half-Life 2’ by Valve
because if there is a connoisseur’s
video game, then this is it. It’s set in a
dystopian future, a retro 80s Orwellian
vision, and Vince’s character is on the
run from an oppressive police state.
The section I started Vince on began
with his character on a rooftop, and I
quickly discovered that he is not great
with heights. He was unsettled and
fascinated and ultimately blown away
by the experience.
He asked if he could let his wife Tracy
try the headset on and she was equally
intrigued and absorbed. As she was
playing, she suddenly realised that this
was what their son had been hassling
them to get him for Christmas and that
they already had one on order. When
I got back to the UK, one of the first
things I did was call the PR for Oculus
Rift, told them about Vince, and got
them to fast-track his order. Another bid
to make Vince my new best friend!
V
ince Clarke’s all-time favourite
song remains ‘The Sound Of
Silence’ by Paul Simon, a
songwriter he has loved since his
teenage years. When discussing
Depeche Mode, he suggests that
another key factor in his decision to
leave was the rest of the group’s desire
to go down a much darker route,
which is something they eventually did.
Despite the many other theories and
explanations, I believe this did play a
big part in the split. While Vince does
admit that he likes dark music – and
‘The Sound Of Silence’ certainly falls
into that category – it’s just not the sort
of stuff he writes.
So who else but Vince could deliver
a Christmas record as bright and
happy as Erasure’s new ‘Snow Globe’
album? It’s a very populist concept and
I fully expect songs like ‘Bells Of Love
(Isabelle’s Of Love)’ to grace Christmas
compilation albums for the next 25
years. The hypnotic beat of ‘Gaudete’,
the group’s Christmas single, is sure to
make it another timeless track.
Although Vince doesn’t write dark
music, Erasure have deconstructed
their version of ‘White Christmas’ down
to a monotone. At heart, it is quite a
sad song and the production of ‘Snow
Globe’ reflects this. Listening to the
sound of the subway in the background
as Andy Bell sings over what we all
know as a Christmas standard, my
thoughts go back to Yazoo’s ‘Upstairs
At Eric’s’, and it’s clear that the same
sonic experimentation is still evident
in Vince’s work today. I think it’s safe
to say that it will also be there on
Erasure’s 15th studio album, which they
are working on now and which is due
for release later in 2014.
Erasure’s ‘Snow Globe’ album and
‘Gaudete’ single are out now on Mute
THE VERY BEST
IN ELECTRONIC MUSIC
AVAILABLE ON ALL
SMARTPHONES & TABLETS
DOWNLOAD THE
ELECTRONICSOUND APP
FOR FREE AT
www.electronicsound.co.uk
REWIND... FAST FORWARD...
REWIND...
FAST FORWARD...
We’re coming to the end of Electronic Sound’s first
year, so we’re feeling both nostalgic and futurist, a
bit like Kraftwerk’s ‘Trans-Europe Express’. To mark
the occasion, we asked 10 key figures from the
electronic music world how 2013 went for them and
what they think the next 12 months might hold…
KARL
BARTOS
Former Kraftwerk insider turned
sound professor and solo
electronicist – and the cover star of
the first issue of Electronic Sound
How did 2013 go for you?
I need a long holiday now. Two or three years, maybe longer.
What were the best and worst things that happened to
you in 2013?
The best was the overwhelmingly good reception for my new record.
The worst was…?
The most memorable gig you played in 2013?
The Brussels Summer Festival was wicked, because it was the first
time that we played the new show. And also, of course, because of
the great weather, the friends, and the people from the Atomium at
the event.
Your favourite album of 2013?
‘Off The Record’ [Karl’s own album], because it introduced me again
to the concept of time. Listening to it occasionally, I get the feeling
that the music on the record had been always be there and has
been composed by itself.
What are your musical predictions for 2014? What
artists or scenes are going to be making waves?
Igor Stravinsky.
What are you working on right now?
I have started to write my autobiography.
Have you found any more old tapes in the attic?
I’m not going up there again in case there are more of those...
Karl Bartos’ ‘Off The Record’ album is on Bureau B
NINA
KRAVIZ
From Serbia – via Moscow and Berlin –
Nina is a sought-after DJ, a top-notch
producer and an all-round
fascinating character
How did 2013 go for you?
It’s been pretty intense, I have to say. I’ve been working
a lot and been to so many different places around the
world. What were the best and worst things that
happened to you in 2013?
Well, I can only say that there have been a lot of great
things that happened to me this year and most of them
have this weird duality, where everything can be seen
from two completely opposite – and often contradictory
– sides. The most memorable gig you played in 2013?
I’ve been blessed to play some truly magical gigs where
everything just clicks, and the DJ and the crowd get lost
in one big voodoo experience together. And luckily for
me, those gigs have fortunately happened considerably
often, so it’s impossible to pick just one. The easiest
to pick would probably be my gig at the Guggenheim
Museum in Bilbao. I played slow motion acid inside one
of the most fascinating museum spaces on earth and the
crowd were totally into it. That’s just hard to forget. And
sorry, I know you asked for just one, but there is a second
one. An almost mystical case. I’ve been always a big fan
of Thomas Mann, especially his book ‘Der Zauberberg’
[‘The Magic Mountain’]. That story was partly the reason
why I started learning German back in the day. It takes
place in a spooky sanatorium for tuberculosis in the
Swiss mountain resort of Davos. I’ve always dreamed
of visiting that place and just a week ago I was on my
way to Davos to play a gig. I asked the promoter if he
knew where THAT house from Mann’s book is and he
just dropped, “Oh, this is exactly where you’re playing
tonight”. You remember ‘The Shining’, the movie with Jack
Nicholson? That’s exactly how it looked and felt inside.
Your favourite album of 2013? I’ve been focused mainly on vinyl record digging, so I am
more dealing with old hidden jams in a 12-inch format
rather than albums. But still, when it comes to new stuff, I
really liked the Omar S album, ‘Thank You For Letting Me
Be Myself’, James Blake’s ‘Overgrown’, and the Kendrick
Lamar album. Ah, and Boards Of Canada also...
What are you working on right now?
I’ve just released a new six-track EP on Rekids and I’m
finishing a remake of one very old song at the moment. I am
also working on a new album.
What are your musical predictions for 2014?
What artists or scenes are going to be making
waves?
Hmm... I prefer to keep quiet about things that I am not a
big expert on.
Is it true that you’re a fully qualified dentist? And
you used to work on Russian cosmonauts’ teeth?
Yes, I am qualified dentist. After I graduated, I worked at
the hospital for veterans of wars and there were also some
cosmonauts there. It was a very interesting experience to
encounter someone who had travelled in the outer space! Nina Kraviz’s ‘Mr Jones’ six-track EP is on Rekids
DAVE
CLARKE
Top techno DJ, producer and
radio show host, whose ‘Red’
series remains a high point of 90s
electronic music
How did 2013 go for you?
Hmm, let me think… It wasn’t a bad one at all. The only
downside was not having enough time and energy to be in
the studio as much as I wanted to be for my solo material
and as _Unsubscribe_ with Mr Jones. We did manage
a few releases, though, such as our debut material on
Houndstooth and a few remixes, including one for Sir John
Foxx which the lovely Nemone on 6Music supported most
fully. Gigs were also generally pretty spot on. I chose to do
some different things and break away from the usual, and I
was quite happy with the results. It was quite refreshing.
What were the best and worst things that
happened to you in 2013?
It was nice to get back to Detroit for Movement and ADE
[Amsterdam Dance Event] was even better this year. Then,
of course, there were some great gigs – Awakenings,
Tomorrowland, some fantastic club shows too. I think the
worst thing that happened to me was being quite sick with
stomach flu a few weeks back. Four days in bed with a
massively high temperature and a dodgy stomach – and
I hate lazing around in bed – but even after four days it
wouldn’t stop… So I dosed up on paracetamol and Imodium
and went away for the weekend... Well, it just about
worked. I was happy to be DJing behind a screen for !K7
for an electro set on the Friday and be in the very capable
hands of Lehmann in Stuttgart on Saturday, so I got away
with it. Being a DJ on stage with a bad stomach and a
temperature isn’t a great combo.
The most memorable gig you played in 2013?
Damn, that is always a political hot potato.... so I am not
answering it. I will just say, with all honesty, there were too
many to mention, but it was nice to play with Carl Cox on
the same stage in Italy. That doesn’t happen very often.
Your favourite album of 2013? Nick Cave’s ‘Push The Sky Away’ was a sublime
achievement. When it came out, I think I announced on
Twitter that this would be my album of the year. It is a
stupendously beautiful piece of Arts and Crafts. Funny to
think that he lives in my old home town now, but I doubt
Jubilee Street in Brighton gave him the inspiration for those
two tracks [‘Jubilee Street’ and ‘FInishing Jubilee Street’]. ;-)
What are you working on right now?
Right now? Today is office day, so I’m doing my RAID,
answering emails, backing up my music, strategising about
2014 events that I am putting on, working on line-ups and
that sort of thing, and I’m about to have a dinner meeting.
What are your musical predictions for 2014?
What artists or scenes are going to be making
waves?
I don’t like to make predictions. I go with the flow and will
continue to support music with passion, so it’s best to listen
to my White Noise radio show to hear what I like.
One of your lesser known roles is head judge
of the private DJ Cook Off contest at ADE, which
Seth Troxler won for the third year running in
2013. How seriously do the DJs take the contest?
And how seriously do you like your food?
A few DJs have taken it to a ridiculous level, practising
the same dish for weeks – without realising it is a social
gathering not ‘Masterchef’ – and then when the judges
don’t like it to the extent they’d like them to, they can be a
tad vitriolic. But most take the whole vibe really, really well
and see it as me and Gary Smith [ADE chap and Electronic
Sound contributor] intended when we first came up with
the idea. It is for those good-spirited souls that we keep
on going, as they make it a highlight on the social side for
ADE. I love good, honest food. In fact, many of my friends
are chefs... so I am not sure what that says about me.
Dave Clarke’s ‘Wisdom To The Wise (Red 2)’ remix EP
is on Boyznoise. Listen to Dave’s White Noise radio
show online at http://www.rte.ie/2fm/white-noise/
MARTYN
WARE
Heaven 17 and BEF main man who started
The Human League and is one of our world’s
most respected figureheads
How did 2013 go for you?
Quite an amazing year for Heaven 17, who are gaining
new audiences all the time, and especially for BEF, with the
release of ‘Music Of Quality And Distinction Volume 3 –
Dark’. I’ve played lots of gigs in lots of new places and I’ve
been planning giant projects for the next decade with my
3D sound installation company, Illustrious.
young artists make enough money to support themselves
in the career they love. Watch out for an exciting initiative
from the people who run UnConvention, too. It’s called Off
Axis and it will create a giant national and international
network of resources, skills and gig opportunities based
on an exchange model. Watch this space, it’s going to be
huge…
What were the best and worst things that
happened to you in 2013?
We did an astounding installation with Illustrious,
spatialising a 30-piece live orchestra and electro-acoustic
band in the courtyard of an eight-storey high, 100m
diameter building in Copenhagen as part of the Strom
Festival. Every one of the 360 windows was lit as a giant
pixel and played like a massive colour organ to an hourlong performance of Arvo Part, Henryk Gorecki and Mike
Sheridan. It was the best live event I’ve ever been involved
with. People next to me in the 2,000-strong crowd were
crying at the beauty of it. The worst has to be performing
with Heaven 17 on a cruise liner in rough seas off the
Portuguese coast. Yuk.
What are you working on right now?
I’m currently moving my studio out of my home for the first
time in 20 years, so I’m looking forward to a new impetus.
I’m planning some new Heaven 17 songs – the first in a
decade – for touring next autumn and I’ve also become
involved with a new instrument called the Seaboard, which
is a physically soft keyboard full of different sensors that
allows pitch bend per key, therefore giving you a unique
way of controlling expression. It’s very exciting and it’s
inspiring me, as soon as I get the prototype, to create a new
experimental piece, provisionally entitled ‘Dignity Of Labour
2’ after the original Human League EP. I’m working on some
collaborations with the original BBC Radiophonic Workshop
guys too.
The most memorable gig you played in 2013?
The BEF show in London, a very special night with some
truly exceptional performances from all the guest artists
involved, closely tied with the V40 show at Koko in
Camden, where we resurrected 10 early Human League
songs, six of them for the first time. That was a great thrill for
us, as I believe the first two Human League albums deserve
a wider audience – and the fans seem to agree.
There was a 22-year gap between volumes two
and three of ‘Music Of Quality And Distinction’.
Does that mean volume four won’t be released
until 2035? If you were to start work on it now,
what singers would you especially like to get on
that next BEF album? Haha, I hope I can keep up the energy! If I do it, I’d better
get on with it a bit quicker this time… Who knows what
talent might emerge by then, but there are a few I’d love to
have on there who I’ve missed out on before – Bowie, Iggy
Pop, Kate Bush, Justin Timberlake, Elly Jackson from LaRoux,
Alex Turner, Beyoncé… Why not aim big? That’s how I met
Tina Turner!
Your favourite album of 2013? Arctic Monkeys’ ‘AM’. Hands down – and not just because
they’re from Sheffield.
What are your musical predictions for 2014?
What artists or scenes are going to be making
waves?
I’d love to say that there’s a revolution coming, but I suspect
it’ll be more of the same… I think intelligent electronic pop
music – not EDM – is gaining momentum and, as a member
of the Featured Artists Coalition, we’re fighting hard to help
BEF’s ‘Music Of Quality And Distinction Volume 3 –
Dark’ album is on Wall Of Sound show online at
http://www.rte.ie/2fm/white-noise/
JESSY
LANZA
Oblique electronicist from Ontario
in Canada whose ‘Pull My Hair
Back’ on Hyperdub is one of the
great debuts of 2013
How did 2013 go for you?
2013 has been a pretty great year. My album, ‘Pull My
Hair Back’, came out and I’ve been lucky enough to play it
for people all around the world. So, yeah, it’s been a good
year.
What are your musical predictions for 2014?
What artists or scenes are going to be making
waves?
I’m not very good at predicting waves. I hope that Mykki
Blanco will become massively huge.
What were the best and worst things that
happened to you in 2013?
Everything’s been very positive. My record came out and
I’ve been touring a lot. I really can’t say I’ve had any bad
experiences to speak of.
What are you working on right now?
I’m working on a new EP at the moment.
The most memorable gig you played in 2013?
My show in Berlin was special for me because it was my
first time playing in Europe.
Your favourite album of 2013? DJ Rashad’s ‘Double Cup’ has been a favourite for me. It
doesn’t sound like anything else, but at the same time is a
combination of musical elements I’ve always loved.
You’ve said that you prefer vintage hardware
to computers. What’s your favourite piece of kit
that you own and why? If you had an endless
budget, is there anything you’d especially like to
buy? I use my Roland SH-101 a lot, as well as my Juno-106. My
TR-707 is always a go-to, but if I had an endless budget
then I think I would just give myself too many options
because there’s so much incredible stuff to buy. I’d love a TR909, a Jupiter 8, a Yamaha CS-10…
Jessy Lanza’s ‘Pull My Hear Back’ album is on Hyperdub
METAMONO
Jono Podmore is one third of the manifesto-wielding
analogue synth alchemists Metamono – and also a
noted Can archivist
How did 2013 go for you?
Some real ups and downs. Watching the music business
continue to ensure that next to nothing ends up in the
pockets of the artists on the one hand, contrasted with the
inexorable and glorious rise of Metamono on the other.
What were the best and worst things that
happened to you in 2013?
Two best things. Achieving 150 per cent of our crowd
funding goal on Kickstarter to finance the Metamono album
was one. Winning the gold medal in the Wu Style Open
Hand Form event at the London Competition for Traditional
Tai Chi Chuan in June was the other. The worst thing? Best
not dwell on it!
The most memorable gig you played in 2013?
The gig at The Electric in Brixton [London] supporting The
Orb in April was special because it was a real vindication
of our ideas, technique and technology. It sounded ACE on
that system and worked a treat in the context of a big stage.
Your favourite album of 2013? Burnt Friedman & Jaki Liebezeit’s ‘Secret Rhythms 5’. Burnt
and Jaki are colleagues. We released the ‘Cyclopean EP’
together earlier this year. I wasn’t that impressed with this
album at first, but I kept listening and found new stuff in
there and began to really enjoy it. So I like it for itself and
also for the lesson to give things a chance.
What are your musical predictions for 2014?
What artists or scenes are going to be making
waves?
I think there are more of us using analogue technology at
gigs now and people will start to turn their backs on bands
that present the audience with digital audio from a laptop.
I also think there will be more scenes developing at a local,
hands-on level. Reaching out for a million clicks is simply
that – they’re just clicks. And things will get punkier as we
all get to feel the cold hand of austerity on our collars. The
anger attached to a government that exists only to make its
financial backers richer at the expense of the poorest and
weakest will continue to spill out culturally.
What are you working on right now?
We’ve just started getting down to writing for a silent film
project we’ve been planning since the summer. It’s been in
the background while promoting and working on the album.
The premiere will be on 5 April 2014 at the Bradford
International Film Festival, followed by a tour of Germany
and more shows at cinemas in Britain.
Do you ever have those dreams where
you are walking through a forest, and you
stumble across a stash of the rarest analogue
synthesisers ever made, covered in leaves, all still
in their boxes and wrapped in plastic? In a way, I do have that dream, but it’s nearer to reality
than you’d think. All my gear somehow finds its way to me,
or has lain in my path waiting for me to stumble across it.
I have a strange feeling that it’s just not right to actively
track down gear I’ve decided I want. It somehow restricts
the resourcefulness and imagination you need to be able
to create with just what you have, or what has decided to
go on the journey with you. Also, that process of buying
and selling gear, and hunting for particular pieces, tends to
form a consumerist idea of value to your instruments. I don’t
know the accurate market value of any of my instruments
– and they’re not for sale. As far as I’m concerned, they
are priceless because they are all a vital part of my voice
and I pay back that debt by letting them express their
idiosyncracies too. Nevertheless, I’m feeling the need for
something polyphonic at the moment and Christmas is
coming up…
Metamono’s ‘With The Compliments Of Nuclear Physics’
album is on Instrumentarium
PERC
Also known as Ali Wells
– DJ, recording artist,
remixer (Factory Floor!)
and the boss of Perc Trax
and Submit Records
How did 2013 go for you?
Quickly! The year flew by with some big changes to Perc
Trax. The Submit and Perc Trax Ltd labels were launched
and I am really happy with their reception. I also completed
my second album and was as busy as ever with my
gigging. In wider terms, I think the UK scene maintained the
momentum it gained in 2012 and I’m looking forward to
hearing where my favourite producers go in 2014.
What were the best and worst things that
happened to you in 2013?
The Perc Trax party in Detroit in May was amazing. I’d
never played or even visited the city before and I was not
sure what to expect. I grabbed a few hours sleep in the
hotel before my set to try to shake off the effects of jetlag.
I was woken by a text from another DJ saying I had to get
down there immediately – the party was packed with a
queue running around the block. I showered, jumped in a
cab, and got there as soon as I could. Such a great night
and so much love from the clubbers there. And the worst?
Hmm... I try to stay positive and forget about bad things
that happen, but missing both the Perc Trax showcase in
Chicago and my agent’s showcase in Barcelona due to
cancelled flights really upset me. The Chicago event was the
first time I’d ever missed a Perc Trax showcase.
The most memorable gig you played in 2013?
Apart from the Detroit event, it would probably have to be
Awakenings in Eindhoven in January. It was my first time
playing such a huge indoor event and to have some friends
of mine push to the front of the crowd as I started meant a
lot to me. My second visit to Cocoliche in Buenos Aires also
needs a mention as well. I love that place.
Your favourite album of 2013? The Sequence Report album, ‘Secromance’, which is a
Tevo Howard alias. Modern electro-tinged house done the
right way. The Nine Inch Nails and Death Grips records
were also great. The Blacknecks series of 12’s has been
amazing, proving you can take risks with techno and mix
up influences previously unconnected in order to make
something fresh. Their music shames the mass of dubby,
bland techno tracks doing the rounds at present.
What are your musical predictions for 2014?
What artists or scenes are going to be making
waves?
Hopefully, more people taking chances with techno.
Whether that is fusing it with outside influences, more
vocals, or just more personality and individual character. As
you can tell, I am a long way from being a techno purist! In
the same way that the mnml thing got boring very quickly,
so has the rawer techno sound which emerged a few
years ago. Throbbing kicks and dubbed-out stabs is fine,
but if that is all you have to offer then I’m not interested. If
Furfriend get the right track out at the right time, I think they
could be huge. Also Tessela, who is already getting some
attention, but I think 2014 could be his real breakthrough
year.
What are you working on right now?
I finished my second album in November. It will be out in
February, so right now I am not doing much in the studio
and instead I’m getting everything ready for the album
release. Vinyl and CD packaging, promotional videos,
launch parties, that kind of thing. My next production work
will be some remixes, but I’ve not thought about them too
deeply yet.
Your new Submit imprint focuses on “raw
electronics” and recently launched with an EP of
Einstürzende Neubauten reworkings. What was
it like to work with that material? And any clues
as to what we can expect from Perc Trax and
Submit in 2014?
Working with the Neubauten tracks was an honour and a
dream come true. I was apprehensive about it, but I think
the end results speak for themselves. It was like handling a
historical relic. You want to be careful not to destroy what
is so special about those sounds and you want to showcase
them in the best way you can. It took a long time to make a
start on that EP, but once the first track came together it all
fell into place quite easily. The second Submit release has
just come out, which is ‘Feral Grind’, a compilation album
of noise and DIY music, largely from the USA, which is a
scene that has been inspiring me a lot recently. The first half
of 2014 on Perc Trax is really dominated by my album and
one single by an artist new to the label. Next year is also
10 years of Perc Trax, so I think there will be some releases
and events related to that in the second half of the year.
