Vive la Fête are one of Belgium’s most exciting bands. Their live shows are blistering, high-energy affairs. This is a recording of their full performance at the 2015 Wave-Gotik-Treffen festival in Leipzig.
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Gary Gilmore murdered two men and was put before a Utah firing squad. His last words were a Christian blessing, but they are remembered in popular culture as “Let’s do this.” His corneas were donated for transplants, and this act inspired The Adverts’ classic punk hit, “Gary Gilmore’s Eyes.” TV Smith of The Adverts has now teamed up with Martin Bowes of Attrition for an updated re-telling of the tale.
Slovenian art-subversives, Laibach, have announced that they will play two dates in the capital of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea on August 19 and 20, 2015. We’ll believe it when it has happened, but in the meantime the group has revealed their poster for the shows (right).
The band, which has established a reputation for subverting propaganda imagery, is an unlikely choice for a performance on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Korean peninsula from Japanese militarism.
Here’s a clip from their Spectre tour:
Diskodiktator is best known for the contrarian anthem, “Just Say NO to Democracy,” but Johan Billing’s main project also churns out remixes and remakes of classic poptronica. Four years ago, Diskodiktator Electric Orchestra & Friends produced a remake of S.P.O.C.K’s Five Year Mission. Like Senor Coconut, the tracks were re-imagined in unexpected musical styles; in this case, with a pronounced jazz-lounge bent. Now, to mark the 20th anniversary of another S.P.O.C.K album, Alien Worlds, Diskodiktator Electric Orchestra is back with a new collection of remakes.
Alien Alien Worlds is more clearly electronic than the previous effort; more Shultze than Puente. Indeed, if Jarre or Schnitzler were to have created a S.P.O.C.K cover band, it might have sounded like this: ping-pong delays, sweeps and Theremin warbles stretching and distorting the feeling of the original tracks into a space-lounge format (coming soon to a cantina near you). As a former member of S.P.O.C.K, Billing has lived with these songs for a long time, and his approach suggests tension bred by familiarity. Does he love them? Does he resent them? Perhaps both, as the transformation is in places more experimental than attractive. This is no shrine to the original material; but, while being broadly faithful to it, the tracks here test its elasticity to a greater degree than on Five Year Mission.
What made the original S.P.O.C.K songs so enduring was composer Eddie Bengtsson’s instinctive feel for pop structures, which were OMD-class, even if the subjects were lifted from cult sci-fi. Slowed down and put into another mode, they can start to sound less iconic than ironic, but there are clever moments here: Billing is a talented programmer and performer, and on tracks like “Astro Girl” he provides a setting that is closer to R&B than classic poptronica. One test of a quality song is whether it can be performed in a different style: one day, someone is going to make a million dollars with a country and western cover of Yazoo’s “Only You.” The transposition works here, too.
Alien Alien Worlds is on iTunes.
Mike Howlett found himself producing many of the key records of the new wave period, but on paper was an unlikely choice: as the bass player in Gong, from 1973-77, he was most closely associated with prog rock. In the wake of punk, the street-cred of long-haired prog refugees had been devalued to almost nothing. Like fellow Gong guitarist, Steve Hillage, however, Howlett had both the technical proficiency and understanding of the new wave to make chart stars of new romantic upstarts. He also had connections at street level: in 1977, he started Strontium 90, the band that spawned The Police. While Sting and company went on to conquer the world, Howlett turned his hand to production, making some of the biggest tracks of the day.
Today, Howlett has an academic life, while also making music with his psychedelic space-funk band, House of Thandoy. Below, we’ve set out some of the milestones of an impressive career.
10. Gong – Sold to the Highest Buddha
Howlett started as a bass player with a band in Australia, which relocated to the UK in 1970. It didn’t achieve the success it hoped for; so, in 1973, Howlett joined Gong, which had been started by an Australian exile, Daevid Allen. The story he tells is that an ex-girlfriend had examined the astrological signs of the band’s members and determined that a Taurus (and bass player) was needed, so he got the call to join the group. Gong’s hippy lineage might have taken a reputational knock during the punk years, but there is a direct line between it and a lot of modern dance music.
