I Satellite is the project of Kalamazoo’s Rod Macquarrie. It’s inspired by Numan, Foxx and Alphaville, but driven by the capabilities of his unique collection of vintage machines. This song was a firm favourite during I Satellite’s Nordic tour for the new cold war, earlier this year.
Rare Video of the Week
Maybe we’d forgotten how great it was when Lush, Pale Saints and Galaxie 500 were doing their thing, but the shoegaze spirit is strong with this one. Canadian expatriate, Jennie Vee, already impressed us with her debut solo EP, Die Alone, and from her New York base shows that there is more to come. Just don’t let a major label do to her sound what Virgin did to Frazier Chorus.
Dan Pachet used to host a late-night public access cable TV show called Alternative Rockstand. His own tastes were quite varied, but he knew when something was worth listening to outside of the musical mainstream. In this show, he featured footage of Skinny Puppy playing the Winnipeg Art Gallery in 1985. If that isn’t rare, we don’t know what is! The sound is better than the video, but hang on for a unique early interview by Pachet, which appears towards the end.
Secession were one of Scotland’s finest alternative acts. The video for their 1987 single, “The Magician,” had been missing in action, as it was never officially released, but it’s just been uploaded to Youtube by the video’s director. Where’s it been hiding? Why wasn’t it released? We don’t know, but any video mixing bicycle repairs with beans on toast might have been vaguely suspect in those days.
Hannah Peel is one of those artists who surprises with their ability to turn common materials into triggers for deep feelings. Air and paper, in this case, are vibrated and cut, and the result is a soul classic first reinvented by a couple of lads from art school in Leeds and then recast by Ms Peel with immeasurable beauty.
Way back in the early 1980s, a trend arose for smashing pieces of metal and organising the resulting sound into ambient urban soundscapes or dance tracks. Berlin’s Einstürzende Neubauten arguably kicked it off, but in short order the availability of new-fangled sampling technology had Fad Gadget (“Collapsing New People”), Depeche Mode (“People Are People”), SPK (“Metal Dance”) and others incorporating post-industrial metal-bashing into their tracks. One of the originals was London’s Test Dept, who reversed the trend by starting as a hammer-wielding group and moving into dance music. This was their first single, released by Some Bizarre to an unsuspecting public in 1983.
The Department haven’t released their own night serum yet, but a light application of their tester does more than firm and tone. On the evidence of this video, it gets under your skin with a foam of bubbling arpeggiators and some smooth bass, scented with just a hint of dominatrix.
The Anglo-Swedish group, composed of Rob Green and Magnus Lindström (Mr Jones Machine), have been around since 2013, but “As If Transformed” is their first commercial video for Hard Cell Records. Directed by Ed Robinson for OneRedEye, it uses the device of segmented characters, who are picked and mixed to humorous effect. Tearing up and reassembling the pages of Vogue could get you to a similar place, but then you’d miss out on the rotated mohawks and dance steps.
Musical inspirations: 80s sounds. Attitude: model’s own.
Malaria! was a girl band from Berlin, who reflected the unsettled post-punk mood of the walled city at the height of the Cold War but also found their way to Studio 54. They were the antithesis of the Spice Girls – naturally cool, comfortable in their own skins and capable of making an incredible racket. This track from 1983 and the accompanying super-8 film clips capture the band as a blueprint for future generations.