Perc’s ‘The Power And The Glory’ album will be released
on Perc Trax in February album is on Instrumentarium
CHVRCHES
Lauren Mayberry is the singer with Glaswegian
synthpoppers Chvrches, whose debut album hit the
Top 10 in the UK and the Top 20 in the US
How did 2013 go for you?
2013 has been a great year for us as a band. We worked
hard, toured a lot and released our first record.
What were the best and worst things that
happened to you in 2013?
It’s hard to say what the best thing was because there have
been so many amazing highlights, but probably finally
putting the album out. It was our special musical baby. The
worst thing has been being away from our loved ones so
much, but we’re getting to do something we love for a living
and know that we are incredibly lucky to be able to do so.
Plus, that’s what they invented Skype for, right?
The most memorable gig you played in 2013?
Supporting Depeche Mode. That was definitely a massive
achievement for us.
Your favourite album of 2013? ‘Cerulean Salt’ by Waxahatchee, because her lyrics and
her delivery really break my heart. What are your musical predictions for 2014?
What artists or scenes are going to be making
waves?
I don’t really believe in predicting “scenes”. I just hope that
great music, whatever genre it may be, can reach people.
There is a Glasgow band called Honeyblood who I like a
lot and I believe they are putting an album out next year. I’m
also excited about the New York band Wet. Their EP, which
recently came out on Neon Gold, is really great.
What are you working on right now?
At the moment, we are finishing our touring for the year and
making plans for 2014. We’re hoping to start writing again
in the first half of next year, schedule depending, and see
where we go from there...
Chvrches’ ‘The Bones Of What You Believe’ album is on
Virgin
GARY
NUMAN
One-time superstar android, now
well-adjusted electronic music senior
statesman living in Los Angeles
How did 2013 go for you?
Career-wise, it went very well. The ‘Splinter’ album came
out and got great reviews in most places. It went Top 20 in
the UK, for example, and so it did better than the previous
few releases had done. The real work on the album is still
to come though, but that’s for next year. Privately, 2013 had
some very scary moments. My wife Gemma had a number
of health problems, some of which we are still dealing with.
Apart from that, it was my first year living in America and
I’ve loved it. I’m very happy we made the move.
What were the best and worst things that
happened to you in 2013?
The worst thing was my wife going into hospital with what
they initially thought might be a brain tumour, although it
turned out to be meningitis. So, not great, but better than
cancer. The best thing was finishing and releasing ‘Splinter’.
It has been seven years since my last proper studio album,
so I have a lot riding on it.
The most memorable gig you played in 2013?
I played two shows with Nine Inch Nails in Florida and
the Orlando show in particular was amazing. It was
Halloween, the crowd reaction to my set was fantastic, NIN
were incredible, we had a huge party afterwards with lots
of friends… It was just one of those very special days.
Your favourite album of 2013? ‘Hesitation Marks’ by Nine Inch Nails. It was unexpected
in terms of its sound and attitude and it was beautifully put
together. Hearing much of it live several times reinforced
my initial feelings about the depth and quality of the
songwriting. It’s a very impressive album.
What are your musical predictions for 2014?
What artists or scenes are going to be making
waves?
I think two UK bands, Officers and Losers, are both strong
candidates for gaining major success in 2014. They both
deserve it, they’re two excellent bands.
What are you working on right now?
I’ve just finished a UK Tour for ‘Splinter’ and now I’m back
in Los Angeles, working on a score for a film called ‘From
Inside’. After that, more ‘Splinter’ touring around the world
and, in between those tours, I’ll be starting on the next
album.
Are you going to miss the UK in the winter? All
those grey skies and rain, all that fighting in the
high streets of small towns?
I won’t miss the cold and the damp and the rain, nor will I
miss the thugs, but I will miss Britain. Christmas is, or can
be, an especially lovely time in the UK. If it snows, well,
that’s hard to beat. A snowy Sussex Christmas, log fire
burning, children happy, roast dinner cooking... that I will
miss.
Gary Numan’s ‘Splinter: Songs From A Broken Mind’
album is on Mortal/Cooking Vinyl
LUKE
SLATER
The techno producer behind Planetary
Assault Systems, L.B. Dub Corp,
Luke Slater’s 7th Plain, and at least a
dozen other aliases
How did 2013 go for you?
It’s been very busy, very interesting and, at times,
unexpected. In between writing, I’ve been mostly on the
road, and l’ve had some ups and downs in my personal life.
Your favourite album of 2013? Well, I would have to say L.B. Dub Corp’s ‘Unknown
Origin’. Why? Well, this this has been quite a spiritual year.
Any another year, the album wouldn’t have been right.
What were the best and worst things that
happened to you in 2013?
I should think some of the best things over any year and
certainly 2013 were the gigs. I’ve done some amazing
nights and days, with amazing crowds. It’s always very
inspiring. Although a lot of people drag out their mobile
phones at gigs these days, for me the live experience is
always about the there-and-then, letting it go and holding
the memory. The worst things? I was playing at DEMF
[Detroit Electronic Music Festival] this year and some of
the things I saw in Detroit at first were very saddening.
It affected me as it does most people who go there, but
behind that is a determination to go forward and create. I
think this is a message that could be used well over here.
In the UK, we have God knows how many thousands of
square feet of empty space, but with high rents so they’re
waiting for the old standard model businesses to move in.
With lower rents, these could be used for creative people,
for arts and music projects, and only good could come of
that. I can see the industrial estates of Britain buzzing with
yoga balls and skinny jeans and inspiring works of art. I
really don’t think this a naive view.
What are you working on right now?
I’m working on some interesting things revolving around
PAS, L.B. Dub Corp and Luke Slater – the music and the
shows. All to be revealed in 2014. :-) We’ll be touring PAS
live again and there will be some special L.B. Dub Corp DJ
sets too. We’ve also just mastered the next PAS single for
release on Mote-Evolver.
The most memorable gig you played in 2013?
That’s very hard to pin down! For live shows, I would say
PAS [Planetary Assault Systems] at Dekmantel Festival in
Amsterdam. And with DJing, a toss up between the Detroit
festival after hours and Mote-Evolver Vs Klockworks at
Berghain in Berlin.
The ‘Unknown Origin’ album demonstrates your
love of dub music. Who do you consider to be the
greatest of the original dub masters? You’ve got
Benjamin Zephaniah on a couple of the tracks, so
how did you hook up with him?
It’s hard to choose an ultimate original dub creator. King
Tubby and Lee Perry have always been concrete sources of
inspiration and anything that came from Studio One had
some kind of imprint vibe to it. I guess I relate the concept
of the underground way they made tracks to the feeling in a
lot of the music I write and that spontaneity feeds the soul.
I plan to go to Jamaica soon as I’ve never been there. It’s a
different place now, of course, but I do feel it’s a pilgrimage
that needs making before I say goodnight. I’ve known
Benjamin’s poetry for a while. I got in touch with him about
the L.B. Dub album concept and he was into it. I’ve got a
lot of respect for him and he’s got a great sense of humour.
Simple as that really.
L.B. Dub Corp’s ‘Unknown Origin’ album is on Ostgut Ton
BBC RADIOPHONIC WORKSHOP
FIVE GO
ADVENTURING
AGAIN
Dick Mills, Peter Howell, Paddy
Kingsland, Roger Limb and Mark
Ayres have reformed the hugely
influential BBC RADIOPHONIC
WORKSHOP. And as this
fascinating interview with all five
members shows, they’re still
intent on pushing the boundaries
of electronic music
Words: BILL BRUCE
Pictures: MARK ROLAND
BBC RADIOPHONIC WORKSHOP
T
he five members of the BBC
Radiophonic Workshop who
have gathered for an in-store
performance at the Rough Trade record
shop in east London have a collective
age of over 300 years. This in itself is
no more surprising than the combined
ages of the surviving members of The
Rolling Stones, The Who or Fleetwood
Mac. But rather than retreading some
old R&B, the music that the Workshop
plays is ageless. And despite some of it
dating back nearly half a century, it all
points resolutely to the future.
The Radiophonic Workshop are back
to lay a few old ghosts to rest, but
also to start a new chapter in a story
many thought was played out. To the
ensemble’s delight and surprise, the
crowd that turns up at Rough Trade
stretches round the block and a large
section surges forward for autographs
as soon as the set ends. It’s like the
cast of BBC TV’s ‘New Tricks’ being
mistaken for One Direction.
Admittedly, tonight’s show gets off to
a shaky start. A projector repeatedly
causes a laptop to crash and sets off
a chain reaction of cock-ups during
the appositely titled ‘Till The Lights Go
Out’, a new track that is a distinctly
offbeat marriage of Kraftwerk and Bo
Diddly. How the group react to this
minor crisis tells you a lot about the
dynamics of the individuals involved
– and about nature of the Workshop
itself. The immediate response is
very English, with lots of blushing
and flustered apologies. Given the
experimental nature of their work, if
they hadn’t chosen to reboot and start
again, I doubt many of the audience
would have twigged anything was
wrong at all. Besides, glitches are so
Workshop.
“Yes,” chuckles Peter Howell, who is
one of the main driving forces behind
this reunion. “It was very Workshop.”
TAKING THE SHOW ON THE ROAD
While often considered a collective,
it is clear that the BBC Radiophonic
Workshop has merely been home to
a group of talented musicians and
engineers, each of whom has chosen
to experiment with sound in their
own unique way. Peter Howell’s work
is rich in melody and atmosphere,
occasionally betraying his early roots
in psychedelic folk music; Paddy
Kingsland’s compositions show his
interest in mixing conventional sounds
with electronics; Roger Limb is an
accomplished jazz and rock musician
and seems the most relaxed working
with an ensemble; Mark Ayres, the
“youngster” of the team, is a composer
in his own right, but has come to the
fore as a conductor, arranger and
archivist of both the Workshop’s music
and the technology.
Then there is Dick Mills, 76 years old
and the only one of the five members
to have been with the Workshop
right from the beginning in the late
1950s. He was the unit’s first technical
assistant. His career is so vast, it takes
in everything from the burpy cavernous
rumble of ‘Major Bloodnok’s Stomach’
for The Goons to the iconic ‘Doctor
Who’ theme music, which he created
in partnership with Delia Derbyshire.
These days, he divides his time flitting
around the world attending ‘Doctor
Who’ conventions, and writing and
speaking as a leading expert in
tropical fish.
By his own admission, a “sound
engineer” rather than a musician, Mills’
role in the group alternates between
tape op and frontman/MC. When
things go wrong, it is Mills who steps
up to the mic and keeps the crowd
entertained with a string of anecdotes
and one-liners.
While the Workshop practically
radiates avuncular charm, the Rough
Trade gig highlights some of the
tensions and challenges they need
to overcome to take this ambitious
project out on the road; a feat that is
compounded by their desire to deliver
sound as a visual and aural experience.
Even this set, in a relatively small
record store, is delivered in Surround
Sound. I count five keyboard stacks of
largely vintage 70s and 80s synths and
modules, a large state-of-the-art mixing
console, at least two guitars, a theremin
and a reel-to-reel tape machine, all on a
stage the size of a small patio.
“We need to get our choreography
right,” insists Dick Mills afterwards.
“At the moment, we are playing on
tiny stages, surrounded by lines of
keyboards, and the band are all
squashed together. We can’t see what
each other is doing, to relay cues and
so on.”
He’s right, of course. At the Rough
Trade shop, ex-Prodigy drummer
Kieron Pepper (yes, that Prodigy!) and
percussionist Bob Earland, formerly
of South London electro-punkers Clor,
are relegated to the wings, wedged in
between flight cases and CD racks.
“They should really be up on stage,
driving the whole thing along,”
maintains Mills.
There’s obviously going to some serious
post-gig analysis of what could be
improved. That’s not because they are
Spinal Tap-esque divas, though. It’s
because the desire to deliver something
of unimpeachable quality seems to be
an integral part of the Workshop DNA.
BBC RADIOPHONIC WORKSHOP
TALES FROM THE WORKSHOP (PART I)
things and coming up with solutions,
but they weren’t that great at getting
anything finished. There always comes
a point when you’re just polishing the
polish, but they struggled as deadlines
approached, and many is the time I
The way that Dick Mills speaks is
came into the Workshop in the morning
effectively one long, unbroken sentence and couldn’t get in the door, because
Delia had been working all night and
with few discernible gaps or pauses.
had fallen asleep in front of it.”
From time to time, Paddy Kingsland or
Roger Limb gamely attempt to slip in a
comment amid the flow and they often “When I first started at the Workshop
in the early 70s, one of the first things
fail, but no-one really minds because
I was asked to do was to help out
Mills’ stories are wonderful. The mere
Delia,” adds Limb. “I even had to help
mention of their late colleagues John
Baker and Delia Derbyshire (who died with the simple process of getting her
in 1997 and 2001, respectively) trigger from A to B. I’d often have to pick her
a slew of anecdotes, many of them too up in my car to get her into the studio
in time for meetings, only to find out
litigious to publish in detail.
she’d put the meeting off until the next
day.”
“John and Delia were perfectionists,”
explains Mills. “They loved analysing
Although the reconstituted Radiophonic
Workshop have a clear agenda for
creating new music and new sounds,
talk inevitably turns to the old days
whenever they get together.
If such tales seem critical of their
colleagues’ eccentricities, they really
aren’t. Each story ends with an almost
melancholic sigh. For all their quirks,
their frustrating behavior, Derbyshire
and Baker are much missed. Both
Mills and Limb laugh as they recall
Derbyshire’s penchant for very short
men.
“She was taller than you…” says Limb,
nodding at me and my six-foot frame.
“And all these blokes were about
this height,” interjects Mills, holding
out his hand at a level that would
be considered sub-Ewok. “So if you
couldn’t find Delia at a crowded party,
you just went upstairs and looked over
the balcony for a hole in the crowd.
She was usually standing next to it.”
THEN AND NOW
Founded in 1958 by a small number
of enthusiastic mavericks, most
notably Desmond Briscoe and Daphne
Oram, the Radiophonic Workshop’s
primary mission was to provide new
and stimulating sound effects and
music for BBC television and radio
productions. Or as Dick Mills once
quipped, “A department that produces
sound nobody likes for plays nobody
understands”.
The Workshop was poorly funded for
much of its original 30-year existence
(the BBC closed the unit in 1998) and
most of its equipment was salvaged
or built from scratch. On the day of
the group’s Rough Trade gig, I visit the
fascinating ‘Oramics To Electronica’
exhibit at London’s Science Museum,
which displays several vintage
Workshop items. Almost all of them
look as if they’d been recovered from a
downed World War II bomber.
remain the basis of much of the music
technology that has followed. A few
display cases up from the Oramics
Machine sits an equally iconic 1980s
Fairlight CMI computer, which I’m
later informed also belonged to the
Workshop and was one of the first in
the UK.
Daphne Oram’s hideously complex
homemade “Oramics Machine” is also
part of the exhibition, a section of it
contained in a hollowed-out commode.
Yet as Heath Robinson as it appears,
the principles behind it – you create
sound on it by drawing waveforms –
How ironic that Workshop founder
Daphne Oram, this formidable, prim,
slightly tweedy looking British woman,
effectively devised the world’s first
Fairlight – and housed it in a portable
khazi.
THE SOUNDS OF TOMORROW
The idea for the five Radiophonic
Workshoppers to get back together
grew from a supposedly one-off
performance at The Roundhouse in
London in 2009. It created an itch that
needed to be scratched, although it has
taken a few years to get the players
into position. They’ve made several live
appearances in recent months, including
sets at the 2013 Festival No 6 in
Portmeirion and Rob Da Bank’s inaugural
London Electronic Arts Festival, and
plans are afoot for further performances
as well as an album of new material for
release in 2014.
The album is provisionally entitled
‘Electricity’ and it will feature
collaborations with some of the leading
lights of electronic music from the past
40 years. It’s a truly jaw-dropping list of
names, but Mills and his cohorts want
to keep the names out of the press while
they sort out a few final details. A live
event to mark the release of the album
is also now tantalisingly in development
and this event will boast a number of the
guest artists.
While too frail to take part in the
performances to date, it is hoped that
another leading Workshop member,
Brian Hodgson (who we interviewed in
Electronic Sound 03), will also be able to
contribute to the album. And what is very
much a fresh challenge for the whole
Workshop team is the prospect of them
all collaborating on the same project.
“In the old days, we tended to work in
our own little cells and rarely worked
together,” says Peter Howell. “We’ve
sort of adopted the same approach
at the moment, with all of us writing
independently and sending stuff to
Mark.”
“My role is to co-ordinate everything,”
adds Mark Ayres. “I also smooth things
out and make everything consistent, for
example the track levels, so that all the
songs will sit comfortably alongside each
other.”
The group are plainly excited by the
possibilities this new approach opens
up for each of them.
“In the past, we all had a clear brief
and specific deadlines,” says Paddy
Kingsland. “And now Mark simply calls
up and asks each of us to contribute
a piece of music, but with far fewer
constraints in terms of time or creative
freedom.”
“At the moment, we’re recreating music
from our past, but what I’m really
interested in, particularly in creating this
album, is how cohesive it will be,” says
Howell. “Will we nail down, or even
define, such a thing as the Radiophonic
Workshop sound? Writing together, for
example, is something I would definitely
like to explore as we move forward.
At this stage, for this album, I think
we will probably continue to write as
individuals, but I think it’s inevitable that
we will write collectively in the future.
It’s going to be interesting to see what
emerges, because it’s something we’ve
done so rarely.”
Dick Mills’ take on this – typically of him
– is a bit more colourful.
“We didn’t work together often, but we
helped each other. Occasionally, Roger
would stick his head round the door
when working on a ‘Doctor Who’ and
he’d say, ‘You know that bit where the
Doctor’s got his nuts in a mangle? Well,
I’ve got the sound of the nuts covered,
but we need something for that bit when
the Doctor says, “Bloody Nora, my nuts
are killing me…”, do you know what I
mean?’.”
I think I do, but it’s still an image of Tom
Baker that I won’t get out of my head
anytime soon. So going forward, can
we expect the Radiophonic Workshop
to be more about new material and less
about recreating the old stuff?
“Oh, we’ll always include a few
classics,” asserts Howell.
That said, while it is fair to say that the
‘Doctor Who’ theme is the Workshop’s
‘Blue Monday’, it’s promising that the
Rough Trade audience didn’t appear
to be dominated by Whovians. Peter
Howell agrees.
“I am glad about that, because I do
worry that the people who come to see
us are fans of the TV shows looking
for a bit of nostalgia,” he says. “But
the audiences so far seem to have
largely consisted of people who like
experimental music or electronic music
in general.”
When it comes to future live shows,
the ensemble’s plans for 2014 and
beyond are ambitious. They talk of
appearances at several big UK festivals
and dates in major cities around the
country, as well as the possibility of
gigs in Europe, Australia and Japan.
They even half-joke about doing the
first gig in space, aboard Richard
Branson’s Virgin Galactic spacecraft,
and I suspect they are only half joking.
“The Workshop once did a gig in
a quarry,” remembers Howell. “We
had speakers up on rocks all around
us so the sound came at you from
all directions. I’d love us to do more
site specific stuff like that, where the
environment becomes part of the sound
and the experience.”
And as if they haven’t got enough
to do in the coming months, the
Workshop are also working with David
Vorhaus on a remastered, Surround
Sound version of the seminal ‘White
Noise’ album, with a possible live date
attached to that too. It all sounds like a
punishing workload for men half their
age, but the team are approaching the
challenges ahead with considerable
relish.
BBC RADIOPHONIC WORKSHOP
TALES FROM THE WORKSHOP (PART II)
The BBC Radiophonic Workshop is
often said to have had two distinct
eras: the musique concrete, sticky tape
and rubber band era, and the later,
heavily synthesised period from the
late 1970s onwards. The mindset of the
early years was considerably different
too. In the 1950s, all the men were
expected to work in the studio wearing
either a suit and tie or a lab coat. That
was the BBC Maida Vale way.
John Baker, despite being a gentle,
free-thinking jazz musician, was still
the product of a proper old school
British education. One day, so the
story goes, he decided he needed
a wife, so he targeted a proposal
towards a gobsmacked BBC secretary,
informing her she was “probably of
marrying age” and that he needed
someone to “cook and clean and
generally look after him”. It’s made
clear, however, that this was a genuine
naivety on his part, rather than simply
unreconstructed misogyny.
With the arrival of Howell, Limb,
Kingsland and others in the 1970s,
the attitude and the approach began
to change, much as it did throughout
society in general. Things became
more disciplined, deadlines were met,
and newer, more reliable technologies
took over. This younger team were also
far more assured in what they were
doing. On one occasion, Roger Limb
recalls being called into Desmond
Briscoe’s office and told that a listener
to BBC Radio 4’s ‘Woman’s Hour’
had written in to complain about
the “horrible, jangling Radiophonic
rubbish” that had accompanied a
section of the programme. Briscoe
asked with some concern how they
should reply to the letter.
“I told him not to bother answering her
at all,” says Limb. “I’d fulfilled the brief
and if she didn’t like it, well, that was
too bad.”
Such resistance to electronic music
was not unusual at the time. It’s almost
impossible for us to imagine now, but
when the ‘Doctor Who’ theme first
aired, Dick Mills says it was “so – for
the sake of a better word – unearthly”
that many viewers rang the BBC
thinking it was a technical fault. But
Mills also believes that the legacy of
the Radiophonic Workshop is that it
helped bring electronic music into the
mainstream.