9. Fast Breeder & The Radio Actors – Digital Love
A one-off project with Steve Hillage and Sting, Fast Breeder & The Radio Actors featured Howlett on bass. It isn’t amazing pop, but as a document of a moment when paths crossed and people thought about the consequences of nuclear energy, it is essential listening.
8. Martha & The Muffins – Echo Beach
Canadian art school students, Martha & The Muffins, found themselves in England in 1979, recording an album with Howlett for Virgin’s Dindisc off-shoot. The result was an international hit, “Echo Beach,” which involved more sax then sex but still managed to get near the top of the charts. Asked by Music News about the influence he had over the sound of that recording, Howlett said:
I did what a good producer should do – I helped the artists to realise a vision, sometimes in spite of themselves. For example, we had to re-record that song because the first recording the drummer wasn’t technically competent enough. But what I did was not to replace him, because what he played was important in its own way, so I trained him up – really. Then when we came to re-record it, the sax player had got some stick from his jazzy friends for the beautiful, melodic solo he had played on the first recording attempt, and tried to play a freakish Alber Ayler-style of atonal squawk, instead! It took me a lot of patience and persistence over several weeks to get the solo that ended up on the record. So I would say I had quite a lot of artistic influence there!
There were two Marthas in Martha & The Muffins. Martha Ladly, the one on keyboards in this video, became Peter Saville’s girlfriend, designed record covers for New Order and performed with The Associates before eventually returning to Canada to become a professor. She also appeared as a backing singer in videos for Roxy Music’s “Avalon,” despite not having performed on the recording, and toured Japan with Robert Palmer – but we will say nothing about these matters. Howlett produced “Finlandia,” one of the two solo singles that she released, but it doesn’t live on Youtube, so we offer only this M&M track for illustration.
7. Blancmange – Feel Me
Although their first UK tour was supporting Nash the Slash, Blancmange were closely associated with early Depeche Mode: appearing on the seminal Some Bizarre album alongside them, sharing the bill at live shows, and even holidaying with Vince Clarke and his then-girlfriend, Deb. The duo of Neil Arthur and Stephen Luscombe successfully combined the electronics of the futurists and the surrealistic drama of Sparks in an eclectic blend, which had mass appeal. Howlett piloted their debut album, Happy Families, into the charts, but their star faded in the coming years. Blancmange recently returned to recording, issuing two albums in short order, but they are best remembered for songs like this.
6. Gang of Four – I Love a Man in a Uniform
Gang of Four mixed Marvin Gaye and Louis Althusser in varying amounts, but were mainly known for having inspired Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers and having had this single banned by the BBC during the Falklands War. Howlett ran the controls for their third studio album, making the sound more complex while placing gunshots into the rhythm track.
5. The Comsat Angels – Independence Day
Named for a Ballard story, The Comsat Angels made a dent in the post-punk world with “Independence Day,” but three albums in found themselves adrift. The Jive label (home to A Flock of Seagulls and, later, Britney Spears) took them on, bringing in Howlett to attempt a relaunch. The effort was spearheaded by a re-recording of “Independence Day,” but the moment for chart success had passed.
4. John Foxx – Twilight’s Last Gleaming
Although most of John Foxx’s Golden Section album was produced by Zeus B. Held with Gareth Jones, Howlett is credited with the role on the closing track, “Twilight’s Last Gleaming.” One of the best tracks on a generally excellent record, “Twilight’s Last Gleaming” features whistling sounds that aren’t a million miles from Goldfrapp’s “Utopia,” along with choral-style backing, over a chugging beat programmed by Howlett on an MC-4.
3. A Flock of Seagulls – Space Age Love Song
A Flock of Seagulls became known more for singer Mike Score’s excessively 80s haircut than their music, but they won a “Best Rock Instrumental Performance” Grammy for the Howlett-produced track, “DNA,” from their debut album. “Space Age Love Song” is as close as they got to sounding like the Steve Hillage-produced Simple Minds, and the melody is quoted in more recent material by Marsheaux.