“I’m just pleased to have been a part
of it all,” he says. “If anything, we
turned generations of children onto
a whole new genre of music. People
always associate us with a few specific
shows, but actually our output for the
BBC Schools programmes far outstrips
what we did on anything else. It
was really this education work that
made generations of young people
comfortable with electronic music –
and that’s what I’m proudest of.”
NEXT STOP, THE FUTURE
Judging by the group’s response to the
technical hiccups of the Rough Trade
gig, I’m tempted to think the technology
might not have improved that much
since the Radiophonic Workshop’s
heyday. Interestingly, Mark Ayres’
vision is to put together a working rig
that allows the ensemble to play easily
anywhere, at any venue of any size,
and feel “comfortable”. Wouldn’t it
be easier, therefore, to ditch all the
old synths and just do the whole thing
with laptops? Howell and Ayres both
vigorously shake their heads at this
suggestion.
“No, no, no, we don’t want to look like
a bunch of accountants up there,” says
Ayres. “If anything, we want to bring
more old synths on stage with us if we
can. Listen, we totally get that gear
porn is a big part of the attraction for
some of our audience. I think ultimately
we are going to move towards building
large, mobile workstations, with
everything pre-wired underneath, so
it’s a matter of plugging in a couple
of cables and off we go. But that’s
the challenge. Just using the vintage
kit, we couldn’t do this. It is only with
some of the modern technology, such
as this fantastic new Behringer desk,
which I literally play during our gigs,
that allows us to recreate what the
Workshop did in a live context.”
“What you can do with the software
now, like MainStage for Logic Pro,
which is only about 27 dollars, is
amazing,” adds Howell. “It allows
us to control all our backing tracks,
plug-ins and effects, and manipulate
them live. In fact, I think it is inevitable
that we will begin developing our own
software in the near future, much the
same way as we used to build our own
instruments. That way, they can be
tailored to our specific requirements.”
Now there’s a thought.
“You could say that this is our
philosophy going forward – to apply
all the old techniques but to modern
technology,” says Howell with a smile.
Which would, of course, be very
Workshop.
The Radiophonic Workshop are
coming to a town near you shortly!
R&S RECORDS
AT THE
SIGN OF
THE BLACK
HORSE
They’ve been in the
business for 30 years
and R&S RECORDS
remains one of the
most innovative and
important electronic
music labels in the
world, not least
because they refuse to
play by the rules. And
today is no different…
Words: PUSH
R&S RECORDS
T
his was a simple idea. To mark 30
years of R&S Records, the Belgian
label that’s given the world some
of the most innovative and influential
electronic music ever, I’ve asked head
honcho Renaat Vandepapeliere to
draw up a list of his Top 10 R&S tracks,
tracks that have a particular meaning
to him, and talk about each of them
for two or three minutes. Like I said, a
simple idea. Presented in the magazine
as a series of boxes. All neat and tidy.
Contained. I should have known better.
The problem is twofold. First, there’s a
massive back catalogue for Renaat to
chose from. “I have no idea, absolutely
none at all,” he says when I ask how
many records have been released
on R&S and its sister label, Apollo.
Second, and more significantly, Renaat
doesn’t really do boxes. He doesn’t
do contained. That’s not how his brain
works. He’s known what I’m planning
to do here for more than a week, but
has he got a list of 10 tracks ready?
Has he heck. But he says it’s OK. He
says he’ll get the list together as we go
along.
So we start talking, we start going
along, and it goes along quite nicely
for a while. We wheel back to 1984
and the first R&S release – “It was
something stupid, a Barry White
cover” – and Renaat jokes about how
that’s definitely not on his list, and then
he jumps to 1990, to Joey Beltram’s
‘Energy Flash’.
“That was the serious start of things
for R&S,” he says. “Everything before
that was a sort of learning school. You
launch a label and you don’t know
how it works, you don’t know the
industry, and you also have no power
and no credibility. I was working in an
import shop and I discovered a white
label called ‘Direct’, which was one of
Joey’s first records. The white label had
a telephone number on it, so I called
the number, spoke to Joey, and that
was it.
“So, yeah, ‘Energy Flash’ is first on
the list. And then another of Joey’s
tracks, ‘Mentasm’, which he did with
Mundo Muzique [released under the
name Second Phase]. That changed
the world completely. It was the start
of hardcore. People like The Prodigy
were influenced by that record. So that
was another milestone for us. So that’s
two tracks, right? And then, of course,
there’s our friend Aphex Twin. Do I
have to pick one track? So many great
records.”
I try to rewind a little and ask a
question about Joey Beltram, but
Renaat is off somewhere else. He’s
wondering aloud about the word
‘ambient’, about where it came from
and when it was first used. He talks
about Manuel Göttsching, then
Vangelis, then The KLF, and before I
know what’s happening, we’re deep
in discussion about The KLF’s ‘Chill
Out’ album and whether or not it’s a
masterpiece (Renaat says yes, I say
no). And as the conversation develops
into a detailed analysis of ‘Chill Out’
– “Come on man, you have to be a
very good producer to work all those
samples into that story,” says Renaat – I
begin to think this Top 10 R&S thing
might not work. Most of what I have
on tape so far is about a record that
wasn’t even released on R&S.
R&S RECORDS
“JUAN ATKINS is such
a talent. He’s released
two badass EPs in the
last two years”
I
remember the first time I met Renaat
Vandepapeliere very clearly. It was
late 1991. I was putting together
an article about the European techno
scene with DJ and fellow writer Dave
Mothersole, and Renaat invited us
to come to Ghent, the north Belgian
city he still calls home. Then, as now,
he was relaxed, charming, eager to
listen as well as speak, and fiercely
passionate when it came to talking
about music. We met him and Sabine
Maes, his partner in both life and
business – R&S stands for Renaat and
Sabine – at their small apartment in the
centre of Ghent. They’re in a different
place now, but Sabine is here with
Renaat today too, sitting across the
other side of the room, quietly tapping
at a keyboard.
CJ Bolland was also at Renaat and
Sabine’s old apartment that day in
1991. R&S had just put out the third of
Bolland’s majestic ‘Ravesignal’ EPs and
we all sat around a table, eating and
drinking and smoking, but it was quite
cramped because we were vying for
space with a 24-track recording studio.
A 24-track recording studio right there,
in the living room of this small flat. It
was here that a lot of the classic early
R&S tracks were recorded, including
Beltram’s ‘Energy Flash’.
“We brought Joey Beltram to Belgium,
to our apartment, Sabine gave him
some good food, we showed him the
equipment, and there was ‘Energy
Flash’,” recalls Renaat.
“No. For many of them, it was their
first time in Europe. But we had a very
strong scene in Belgium, we had new
beat and we had Boccaccio, this club
I ask Renaat if he’d seen the recent
playing so much great electronic music,
Facebook post from Dave Clarke,
and we were the first with this music.
another early 90s R&S artist, about the In the context that we know it now, we
memorable meals Dave had when he’d were the first. Even Chicago house, we
stayed with him and Sabine.
played it here before it was played in
Britain. So when the artists came here,
“They were all poor, all hungry, so
they could see that their music was
that was the trick we used,” laughs
respected and they had a platform
Renaat. “But you have to welcome your here.”
guests, right? So they came to the flat,
they stayed with us, they worked, they
The Detroit musicians were especially
slept on the floor, and they became
influenced by European music, weren’t
part of the family. We lived like that,
they? Juan Atkins and Derrick May
constantly with people sleeping on the were always referencing Kraftwerk and
floor, for seven or eight years. Joey
Tangerine Dream back in the day.
was one of them. Carl Craig too. Ahh,
Carl Craig. You know, his 69 album
“Listen, Kraftwerk and Göttsching
[‘The Sound Of Music’] is so special.
and the other Germans were such
Very funky, very unique at that point.
inspirations. Giorgio Moroder too. ‘I
And Atkins was another. Jesus Christ.
Feel Love’ is probably the first techno
Amazing guys. There’s so much from
sequence ever and it’s really pumping.
our catalogue I could put on this list.
Without those guys, we wouldn’t have
Fucking hell. Atkins is still signed to
any electronic music. But like I said,
the label [as Model 500]. Juan Atkins
the Belgians too. We’re very close to
is such a talent. He’s released two
Germany and we share that electronic
badass EPs in the last two years. My
culture and heritage. In my mind, that
favourite Model 500 is ‘The Passage’.
explains a lot.”
That’s on the list, for sure.”
Did Beltram and the other American
artists even know where Belgium was
when you brought them over?
R&S RECORDS
“APHEX TWIN was the
first musician I met who
had a serious impact
on me. I have so much
respect for him”
W
e get back to Renaat’s Top
10 and I tell him I need him
to talk a bit more about each
of his choices. Come to that, I still need
him to pick something from Aphex
Twin. I suggest ‘Xtal’, which appears
on the 30-track ’30 Years Of R&S’
compilation that was recently released
as a digital download.
“I do love ‘Xtal’,” says Renaat. “But
‘Selected Ambient Works’ as a whole
is such a beautiful album. It set the
standard, it’s the blueprint for ambient
music ever since. And he made it when
he was 16 years old, 18 years old.
Can you imagine? For a young kid to
come up with such music? For me, it’s
his best work ever. I think Aphex Twin
was the first musician I met who had a
serious impact on me. I have so much
respect for him. You have artists and
you have Artists – and here is an Artist
with a big A. Still today, he’s very
intelligent, very into what he does, no
compromises.
“Also on the ambient side, Biosphere
is another interesting person. Beautiful
music again. ‘Patashnik’ is an
incredible record. And Locust too.
Locust is another one. Locust is like
Aphex because he set out to do what
he wanted to do and fuck the rest.
And another favourite is ‘Andromeda’,
the Mundo Muzique track. I have
goosebumps every time I hear that.
Every time.”
What sort of things usually give you
goosebumps when you listen to a
track?
‘I don’t know…” he runs his fingers
through his hair and puffs his cheeks.
“How do you explain a feeling? How
do you explain love?”
OK, what do you listen out for when
you first hear a record? Are there
certain sounds or elements that always
grab you?
“I like music that’s a sort of melting pot
of ideas. I’m 56 years old and I went
from pop culture to The Rolling Stones
and Jimi Hendrix, but I was also a
jazz fan, a soul fan, a funk fan, so I’ve
always listened to different things in
my life. I love melodies and I especially
love drums. So a track has to have an
interesting rhythm. The drums have to
sing. Or when it’s softer music, it has to
be emotional, it has to get you in that
way. But then sometimes I’ll release
music that’s highly experimental and I
don’t understand it directly, but I know
it’s been put together well, so I’ll give
it a shot.
“Something people don’t realise
about R&S is that most of our releases
have been out of sync with what’s
happening around us. Jaydee’s ‘Plastic
Dreams’, which was probably our
biggest hit, came out when everyone
was into gabba. I took that record
to Berlin, where Jam & Spoon were
playing at a rave. I used to give them
white labels and they’d often play them
without hearing them. Marc Spoon was
playing this music that was so fucking
hard – bang, bang, bang – and he
listened to ‘Plastic Dreams’ on the
headphones and he said, ‘It’s too soft,
I can’t play this’. But then he listened
some more and he said, ‘Fuck it, let’s
do it’, and he played it. Man, we had
a party going on with that.”
R&S RECORDS
“To have a good
relationship is
important, not only in
the good days but in
the bad days as well”
I
’ve often thought of R&S as being
a bit like Factory Records in the
sense that there’s much more to
the label than just the music it has
released. Renaat Vandepapeliere is a
very different person to the late Tony
Wilson, but he’s got the same high
levels of charisma and passion and
belief, and R&S has a distinct vibe
about it, just as Factory did. R&S has
also cultivated a strong visual identity,
again just as Factory did. Right from
the off, I was taken by the fact that
R&S vinyl records didn’t have A-sides
and B-sides. They had black and silver
sides instead.
up on its back legs, meaning that we
are on top of everything. As a boy, I
wanted to become a professional horse
rider, but I came from a family of nine
kids so there was no way we could
afford for me to do that.”
Renaat did get a chance to work
with horses for a few years, though.
Between 2000 and 2007, Renaat and
Sabine left the music industry, putting
R&S into hibernation and devoting all
their time and energy into breeding
horses at a stud farm.
“I didn’t listen to any music during that
period and I forgot everything about
R&S,” says Renaat. “In my mind, it was
like we’d never done it, we’d never run
a label. I couldn’t remember anything
about it. Honestly, it went that far.
It was erased from my mind. Totally
blank. But doing the label again these
last few years, yeah, it’s been good.
It’s been great.”
The black horse logo, which R&S has
also had from the early days, is an
important part of that visual identity.
Each element has a specific meaning.
The green is the colour of hope and
the triangle represents protection. The
horse itself is redolent of the old Ferrari
logo and it’s been rumoured that R&S
had to pay the ultra-hip car company
to use it, but Renaat says that’s not true. What made you want to return to the
He’s a big fan of Ferraris, as it goes,
music business?
but he’s an even bigger admirer of
horses.
“Long story. It’s the virus. It’s the love.
I kept getting mails saying, ‘Hey, you
“I loved seeing the Spanish horses
should start again, blah-blah-blah’, and
when I was younger. I loved the high
I always said, ‘No, I’m done’. Then one
dressage, like you see in Vienna,
day, some people who’d worked with
where the horses really dance and they us for 20 years came to the farm. They
have such elegance and power. The
wanted to persuade me. I said no for
R&S horse is dancing and it’s going
10 hours. And then I said, ‘OK, let’s
see how we go on’. So here we are.
I’m really enjoying it, so we’ll carry on
for now.”
Whenever anybody writes about R&S
Records, the focus is on Renaat, which
makes sense because he’s a king-sized
character. But I want to ask R about
S. Could he have done this without
Sabine?
“No way. Simple answer.”
Do you drive her crazy?
“She can answer that,” he says,
craning his neck to call across the
room. “Hey Sabine, do I…?”
“Sometimes,” she says, without looking
up.
“There you are,” he chuckles. “But
we are a perfect match. Sabine has
good ears too. If we like something,
we’ll look at each other… And Sabine
is more stable and organised than
me. She makes sure everything gets
done. To have a good relationship is
important, not only in the good days
but in the bad days as well, because
our lives haven’t always been rosy.
But what can I say? I know I’m lucky.
So the answer is to your question is,
without Sabine, no. Without Sabine,
nothing.”
R&S RECORDS
“TREE is working
on his own terms.
You can see it in his
eyes, just like you
could with Aphex Twin”
T
he clock is running down and the
idea of doing Renaat’s Top 10 R&S
tracks is in tatters somewhere back
up yonder. Neat and tidy boxes? Pffft.
But I’d still like to know what Renaat
will choose from the more recent R&S
catalogue, from the records the label
has released since he and Sabine
came back to the music industry in
2007. I know what one of them will be.
called Oliver Nickell – and he’s like a
new James Blake, a new Aphex even.
He’s a complete artist – a songwriter,
a multi-instrumentalist, he plays piano,
guitar – and he has a very clear vision.
Tree is working on his own terms.
Whatever he says he wants to do, he’s
going to do it. You can see it in his
eyes, just like you could with Aphex
Twin.
“Yes, yes, yes, James Blake,” he says.
“‘CMYK’ is a brilliant record. James
Blake changed the rules again.”
“Sometimes people take a while to
understand some of these artists.
Synkro is another one. Again like
Aphex, again like Locust, it’s always
on his own terms. He came from the
drum ‘n’ bass scene and he’s going
into very emotional music now, very
soulful music. When we first did Aphex
Twin, people said, ‘You’re crazy, this is
crap, blah-blah-blah’. We had people
saying they didn’t like R&S anymore
because of Aphex. We’d put out
those club anthems and then suddenly
people didn’t get what we were doing.
We sold something like 20 copies
of ‘Ambient Works’ in the first year
because nobody was interested.
Were you pleased that he won the
Mercury Prize?
“That was James with his pop album,
but then again it wasn’t pop as we
usually understand it, it was quite out
there. I was extremely pleased. Here
is a youngster breaking all the rules
and still winning the Mercury Prize.
So I think there’s hope for the future,
you know. Someone else I have on the
label now is this kid from California
and what he’s doing is mind-blowing.
He records under the name Tree – he’s
“I do get frustrated because there’s so
much cut-and-paste music out there.
There always has been. You know,
EDM, it all fucking sounds the same.
The sound is the same, the melody is
the same, it’s just the artist name that
changes. OK, maybe there are tracks
that are great, but I haven’t heard
them. But then when I hear Tree or
Synkro, man, these guys are coming
from a different planet. I listen to their
records and I just go, ‘Fuck!!’.”
Is that how you want people to react
when they hear something on R&S?
“With everything on R&S, it’s always
been about whether I like something.
If I like it, it goes out. That’s it. I’ve
tried not to fish in the same pool as
everyone else. I’ve tried to follow my
heart instead of following the factory.
I hope other people like what we do,
of course I hope that, but If they don’t,
well, so be it.”
The ’30 Years Of R&S Records’
compilation is available on iTunes
CABARET VOLTAIRE
GASOL
DAYS
With a history stretching back to 1973,
CABARET VOLTAIRE produced some of the
finest British electronic music ever committed
to vinyl. As a chunk of it gets a well-deserved
reissue, Richard H Kirk discusses the band’s
explorations of the dancefloor in the early 80s
Words: NEIL MASON
Pictures: PETER CARE and MARKUS BIENER
LINE
CABARET VOLTAIRE
L
et us take you back a little. It’s May
1982. A new club has just opened
its doors in Manchester. It’s not like
any club the UK has ever seen before.
A vast sprawling space, it looks like
some sort of industrial warehouse, like
a factory. Which is appropriate seeing
as how the ambitious record label
behind it is called Factory.
“Yeah, that’s right, we played The
Hacienda’s first night,” confirms
Cabaret Voltaire’s Richard Harold Kirk
down the line from Sheffield. “New
Order performed at a private party
on the Friday night and then, on the
Saturday night, when it was open to
the public for the first time, Cabaret
Voltaire played.”
Riding high on the success of a holy
trinity of industrial marvellousness
(1980’s ‘Voice Of America’, 1981’s
‘Red Mecca’ and the ‘Sluggin’ Fer
Jesus’ 12-inch, also from 1981), what
was a band from Sheffield doing
cutting a rug across the Pennines on
Manchester dancefloors? More at
home in Manchester, perhaps? Bands
there more akin to what Kirk and his
Cabaret Voltaire partner Stephen
Mallinder were up to? How much of an
influence was Manchester on the Cabs,
we wonder.
30 years on, the evidence has been
lovingly compiled for all to hear on a
recently released six-CD and double
DVD box set, ‘#8385 (Collected Works
1983-85)’. The deluxe edition also
includes four remastered vinyl discs.
“I actually think Cabaret Voltaire
were quite influential on Manchester,”
says Kirk. “We knew all those people
because we’d played the Russell Club,
the original Factory night. We got to
know Joy Division, Tony Wilson, Rob
Gretton and Alan Erasmus, they were
like mates. We donated a couple of
tracks to ‘A Factory Sampler’, their first
release, and I think we’d have ended
up working with them, but Rough Trade
came up with some money for us to
buy a four-track tape machine, so we
ended up going with them.”
Several years in the making, it
covers Cabaret Voltaire’s midperiod, a time when Richard Kirk
and Stephen Mallinder yanked hard
on the handbrake, performed a
screeching u-turn from their trademark
experimental industrial sound, and
pointed themselves in the direction of
the dancefloor.
I
t might be easy to forget that
Cabaret Voltaire were the
trailblazers, the mavericks, the
pioneers who have influenced
generations of electronic musicians,
Factory bands no exception. Some
“The box set was prompted by the fact
that the material was signed via Some
Bizarre to Virgin Records, and after
28 years the rights finally came back
to me,” says Kirk, who is now the sole
custodian of the Cabs back catalogue.
“Virgin did talk about doing reissues,
but I think they’d have just wanted to
put out some CDs with bonus tracks
and that would’ve been it. I wanted to
make sure it was done properly.”
Bringing together 1983’s ‘The
Crackdown’, 1984’s ‘Micro-Phonies’
and, from 1985, ‘The Covenant, The
Sword And The Arm Of The Lord’ and
the ‘Drinking Gasoline’ double pack,
alongside a CD of 12-inch remixes and
another CD of unreleased tracks, two
live DVDs and a 40-page booklet to
boot, that looks like “properly” to us.
It’s quite an undertaking.
“You could say that,” laughs Kirk.
“Believe you me, it wasn’t easy. It
has been kind of endless. I basically
had loads and loads of boxes full of
documents and tapes and they’re not
particularly that well archived, so it
involved a lot of rooting around and
trying to figure out what was where,
but I got there in the end.”
A
lthough the set kicks off in 1983,
the story of this mid-period
starts back when they were
playing The Hacienda for the first time.
That’s May 1982, remember? Cabaret
Voltaire were undergoing something
of an upheaval at that point. Slimming
down from a three-piece to a duo
with the departure of co-founder Chris
Watson, Kirk and Mallinder had just
released their first material since the
seminal ‘Red Mecca’.
The ‘2x45’ six-track album marked
something of a departure for the band,
a halfway house if you like between
experimental Mark I and the emerging
dancefloor Mark II. Just soak up the
stonking 13-minute locked-down
groove of ‘Get Out Of My Face’ and
you’ll get the idea.
“After Chris left, we were kind of
thinking, ‘Where do we go from
here?’,” explains Kirk. “We were
getting a bit bored with Rough Trade
because we were selling a certain
amount of records, but we were never
getting beyond that. It just felt like,
‘What do we do? We can’t go and
repeat the experimental, far-out stuff,
we’ve already done that’. We were
getting more and more into dance
music and listening to New York
electro, and then Stevo came along…”
The Soft Cell manager and Some
Bizarre label supremo offered a
helping hand by coughing up for
a 24-track studio session on one
condition: cleaner vocals. In fact, less
effects all round.
“And we just thought, ‘Yeah, why
not?’. So we went to Trident Studios
in London and took a load of the
equipment from our own Western
Works studio, which was only an eighttrack at the time, and set about doing
‘The Crackdown’ album… which we
recorded in about four days.”
Come again?
“I think we had one-and-a-half ideas
for tracks,” laughs Kirk. “We had some
bits and pieces on tape, and we were
put in the studio with this guy Flood.
We’d never really worked that
much in commercial studios and he
was great. He took on board what we
wanted to do and taught us a lot, and
maybe we taught him a few things
too.”
He obviously learnt well, did Flood.
He went on to become Flood the über
producer, with credits such as New
Order, Depeche Mode, Nine Inch
Nails, U2 and The Killers to his name.
So was this Cabaret Voltaire’s first
time recording outside of Western
Works?
“Not the first. We recorded part of
‘2x45’ in a 24-track called Pluto
Studios in Manchester, but it was
the first time we’d done an entire
album in one. Obviously we indulged
ourselves because we were used to
bouncing things around on four and
eight tracks, but we’d got a lot more
room to manoeuvre with 24 tracks.”
That manoeuvring is plain to hear on
‘The Crackdown’. Widely considered
to be one of the Cabs’ finest albums,
it’s a four-to-the-floor driven beastie
soaked through with melody. But
the trick was always going to be to
repeat it, a trick that popular critical
opinion of the day decided they
hadn’t pulled off when they released
‘Micro-Phonies’ in 1984.
However, hindsight is a wonderful
thing. Listening to ‘Micro-Phonies’ these
days, it’s apparent that it’s a cracker of
a record. Moving on again from ‘The
Crackdown’, it’s fuelled by New York
electro, rich kick drums, swirling vocal
melodies and infectious sequencer
spirals. It is, in short, a belter.
“It is,” agrees Kirk. “Unfortunately,
when it was released no one liked it.”
It’s hard to fathom why. It isn’t so
far removed from the chart success
pouring out of Sheffield at the time
from the hands of The Human League
and Heaven 17. It’s a bright pop
record. This being the Cabs, it’s pop
in inverted commas, but it’s as pop
as Cabaret Voltaire would ever get.
You kind of catch yourself wondering
where it would have led had Kirk and
Mallinder continued down this path.
“We were never bothered about
commercial success,” offers Kirk. “From
day one, The Human League always
wanted to make pop records, they
never made any secret of that and they
did very well. And likewise for Heaven
17. But we always wanted to be a bit
more subversive and not really be an
out-and-out pop band. Although there
were elements that could be construed
as pop, we were more concerned with
art.”
S
tateside remixers such as three
Johns – Robie, Luongo and
Potoker – knew what they were
hearing and were queuing up to work
with the Cabs. Robie had got in early
doors, reworking ‘Yashir’ from ‘2x45’,
while Potoker’s remix of ‘Sensoria’
from ‘The Crackdown’ rocked the
dancefloors on both sides of the pond.
It did seem that Cabaret Voltaire were
one of very few bands who didn’t
really need remixes, though. Their
albums lived as complete entities, no
remixers required. But that wasn’t quite
the point.
CABARET VOLTAIRE
“I liked the remixes, but they were done
to try and move us more into the club
area,” says Kirk. “It was always written
in stone that the albums would be how
we wanted them to be, it was always
the case that they were the main thing
for us, but working with people like
John Luongo on ‘The Crackdown’ and
‘Just Fascination’ was what got us
signed. That’s what really swung it for
Virgin.”
The 1985 ‘Drinking Gasoline’ double
12-inch proved to be another shift in
the sand. Surrounded by the trappings
of a major label, the band decided
that, on the coat-tails of the muted
response to ‘Micro-Phonies’, they
needed to take a different approach.
“It was back to basics in so much
as we decided not to work with any
outside people,” explains Kirk.
Did they feel like they were losing
their grip on what Cabaret Voltaire
was? Big studios, name producers, top
remixers…
“Partly,” he says, “When ‘MicroPhonies’ wasn’t well received we
thought, ‘Right, let’s fucking show ’em’.
Doing ‘Drinking Gasoline’ was great.
It was all recorded back in Western
Works on 16-track, so it was a lot
cruder and more reminiscent of the
earlier records. It was cut at 45rpm
and there were two pieces of vinyl, so
it was loud, in your face. I remember
someone telling me they saw all these
black kids breakdancing to tracks off
it at Rock City in Nottingham and I
thought, ‘Yeah, we’ve hit the spot’.”
And that kind of thinking, that way
of working, just carried straight on
through with ‘The Covenant, The Sword
And The Arm Of The Lord’?
“Exactly. That was all done in-house at
Western Works too, on the 16-track.
I think it sounds great. A lot of people
don’t like it, but I think it’s one of the
best. It’s one of my favourites from that
period.”
show, it was a performance, a never-tobe-repeated one-off experience. And
for a band whose motivation was art
rather than commercial acceptability,
that must’ve been an irresistible
prospect.
It is also one of the best album titles.
Ever.
“I really did enjoy playing live,” says
Kirk. “It was a fantastic experience.
The shows were much more in-yourface, more aggressive and fiery than
the recordings. I remember just getting
totally immersed. Occasionally I’d turn
round and start watching the visuals
and get tranced out by the strobes and
the lighting. I would have loved to have
been in the audience. You don’t see
anything like that now. It was art as
much as anything.”
“We were on tour in America in 1985
and we heard about this survivalist
group called The Covenant, The Sword
and The Arm of The Lord who were
holed up in some enclave with loads
of weapons and marijuana and Christ
knows what else. It was just one of
those things we heard on the news and
thought, ‘Yeah’. The album was very
much inspired and fired by the month
we spent touring America that year.”
T
he ‘#8385’ boxset also includes
two intriguing live DVDs, one
from Bedford Boys Club in August
1984, the other from the Hammersmith
Palais in London in December of the
same year. They seem like strange
choices. You couldn’t have picked two
more diverse shows if you’d tried.
“To be honest with you, it wasn’t a
case of strange choices,” says Kirk.
“There weren’t many video recordings
of us from that time. In fact, that was all
there was. What I really like about the
Hammersmith show is you can see the
projections, the visuals. The quality isn’t
fantastic, it was shot on VHS, but it’s a
great document. If anyone wants to see
what Cabaret Voltaire were like in that
period, check it out.”
And you really should. For all the might
of the albums, it was when they played
live that the Cabs were arguably at
their very best. It was live that the entire
machine came to life. It wasn’t just a
With hindsight, does Richard H Kirk
feel like a pioneer?
“I mean, it’s nice when people say
that,” he says. “And when it’s 30
years on and there’s still interest and
excitement about these reissues, that’s
a nice feeling. Did we feel like we were
pioneers at the time? We never really
thought much beyond the next week,
let alone 30 years into the future. We
were just totally into what we were
doing and gave everything to it.”
‘#8385 (Collected Works 1983-85)’
is out now on Mute
THE STORY BEHIND THE ‘EARTHSHAKER’ OPUS
It’s often assumed that ‘Theme From Earthshaker’ on ‘Micro-Phonies’
was from an imaginary film soundtrack, the title sequence to a nonexistent sci-fi flick, but there’s a lot more to it than that. The ‘#8385’
bonus CD of unreleased material is called ‘Earthshaker’ and reveals
five more parts to the ‘Earthshaker’ opus.
“It was going to be a film and part of the script is included in the
box set booklet,” explains Richard Kirk. “It was co-written with Peter
Care, who directed a lot of our promos at that time. Earthshaker was
a synthetic drug, a bit like you get these days with all the designer
drugs. It was going to be kind of ‘Bladerunner’ on a smaller budget…
and set in Manchester and Sheffield.
“We were talking with Palace Pictures at one point, but in the end we
couldn’t get the finance together. I thought it would be interesting to
include it here to let people see what we were cooking up. Because
the film never got made, the soundtrack is rough and ready. The
mixes aren’t final mixes, they’re just works in progress. Some of it’s
quite atmospheric, but a lot of it sounds like really fast electro, like car
chase music.
“We had shot quite a bit of footage which we ended up using on
[1985 VHS video compilation] ‘Gasoline In Your Eye’ instead. Virgin
thought it might be useful to make videos, what with MTV coming
along, but mainstream television wouldn’t go near it. They always had
some excuse why they wouldn’t show it, you know, it wasn’t broadcast
quality and this and that. Which is kind of laughable now when you
see camera phone footage on the news every night.”
KRAFTWERK UNCOVERED
CHAIN
REACTION
AND
MUTATION
What do you get when you cross Kraftwerk with ambient
minimalist composer J Peter Schwalm and totalist
contemporary classical ensemble Icebreaker? You get
‘KRAFTWERK UNCOVERED: A FUTURE PAST’ –
and the show is touring the UK shortly
Words: MARK ROLAND
KRAFTWERK UNCOVERED
Kraftwerk performing ‘Tanzmusik’ in 1973
Icebreaker’s ‘Kraftwerk Uncovered’ preview clip
H
ere’s an idea: get a renowned
modern electronic composer to
come up with a new piece of
music for a modern classical ensemble
with a reputation for playing “seriously
loud”. So far, so interesting to BBC
Radio 3’s more adventurous listeners.
But – and this is why we’re here –
commission the composer to reimagine
the work of Kraftwerk for a series of
live concerts and an album release in
2014.
The composer is J Peter Schwalm and
the ensemble is London’s “totalist”
Icebreaker – totalism being a
younger, groovier, louder response
to minimalism – who are a 12-piece
of classical musicians already well
known for their virtuoso performances
of music by the likes Steve Reich,
Philip Glass and Michael Nyman.
They’ve upset more than one classical
music critic with their volume, the Irish
Times describing the Icebreaker live
experience as ideal for “the deaf and
stoned”. They recently performed Brian
Eno’s ‘Apollo’ and now they’ve asked
Schwalm to compose a new score for
them, a Kraftwerk-inspired workout
for violins, cellos, saxophones, flutes,
vibraphones, pan pipes (wait! come
back!), drums and guitar. The resulting
piece – ‘Kraftwerk Uncovered: A
Future Past’ – will make its live debut in
London at the end of January.
J Peter Schwalm gained recognition
worldwide when his album with Brian
Eno, ‘Drawn From Life’, was released
in 2001. With Laurie Anderson and
Holger Czukay also contributing, it
was a heavyweight piece of minimal
ambient work. Since then, Schwalm
has worked with Eno on several more
projects, including the music for the
film ‘Fear X’, a 2003 thriller directed
by Nicolas Winding Refn, who made
2011’s electronic soundtracked ‘Drive’. “You know, I’m not the biggest
Kraftwerk fan in the world,” Schwalm
reveals from his Frankfurt base. “But
I don’t have to be. I’ve just finished
a Richard Wagner project [‘Wagner
Transformed’ on Intergroove Classics]
“I worked on ‘Megahertz’ from
‘Kraftwerk’ and ‘Tanzmusik’ from ‘Ralf
Und Florian’,” says Schwalm. “But
some of the tracks I glued together, so
‘Megahertz’ and ‘Mitternacht’ [from
‘Autobahn’] becomes one piece, with
ith ‘Kraftwerk Uncovered:
the melodies on top of each other.
A Future Past’, J Peter
Although they are separated by four
Schwalm has two distinct but years, they have very similar melodies.
connected approaches to Kraftwerk’s
The ambient pieces, ‘Megahertz’,
back catalogue. One is to use the
‘Mitternacht’ and ‘Morgen
melodies and structures that Ralf Hütter, Spaziergang’ [also from ‘Autobahn’],
Florian Schneider and their Kling Klang are more connected to the originals
pals Karl Bartos and Wolfgang Flur
than some of the other pieces. With
created, and recast them for different
‘Tanzmusik’, I reworked it into a piece
instrumentation in a whole new context. that I have called ‘Multitanz’.”
The other is to take inspiration from the
Kraftwerk sound and aesthetic, and
use it as a jumping off point for brand
chwalm is all too aware of the
new compositions. The initial concept
potential dangers of tackling this
was put to Schwalm by Icebreaker’s
kind of project. When he was
James Poke around a year ago.
working with Eno on the live shows
for ‘Drawn From Life’, the idea was
“I thought it would be an intriguing
mooted for the pair of them to rework
task,” says Schwalm. “It would be a
‘My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts’.
bit too simple if they kept playing the
same lines, like the original Kraftwerk,
“Eno thought about it for more than a
so I thought we should do something
day,” says Schwalm. “But in the end,
different. And for me, I need to have
he didn’t want to do it. He said, ‘I
complete freedom in order to make
cannot understand this, I prefer to work
something that I can live with.”
on new stuff’. And probably the danger
of ruining a great piece of art is very
When Schwalm turned his attention
imminent…”
to the Kraftwerk catalogue, he found
that he was particularly drawn to the
Well, quite. group’s earlier material.
“I hope you like it, as a Kraftwerk fan!”
“I worked on one track from ‘Computer he laughs. “It’s my only concern, that
World’, which was ‘Heimcomputer’,” he Kraftwerk fans will react badly. There
says, mixing English titles and German is Kraftwerk in every song – I promise!
titles as he speaks, which is something Well, there’s just one track where I got
inspired by ‘Radio-Activity’ and did
he does throughout the interview. “All
the rest is taken from material dated
something entirely new [a composition
called ‘Modul 6’]. I thought it would
between 1970 and 1977 – from
be good to look at this issue of
‘Radio-Activity’, ‘Autobahn’, ‘Transradioactivity and power plants from
Europe Express’, ‘Kraftwerk’ and ‘Ralf
Und Florian’.” today’s perspective, because in the
1970s it was this really big thing, the
whole myth about radioactivity. Now
It’s good to see Kraftwerk’s 1970
we know that power plants explode,
eponymous debut and 1973’s ‘Ralf
And Florian’ getting a little rework love, so I made this one track where I used
words from a power plant manual,
especially since Ralf Hütter himself
where it describes what to do when
hasn’t seen fit to re-release either of
these albums (or the 1972 release,
the whole thing goes wrong. It’s very
technical, very static, very German,
‘Kraftwerk 2’).
actually. It’s the only piece where I
and I’m not his biggest fan either.
But if something has a history and
an importance, then I think it’s worth
taking time to understand it.”
W
S
KRAFTWERK UNCOVERED
haven’t used anything musically from
Kraftwerk, but I kind of transformed the
idea and made music.”
Having listened deeply to the music,
has Schwalm come away with some
new insights into Kraftwerk’s methods?
“Yes, I have. When you listen to
Kraftwerk, and you keep listening to
it, you find lots of different ideas in
there. It’s not just the appearance of
the music, it’s not just that it’s electronic
music, there’s much more happening
inside. Also it’s strange to see how this
music was seen as, or referred to as,
computer music, because when you put
it into a computer, it runs out of synch.
This is really interesting. It just doesn’t
sound like it’s very precise. They were
working with tape machines and
playing by hand, so it’s more human.”
P
op music, it seems, once a
disposable commodity made to
entertain thrill-seeking teenagers
for the precious year or two before
they turned into adults, is becoming
classical music repertoire. Certain
back catalogues have, over the years,
gradually been elevated in status.
Maybe The Bootleg Beatles and Bjorn
Again were the pioneers in this respect,
taking great pains to replicate the
music they and and their audiences
loved but couldn’t hear in the flesh
anymore.
There have also been attempts to
recast certain popular music scores
in other genres. Slovenian headcases
Laibach made a compelling case for
the process by covering the whole of
The Beatles’ ‘Let It Be’ album in 1988.
Dread Zeppelin’s cod reggae take on
Led Zeppelin was surprising successful,
as was the Easy All Stars’ ‘Dub Side Of
The Moon’ and ‘Radiodread’. Electronic
obscurists Globo pulled apart The
Fall’s ‘This Nation’s Saving Grace’ for
an album in 2008 and Scanner has
recently tackled the Joy Division back
catalogue in a classical context. Does
J Peter Schwalm have a theory why the
concept is gaining traction?
“Maybe it’s the answer to remixing
and pop music,” he says. “But it’s not
focused on the simple idea, it’s focused
on the complexity and isn’t worried
about making it more complex. A
pop music remix takes one melody
and makes it as simple as possible,
so people can digest it even more
easily than the original song, and uses
a rhythm that people can dance to.
Using this idea with a contemporary
music ensemble like Icebreaker, it’s
really focusing on the interesting side
of the music, and maybe underlining
how modern this music can be and
how there are elements of the original
that are still up to date.”
Drawing the modern listeners’ attention
to aspects that might have been missed
in the original pop rush, perhaps?
“Yes, it’s taking the spirit of the minimal
character of Kraftwerk’s music, then
taking little bits and pieces, and
making different lengths of loops, and
making something that is a complex
piece. Because even if it’s minimal
music, it can be complex. So this was
the first idea I had, the first connection,
and then there is the sound itself and
the work of digging deeper into the
original.”
“It’s the post-war industrial area,” says
Schwalm. “Germany was destroyed
in the war, and it was built up again,
but with really ugly houses. It’s quite
depressing, actually. It stands for the
post-war German culture in a way,
the ‘Wirtschaftwunder’ [the ‘economic
wonder’] and Germany rising up
again as an industrial power. So it’s
about industry and how the sound of
Kraftwerk was the sound of that work
beat.”
At the time of writing, the first rehearsals
for the ‘Kraftwerk Uncovered’ shows
are yet to happen. Icebreaker will have
only two days to get it nailed when
they do start rehearsing and, right
now, Schwalm hasn’t even finished the
scores. He has developed the pieces
by listening to certain songs and “doing
treatments” with his equipment, such
as live sampling and multi-effects. The
first sketches that Sophie Clements
heard were played on synthesisers and
loops. Schwalm has since changed
the instrumentation, reassigning parts
and creating a version for the MIDI
instruments that Icebreaker will be
playing.
“This was really changing the music
again,” says Schwalm. “Sophie
got used to me composing with the
electronic sounds, and then I started
cebreaker’s Kraftwerk performances working with MIDI sounds, like
will be accompanied by a short film
saxophone, violin and cello sounds, and
made by British video artist Sophie
she realised the feel of the music was
Clements. Her work, which has been
changing again. It was quite stressful for
shown in museums and galleries
her. She had to follow this and imagine
all over the world, combines
what the ensemble would sound like.
photography, animation and footage in Still, until we have the first rehearsals,
ways that are often witty and always
none of us knows exactly how it will
visually arresting. She has also worked sound.”
with Scanner, a musician who, like
J Peter Schwalm, is defining a new kind The rest of the world will find out when
of post-classical, post-electronic music
Icebreaker and Schwalm tour the
that has one foot in all-out populism
project throughout the first half of 2014.
and the other in the avant garde
traditions (if that’s not an oxymoron) of
the minimalist composers and sound
The first ‘Kraftwerk Uncovered: A
artists of the 20th century. Sophie
Future Past’ performance is on 24
Clements’ Kraftwerk film has been
January at the Science Museum IMAX
inspired by the area and the era the
Theatre in London. More info at
group are from.
www.icebreakerkraftwerk.co.uk
I
GARY
NUMAN
GETS
ELECTRONIC
SOUND
MAKE SURE
YOU DO TOO
JOIN THE MAILING LIST AT
www.electronicsound.co.uk/signup
WRITERS’ PICKS
The Writers’ Picks
2013 was the year that Electronic Sound arrived – and what a year it was.
Kraftwerk live in London, new albums from Daft Punk, Boards Of Canada and
Depeche Mode, and opportunities to put Karl Bartos and Gary Numan on the
cover. So what did our esteemed writers think made the year oscillate so wildly
and what are they looking forward to in 2014? Read all about it…
WRITERS’ PICKS
DAVID STUBBS
2013’s tide brought in another wealth of myriad treasures, without
some overarching, tsunami-like movement. But then, as EDM continues
to demonstrate, do we want that? Diverse pleasures included LE1F’s
‘Fly Zone’ mixtape, METAMONO’s ‘With The Compliments Of Nuclear
Physics’ debut album, as well as their always brilliant live shows, and
ARCHIE PELAGO’s ‘Sly Gazebo’ EP. Predictions? The revival of the
HÖRSPIEL, or radio play, a German concept briefly practised in Britain
by Delia Derbyshire and Barry Bermange. Felix Kubin and Matthew
Herbert should put their heads together on that one.
GEORGE BASS
My highlight of 2013 has to be going to Warp Records to listen to the
new BOARDS OF CANADA album before it was released. I’ve been a
BoC nut since 2001, when I heard ‘Music Has The Right To Children’
while catching hypothermia in a Welsh village. I’d never have thought
that, 12 years later, a) the human race would still be here, and b) the
lovely Leah at Warp would arrange for me to visit their swanky Kentish
Town office, walk past the glass doors etched with ‘Tomorrow’s Harvest’
artwork, and hear the Sandisons’ apocalyptic puzzle in full. As for
2014, anything on HYPERDUB is going to be getting me excited.
FAT ROLAND
JON HOPKINS’ triumphant, Kaoss Pad-tweaking tour
twiddled my knobs big-time. He even turned a sudden
sound outage into one of 2013’s most crowd-unifying
moments. I hereby award him a Fat Roland Award, which is
the equivalent of, like, 10,000 Mercury Prizes or something.
As for 2014, the big question is this: if artists keep hopping
from PLANET MU to NINJA TUNE (FaltyDL, Machinedrum,
Raffertie), who the flipping flip is going to be releasing that
new APHEX TWIN album?