2. Indochine – Punishment Park
Indochine are enormous stars in France, Belgium, Switzerland – and Sweden. Although lesser known to Anglophone audiences, their credentials as pop stars on the continent (including its northern fringes) are well-established. In 1990, Howlett was tapped to produce “Punishment Park,” a single that features the actress Juliette Binoche on supporting vocals.
1. Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark – Messages
The version of “Messages” on Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark’s eponymous 1980 album was magnificent but not quite the stuff of jukebox glory. Dindisc hired Howlett to make a single of it, and his approach lifted the track from a slightly more contemplative song into a danceable number with eyes on Top of the Pops. Howlett took it out of the cathedral and pushed it out onto the dancefloor, scoring a Top 15 hit. The eye-catching Saville sleeve has become a design classic, as well.
The loss of Nash the Slash was a terrible blow to Canadian alternative music. Nash had been one of the first successful electronic artists, first with FM and then in a solo career that took him to the UK to work with Steve Hillage and tour with Gary Numan. He made music for films and comic books, driven by an interest in the horror genre, but the man inside the bandages wasn’t accorded the recognition he deserved before he passed away. This clip was recorded four years ago this week, at a show in Toronto, and shows his version of the Jan & Dean classic, “Dead Man’s Curve.”
Gareth Jones is best known for his work with Depeche Mode, having manned the studio for their so-called Berlin trilogy – Construction Time Again, Some Great Reward and Black Celebration. As the first DM records involving Alan Wilder, making use of emerging digital technology and using the legendary Hansa studios for mixing or recording, they are key to the evolution of the group’s sound, and Jones had a central role in their production. He dispatched the group into the side streets of London with a Sony Professional Walkman to record found sounds, turned Hansa into a multi-level experimental sound room, and ran tracks through tiny speakers to maximise their effectiveness for radio. Commercially and artistically, there was no looking back.
Jones’ connection with Mute Records began with a nudge from John Foxx. As an engineer working at London’s Pathway studios, Jones had been tapped by Foxx to work on his first solo album, Metamatic. The icy, stoic electronics of Metamatic were an English re-imagining of the technology-driven music then coming from Germany, informed by the dystopian fiction of J.G. Ballard. Himself a Ballard and Kraftwerk fan, Mute’s Daniel Miller had begun to make his own music as The Normal and Silicon Teens, as well as developing the Fad Gadget sound and encouraging other electronic artists. His discovery of a young group of musicians from Essex, who named themselves after a French fashion magazine that they weren’t entirely sure how to pronounce, had given Mute a chart-baiting hit band, but by the time of their third album he was looking for a way to raise their game. Foxx’s East London studio, The Garden, was an attractive proposition, and Jones was then working as a freelance engineer. Foxx suggested that Jones have a chat with the Mute team, and a short meeting led to a relationship that started with sampling trips to abandoned building sites and has held strong over three decades.
Jones has worked closely with a number of Mute artists, from Fad Gadget to Erasure and Nick Cave, but he also has a solid track record away from the Hammersmith-based label: Tuxedomoon, Indochine, Efterklang, Ideal and Madness have all had the benefit of his studio magic in the course of a career that began at the BBC in the 1970s.
In 2008, Jones had a near-miss with cancer, which he blogged about and used to inspire occasional “field recording” compositions, including “A Visit to the Oncologist”:
Jones continues to produce and mix, but is also found outside of the studio, providing time to encourage young artists and engineers, including through the Red Bull Academy lecture series. He is working on a book on “Spiritual Friendship” with his friend, Nick Hook. Below, we’ve collected some of the highlights from his career so far.
10. Nitzer Ebb – Let Your Body Learn
Nitzer Ebb showed up on the scene as obvious descendents of DAF and Portion Control, but it was when they were taken on by Mute that their sound acquired real finesse. While Phil Harding of PWL produced and mixed most of the record, Jones and Miller teamed up to remix “Let Your Body Learn” for NE’s first album, That Total Age.