NGAIRE RUTH
There are too few women producers, so it’s smart to pay close attention
to anything MICACHU gets involved in for 2014. Over the last year
or so, she’s released a second Micachu And The Shapes album and
worked with Matthew Herbert as part of THE NEW BBC RADIOPHONIC
WORKSHOP, as well as collaborating with urban artist TIRZAH, who
is another one to watch. Whatever she does next is guaranteed to
be stamped with her off-kilter beats, humour and the type of “what
happens if I do this?” forward thinking that takes electronic music to a
higher place.
NEIL MASON
This year’s highlight? Hands down, POLLY SCATTERGOOD’s
‘Arrows’ long-player. It’s such a gobsmacker, I think she
might be a bit witchy, weaving spells into a heady musical
brew that makes me feel giddy just thinking about it. Being
an 80s buff, I’m hoping 2014 brings a right fuss over the
30th anniversary of FRANKIE GOES TO HOLLYWOOD riding
roughshod over everything. The thrilling double vinyl of
‘Welcome To The Pleasuredome’ gives ‘Dare’ a run in the
importance stakes if you ask me.
ANDREW HOLMES
Much as one hates to fetishise objects, I’m making an exception for JEFF
MILLS’ ‘Jungle Planet’ release. It comes as an eminently strokeable black
cube in which nestles a USB of the album, as well as PDFs explaining
the inevitable narrative. Apparently only 400 were made; certainly they
sold out in the time it took me to complete my order. Still, having missed
out on Kraftwerk tickets earlier in the year, I felt as though I was owed
a little early-worm luck. I’ve enjoyed 2013’s DARK TECHNO so much
that I’m hoping for some more of the same in 2014, though wouldn’t be
unhappy seeing increased bpms as well.
CHI MING LAI
OMD released their best album in 30 years with
‘English Electric’, but my moment of 2013 was
VILE ELECTRODES supporting them at Cologne
E-Werk. Andy McCluskey told me that they got the
gig partly due to him reading something I wrote
about them, so it was a really proud moment for
me. For 2014, I hope CURXES finally get round to
releasing their debut album – they’re like Depeche
Mode being eaten by Siouxsie!
BETHAN COLE
2013 was all about seeing DAFT PUNK achieve world domination and
still actively resist becoming part of the tawdry world of celebrity. It
brought back memories of when I interviewed the pair in 1994, but I
was also very saddened by the loss of Daft Punk collaborator and house
music legend ROMANTHONY in May. There was some brilliant pop
music from RUDIMENTAL and CHVRCHES this year too, and I got into
JAMES BLAKE and JON HOPKINS – although I was rather late to the
party! Looking ahead to 2014, I’m going to very interested to hear the
forthcoming SOLANGE KNOWLES album.
PAUL CONNOLLY
Ferreting out great, unheralded electronic music is
a deep, deep joy. This year, Sweden provided two
magnificently ignored albums, SHADOW SHADOW’s
‘Riviera’ and HENRIC DE LA COUR’s ‘Mandrills’. If
the latter was a gothic, melody-soused tribute to 80s
electronica, the former was a resolutely modern take on
lush, synthesised, downbeat melodrama. In the electro
ballad ‘100001’, Shadow Shadow provided the best
song of the year. 2014? Listen out for FRIDA SUNDEMO.
VADER EVADER
A bit niche, but I was very excited to discover the Barcelona
based DOMESTICA label, which specialises in re-releases
of rare electro, synth wave and new romantic stuff. Listen
to ARTIFICIAL ORGANS’ ‘Practiced Grace’ on Soundcloud
and remind yourself why the early stuttering forays into
electronica were so exciting. For 2014, my eyes are on the
following labels, all of which do everything right: LA FORME
LENTE, MANUAL MUSIC, KOMPAKT, ROMANCE MODERNE
and IRREGULAR LABEL. Electronica’s never been so alive.
WRITERS’ PICKS
TOM VIOLENCE
I was lucky enough to get tickets for two of the KRAFTWERK nights at the Tate
Modern in London in February. For me, the performance of ‘Radio-Activity’
personified the band’s combination of mournful nostalgia and sci-fi futurism, while
‘Tour De France’ provided a complete contrast of sleek techno workouts. Elsewhere,
the recent confluence of pagan, bass-driven hauntology reached a crescendo with
THE HAXAN CLOAK’s stunning second album, ‘Excavation’. With rich pickings from
the likes of DEMDIKE STARE, HACKER FARM, IX TAB and FOREST SWORDS, and the
recent OUTER CHURCH compilation coming up close behind, this is a proving a rich
seam which I’m hoping will continue to be mined well into 2014.
SAM SMITH
As someone who regularly watches horror movies
full of monsters popping out of wardrobes and
the like, I’ve found that I genuinely enjoy being
surprised by ridiculous things. With that in mind,
I’d say my highlight of 2013 was hearing ‘Come
& Get It’ by SELENA GOMEZ and properly loving
it. Looking ahead to 2014, I can only hope that
THE AVALANCHES might be inspired by Boards Of
Canada’s return and bloody release something.
VIK SHIRLEY
One track I fell completely in love with this year
was BIBIO’s ‘À Tout À L’Heure’, taken from his
seventh studio album, ‘Silver Wilkinson’. Such a
beautiful piece, which combined his electro-folk
sound with exquisite melodies, a fluid bassline
and a festival of rhythms. A truly special moment.
Looking to 2014, I’m really excited about the new
SBTRKT album. If the 2011 debut is anything to go
by, it should be a corker!
PAUL BROWNE
2013 served up some fine musical moments, including
OMD’s triumphant return with ‘English Electric’, while new
contenders such as CHVRCHES and AUSTRA continued
to deliver quality tunes. The year also saw Japan’s
technopop trio PERFUME make their UK debut. As for
2014, I’m particularly keen to hear future releases by
sleazy synth masters TRUST, as well as delving into the
emerging next generation of electro pop outfits, such as
the wonderful GIRL ONE & THE GREASE GUNS.
ANDY THOMAS
With a second GROUP RHODA outing and an album with MAX BROTMAN (on
the brilliant Dark Entries label), MARA BARENBAUM impressed with a slightly
darker take on her detached avant-pop. She also remixed one of the tracks
on an ASPHODELLS long-player that managed to reference John Betjeman, AR
Kane and Neu!. Krautrock continued to inform some of the best electronic music,
with one of the highlights being MUSICCARGO’s ‘Harmonie’ on the prolific
Emotional Response imprint. And among some deep reissues, the standouts
included the Balearic exotica of FINIS AFRICAE’s ‘A Last Discovery’ and the
African electronics of WILLIAM ONYEABOR’s ‘Who Is William Onyeabor?’.
DANNY TURNER
My favourite album of 2013 has to be FRONT LINE
ASSEMBLY’s ‘Echogenetic’. I’d fallen out of love, but that
was the mother of reprisals. My tastes are pretty varied,
so I would also recommend albums by SUB FOCUS
(‘Torus’), JOHN FOXX & THE MATHS (‘Evidence’), IAMX
(‘The Unified Field’) and JON HOPKINS (‘Immunity’). I also
thought DAVID BOWIE’s ‘The Next Day’ was his best since
‘Scary Monsters’. Next year, I’m looking forward to the
‘Echogenetic’ rework and a new NOISE UNIT album.
HEIDEGGER SMITH
FUCK BUTTONS’ ‘Slow Focus’ was excellent, JON HOPKINS’ ‘Immunity’
should have won the Mercury prize, and it was a shame that I lost
Richard D James’ laptop when I borrowed it to update my Facebook,
because that new APHEX TWIN album would have been great. For
2014, I have a project in mind that involves a soldering iron, a Moog
Taurus bass synth pedal and several members of Her Majesty’s
Government. It’s like ‘The Human Centipede’, but with synthesisers and
politicians. And I’m also hoping for a CONSOLIDATED reunion. I’m
almost certain that neither of these aspirations will transpire. #FML
BILL BRUCE
2013 delivered great new music from VILE ELECTRODES, GARY
NUMAN, KARL BARTOS, MARSHEAUX and PERFUME, among
others. I thoroughly enjoyed writing about many of my heroes,
including YELLO, THE RADIOPHONIC WORKSHOP and DEPECHE
MODE, as well as creating a LEGO Karl Bartos and seeing
Human League and Heaven 17 legend MARTYN WARE meet
synth-mad JASON BRADBURY from ‘The Gadget Show’. My
biggest highlight remains contributing to Electronic Sound. May it
go from strength to strength in 2014. It’s been a privilege, folks.
MARK ROLAND
The KARL BARTOS album, ‘Off The Record’ was excellent. He was the perfect cover
star for the first issue of Electronic Sound. Bartos’ old pals KRAFTWERK live at the
Tate Modern was a three-dimensional exercise in legacy management which I was
very pleased to have witnessed, and the first LEAF – the London Electronic Arts
Festival – with THE RADIOPHONIC WORKSHOP was pretty special, too. My albums of
2013 included corkers by DAFT PUNK, FACTORY FLOOR, JON HOPKINS and JOHN
FOXX, but there were so many more. 2014? That new Kraftwerk album, obviously.
Hahahahaha! Seriously though, I’ll be anticipating anything on BUREAU B. And an
album from DAVIDGE, due out in February, has just glued itself onto my turntable…
PUSH
Never meet your heroes? Bollocks. Spending a day with MARTYN WARE
was certainly a highlight of my year, and what a top fella he turned out
to be. I’m spoilt for choice picking my favourite album of 2013 – POLLY
SCATTERGOOD, FACTORY FLOOR, EMIKA, CLOCKWORK and HUSKY RESCUE
are all contenders – but it’s probably between THE FIELD’s ‘Cupid’s Head’ and
FLOORPLAN’s ‘Paradise’ (Floorplan being Detroit legend Robert Hood). I loved
NINA KRAVIZ’s “Mr Jones” EP and ABIGAIL WYLES’ ‘Mantra’ single too – and
I’ll lay any money you want that electronic soulstress Abigail Wyles will make
big waves when her debut album drops next year. You heard it here first.
ALBUM REVIEWS
Be Home’ containing an explicit reference
to Christmas itself. A tossed-off version of
‘God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen’ added
on the 12-inch single didn’t really count.
Nonetheless, the EP has become something
of a Yuletide standard round our house
ever since – and I’ll happily wager any
money you like that ‘Snow Globe’ will too.
With ‘Snow Globe’, Erasure have achieved
the seemingly impossible. They’ve crafted
a decent Christmas record. The reason is
simple. They are believers. It really isn’t a
stretch to imagine Andy Bell loving Christmas
ERASURE
Snow Globe
Mute
The synthpop superduo get their
Yuletide mojo on for a collection
of electronic classics new and old
Once a festive season staple, the Christmas
album had fallen out of favour with
“credible” artists by the end of the 1980s,
the concept being maintained by just a few
shameless pop stalwarts. Critically, it had
become the height of naffhood; expressing
sentiments of such saccharine levels that
they would induce a diabetic coma. The
Christmas record deserved to be greeted with
nothing but cynicism for it was itself the most
cynical of gestures, which coming from a
music industry not renowned for its generous
open-heartedness is really saying something.
In recent years, a few plucky electronic artists
have attempted to resurrect the notion of the
Yuletide song, but even the best have tried to
negotiate the cheese minefield by steeping
the whole thing in irony. Hurts’ downcast ‘All
I Want For Christmas (Is New Year’s Day)’
or Dragonette’s thrillingly catty ‘Merry Xmas
(Says Your Text Message)’, for example.
If any act can resurrect the Christmas
record with the right blend of sugar and
spice, it has to be Erasure. Their previous
festive outing, the wonderful ‘Crackers
International’ EP in 1988, was a surprisingly
coy affair, with only the sublime ‘She Won’t
and all the trimmings, but there is something
truly wonderful about Vince Clarke, electronic
music’s most taciturn songsmith, embracing
the festive season. Within every cynic is an
idealist wishing to be let out. So Bell provides
the tinsel and Clarke the twinkly lights.
‘Snow Globe’ is also a supremely confident
record. Bell’s voice has matured from its early
wavering reediness and now encompasses
a wide range of shades and colours, while
Clarke has blurred the lines between his soft
synths and his arsenal of vintage instruments
to craft a sound that is both of the moment
and somehow timeless. Of the new material,
‘Bells Of Love’, ‘Make It Wonderful’ and
the springy, galloping disco of ‘Loving
Man’ and ‘There’ll Be No Tomorrow’ are as
good as anything Erasure released during
what was arguably their purple patch,
between ‘The Circus’ and ‘Wild!’. And
it couldn’t be more Christmassy if it was
delivered by a singing reindeer jumper.
Amid a strong set of original compositions
are a number of perennial standards, all
given the Erasure treatment. ‘Silent Night’
is delivered with a tremulous ambient piety,
‘The Christmas Song’ sounds like a duet
between R2-D2 and Dean Martin, and the
album closes with a cooing interpretation
of ‘Silver Bells’. Only the single, a cover
of Steeleye Span’s ‘Gaudete’, threatens
to pitch things perilously close to ‘A Very
Moogy Christmas’. It’s a sort of Radio
Fab chart-pleaser that would have Alan
Partridge singing along in his Rover Vitesse
hatchback. Even Ken Bruce would blush.
Erasure have no credibility to lose,
though. They aren’t trendy, they aren’t
arch, they are simply pop with a big
exclamation mark at the end. Like Andy
Bell’s spiritual mentors ABBA, they
operate beyond the normal realms of
critical or commercial comprehension.
As such, there is a tremendous freedom
to ‘Snow Globe’. If you play it and
your relatives sneer, you should thumb
your nose at them, for they surely
have no Christmas in their heart.
BILL BRUCE
ALBUM REVIEWS
three days on clunky recording equipment.
A major turning point in propulsive, moody
electronica, John Carpenter’s soundtrack for
‘Assault On Precinct 13’ wasn’t available
until the French label Record Makers put it on
CD in 2004. There it has lingered until now,
with the Death Waltz imprint giving it the
release it deserves: a deluxe immortalisation
of 180gsm vinyl in red and vanilla, a wink
to the film’s darkest and most pivotal scene.
Built from five themes that imagine South
Central as a maze of drums and synths,
JOHN CARPENTER
Assault On Precinct 13
Death Waltz
A fabulous deluxe reissue of the
landmark 1970s electronic score
John Carpenter’s 1976 thriller about a cop
station under siege was a game changer.
First film to present a murderer who is as
courageous as the police chief hero. First
film to focus on pistol silencers. First film to
show us the consequences of letting your
little girl go alone to the ice cream truck.
First film to feature a bare bones electronic
score, one that the director hashed out in
the ‘Precinct 13’ score is more than just an
artefact. Forget this is a soundtrack and listen
to those beats, like something from a futuristic
voodoo ceremony. Ice Cube would later
tell Carpenter that “The beat always comes
first”, which must have justified the three
long days the director spent constructing
it, resetting machines that couldn’t cope
with the drum program. You can hear the
sweat when it first weighs in on ‘Main
Title’, all ticking cymbals, thudding kicks,
and those glowering keyboard chords in a
four-bar rotation, as predictable as they are
empowering. ‘Wrong Flavour’ ties together
a pulse and Radiophonic Workshop sound
effects, well suited to the story’s grim inciting
incident, while the steady thump of ‘Well’s
Fight’ is like the drums in ‘King Kong’,
deadly and tribal. I’m not saying Carpenter
fathered trance, but the mileage he gets from
his ultra-simple formula may have put an
idea into some Belgian producer’s head.
The simplicity of ‘Precinct 13’ is what
makes it timeless – the recycling of themes
normally associated with film scores here
feels necessary, like it’s a dance seveninch. The less Carpenter does, the more
cinematic it becomes and the clearer
each of his characters seems. ‘Lawson’s
Revenge’ is a 60-second high C, the theme
for the Street Thunder gang, while the
bass-heavy sting and single arpeggio on
‘Napoleon Wilson’ are the perfect intro for
the quipping prisoner hero. On ‘Julie’, the
reappearance of an earlier lounge motif
sets her up as a counterpart to the Austin
Stoker character, while the eerie music
boxes on ‘Targets/Ice Cream Man On
Edge’ take the street punks from sinister to
‘Silent Hill’ scary. It’s all wrapped up in the
perfect bow of ‘Walking Out’, a twist on the
slower theme that cements the bromance
between the cop and his convict ally.
‘Assault On Precinct 13’ might seem like
a trainspotter-only item at first glance
– a score from a seldom screened cult
film – but Death Waltz have rolled out a
long red carpet to acknowledge what a
milestone in electronic music it is. Beyond
the cleaned-up cues and blood red vinyl
are some fantastic treats: a fold-out poster,
notes from actor Austin Stoker, notes from
‘Moon’ composer Clint Mansell and notes
from John Carpenter himself, who listened
to this pressing and gave it his approval.
There’s no higher compliment can be paid
to this lavish restoration of the director’s
finest musical achievement; four bass chords
and choppy, ticking beats that would outdo
the Hollywood Symphony Orchestra and
should get all future knob-twiddlers thinking.
GEORGE BASS
‘Nag, Nag, Nag’ and ‘Red Mecca’. After
punk became a yawning bore, the dystopian
vocals and miserable experimentalism of
‘Red Mecca’ must have been on every
student stereo in the country. ‘#8385’
joins them post-‘Mecca’, however, after
their genius tape-splicer Chris Watson
split to work for Tyne Tees Television and
for, er, Bill Oddie’s ‘Back In The USA’.
In retrospect, Watson’s departure left the
Cabs in a difficult place, as an “experiment
within pop” (copyright Richard H Kirk) and
label mates to The Human League (Mark
CABARET
VOLTAIRE
#8385 (Collected Works
1983 – 1985)
Mute
Hench box set of goodies from the
Sheffield pioneers’ mid-period
This is what the rave children rebelled
against. They fought against the 1980s
industrialism, with its lo-fi rhythms, real
instruments sliced into strange dubby
exclamations, and lofty artistic pretensions
reflected in titles like ‘Why Kill Time (When
You Can Kill Yourself)’. The rave generation,
of which I am one, ditched
all that in favour of short, sharp, highlighteryellow
bursts of medicated exotica. An Altern-8
reality of sequenced digitalism.
It’s rave that still speaks to today’s music
makers, through the likes of Rudimental and
Disclosure and their sharp house music.
So how does this massive Cabaret Voltaire
box set sound to modern ears? With its
completist collection of mid-80s albums,
12-inches, DVDs and unreleased material,
does ‘#8385’ just serve a dedicated fan
base, or has it a wider relevance for the
post-noughties coiffured kid planning a
Goa trip on a Google Hangout while
BBMing selfies at a Martin Garrix gig?
Talk to Cabaret Voltaire fans now and they
will mythologise the Rough Trade era of
II) and Culture Club. According to the
mythology, it had some of their previous
fans scratching their heads, while not
quite engaging the dancefloor enough to
ensure sustained chart success – and this
at a time when others embraced critical
and commercial success more effortlessly.
Joy Division into New Order and David
Byrne’s house-burning appeal, for instance.
Voltaire were much more volatile. You can
hear it here. The rhythms sound awkward;
lurching subterranean funk Sellotaped
together with otherworldy synthesis;
bleeps and cymbals almost drowned out
by clapping electro on ‘Talking Time’; the
sirens of the claustrophobic ‘Diskono’.
But they weren’t the art provocateurs they
once were, and indeed the politicism of
their earlier work is dialled down in favour
of MTV sheen. Were they thinking of the
discos? Living room stereos? The tellybox?
In any case, the messiness, the scrapes and
the parps, such as the industrial clangs that
pepper ‘Just Fascination’, work the ears and
there’s a satisfying dirtiness to the basslines.
Of the two most interesting studio albums
here, ‘Crackdown’ and ‘Micro-Phonies’,
‘Crackdown’ is the lesser of the two. It seems
unable to decide between the darkness of the
1970s and the sequenced order of the future.
‘Animation’ is mutated Donna Summer,
‘Over And Over’ has a real Ian Curtis
posture, and ‘Theme From Doublevision’ is
all a bit Eno. ‘Micro-Phonies’ sets out its stall
more assuredly in a time yet to come – and
no more so than with the sample-heavy
‘Do Right’. The echoing reggae of ‘Digital
Rasta’ (awful title) has a detuned feel that
significantly predates similar IDM efforts and
the insistent energy of ‘James Brown’ can be
heard in recent albums by Dam-Funk. And
is that a touch of LCD Soundsystem in the
staccato synth attitude of ‘Sensoria’? It’s the
‘Micro-Phonies’ album that will speak most to
the coiffured gig kids and ex-ravers like me.
The track lengths on the ‘Drinking Gasoline’
12-inch collection are more naturally suited
to the Cabs (note the excellent ‘Kino’ and the
sax-stifling ‘Big Funk’) and their 1985 Virgin
swansong, ‘The Covenant, The Sword And
The Arm Of The Lord’, perhaps has a sense
of going through the motions – especially on
the chart-by-numbers contractual obligation
‘I Want You’. By now, the group’s transition
was complete and their experimentalism
was more knowing, more controlled. The
samples are polished and gleaming, the
twilight murk of their previous work forgotten.
Cabaret Voltaire reached for a distant future
and, although they didn’t fully achieve
their vision, ‘#8385’ documents their
attempt during the period 1983 to 1985.
The material here has serious relevance
to house, to rave, to IDM. No yellow
bursts of medicated exotica, but this Cabs
era reminds us that 1990s dance music
in all its forms was birthed by Sheffield
steel – not by rave sticks, but by girders.
JOHNNY MOBIUS
ALBUM REVIEWS
ACTRESS
Ghettoville
Ninja Tune
It sounds like Darren J Cunningham
is calling time on the Actress name
– and he’s going out with a growl
‘Ghettoville’, according to the press notes,
is the “bleached-out and black-tinted
conclusion of the Actress image”. Which
– ooh – sounds like a hint to us. The notes
are signed “RIP Music” by Actress himself
and contain such nuggets as “Where the
demands of writing caught the artist slumped
and reclined, devoid of any soul…” and
“The machines have turned to stone, data
reads like an obituary to its user…”, so
you’d be forgiven for thinking Darren J
Cunningham is a bit fed up with the Actress
lark. Might even have considered giving it
up. After all, what’s a techno pioneer to do
when his machines have turned to stone?
Accordingly, there is a weight that
hangs over ‘Ghettoville’. Cunningham
hasn’t sounded this gloomy since 2008’s
‘Hazyville’, the album that served notice
of his singular talent for blurring the lines
between IDM, techno and dubstep. He
followed that with ‘Splazsh’ in 2010 and
‘R.I.P.’ in 2012, and it was those two
long-players that drew him alongside
the likes of Four Tet and Burial as one
of electronica’s biggest stars, the kind
whose next records are eagerly hyped
way in advance of their release.
Perhaps it’s a position that did not rest easy
with him. Just as Four Tet has retreated
from the chill-friendly indie-electronica on
which he made his name, Cunningham
has dispensed with the melodies that,
while often angular and disguised, were
very much a part of his last two albums.
Virtually everything on ‘Splazsh’ and
‘R.I.P.’ sounds positively perky next to the
claustrophobic soundtrack dynamics of
‘Forgiven’, the opener here, and if you’re
waiting for things to brighten up later then
you’d best have a good book to read.
that Cunningham has pitched everything
down, down, down, taking the music
into hazy, sub-narcotic depths. There’s a
ferocious and monolithic sense of purpose,
only leavened by the appearance of
some almost pretty chords on ‘Birdcage’,
while the glitchy micro-melodies of ‘Time’
recall ‘Chiastic Slide’-era Autechre.
This is still an Actress album, though.
Cunningham cannot help but at least nod
to the dancefloor, and much of ‘Ghettoville’
sounds as though he’s repurposed a diet
of early 90s electro, fattening it up and
slowing it down. OK, so ‘Corner’ sounds
too fattened-up – turgid, even – but ‘Rims’
is much better. Imagine Drexciya played
at half speed and that’s ‘Rims’: as deep as
you’d expect if you’re invoking a Drexciya
comparison, but forbidding as all hell.
‘Contagious’, meanwhile, is an absolute
juggernaut of a tune, unswerving in its
belief that it is the heaviest, most sinister
and brooding muthafucka on the block. It’s
like being crushed by breezeblocks and
slowed, chanting voices add to the sense
so it seems a fitting way to go out here,
and what comes across most forcefully is a
sense of the artist reconnecting with what
inspired him in the first place. Either that or
he’s raiding the archives, using old ideas,
clearing the decks for a next phase.
By now, the album has lost its shape
somehow. Or seems in search of a new one,
which it eventually finds in the reconstructed
hip hop of the final trio of tracks. Hip hop
was an early touchstone for Cunningham,
In the end, ‘Ghettoville’ may not be the
most listenable of everything Cunningham
has put his name to so far – that honour
goes to the brace of ‘Splazsh’ and ‘R.I.P.’.
It may not be the most focused. For that,
you should try ‘Hazyville’. But it will
probably be the most polarising and is,
without a doubt, the most fascinating.
ANDREW HOLMES
in their own little bubbles, each with their
own characteristic sounds, fashions and
dancing. And in the early part of the decade,
at the crossroads of western Europe in
Belgium, a DJ called Ronny Harmsen (aka
Fat Ronny) was pioneering a style that
would later become known as new beat.
Bridging new wave acts like Siouxsie And
The Banshees, PiL and Suicide with eurobeat
and synthpop, Fat Ronny interspersed his
slow motion 100 bpm mixes with film scores
and jazz pieces. It was an unusual sound,
diametrically opposed to the mainstream
VARIOUS ARTISTS
The Sound Of Belgium
La Musique Fait La Force
A quality bumper package of 80s
new beat and 90s techno classics
Anyone with even a passing interest in
dance music knows how a group of London
soul DJs known as The Special Branch
invented modern-day clubbing in 1988. After
experiencing the joys of electronic music and
ecstasy in Ibiza, Danny Rampling started
Shoom at the Fitness Centre in Southwark,
Paul Oakenfold opened Spectrum at Heaven,
and the rest, as they say, is history. Well, yes,
it is, but only because that particular version
of history was writen by the UK media and
has been endlessly rehashed ever since.
While it’s important to recognise the truly
massive impact of acid house, in reality
it was just one – albeit explosive – part
of a much bigger story. A story that had
been steadily unfolding in a number of
places across the planet throughout the
1980s. From Dallas to Goa, from Rimini to
Frankfurt, electronic music scenes existed
disco and pop played in most Belgian
clubs at the time. In 1985, as Ronny’s
fame grew, he moved from small clubs
like Scandals to Antwerp’s newly opened
Ancienne Belgique, but his residency at
the 2,000 capacity venue was cut short
due to drug problems. His fellow DJ at
the club, Marc Grouls, had picked up on
Ronny’s style, however, and when Grouls
famously played the 45 rpm ‘Flesh’ by
industrial/EBM act A Split Second at 33
+8, the sound of this fresh style of music
was cemented. Other clubs like Prestige and
the legendary Boccaccio in Destelbergen
soon followed; Sven Van Hees and Paul
Ward gave the music a platform on their
Liaisons Dangereuses radio show; and by
1987 new beat tracks were making regular
appearances in the Belgian Top 10. New
beat had truly become the sound of Belgium.
Which brings us to this compilation.
Designed as an accompaniment to Jozef
Deville’s documentary of the same title,
‘The Sound Of Belgium’ is an expansive,
four-CD collection covering not just the major
hits and landmark records, but also tracks
(played by Fat Ronny and others) that helped
to shape the Belgian sound. CD1 kicks off
with Trans Volta’s wonderful 1978 hit ‘Disco
Computer’ before taking in, among other
things, Birmingham post-punkers The Au
Pairs, EBM stalwarts The Neon Judgement
and Front 242, the Italo disco influenced
Public Relations, and ambient master Klaus
Schulze. CD2 meanwhile concentrates on
what was perhaps the golden era of new
beat, a time when slow grooves, porno
samples and EBM hooks ruled the roost.
The highlights include HNO3’s heavenly
‘Doughnut Dollies’, The Erotic Dissidents’
‘Move Your Ass’, Confetti’s dancefloor
destroying ‘The Sound Of C’, Neon’s
Masters C & J-sampling ‘Voices’, and Rhythm
Device’s ridiculously bombastic ‘Acid Rock’.
But the Belgian sound wasn’t just about
new beat. As Renaat Vandepapeliere, the
charismatic boss of R&S Records says,
“New beat gave us a platform – and it was
from there that we could really push things
forward”. And as the 1980s came to a
close, the more light-hearted aspects were
left behind as new influences from acid
house were incorporated and new beat
morphed into the rave-conquering sound of
Belgian techno. With their irresistibly catchy
hooks, thunderous kicks and dark, ominious
atmospherics, tracks like Lhasa’s ‘The Attic’,
T-99’s ‘Anasthasia’, Outlander’s ‘Vamp’ and
‘Cubes’ by Modular Expansion – all of which
are on CD3 – dominated dancefloors across
Europe in the early 1990s. On a trippier tip,
‘Age Of Love’ by Age Of Love, released in
1990 on the Diki imprint, helped crystalise
the early trance sound and is now considered
one of the most important releases of that
decade. The trance vibe continues on CD4
with choice cuts by Push, Emmanuel Top and
Cherrymoon Trax, alongside techno classics
like CJ Bolland’s epic ‘Carmargue’ and Frank
De Wulf’s era-defining mix of ‘Golden Girls’.
There’s a lot here and a lot of it is very high
quality stuff. ‘The Sound Of Belgium’ is the
sound of a small country that beats with a
big musical heart and has made a huge,
absolutely indispensable contribution to
electronic music. Long may it continue.
DAVE MOTHERSOLE
ALBUM REVIEWS
L.B. DUB CORP
Unknown Origin
Ostgut Ton
Dubby collection of dancefloor tunes
enlivened by Benjamin Zephaniah
Luke Slater has been a name on the
techno circuit since the early 1990s and is
responsible for some of the genre’s smartest
mutations. His albums for the great and
lamented GPR label, in particular ‘My
Yellow Wise Rug’ (with its of-the-moment
autostereogram optical illusion cover)
and ‘The Four Cornered Room’, helped
to define the so-called IDM movement – a
name cooked up in the USA to describe
the outcrop of techno created by mostly
British experimenters who produced
music that used the rhythms and sounds
of the dancefloor but was thoughtful and
reflective. The roster at GPR (which also
included the likes of Beaumont Hannant
and Andrew Lagowski), often seemed to
be engaged in a kind of sonic arms war
with the artists at rival labels such as Warp
(whose ‘Artificial Intelligence’ compilations
did much to popularise the “intelligent”
strain), resulting in them continually
leapfrogging one another to produce
records more beautiful and atmospheric
than the last. The winner was the listener.
Slater went to record a couple of albums
for Mute in the later 1990s. These were
harder affairs, technoid and sci-fi with a
sense of edginess, yet always tuneful and
memorable. ‘Freek Funk’ and ‘Wireless’ had
a filmic quality to them. It might have been
the photographic covers, looking for all the
world like stills from cool movies you’d want
to see, but there was an urgency to the beats
and the atmospheres which captured that
pre-millennial anxiety everyone was keen
on as the decade wore on and out. The
third Mute album, ‘Alright On Top’, was a
shocker for its singing (from The Aloof’s Ricky
Barrow), and was probably an attempted
land grab for some chart action, although
it retained Slater’s production edge.
with droning synths in a key of their own
choosing filling in the gaps, making the
whole thing feel airless and claustrophobic.
The far more dub-normal sound of ‘L.B.’s
Dub’ meanwhile feels oddly void, and it’s
a sensation that never quite goes away for
the duration of the record. And it’s entirely
possible that this is precisely the point,
of course, to create an unsettling mood,
one where you are reminded constantly
of the idea that is driving the project.
This album, then, released not as Luke Slater
nor using his Planetary Assault Systems brand
but nudged out under his lesser known L.B.
Dub Corp alias, is an altogether different
proposition. Its main point of difference
is its focus on dub sounds, and at times
‘Unknown Origin’ comes on like an Orb
record with pumped up bpms and the fecund
soundscapes of an imagined Africa. It’s an
Africa as seen through a lens of Jamaican
dub, and sprinkled with some Italo piano
over an unyielding drum machine beat.
“Look to Africa” intones a voice on ‘Nearly
Africa’. What does it mean? I’m reminded of
The Shamen’s ‘Boss Drum’ album, which was
their attempt to remind techno’s pop wastrels
of the origins of all this dancing about
outdoors in large, celebratory groups, off
your crumpets on nature’s very own MDMA.
create a hybrid which tells its own story of
the origins of dance – of all of us, perhaps
– through the exploration and collision of
different production techniques and sounds.
The best of it is to be found in the set’s
closing track, the driving pulse that is ‘Roller’,
and in ‘I Have A Dream’, which is basically
a vehicle for an excellent and pretty funny
Benjamin Zephaniah poem. “The time is
coming when all people, regardless of colour
or class, will have at least one Barry Manilow
record,” says Zephaniah at one point.
In ‘Ever And Forever’, Slater’s daring splicing
of repetitive house piano figures into the dub
tape echo is awkward and oddly dissonant,
Pic: Daniel Burman
It’s a laudable experiment, to use dub as a
root for various techno and house tropes, to
‘Unknown Origin’ is a mixed bag,
there’s no doubt about that, but it’s an
entertaining and interesting one.
MARK ROLAND
It’s certainly true that Harold Budd, who
was born in 1936, has always been an
innovator, way ahead of his time, and has
probably not received the full recognition
he is due. Various waves of musicians
and producers have been inspired by
him, including Brian Eno, who produced
his first recordings, Bob Dylan and U2
producer Daniel Lanois, Robin Guthrie of
the Cocteau Twins and David Sylvian, who
released a Budd album called ‘Perhaps’
on his Samadhisound label in 2007.
The best introduction to Budd is possibly his
HAROLD BUDD
Wind In Lonely Fences,
1970 – 2011
All Saints
A restrospective snapshot of
40 years of “lovely music”
by the ambient innovator
Harold Budd says he makes “lovely music”
and indeed it is just that: the lulling sound
of muted pianos in wide-open spaces,
gentle arpeggios, and dreamtime melodies.
Poised on the threshold of ambient, avant
garde and modern classical, Budd has been
influenced by composers like West Coast
minimalist Terry Riley and indeterminate
music pioneers John Cage and Morton
Feldman. He was also moved by the
colour field paintings of Mark Rothko.
If you want to locate his work in the
geography that produced it, Budd grew
up in the Mojave Desert and returned to
live there later on in his life, and there
is an argument to be made that it is this
landscape, more than anything else,
that has suffused his sound. Sparse,
thoughtful and, in places, angelic – he has
described it as existentially pretty – it is a
music devoid of ego, which seduces with
aerated pleasantness rather than bombast.
‘Wind In Lonely Fences’ collects together
40 years of his prolific output between
1970 and 2011, and is an opportunity
to immerse yourself in abstraction.
1974 opus, ‘Bismillahi ’Rrahman ’Rrahim’,
which is a result of his collaboration
with the intellectual saxophonist Marion
Brown. It’s the second track on this
compilation and is a cumulus of loveliness.
The saxophone exhales a kind of gilded
somnambulism throughout and there are
glimmering accompaniments of synth,
like stars twinkling in the sky. All is warm,
enveloping and ultimately comforting. This
is supremely imagistic music too: listen
to ‘The Pearl’, which was Budd’s 1984
collaboration with Eno and Lanois, and the
opening resonant/sustained piano notes
remind you of ripples on the surface of a
pond. ‘A Child In A Sylvan Field’ sounds
like wind waving through undulating
tall grasses and ‘Ice Floes In Eden’ does
make you think of glacial drift, still waters
and the crash of vertiginous icebergs.
It would be disingenuous to label Budd as
solely defined by his “lovely” aesthetics,
however. The opening track here, ‘The Oak
Of Golden Dreams’, is quite a challenging
piece of drone music composed in 1970.
It was created using the pentatonic scale
on an Indonesian gamelan and begins
with a sustained, very synthetic drone that
sounds a bit like static electricity and really
does defy the digital listener to persevere
with it. Maybe starting with this is Budd’s
bid to exhibit his more profound side in
this retrospective edit of material. There
are actually few tracks on this compilation
with the archetypal fragrant sweetness you
might expect from Budd, but a lot more that
demonstrate a kind of oblique contemplation
tainted with plaintive melancholy.
Two of the high points of ‘Wind In Lonely
Fences’ feature Robin Guthrie and his
Cocteaus partner Elizabeth Fraser. ‘How
Distant Your Heart’ is an interface of
Guthrie’s shimmering guitar and Budd’s soft
pedal piano, a pining for something lost or
far away. It is a picturesque standout track,
even for Budd, who is a master of evocation.
‘Ooze Out And Away, Onehow’ has one
of those onomatopoeic Cocteau Twins titles
and features a whispered, barely tangible
vocal from Liz Fraser which eventually
breaks out into her usual potent glossolalia,
emanating from mirrored surfaces of sound.
Fraser’s vocal is a gift and ‘Ooze Out
And Away, Onehow’ is one of several
tracks here that is worth returning to
again and again. Whilst this album is
by no means comprehensive – given
Budd’s exhaustive output over the last
40 years, how could it be? – it serves as
a great introduction to his work, even if
it is not perhaps always typical of it.
BETHAN COLE
Pic: Masao Nakagami
ALBUM REVIEWS
KOSHEEN
Solitude
Kosheen/Membran
The Bristol trio return with an album
that’s big on ideas and big on sound
Much-vaunted when they first burst onto
the scene in 2000, Bristol three-piece
Kosheen almost immediately dented the
upper reaches of the UK charts with a
series of club-friendly classics such as ‘(Slip
& Slide) Suicide’ and ‘Hide U’. Like their
almost contemporaries Sneaker Pimps and
Morcheeba, Kosheen made downbeat,
dub-inflected electronica, but similarly
struggled to maintain mainstream momentum.
While their first two albums remain critical
and commercial favourites, later attempts
to adopt a more guitar-led “rock band”
sound felt like they were floundering. A
subsequent bout of label hopping didn’t help.
Not that they haven’t been busy, mind.
They have worked as DJs and on a number
of solo projects while managing to tour
and record consistently as Kosheen. They
have continued to release interesting music
independently and still have a strong
following, despite slipping somewhat under
the radar. More than a decade on from their
debut, ‘Solitude’ is their fifth studio album
and easily one of their best. Impossible to
accurately pigeonhole, it blends elements of
dark electronica, dubstep, electro, flashes
of drum ’n’ bass and even a little two-step.
If that sounds like a dog’s dinner, the
remarkable thing is how effortless, fresh
and coherent ‘Solitude’ feels. Kosheen
were always capable of harnessing the
same hypnotic, undulating rhythms and
timbres as Bristolian trip hop pioneers
like Massive Attack without merely being
derivative, and if anything this album sees
them further refine their sound. This is at
heart, a dark ambient electro-pop album.
On occasion, like a sort of James Blake
for grown-ups but with less of the chilly
apprehension and attendant mumbling.
It’s almost unfair to try and describe
Kosheen by referencing other artists, but
they continually draw from such a wide
pallet of genres and sonic colours that
it’s remarkable it holds together at all.
It would be easy to paint ‘Solitude’ as
largely mellow and dreamy but, from
moment to moment and from track to track
there is enough bite and grit to keep your
brain engaged and your toes tapping.
The new single, ‘Harder They Fall’, is
anchored around a spongy, skipping synth
bass punctuated by sinister string riffs and is
an excellent slice of contemporary neo-noir
pop. ‘745’ is a slow, mesmerising chant,
while instrumental ‘And Another’ would sit
texturally alongside recent works by Jon
Hopkins. Equally, Kosheen can casually
flip to the mature synthpop sound of ‘Save
Your Tears’, then change direction again,
so that singer Sian Evans’ voice moves
with the same effortless, jazzy grace as
Tracey Thorn when set against the drum
’n’ bass undercurrent of ‘Observation’.
latest callow youth “producer”, but when
it comes to creating a work of substance,
experience is clearly the better teacher.
Kosheen may just have nipped in with
one of the last great albums of 2013. The
mainstream will remain enthralled by the
BILL BRUCE
performed in a deserted mining town in the
Russian Arctic, and created a transmedia
novel that uses music, text, artwork and
various online media channels to tell a story
called – spot the theme developing here
– ‘Earthbound: Surfing The Apocalypse’.
His fondness for experimentation frequently
extends to his music itself – and this is
certainly true of much of ‘CYCLS’. ‘Quarks’,
for instance, sounds like a drum ‘n’ bass
track recorded on a pub fruit machine.
MENTAL OVERDRIVE
CYCLS
Love OD Communications
Respected Norwegian producer
Per Martinsen experiments with
notions of the apocalypse
You shouldn’t be reading this. You shouldn’t
actually be here at all. You should have
gone up in a puff of apocalyptic smoke,
along with everybody and everything
else in the world, on 21 December 2012.
Yes, that’s right, the Mayan Prophecy
thing. Forgotten about that, hadn’t you?
Martinsen has never been one to stick to
any particular genre or style, even within
the confines of an individual cut. So while
‘Sunstorm’ is a perky, jerky, vaguely
Latin-ish, vaguely housey tune, ‘Beaches’
slowly winds itself up into a heady trancer
and ‘Damascus’ is a strange brew of bass
wobbles and acoustic guitars. Balearic
dubstep, anyone? Nothing here is very
long – five-and-a-bit minutes tops – and the
album sometimes seems quite jumbled as
a result. You’ve barely got your brain cells
around what’s happening with one track
before you’ve been moved on to the next.
But then Martinsen doesn’t seem interested
in creating music for purists and it’s also
worth remembering that this material was
originally issued as a series of single tracks.
The highlights are perhaps the darker
moments. The icy blast that is ‘Liverpool
Street’ could be the theme tune to an edgeof-your-seat spy thriller and ‘A Fireball, It
Is Red, The Sky Looks Black About It’ is
propelled by a fabulously sinister bass
synth. ‘A Fireball’ has samples of a US
Air Defense Command officer describing
a nuclear warhead being fired from a
jet fighter and exploding above his head
during atomic tests in the skies above the
Nevada desert in 1957. He sounds almost
ecstatic about what he’s watching, which
makes his words all the more chilling.
Per Martinsen apparently chose the title
‘CYCLS’ to suggest there’s no absolute
deadline to our existence, but rather
that everything keeps running around
in cycles, just like a vinyl record. Which
is a nice idea. That said, ‘A Fireball’
made me google how many nuclear
warheads there are in the world right now.
Something like 17,000 apparently and
almost half of them are actively deployed.
If the end isn’t quite yet nigh, that’s
perhaps more by luck than judgement.
PUSH
Per Martinsen, the Mental Overdrive
man, first made these tracks available via
Bandcamp in the weeks leading up to
We’re All Gonna Die Day in 2012. He
posted up a new one every Monday, as
a sort of countdown to oblivion. Or not,
as it turned out. Anyway, to celebrate the
fact that most of us are still here, he’s now
brought the tracks together on ‘CYCLS’,
which is a touch-me-I-really-exist physical
release. Let’s hope he’s not tempting fate.