9. Wire – Ahead
Paleontologists will look back at Wire’s time on Mute as a discrete period in their path from art-punk outsiders to indie rock godfathers. They made five albums for the label (six, if you include Wir), and Jones produced the first two, The Ideal Copy and A Bell Is a Cup…Until It Is Struck. This track, the first single to be lifted from The Ideal Copy, is an enduring classic.
8. Tuxedomoon – Music #2
Tuxedomoon is another band that called on Jones through connections with John Foxx. After a European tour, towards the end of 1980, the band was ready to record the Desire album in England. They found a studio in Surrey and Foxx pointed them in Jones’ direction as engineer and co-producer. They returned in 1982 to record a 12″ single, “Time to Lose,” which was backed with this simple, elegant track featuring Steven Brown on piano and Blaine L. Reininger on violin.
7. Fehlmann’s Ready Made – Ready Made
Thomas Fehlmann’s Ready Made project arrived at just the right time to make use of sampling technology. The former Palais Schaumburg performer went into the studio with Jones to make this track, which incorporated contributions from Art of Noise’s JJ Jeczalik and Neubauten’s FM Einheit, among others.
6. The House of Love – Safe
The choice of Miller and Jones to produce “Safe” wasn’t made by the suits at The House of Love’s record label. Having left Creation Records, the band was on the cusp of shoegaze greatness, and Fontana weren’t entirely pleased at the idea of Depeche Mode’s production team having a look-in. The track was used as the B-side of “Never,” but the band felt that the results deserved more appreciation – and they were right.
5. Erasure – Fill Us with Fire (Fired Up Mix)
Jones has carved out a niche for himself as a remix artist, taking assignments from acts like Erasure. This mix, prepared for a track from their 2011 album, Tomorrow’s World, is a high-energy example of his talents.
4. Einstürzende Neubauten – Yü-Gung (Fütter mein Ego)
Jones provided the technical link between the metal-bashing rhythms of Einstürzende Neubauten and emerging sampling technology, which led through design or inspiration to EN’s “Yü-Gung (Fütter mein Ego),” Depeche Mode’s “People Are People,” and Fad Gadget’s biggest commercial success, “Collapsing New People.”
3. Sunroof! – Various
The Sunroof! project is a studio collaboration between Jones and Daniel Miller, which has mainly produced covers of classic Krautrock tracks for tribute albums and remixes. Jones uploaded many of them to his Mixcloud account, so they can be enjoyed on demand.
Sunroof Mixes #1 by Geniusjones on Mixcloud
Sunroof Mixes #2 by Geniusjones on Mixcloud
2. Depeche Mode – But Not Tonight
The story plausibly goes that “But Not Tonight” was recorded quickly by Depeche Mode as the B-side to “Stripped.” Their US label, Sire, liked it better, and it found its way onto the soundtrack for the film, Modern Girls – a pure commercial play that annoyed the band and ensured Martin Gore’s abiding antipathy. It is, nevertheless, great 80s pop, and Gore recently performed the song to an ecstatic US audience.
1. John Foxx – A New Kind of Man
When he left Ulravox!, John Foxx had some ideas about how he wanted his first solo album to sound. The difficulty was that nothing had ever sounded like it before. Another was that the technology didn’t yet exist to create it. So, Foxx and Jones set out to craft the sound of Metamatic by hand, keying in the basslines in the space between delays and pushing an Elka string machine to the limit. Although “Underpass” seems to be the track that always makes it onto the retro compilations or is picked up for remixing, every song on the album was beamed from the future.
The House of Love chose Daniel Miller and Gareth Jones to go into the studio with them to record “Safe,” which caught their record company stiffs off-guard. The Miller-Jones team was best known for work with Depeche Mode, and the sound that they obtained from the session was excellent but not what the long-hairs were expecting from a HOL record. In its live incarnation, the song follows the studio pattern closely, but with Guy opening up the vocals at the end. Magic from a Channel 4 recording.
I Am Snow Angel first came to attention with the release of a self-titled, four-track EP at the beginning of 2014. The debut release for Julie Kathryn’s laid-back electronic project sleekly combined pulsing electronics with dreamy vocals. Comparisons between singers are always unfair, but on first hearing we were put in mind of Naomi Yang (Galaxie 500) and Brenley MacEachern (Zoebliss). “Not the Same” was a quirky track with roots in the Americana style which Kathryn has been known for, but “Let Me Go” and “Grey White December” showed an approach which was more European. Favourable reviews started to come in from the poptronica press: The Electricity Club said, “the music evokes images of icy landscapes and crystalline hydro basins.”
A full album followed in November. Crocodile developed the IASA sound further, warming up with more sophisticated rhythms and defrosting the synth sound to add a more organic feel to proceedings. Kathryn has explained that she is interested to explore the interaction between the instinctive and the intellectual, and the songs on Crocodile are playful and accessible.
The most recent release is an EP of remixes for “Walking on Wires,” a track from Crocodile, with Jared Jordan, G8 and Cold Youth at the controls. “You think I’m crazy,” sings Kathryn, but no, we don’t. We borrowed some time between solo IASA shows to ask Kathryn about the project.
Julie, your previous output (for example, 2013’s Black Trees album) has been based on more traditional pop-folk instrumentation. What inspired the move to a more electronic style for I Am Snow Angel?
It happened organically. I started playing around with engineering my own tracks, and the result was much more electronic than anything I had done in the past. It felt natural for me – really exciting actually – so I kept going with it. My musical tastes have shifted in that direction in general. For a while, I was mostly drawn to folk and Americana music. Now my tastes are more varied, and that’s coming through in the music I create.
Although your previous work has been described as “Americana Noir,” there is a more European feel to I Am Snow Angel. Are there particular influences on your songwriting that have moved you in that direction?
Yes I agree with this. My songwriting is still traditional, especially compared to other electronic artists. But I’ve definitely been inspired by producers and artists who blend both sensibilities – conventional songwriting with electronic production. Chet Faker, The Postal Service, Grimes and the xx are some that come to mind. I’ve also been listening to Brandon Flowers’ new solo album, which feels like synth-pop but has a slight Americana twang to it.
I Am Snow Angel performances appear to be solo affairs. Do you have any interest in expanding the line-up for stage shows?
Right now I’m working on making my solo set really strong. Once I start playing bigger venues, I’ll probably be adding to my lineup. Live drums and maybe bass.
Any chance of seeing you perform in Europe soon?
I hope so! Thanks for asking and I’ll keep you posted.
I Am Snow Angel home page: iamsnowangel.com.
I Am Snow Angel EP: Amazon.
Crocodile: Amazon.
Walking on Wires EP: Amazon.
When the RocknPop Museum in Gronau, Germany, incorporated Can’s studio into a working exhibit, they acquired a mixing desk made for the band by the legendary producer and engineer, Conny Plank. They also made an exhibit of part of Plank’s kitchen. Another mixing board might have provided the functionality of Conny’s Studio, but its heart was where the engineer gathered with musicians to talk about music and life. Its significance is clear in the story that Plank’s son, Stephan, told The Quietus about the recording of Die Kleinen und die Bosen, the first album on Mute Records:
[…] when they did the first D.A.F. album on MUTE [Editor: This was in 1980.] Daniel Miller made a deal with my father to record the album in four days. So my father spent the first day talking to Robert Görl and Gabi Delgado [of D.A.F.] discussing music. Daniel said, ‘Well, they’re going to record for the next three days.’ And the next day, they spent talking about music, eating good food and being very philosophical about it and didn’t record anything. Daniel was getting very nervous at that point. On the third day, when they were really supposed to start the album, they talked some more about music and went for a long walk and nothing was recorded. Now, Daniel was really afraid of losing his money. On the fourth day, in the morning, they had a really nice breakfast, went to the studio and recorded the album.