From the Norwegian city of Tromsø, the same
place as Röyksopp and Biosphere, Martinsen
has been making records since 1990. He’s
released material on R&S and Smalltown
Supersound, as well as his own Love OD
imprint, but he’s also been involved in
numerous intriguing art projects. He’s created
music for installations and old silent movies,
Pic: Christian Nilsen
ALBUM REVIEWS
the minds of several generations of British
kids, many of whom were enthralled by the
theme tune. Which isn’t, I am very happy
to report, to be found on either of these
discs. ‘The Doctor Who Theme’ (a Delia
Derbyshire masterpiece, make no mistake,
despite the fact that the writing credit
belongs to Ron Grainer) is wonderful and
important, but its sheer ubiquity makes it
less interesting than many of the little-heard
gems scatted across these two albums.
Remastered by late Radiophonic Workshop
recruit (cir ca 1988-89) and archivist Mark
Ayres, these are re-releases of 1968 and
1975 collections of compositions, most of
which were also held together with sticky
tape. Literally so. Much of the work here was
created with sliced and spliced audio tape,
especially on the disc of earlier material. BBC
RADIOPHONIC
WORKSHOP
BBC Radiophonic Workshop
The Radiophonic Workshop
Music On Vinyl
Two re-releases of some of the
best output from our most beloved
electronic music experimenters
We can’t switch on the telly without some
reference to ‘Doctor Who’ at the moment.
It’s been 50 years, you see. Fifty years
since a ropey, under-funded tea-time
kids show was first aired, reluctantly let
out of Broadcasting House on a stingy
budget with no expectation of success.
The programme was, famously, held
together with Sellotape and re-purposed
kitchen utensils. Yet it went on to shape
‘BBC Radiophonic Music’ (doncha just
love these utilitarian titles?) showcases the
work of Delia Derbyshire, David Cain and
John Baker. It opens with interstitial music
composed for the local BBC radio station
in Sheffield. You have to wonder whether
little Martyn Ware and the other Sheffieldbred electronic music pioneers’ ears pricked
up when the electronic clanking of licence
fee-funded musique concrete came spurting
out of the family wireless, and whether
therein lie the seeds of ‘Being Boiled’ and
’Nag, Nag, Nag’. Certainly, listeners of a
certain age (over 40), whether electronic
music fans or devotees of Keane, will
find repeated odd sensations of nostalgia
sweeping over them when listening to this.
It might be the crazed and slightly alarming
version of ‘Boys And Girls’ (hmm, didn’t The
Human League record a song called that?
Yes, Mark, I believe they did…) that does it,
swooshing giddily, its sound palette derived
from what everyone probably thought
must have been the sounds made when
hitting spaceships with sonic screwdrivers.
Or maybe the almost unbearably jaunty
‘Reading Your Letters’, or ‘Christmas
Commercial, which is ‘O Come All Ye
Faithful’ performed by cash registers (such
satirical bite! The BBC was stuffed with lefties
in the 60s, after all). You can hear pre-echoes
of every 1970s children’s TV show – that
sequenced blurt at the end of ‘Newsround’
is tried out on ‘Sea Sports’ and the school
kids’ fave classroom disrupter, a ruler being
pinged on the edge of a desk, a sound that
cropped up again and again on various
theme tunes, is demonstrated in ‘The Frogs’. The second album, ‘The Radiophonic
Workshop’, is the work of Dick Mills, Paddy
Kingsland and Roger Limb (all of whom are
in the current performing incarnation of the
Workshop), alongside several other BBC
employees of good standing. This collection,
which is from 1975, features longer pieces,
like the easy listening ‘Geraldine’ by Roger
Limb, which sounds like elevator muzik
from a particularly aggressive JG Ballard
shopping centre, and Malcolm Clarke’s
evocative and bubbly ‘Bath Time’. It is, at
times, really quite haunting and beautiful.
What these two collections represent, as
listenable and fun as they undoubtedly are, is
a high water mark of British musical invention
and improvisation, which squeezed out
between the cracks where academic rigour
and populist entertainment rubbed up against
each other, a position the BBC used to
occupy so brilliantly. Oxbridge mathematics
graduates, schooled in the avant garde of
mid-century composition, beamed cohorts
of school kids into the future and helped
birth the entire field of popular electronic
music. The Radiophonic Workshop is the
Delta Blues of this music we love so much,
its sub frequencies still resonating down the
decades. Tune in and oscillate, indeed.
MARK ROLAND
Shifted’s contribution to ‘The Black Ideal’
was a beatless exercise in dark ambience
and gives an idea what to expect on this,
his second album. While ‘Crossed Paths’
was distinguished by its successful meeting
of dancefloor demands with headphone
listening, ‘Under A Single Banner’ sees the
music sidling towards the point at which the
dancefloor reaches a damp and uninviting
corner. The beats are even grimier, like music
heard through a wall or, on ‘Chrome, Canopy
And Bursting Heart’, like the distant approach
of an invading force. On ‘Burning Tyres’,
SHIFTED
Under A Single Banner
Bed Of Nails
The mysterious producer unveils his
follow-up to 2012’s ‘Crossed Paths’
– and he’s gone full dark, no stars
Earlier this year, a compilation album called
‘The Black Ideal’ summed up the state of
dark, post-industrial techno in 2013. A mix
of torture-chamber atmospherics and rusty
beats, this was techno that lay some way
to the south of Berghain’s polished minimal
stylings or the sci-fi conceptualism of Detroit.
‘The Black Ideal’ was wintry and European.
‘The Black Ideal’ was the sound in your head
when you look out of a frosted-up window
on to a bleak, misty morning and imagine
that something is out there, waiting for you.
Shifted was on it, of course, because
with 2012’s ‘Crossed Paths’ album, he
had already created one of the genre’s
definitive statements. ‘Crossed Paths’ is a
superb record, mixing warehouse-sized
thump-o-rama with lost-in-the-woods sound
design, and if only we could find him we’d
shake his hand. The trouble is, Shifted
remains determinedly anonymous: he’s
one half of drum ’n’ bass duo Commix,
says internet gossip, while his Discogs
page reveals plenty of other aliases,
including Alexander Lewis, who records
for gloomy boutique label Blackest Ever
Black. Fittingly, he remains in the shadows.
a thunderous kick drum delivers ominous
whistles and half-heard whispers, like a Goblin
soundtrack remixed by Surgeon. Neatly
contradicting my earlier statement, ‘Story Of
Aurea’ sounds just like the sci-fi conceptualism
of latter day Jeff Mills, only with the terrain
moved from outer space to the innersphere.
And yet, and yet… while there is a certain
isolating feel to ‘Under A Single Banner’,
there’s no lack of warmth. Sure, the music
shares DNA with noise and industrial artists,
but the effect is dissimilar. Like the safe scare
of a horror movie, Shifted’s skill is in creating
an immersive and ultimately oddly comforting
world. To return to the frosty-morning analogy,
you are on the inside, and the feeling is of
being enveloped, insulated against the cold –
in many ways the most warming feeling of all.
ANDREW HOLMES
ALBUM REVIEWS
Formed by Bremen DJ Ralf Behrendt in 1982,
Saâda Bonaire were a unique concept
band focused on two gorgeous but blankvoiced female vocalists (Stefanie Lange and
Claudia Hossfeld), who were joined by a
host of Arabic musicians drawn from the
local immigration centre. There was born
a strange disco/world hybrid overseen
by Behrendt and his choice of producer,
dub/reggae legend Dennis Bovell. By 1984, ‘You Could Be More As You Are’
was ready to go. Expectations were high.
However, just as the single was due for
SAÂDA BONAIRE
Saâda Bonaire
Captured Tracks
Top synthpop from an 80s group
whose ambitions were quashed
by record company in-fighting
This is the best kind of “reissue”. Instead
of celebrating the 20th anniversary of the
release of an album everyone already has
by appending a couple of takes of the
drummer scratching his bottom or a demo
for a song so lacking in quality it’s never
even made a B-side, Captured Tracks have
managed to hunt down 13 tracks from
one of the great lost acts of the 1980s,
Saâda Bonaire from Bremen in Germany.
Saâda Bonaire’s backstory is so thoroughly
ridiculous, so gloriously redolent of the
mad music business excess of the 1980s,
that one is tempted to wonder if the whole
sorry tale is not some fantastical marketing
concoction. In fact, I’d be lying if I said I
hadn’t spent a couple of hours googling
the band’s name to make sure they actually
were around in the 80s. I didn’t want to be
caught out by a clever scam. Because I was
there and I don’t recall them at all. Which
is rather annoying because the one single
they did release, ‘You Could Be More As You
Are’, a coolly sumptuous electro-Arabesque,
is fantastic. Unfortunately, amid record
company shenanigans, it sank, leaving only
a ripple in Greece, where it was a minor hit.
release, a row enveloped their label, EMI.
Saâda Bonaire’s A&R man, notorious for
blowing his budgets, was in a constant tug
of war with the EMI finance department.
He had previously exceeded his budget
five times over on Tina Turner’s ‘Private
Dancer’ and was more than three times over
budget for Saâda Bonaire, an oversight
that proved to be the last straw. Fed up,
EMI released ‘You Could Be More As You
Are’, but pulled the plug on all further
promotional support for Saâda Bonaire.
The group disappeared soon after. ‘Saâda Bonaire’ gathers up pretty much
everything the group recorded. Surprisingly,
there is little here that isn’t fairly wonderful.
Only the interminable dirge of ‘Joanna’
disappoints. ‘Little Sister’ is as bouncy as a
Cocker Spaniel puppy – all breathy chirrups
and memorable hooks – and sounds like
Bananarama if they’d been fronted by The
Slits. ‘Invitation’ evokes early Madonna and
the Pet Shop Boys, while ‘More Women’,
‘I Am So Curious’ and ‘The Facts’ bring to
mind not only Saâda Bonaire’s compatriots
Propaganda but also the Grace Jones of
‘Warm Leatherette’ vintage. Elsewhere,
the eerie, icy synths and organic lolloping
of ‘Give Me A Call’ and ‘Wake Up City’
prefigure both 808 State and Ultramarine.
This is a remarkable record, but a
sad one too. Were it not for record
company incompetence, Saâda Bonaire
really could have been huge.
PAUL CONNOLLY
What is also here, and will be doubtless
be welcomed by the keen Can follower,
is ‘Out Of Reach’. This is the album Can
recorded in 1978 without Holger Czukay,
who had been ejected through various
passive aggressive machinations behind
the scenes. It’s also the album that the
band haven’t talked about or re-released
until now. It was the floater in the pool,
the stinker, the album with what has been
described as ‘Can’s worst-ever recorded
piece’ on board, ‘Like Inobe God’. And it
does actually sound like a cabaret band on
CAN
Can Box Set
Spoon
Epic reissue of the entire Can back
catalogue is a must-have for every
well-heeled krautrock aficionado
It’s a bit of a shocker to realise that the first
CD re-releases of Can’s estimable back
catalogue came nearly 25 years ago, when
the afterglow of krautrock’s biggest name
had been kept warm through the 1980s
by the likes of The Fall’s Mark E Smith and
PiL’s John Lydon name-checking them in
interviews. They were remastered again for
the SACD releases in 2004 (with sleeve notes
from regular Electronic Sound contributor
David Stubbs, don’t you know) and now
they’ve getting the luxury vinyl reboot.
If you’re in the market for this rather
monstrous box set of vinyl (download voucher
included), then you probably already have
the re-releases, and the ‘Tago Mago’ 40th
anniversary issue, and the excellent ‘Lost
Tapes’, and Irmin Schmidt’s also splendid
recent retrospective. An investment of
£275 for this 17-piece vinyl set is quite the
wallet dump, but it will put the completist
in possession of one disc that I haven’t
actually been able to hear – a live concert
from Sussex University in 1975. The record
company aren’t sending any of the limited
edition of 1,500 linen-covered boxes to
lowlife reviewers, you see. And it’s not being
released digitally, for obvious reasons. a cruise ship off their knackers on a cocktail
of Mogadon and bootleg gin made with
anti-freeze which has induced a half-asleep
speaking-in-tongues session. It goes around
in ever-decreasing circles like a mental
health therapy session. It is, in its defence,
quite funny, but the band were imploding
and the input of half of Traffic (bassist Rosko
Gee and percussionist Reebop Kwaku
Baah) wasn’t really helping by this point.
The other famous howler is ‘The Pauper’s
Daughter And I’. It is terrible, an attempt
to weld disco and the guitars of African
highlife, but the overall lack of discipline or
just plain interest is the real problem. It’s an
enervated band you’re listening to, almost a
parody of their earlier greatness, particularly
in the nursery rhyme quoting, which only
serves to remind you how good the likes of
‘Mary Mary Quite Contrary’ from ‘Monster
Movie’ was. You know the old complaint
about reviews of live gigs, when someone
asks if the reviewer was at the same gig
as them? Well, ‘Out Of Reach’ begs the
question whether the musicians were actually
playing the same song as each other half
the time. It really is a fucking shambles. Still, there are 16 other discs to get your
ears around (plus five posters and a
20-page 12-inch booklet to look at while
you’re at it) and at least six of the albums
are just fantastic. From their 1968 debut
‘Monster Movie’ to 1974’s ‘Soon Over
Babaluma’, and not forgetting ‘Delay’, a
1981 archive release of early material,
Can’s ever-shifting take on rock culture and
their sideways forays into pop and world
music have always been fascinating, even
when they accidentally became horrible.
MARK ROLAND
ALBUM REVIEWS
up the bpms. Predictably, Ninja Tune are
at the forefront of what’s still perhaps too
early to be calling the drum ‘n’ bass revival.
However, while their recent Congo Natty
release had an undeniable glucose-tinged
energy rush, repeated listens proved it
be stale and derivative, even for those
able to accept at face value the whole
quasi-mystical dub guru schtick from the
artist formerly known as Rebel MC. Happily, ‘Alternative/Ending’ is a different
proposition entirely. Drawing on his
background in the latter-day NYC hip hop
LEE BANNON
Alternative/Ending
Ninja Tune A joyous and triumphant recalling
of the glory days of drum ‘n’ bass
With dubstep having gone overground and
Skrillex seemingly on a one man bro-step
mission to strip dance music of its groove
and soul, there’s something inevitable
about producers looking to differentiate
themselves by thinking about speeding
Pic: Josh Wehle
scene, Lee Bannon has sampled a load
of bespoke basslines from ex-Mars Volta
bassist Juan Alderete and dusted down a
truckload of vintage Amen breaks. It’s a
bold move. The history of drum ‘n’ bass is
littered with the corpses of failed albums
from incredibly talented producers who
nevertheless couldn’t muster the focus,
vision and discipline to paint across the
broader canvas of a long-player.
So while the opening salvos, ‘Resorectah’
and ‘NW/WB’, dive straight in at the deep
end, all twitchy, itchy undulating grooves,
it’s when he slows things down to an
almost dubstep pace for a mellifluous midsection that Bannon makes clear he has no
intention of following many of his illustrious
predecessors into the bargain bins. The likes
of ‘Phoebe Cates’ and ‘Perfect/Division’
venture deep into inner space, splicing
Burial-style memory fragments with ‘Blade
Runner’ dystopia, like a pitched-up version
of Ben UFO or Pearson Sound. Then, just to
prove that the whole thing hasn’t deteriorated
into an exercise in navel gazing, ‘Value 10’
serves up a slice of old skool jungle, cranking
up the gears into a triumphant final hurrah.
At its very best, ‘Alternative/Ending’ is a
return to the vision, reach and bombast
of prime era Metalheadz, but done in a
way that doesn’t sound in the slightest
bit jaded or retro, and with the chops
to know the difference between a killer
club tune and an engrossing, immersive
album. Quite an achievement.
TOM VIOLENCE
the beefiest track here, the one you’d use
to test out the 50-inch woofers all along
the back of your boom car. But while it’s
an undoubted highlight – perhaps the
highlight – it by no means tells the whole
story of what is a tremendous collection,
one that uses electro as a reference point,
but fires it off in a multitude of directions.
The jitterbug approach of Kero, for
example, which is electro given a glitch
overcoat, and like Sky Tucker’s IDM-esque
‘Notewithstanding’, the sort of thing you
used to find knocking around on Warp in
VARIOUS ARTISTS
Present Tense
Touchin’ Bass
A superlative collection from
Andrea ‘No One Darker’
Parker’s Touchin’ Bass label
As Andrea Parker marinades gently in
critical and peer respect, a Discogs user
wonders aloud why she’s never followed
up her debut artist album, ‘Kiss My Arp’,
which appeared on Mo’ Wax in 1999
and still sounds as fresh as a daisy
today. I know this. I just listened to it.
I followed that with a spin of Parker’s 2001
mini album, ‘The Dark Ages’, on which her
vision was changing, moving further away
from downtempo, hip hop-oriented tropes,
and towards an electro sound that was
heavy of bottom and black of soul. ‘The
Swamp’, in particular, managed to fuse
Drexciyan sensibilities to a wobble-bottomed
bassline that prefigured the arrival of dubstep
by a good couple of years. Shortly after
that, Parker set up the Touchin’ Bass label,
where she has reigned ever since, no doubt
basking in a well-earned reputation as the
go-to girl when it comes to fat, dancefloor
electro and knocking out sets and releases
to prove it. No, there never was a proper
follow-up to ‘Kiss My Arp’ but, still, there’s
been plenty to enjoy in the meantime.
Parker’s contribution to this Touchin’ Bass
label compilation is by some distance
1996, only more… modern. In fact, what
goes through this compilation is a sense
of technology catching up with electro’s
erstwhile longings. The way Clatterbox’s
‘Transformer’ is all 808 stylings and steamy
1980s New York streets, but buffed up
for the shiny headphone goodness, or
how the obscene amounts of bass utilised
on Adapta’s fantastically growling ‘Low
Rise’ feels almost decadently now.
In a neat piece of sequencing, ‘Present Tense’
holds back its more challenging entries for a
second half that buzzes with life. Uexkull is
Dave Conner, who formed Bitstream with his
brother Steve (the aforementioned Adapta),
and here he uses the kind of sounds you’d
be more likely to find in a horror film about
a killer puppet to truly disorientating effect.
Sonarbase’s ‘Last Transit’, meanwhile, is
as Drexciyan as it gets without actually
featuring a Lardossen Cruiser – further
emphasising a sense that there’s something
here for electrofreaks of every stripe.
In short, as both a main course in itself
and a brilliant appetite whetter for what
you fervently hope are more treasures to
come, ‘Present Tense’ is nigh on perfect.
ANDREW HOLMES
ALBUM REVIEWS
major label fuckwittery galore), he’s has
managed to turn in one heck of a lot of
very fine music over the last four decades.
‘Kube’, Haig’s first long-player since 2009’s
pop-fuelled ‘Relive’, is a delightful joining of
musical dots that pick their way through his
back catalogue. So while it is electronically
driven, we duck and dive from pop (the
excellent Pet Shop Boys-y hooks of ‘All Of
The Time’, the extraordinary Bowie-esque
vocal and thrilling bounce of ‘Daemon’)
to dancefloor (the almost deep housey ‘It’s
In’ and the infectious groove of ‘Four Dark
PAUL HAIG
Kube
Rhythm Of Life
Quality electronica and cinematic
pop from the former Josef K man
The first thing that strikes you about this,
Paul Haig’s 12th solo outing, is that it is
quite probably the sound of the inside of
his head. Take ‘Cool Pig’. With its beats
and breaks, pop hooks, avant garde jazz
licks, power chords, rolling bass and
hands-in-the-air breakdowns, it’s like a
sampler for the whole 14-track shebang.
You see, Paul Haig is a man with an awful
lot of stuff running around his skull. A long
while ago, he was in a band who, in the
grand scheme of things, didn’t last long
(five singles and an album) and imploded
in a stylish whirl of bad feeling and big
rows in 1981. But while that band’s
influence seems to grow as the years tick
along, Haig isn’t one to hark back – and
his career since he was the frontman
with Josef K is an extraordinary one.
His is a tale of croonery and imaginary film
soundtracks, of funk and pop and electronic
beats, with a fair share of heart-jumping
collaborations (Bernard Sumner, ACR, the
Cabs, Mantronik, Lil’ Louis, Billy MacKenzie,
Alan Rankin, Justin Robertson) along the
way. And while there’s little doubt he would
have been a contender had he not been
blighted by a whole hog of bad luck (hello
Traps’, which could be twice as long and
you’d still not tire of it) to the experimentally
cinematic (the widescreen crackles and
pips of ‘Midnattssol’, the detuned chatter
of ‘Dialog’). I’d wager that ‘Dialog’ is the
sound of Haig’s noggin at night, poor sod.
That Paul Haig has managed to unload so
much of what is in his head onto one record
is a joy. When a band like, say, Radiohead
does stuff like this, the world swoons. When
Paul Haig does it, there really should be
more swooning. Much more. But he knows
that. It’s what makes him such a treat.
NEIL MASON
for music with horror movie production
values. With ‘Akkord’, ‘Torr Vale’ opens
proceedings and at first sounds not unlike
John Carpenter’s score for ‘The Fog’, before
the deepest of deep bass booms introduces a
section of decayed jungle played at 33rpm.
It leads into ‘Stone Circle’, where the drums
take on a more hypnotic tone and a distant
chanting adds a tribal atmosphere. Here
seems the right place to wonder aloud
whether African Head Charge have ever
been given their due. Like the best of the
Head Charge, ‘Akkord’ sounds as though
AKKORD
Akkord
Houndstooth
Narcotic jungle mixed with
dungeon dub and techno.