Plank’s appearance in photos is of a slightly unkempt, bearded and amiable man, often clad in a woolly jumper; perhaps a little like Michael Caine’s character in Children of Men. The former Stockhausen technician was famed for living and working in a cloud of smoke and taking his artists to unexpected places, sonically and otherwise. Brian Eno, who borrowed Plank’s sound for Bowie’s Berlin albums and worked with Plank on his first overtly ambient album, Music for Airports, has his own anecdote that he told to the art magazine, Frieze:
‘I recall one evening, after we’d been working all day, [Conny] said “Do you feel like a ride into the forest?”’ says Eno. ‘That seemed like a nice idea on a warm autumn evening, so we jumped into his lovely old Merc and set off. We were in the forest after about 20 minutes, sitting in the car in a sort of clearing, just birds and breeze around us. We sat talking for a few minutes. “Do you want to hear something on the radio?” he asked. I said “Why not” – though I thought it was a bit odd that he’d want to put the radio on in this bucolic place. He switched on the radio – and it suddenly broadcast the piece we’d been working on all day!’ ‘It turned out that Conny,’ Eno continues, ‘in another brilliant technological stroke, had rigged up a transmitter at the studio so that he could hear the day’s work in his car – he thought, and was right, that that gave a different perspective to the music. I was impressed, not only by the idea, but by the fact that he must have secretly synchronized watches with somebody at the studio so they started playback at exactly the right moment – That was very Conny!’
It was Plank’s unassuming but technically forward style that attracted a number of experimental artists to his studios outside of Cologne. He was at the center of the Krautrock universe, helping to shape the sound of Neu!, Can and Cluster, and the producer of choice for Ultravox, Killing Joke and Eurythmics. Moebius and Roedelius saw him as an unofficial member of Cluster, and he played and toured with the band. Not all of his artists were as willing to recognise his contributions: having pushed Kraftwerk in the direction of synthesizers and added the vital delay to “Autobahn” while the band were out of the studio, they in-sourced their production work and froze him out of future albums. Plank’s reputation was undiminished, and the story is told that Brian Eno suggested him as the producer of U2’s Joshua Tree album – an idea that Plank himself rejected with characteristic directness, simply saying, “I cannot work with that singer.”
Plank once explained his approach in these terms:
The job of the producer – beyond the technological aspect – is, as I understand it, to create an atmosphere that is completely free of fear and reservation, to find that utterly naïve moment of ‘innocence’ and to hit the button at just the right time to capture it. That’s it. Everything else can be learned and is mere craft.
Plank passed away in 1987, after the cloud of smoke that he lived in had caught up with him. Conny’s Studio continued to be run by his partner, Christa Fast, until her own passing in 2006. The kitchen is on display in Gronau.
10. Organisation – Tone Float
Before there was Kraftwerk, there was Organisation – or, if you prefer, Organisation zur Verwirklichung gemeinsamer Musikkonzepte. Ralf Hutter and Florian Schneider were the group’s core, and it was in this guise that they first worked with Plank. Like AMM in the UK, Organisation were influenced by the improvisational practices of jazz artists and the indeterminacy of experimental composers like La Monte Young. Under Plank’s guidance, they created an album, Tone Float, in 1970, that was loosely structured and by today’s standards sounds a little naïve. At Plank’s urging, RCA released it in the UK, where it failed to make much of an impression, but a ball had started to roll for Hutter and Schneider, who quickly refocussed their efforts on Kraftwerk.
9. Neu! – Hallogallo
Klaus Dinger had been recruited to play drums on Kraftwerk’s debut album. Michael Rother joined the band as guitarist after completion of the record. For a short time, Kraftwerk was the trio of Dinger, Rother and Florian Schneider, following the departure of Ralf Hutter. An attempt to record an album together failed, however, and Hutter rejoined Schneider while Dinger and Rother split off to start Neu! Both Neu! and Kraftwerk worked separately with Plank, creating uniquely influential recordings.
The first album from Neu! contained this track, which embodies the Motorik rhythm that became one of the most influential elements of Krautrock, as well as soaring guitar lines. The opening riff still echoes in the work of dance acts like System 7.
8. Cluster – Für die Katz’
Cluster was the project of Dieter Moebius and Hans-Joachim Roedelius. The pair enjoyed a close creative and personal bond with Plank, who was identified as a member of the group on their first album and provided them with material support. Plank is credited as a producer and composer on 1972’s Cluster II, from which this track is drawn. A cosmic swirl of noise and electronics, it is 2,000 light years from any recognisable song structure, but both anticipates industrial music and makes use of the studio as an instrument.