Be afraid. Be very afraid
What a year it’s been for lovers of the
black stuff. The dark, seething electronica
that crept across 2013 like a slowly
unfurling mist, bringing with it a sense
of dread and isolation, has its roots
partly in dubstep and partly in the deep
techno pioneered by Basic Channel many
moons ago. Think Dadub, These Hidden
Hands, Senking and Blackest Ever Black
– each one as crepuscular, oppressive,
sometimes outright crushing as the next.
Akkord’s debut album sits with the best
of them. A collaboration between noted
Mancunian bass producers Synkro and
Indigo, it comes on Houndstooth, a
label A&R-ed by the tireless Rob Booth,
whose Electronic Explorations podcasts
have long been essential listening.
As a pair of ears, Booth is as open as they
come, and Houndstooth releases have
been notable for their deft mix of styles.
Nothing too major, you understand. We’re
still talking about a fairly limited spectrum
– and so far they’ve tended to come clad
in black – but there’s a distinct sense of
not quite knowing what’s going to happen
next, which is something of an advantage
it’s been recorded in a smoky basement with
damp seeping through the walls. Imagine
those kind of atmospherics and, yes, some of
that urban dread conjured by Burial, and you
pretty much have the flavour of this album. At
its halfway point, on ‘Conveyor’, dub meets
slowed-down jungle meets techno and the
effect is exhilarating in it own ominous way.
That Akkord’s music really, really benefits
from being played loud on a decent sound
system, is partly a recommendation, partly a
warning, because the fact is you won’t get
the best out of it unless your bass response
is set to optimum. Sort that out, though, and
this is sonic shadow dancing at its very best.
ANDREW HOLMES
ALBUM REVIEWS
Parker. For Schnitzler, noise was never
an aberration, but a natural condition. A co-founder of the Zodiak Free Arts Lab
in Berlin in the late 1960s, and an original
member of both Tangerine Dream and
Kluster before going solo, Schnitzler had
little truck with the bucolic, tranquil leanings
of the hippy movement. He had always
refused “proper” musical tuition, instead
embracing electronics – first modified
conventional instruments, later synthesisers
– to strafe listeners with bracing barrages
of experimental noise, leaving no respite
or hiding place. However, in his work from
the mid-70s onwards, the compulsively
creative Schnitzler began to move towards
what can retrospectively be regarded as
an uncanny prototype for 80s synthpop
and the network of electronic rhythms
which underpins much of modern music
and which we take for granted today. CONRAD
SCHNITZLER
Silber
Gold
Bureau B
Two precious albums of electronic
connections between the avant
garde and the electro pop to come
Conrad Schnitzler was among a handful
of the krautrock generation, including
also Irmin Schmidt and Hans-Joachim
Roedelius, to have childhood memories
of the Second World War. His formative
years were spent amid the trauma, noise
and brutal chaos of bombing campaigns.
When peace came, he was subject to
more cacophony, taking a series of
factory jobs. His first serious musical
love was for new musical extremists like
Stockhausen, John Cage and Charlie
‘Silber’ and ‘Gold’ are part of an occasional
series of colour-coded Schnitzler releases.
There’s also ‘Rot’ (Red) ‘Grün’ (Green) and
‘Blau’ (Blue). ‘Silber’, first released in 2009
on vinyl, is a collection of recordings from his
archives made in the years 1974 and 1975,
around the time that Kraftwerk’s ‘Autobahn’
was impacting on the world. Divided up into
‘Titels’, ‘Silber’ lacks the precise beauty of
‘Autobahn’ – Schnitzler is neither pretty nor
picturesque to listen to – but it is a formidable
work. It’s a lab experiment in the ongoing
process of creating a connection between
the atonality of avant garde electronic music
and a burgeoning new pop yet to come.
Stuttering sequencer emissions, ominous
metallic clanks, and spiralling flourishes a
la Kraftwerk’s ‘Hall Of Mirrors’ abound,
all bouncing around and off a long, thin
wire of continuity. Suddenly, there’s what
sounds like a chorus of gremlins – this is a
music that assails you from every side.
‘Gold’ was recorded between 1976 and
1978, though only released officially in
2003. Again, it’s an episodic series of
untitled tracks. Here, however, the alchemy
begun on ‘Silber’ is further advanced. As the
title implies, it’s more colourised, upgraded.
Bubbles surface from liquid nitrogen pools
of electronics and cascading chimes are
buffeted by brutal, atonal winds – but like
fish slithering out of the water in an early,
evolutionary stage, there are outbursts of
regular, almost Depeche Mode-ish rhythm, or
off-kilter cubes of DAF-style synth. Although
this music has its identifiable place in the
timeline of electronic music’s development,
it still presents the same challenges today
as it would have done to the audience
deemed unready for it in its own time.
DAVID STUBBS
‘Throwback’, an Apani B sample adds
sass to smooth house, yet the cheeriness
is brought down by some nicely scuffed
synths. None of this is criticism: it all works
well. On a couple of occasions, the vocals
dominate. The ridiculous ‘Murder’ brings
gothic opera into the mix, sirens and
breakbeat interludes adding novelty to the
dour stomp. ‘Chillinger Track’ meanwhile
seems unfinished and the use of German
rapper Jean Bordello seems like a diversion.
Take out the eccentricities and ‘Self Therapy’
is an album of beauty and maturity. With
SCNTST
Self Therapy
Boysnoize
German techno wunderkind delivers
a debut of beauty and maturity
There’s a moment in Hannes Stöhr’s
2008 movie ‘Berlin Calling’ where Paul
Kalkbrenner throws a record deck through
a perfectly good coffee table. And I
don’t mean the Ikea type. We’re talking
second-hand furniture store. It’s not the
sort of thing a grown-up would do. Bet
he didn’t even have contents insurance.
With age comes sensible shoes and
mortgages and school runs and hedge
clippers. So I was expecting the debut album
from teenaged Bryan ‘SCNTST’ Muller, who
cites ‘Berlin Calling’ as an influence, to be a
brash, Rustie-style clash of experimentalism
and swagger, full of the vigours of youth, the
musical version of coffee table smashing with
an added progressive techno vibe. But what
we have with ‘Self Therapy’ is, as the title
hints, an introspective dancefloor album. It
wears its influences lightly (Tresor here, Warp
there) and, while never far from all-out club
mayhem such as on the buzzing industrial
delays of ‘Park By Night’, this debut longplayer furrows a decidedly downbeat path.
‘Percee Scan’ throws hip hop excerpts at a
belting Kraftwerkian synth line, but there’s
no getting away from it sounding like a
photocopier having a mid-life crisis. On
‘Velour’, fat waves of neon IDM tingle the
spine, while the stop-start club house of
‘Mintra’ draws you deep into its layers.
The simple melodies throughout let the
simplest of ideas develop and maintain
the listener’s interest, such as the Plaidstyle steel drum theme of ‘Loqui’, or the
playful synth spikes of ‘Kid Adventure’, or
the four-note refrain of ‘Waves Change’,
its chugging steam engine ambience
perfectly matching a tidied-up J Dilla beat.
It’s SCNTST’s blistering control of the
most basic of ideas that makes this album
rise above a four-four techno album. No
furniture smashing here: just a stupendously
listenable debut of driving, engrossing
music. I bet this lad’s living room is dead
tidy, with a magazine rack and everything.
JOHNNY MOBIUS
ALBUM REVIEWS
closer to St Etienne’s Sarah Cracknell.
NORTHERN KIND
Credible Sexy Unit
Northern Kind
The latest from the Midlands
synthpop duo epitomises their
independent approach and ideals
Northern Kind, who first emerged in 2007,
are a fine example of how artists can flourish
by writing, recording and releasing their
own work while cultivating a healthy fanbase
within a particular genre. Three albums into
their career, the duo of singer Sarah Heeley
and instrumentalist Matt Culpin are already
well regarded by more savvy electronic
music fans, but are clearly seeking to build
a wider audience with a long-player that
is both technically and artistically more
adventurous than their previous releases.
While it is true that they wear their influences
on their sleeve – Yazoo, The Assembly,
The Human League and early Eurythmics
are obvious touchstones – they are bright
enough to use them in their own way. Of
course, if you are going to be influenced,
be influenced by the best. In the pureness
of their vision, they recall a rich period in
synthpop history from 1981 to 1983, but
without simply recreating it. And sonically,
‘Sexy Credible Unit’ does at times update
Yazoo’s ‘You And Me Both’, Vince Clarke’s
short-lived The Assembly project, and
Erasure’s ‘Wonderland’. Sarah Heeley’s
vocals aren’t the bluesy growl of Alison
Moyet, though. They’re actually much
Matt Culpin obviously enjoys the primitive
tick and tock of analogue-sounding drum
machines, horizontal arpeggiator runs,
and fizzy old-school synth timbres, but has
painted them in far more vivid colours. That
most of these ancient machines are now
uncanny software programmes may go some
way to explain the dexterity and clarity of the
production work here, which is meticulous.
Another refreshing aspect is that Northern
Kind’s lyrics tend to eschew the regular
boy-meets-girl fodder of electronic pop,
opting instead for a mixture of wry social
commentary on tracks like ‘Free Prescriptions’
and, on ‘Heat’, a call for people to make
more of themselves. With ‘Life’ Heeley insists,
“There’s so much to hear / So much to learn
/ I just can’t get enough”, with perhaps
the faintest of winks on that last line.
Whether ‘Sexy Credible Unit’ has the
crossover potential to widen the band’s
considerable following beyond fans
of electronic music is in the hands of
the audience. But even without more
mainstream recognition, Northern Kind
continue to go from strength to strength.
Certainly, radio programmers and other
industry cognoscenti tired of conventional
manufactured pop could do a lot worse
than embrace their independent spirit.
BILL BRUCE
Radiance’, and introduced the idiosyncratic
talent of Laraaji to the world stage.
Laraaji’s music is transfixing, hypnotic
and primal. He didn’t finish his music
degree, leaving university when he felt
he had learned enough, and you have to
assume that a certain amount of that formal
training informs the improvised pieces on
this double CD set. He certainly squeezes
an impressive amount of variation out of
one instrument. But Laraaji is on a lifelong
spiritual quest, and music is for him a way
of capturing fleeting glimpses of paradise.
LARAAJI
Celestial Music 1978 – 2011
All Saints
A tasty retrospective that includes
some of the earliest cassette works
by the world’s top zither hippy
One day in 1979, Edward Larry Gordon
was busking in Washington Square Park in
New York City. His usual modus operandi
would be sitting cross-legged on blanket,
with his eyes closed, playing an open-tuned
zither through a small amplifier. A couple
of effects pedals fleshed out the sound
and gave his playing a spacey, trancelike feel, often causing the strolling New
Yorkers and tourists to stop and immerse
themselves in this otherworldly atmosphere
for a while. Some of them would buy one
of the homemade cassettes he sold.
At night, Gordon might sleep on a subway
train, or at the YMCA, or sometimes at
his mother’s house. He was an itinerant
refugee from the hippy era on a spiritual and
aesthetic journey, not exactly homeless, but
not far off. After a busking session on this
particular day in ’79, he opened his eyes
to find a handwritten note on his blanket:
“Dear Sir, please excuse this scraggly piece
of paper, but I’m wondering if you would
consider participating in a recording project
I’m launching”. It was signed “Brian Eno”
and there was phone number. The resulting
collaboration became the third of Eno’s
‘Ambient’ series, ‘Ambient 3: Days Of
He had a Philip K Dick-scale, erm, let’s
call it “experience” in the 1980s, when he
suddenly heard the music of the spheres as
he puts it, some kind of ineffable perfection
achieved or communicated to him through
sound, using drones, and it seems a lot of
his music is an attempt to recapture that.
Certainly the layering ringing of the zither
has an consciousness-altering quality to
it. As the hypnotic and delicate melodic
rhythms build, somehow driving yet ambient,
especially on the set’s opener, ‘Lotus
Pic: Liam Ricketts
Collage’, you can just imagine why Eno
stopped in his tracks and felt the urge to
get it down on tape. Mind you, the prolific
outsider artist part of Laraaji, the one
who duped up four cassettes a day to sell
from a blanket in the late 1970s, until he
discovered you could get a hundred done
in one go by a duplication service, is never
far from the surface. He did, after all, call
one of his albums ‘Unicorns In Paradise’. Its
title track is here, and it ends with Laraaji
giving some solemn praise to the “infinite
creator” in a two-minute prayer. This is a
pretty good window into Laraaji’s motivation,
though. He wants be engaged with the
flow of life and he’s not an egotistical,
money-motivated kind of a guy. He runs
very good value ($20, kids $5) laughter
workshops in New York, for example.
‘Celestial Music’ is life-affirming and
beautiful music. It’s utterly unique and
especially valuable in its gathering
together of Laraaji’s early cassette releases.
Well worth your time and money.
MARK ROLAND
ALBUM REVIEWS
‘Eleanor’s Elegy’, you’d expect something
sombre and mournful, but you’re greeted
with an altogether more volatile emotion
– longing. The yearning, echoed calls of
“I believe in love” bring to mind a person
deeply missing another, so much so that
they’re willing to brave the unsafe island in
search of them, whether they’re there or not.
As with all scary places, there are moments
of relief, points where light creeps in through
the trees. They’re few, far between and not
all that luminous anyway, but the funk-bass
groove of ‘Semper Viktrix’, mixed with the
CANOLA
TENDERFOOT
Hy-Brasil
Slime Recordings
Electronic exotica with a hint of
menace lurking in the shadows
Gorillaz’s ‘Plastic Beach’ album opened with
the laid-back but slightly wacky ‘Welcome To
The World Of The Plastic Beach’, letting us
know what we were in for with that record:
a star-studded seafaring saga, complete
with blue skies and fluffy cartoon clouds.
‘Hy-Brasil’, the second long-player from
Bristol duo Canola Tenderfoot, opens with
‘Setting Sail For Hy-Brasil’, which is similarly
nautical and serves the same purpose as
‘Welcome...’. It’s a precursor of sorts. The
cotton-candy clouds are nowhere to be
seen, though. Instead, the sky is brewing up
a storm and the seas are getting choppy.
‘Hy-Brasil’ is a dark island, humming with
dense thickets of sound, urging you to
take another step deeper into forest.
A heavy, foreboding atmosphere looms over
several of these tracks, a tangible feeling
of something hiding around the corner.
The intricate refractions of crushed synths
on ‘I’m Not Sinking’ wouldn’t elicit that
reaction by themselves, but pulsing bass
notes, repeatedly revving up and up, hover
imposingly like the Smoke Monster from
‘Lost’, waiting to block out light and sound
near the end of the song. With a title like
almost cheesy keyboard whistles, will make
you smile. It’s like the bit in an adventure
movie where the hero hops on a mine-craft
and happily careens through a rickety tunnel.
It builds confidence, lets you know the island
can be conquered. The bubbling drums and
sparkling synth flutters of ‘Fade’ create a
misty river in your mind. It looks calm, and
for the most part it is, the haunting vocals
hinting that there’s something special, maybe
even magical, about where you stand.
Beyond the edge of the darkness, there
must be some respite, right? With ‘HyBrasil’, there is a resolution, but it’s not an
escape. It’s acceptance. ‘No Parasan!’ sees
you making peace with the island, with
all its madness intact. There’s no sense of
foreboding and no monster in the shadows,
but it’s still just as exotic and trippy. The
electronic wilderness washes over you,
a lively tangle of bleeps and bass notes
merging you and ‘Hy-Brasil’ together, and
there’s no place you’d rather be than there.
SAM SMITH
lacks the addictive qualities of ‘You Burn’.
The further you go into ‘Chiaroscuro’, the
less impressive it all seems. ‘Ascension’
is frustrating because it goes nowhere.
‘Medicine Brush’ has a destination, but it’s
a place we’ve been before. Ladies and
gentlemen, welcome to Röyksopp Central.
Listen to the vocal chopping in the opening
of ‘Berceuse’ and then listen to the vocal
chopping of The Field’s ‘No No...’ and
things seem oddly familiar... again. ‘Denial’
is semi-skimmed Saint Etienne without the
panache and thrusts 80s-style tom-toms
I BREAK HORSES
Chiaroscuro
Bella Union
A disappointing second
album from the Swedish
electro pop soundscapers
In this age of ever accelerating newness,
the fact that this is I Break Horses’ second
album almost marks Maria Lindén and
Fredrik Balck down as journeymen within
their field. I must confess that their first
album, ‘Hearts’, largely past me by, but it
was regarded as promising, which means
we’re now expectant. They’re currently
bouncing around on tour with Sigur Rós,
so you have to assume that the Icelandic
creators of “music to watch emotional
DIY restorations by” think good things
in order to have invited them along.
Roughly translated, ‘Chiaroscuro’ means
‘Tricky Second Album’. As I write, I’ve just
pressed repeat on the opener, ‘You Burn’, for
the 23rd time. It’s effortlessly fragile, ghosts
of sadness tugging at the outer edges of its
airless corridors, cosseted by the past but
careful to ensure the new hallmark shines
most brightly. I’d almost buy the album just to
have this in my collection. The second track,
however, is where things start to go askew.
Bizarrely, ‘Faith’ kicks off like a speeded up
version of the intro to ‘Black Sea’ by fellow
countryman The Field, before heading into
Fischerspooner territory. It’s listenable, but
it doesn’t sound altogether original and
onto the listener. The problem with doing a
knowing nod to the 80s is that Barry down
the road who owns a Yamaha Portatone
also writes 80s inspired music. In other
words, it can be shit in the wrong hands.
And then, right at the very end, after
‘Disclosure’ (meh) and ‘Weigh True
Words’ (gah), there’s ‘Heart to Know’.
And you know what? Yes! It’s great!!
With exclamation marks to prove it! But
it’s such a shame that the eight thoroughly
beguiling minutes of gently shifting
melancholia merely serve to highlight the
lack of ingenuity that runs before it.
Going back to ‘You Burn’, it’s clear that the
opening track is the album’s centrepiece
– and that really is quite odd. Sure, you need
a strong beginning, but if you want people
to pay for an album, there needs to be
something more to back it up. Unfortunately,
there isn’t. ‘Chiaroscuro’ opens beautifully
and finishes with a gloriously dark, artistic
flourish, but there’s little in between.
Perhaps I Break Horses need blinkers. With
more focus might come greater clarity.
VADER EVADER
ALBUM REVIEWS
GENTLEMAN’S
DUB CLUB
Fourty Four
Ranking
Long-awaited debut album
from the live champions of
bass, beats and brass
Inspired by their home town peers Iration
Steppas and the Steppas’ legendary SubDub
nights, Leeds nine-piece Gentleman’s Dub
Club formed back in 2006. The band
are torch carriers of 2-Tone ska, dub and
reggae, but they bring their sound right up
to the present day with flavours of dubstep,
grime, house and techno. They’ve been busy
creating legendary party vibes all over the
world, supporting the likes of The Wailers,
Roots Manuva and The Streets on tour, as
well as packing a hefty punch at festivals
such as Glastonbury and Outlook in Croatia
(the latter run by GDC frontman Johnny
Scratchley). Championed by Don Letts and
Rob Da Bank, the only thing they’ve been
missing is an album. Well, finally, that’s here. the band’s multi-dimensional approach.
‘London Sunshine’ is stripped down in
places, and is thoughtful and reflective,
with an uplifting chorus that seems to burst
out from behind the clouds. GDC can go
smooth, as evidenced by the deliciously
melodic ‘Slave’, and ‘More Than Words’ is
reminiscent of lovers rock, but with sub bass.
On first glance, with their black and
white attire, including ties, braces and the
occasional trilby, you might be expecting a
straight-up 2-Tone band. But while there are
certainly some Specials-esque comparisons
to be made, not least in the ska banger ‘Too
Little Too Late’ (a reference surely to The
Specials’ live anthem ‘Too Much Too Young’),
this record isn’t just a slavish attempt at a ska
or reggae revival. ‘Fourty Four’ has a digital,
modern dance music sound. Hardcore fans
of old school genres will find it hard to resist
the infectious grooves and warm, woozy
brass arrangements, whereas the dubstep
and grime generations are sure to feel that
they’ve struck gold with this new discovery.
The standout track is ‘Forward’, which is
empowering in its message – “Don’t look
back, look forward / If there’s something
in your way just ignore it” – and has
Scratchley, a force to be reckoned with,
urging you to “jump higher” as things hurtle
to a massive ending. Refreshingly, and
appropriately given reggae’s conscious
roots, ‘Riot’ offers something of a social
and political commentary: “Watching the
world disappear from our rooftop / Things
will never be the same again”. The album
finishes with two live tracks which do a
half-decent job of capturing the energy that
is integral to what GDC are all about. The album’s heavy opener, ‘Give It Away’,
is full of electro dub explosions and
irresistible melodies. Rich, laid-back horns
contrast nicely with the electronic synths.
‘Feels Like’ has a softer vocal and a reggae
groove, but the pounding house beat which
emerges towards the end reveals more of
‘Fourty Four’ is a sub bass and ska
extravaganza. Get involved, bass lovers of
the world, this one’s for you. Gentleman’s
Dub Club have arrived for your pleasure.
VIK SHIRLEY
THANKS
FOR
READING
ELECTRONIC
SOUND
We’ve had a blast and we hope that you
have too. Our next issue will be out faster
than you can say Deutsch Amerikanische
Freundschaft. If you’ve agreed to receive
notifications from us, we’ll let you know
when it’s ready for you to download. You
can check and change your notifications
under Apps in Settings on your iPad.
THE VERY BEST
IN ELECTRONIC MUSIC
AVAILABLE ON ALL
SMARTPHONES & TABLETS
DOWNLOAD THE
ELECTRONICSOUND APP
FOR FREE AT
www.electronicsound.co.uk