7. Brian Eno – 2/2
Roxy Music’s former keyboard player had already recorded much of Ambient 1 – Music for Airports in the UK before he arrived in Germany to work with Plank. Eno’s ambition was to write music for public spaces, which could be interrupted, wouldn’t interfere with conversations, and was sufficiently long that changes would not be jarring. He had already created several albums of ambient music, but this was the first time that he consciously applied the label to a release. With Plank, he recorded “2/2” using loops of tape that were wound around chairs and were layered together.
6. The Meteors – Together Too Long
The Meteors were one of the new wave of artists who made their way to Conny’s Studio, seeking a touch of his magic, following the success of his Krautrock projects. Plank is credited both as producer and as a composer for this track, taken from the Dutch band’s 1980 album, Hunger. Plank’s commercial successes enabled him to continue working on less financially viable projects, but the story goes that he kept his awards in the studio’s bathroom.
5. Rita Mitsouko – Marcia Baïla
One of the most popular French pop songs of the 1980s, “Marcia Baïla” was Rita Mitsouko’s tribute to their dancer, Marcia Moretto, who had died from breast cancer. The sound was shaped by Plank into a squelchy, synthetic hit.
4. Phew – Signal
Take Can’s Holger Czukay and Jaki Liebezeit, throw in a Japanese vocalist who sounds like an art-punk refugee, mix with Plank’s studio skills, and you get this rare release from 1981. It’s a great example of Plank’s experimental side, but it also owes something to the sound he was shaping for DAF at the time. Phew is musical Marmite, but it’s certain that he had moved past his early work for Marlene Dietrich or Duke Ellington.
3. Ultravox – Quiet Men
Ultravox recorded 1978’s Systems of Romance with Plank, lured by the prospect of working with Kraftwerk’s former producer. On “Quiet Men,” the Roland TR-77 rhythm box mimics the Motorik drum style of Neu!, while synthesizers play string and lead roles. John Foxx was impressed by Plank’s use of the studio as an instrument, including his creation of an analogue sampling system that allowed the mixing desk to be played like a polyphonic keyboard. Foxx later summed up Plank’s significance this way:
He’d ditched all the boundaries between engineer, producer, artist and equipment, and reinvented the whole environment into something human, organic and intelligent, rather than received or conventional. The best operators do this – George Martin to Lee Perry. Conny was equally important. He’d discovered and recorded an entirely new genre of music – allowed it to retain complete integrity and made it available to the world. Without him, most of that might have remained undiscovered – may have been disregarded, misconceived, or lost completely.
2. Kraftwerk – Autobahn
Autobahn was the album that took Kraftwerk global. It marks their transition from electro-acoustic experimentation to electronic pop music, and Plank’s influence can be heard by comparing demo recordings to the final studio versions. This was the last Kraftwerk album to incorporate flutes and violins, as their new EMS, Moog and ARP synthesizers became the key to their sound. Plank is credited with pushing the band in this direction, but it was the last recording they made with him.
1. DAF – Ich und die Wirklichkeit
Deutsch Amerikanische Freundschaft made three and a half albums with Plank: the studio side of Die Kleinen und die Bosen for Mute and Alles Ist Gut, Gold und Liebe and Für Immer for Virgin. The last three were released in a burst of creative energy over a short period, between the beginning of 1981 and the summer of 1982, after the duo of Gabi Delgado and Robert Görl had reduced the band to its minimalist core. With Görl’s tight drumming and concise synthesizer programming providing a framework for Delgado’s vocals – now menacing, now purring – the sound of DAF became taut and angular, while drawing rich emotions from simple waveforms.
“Ich und die Wirklichkeit” [EN: “Me and Reality”] is from 1981’s Alles Ist Gut album. The background sound, rumbling like a radio astronomer’s tape archive, gives the track a sense of space a million miles from the bombast of a Trevor Horn production, but the final bars lift the track into the stratosphere.