Way back in 2007, London-based duo, Komputer, released this track as part of an online-only EP release. A different version appeared on the Mute sampler, 14 Irregular Files. It’s the kind of Kraftwerk-inspired material that Komputer successfully took up after shedding their I Start Counting skin, and it’s as sleek as a black panther in the rain.
coldwarnightlife
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.
The lightning storm over Gothenburg this past weekend can only mean one thing: Electronic Summer is coming. One of Europe’s best-programmed festivals, ES turns a large venue in Sweden’s second city into a hive of ~tronica for three days, starting on August 28. This year, as an added bonus, Deb Mann will be taking part to share her memories of Depeche Mode’s first years. To help accompany the celestial light-show, we’ve put together some tracks from our favourites among this year’s featured artists.
COVENANT – “Prime Movers”
EMMON – “Smalltown Boy”
DAILY PLANET – “Nobody’s Friend”
CLIENT – “Refuge”
LEGEND – “City”
CANDIDE – “Änglar”
AESTHETIC PERFECTION – “Big Bad Wolf”
Filmed at a 1984 appearance in the Swedish town of Linköping, this rare clip shows Page performing their hit, “Dansande man” for an appreciative audience. A couple of Pro Ones take a prominent position in the set-up, and both Eddie Bengtsson and Marina Schiptjenko look as cool as could be.
UPDATE
Shortly after this post went up, new footage emerged from Denmark of an even-earlier incarnation of Page from 1983.
Edvard Graham Lewis has appeared in a variety of guises since his first days with Wire. As one half of Dome, he erected a tent inside a recording studio. As one-third of Duet Emmo, he voiced the most achingly beautiful single ever written. As four-quarters of He Said, Lewis reimagined pop as an intellectual pursuit. The list of fractions and factions takes us through P’o, 27#11, Halo, Hox, Ocsid – a fluid combination of characters, both musical and typographic, dissolving and reforming. The unifying thread is a shifting tension between the lyrical and experimental; music that sometimes approaches commercial pop but draws away just in time. You can’t always dance to it, but you’ll have fun trying.
Two albums have just been released under Lewis’ own name by Editions Mego, but that doesn’t make them any more straight-forward. All Under starts with a film score and installation piece of the same title: the former seemingly a series of intercepted radio signals, processed into a sequence of overlapping tonal waves; the latter a strikingly delicate and haunting drone set against more visceral electronics. Lewis acts as narrator on “The Eel Wheeled,” a short story somewhere between Kafka and Conrad, set in the dystopia that is the Homeland. “No Show Godot” is a slow-burning, restrained conclusion. With the most sparing manipulation of electrical current, Lewis has taken large strides along the experimental path that he first explored in the early 1980s, and All Under is an exemplary transmission from his Uppsala base.
The companion album, All Over, serves up a dozen tracks that walk on the knife-edge between pop and experimentalism. “Straight into the Corner” could easily fit into the Wire/Wir canon, with an easy-going sensibility, but it is a singular example – other tracks might appropriate familiar conventions, but only so that they can be deconstructed and repurposed. This is unmistakably a Lewis album, with his signature wordplay and playful subversion. The stand-out track, “We’ve Lost Your Mind,” is the closest thing to a single, but in a fairer world “Passport to International Travel” would be all over the radio. Take that, white van man.
Krister Petersson is Sweden’s most loyal devotee of Italo Disco. As the instrumental anchor of the legendary Vision Talk, Petersson was a prolific source of high energy dancefloor-friendly tracks. Although Vision Talk are no more, he hasn’t stopped writing new material, so the Italo flame remains lit in the North. His latest project, Swedit, is a contraction of Swedish Italo; and, like Vince Clarke’s original idea for The Assembly, is built around the idea of using different guest vocalists for each song.
The first vocalist to join up with Petersson is Richard Flow, also ex-Vision Talk and currently the keyboardist with Machinista. Their collaboration, “Lost and Found”, is out now on 12″ vinyl release through direct order (contact Swedit Records for information). We think it’s awesome.
Hoxton Square Bar & Kitchen
London
9 July 2014
No one is staffing the merchandise table at Karin Park’s Hoxton show. A folded t-shirt sits next to a CD – abandoned, perhaps, so that the merch rep can take in the gig from a position closer to the stage. Spaces at the front are at a premium, taken up by photographers pointing lenses at Karin and girls pressing forward for a closer look at her brother, David.
It’s hard to fault them, really. Drummer David is a blonde mane atop a muscular V, while singer Karin’s symmetrical features are a lure to lenses. The show is a rare London outing for the Parks, and Dalston hipsters vie with Essex music veterans for the best view as David energetically knocks out rhythms and triggers pads. Sister Karin owns the stage, striding from Dreier-esque vulnerability to confident, floor filling dance tracks with a vocal range as wide as her legs are long.
The set feels like it is over in a heart-beat, but the hour-long show covers a lot of terrain: from current Beatport favourite, “Shine,” to the dueling drums of “Thousand Loaded Guns.” A new song, “Look What You’ve Done Now,” is darkness and magic. “New Era,” from the Tiger Dreams EP, rubs shoulders with “Wildchild” from Highwire Poetry and a version of Maya Jane Coles’ “Everything.” Recalled to the stage by enthusiastic applause, the Parks reach back to 2009’s Ashes to Gold for “Desire” with just the slightest hesitation – it hasn’t been played live recently, but it’s a reminder of how far their sound has traveled and how vital it remains.
From the backwoods of Dalarna to an intimate venue in Hoxton, Karin Park’s song-craft is consistently unvarnished and raw. It touches nerves, breaks hearts and moves hips. It’s the real thing. You can pick up a t-shirt another time.
Canadian electro-pioneers, Rational Youth, recently wrapped up a successful tour of the Nordics. Their visit to Europe coincided, not only with a new Cold War, but also the release of a box set from the German artisan label, Vinyl-on-Demand. VOD have a reputation for careful and detailed craftsmanship, and the Rational Youth box has clearly been assembled with a designer’s eyes and a studio engineer’s ears. There is no other label producing material of this quality, which makes the compilation of Rational Youth’s recordings even more special. For those who missed the Nordic dates, admiring the VOD box is the best way to pass time until the band return to Europe for German shows in October.
There are five albums in the set, focused mainly on the band’s early years, when they produced their most influential work.
LP1: COLD WAR NIGHT LIFE
The original version of the Cold War Night Life album was released on Montreal’s YUL Records in 1982. It fused the edgy, shadows-and-fog atmosphere of Berlin in the Smiley and Harry Palmer films with a Kraftwerkian pulse. Canada’s first synth band, Rational Youth created a collection of world-class electronic pop that easily sits alongside Depeche Mode’s Speak and Spell or Human League’s Reproduction in the pantheon of classic synthesizer albums. Every one of the songs is a gem, from the opening click-track of “Close to Nature” to the politically prescient underground hit, “Dancing on the Berlin Wall.”
LP2: YUL RECORDS 1981-1983
YUL Records was named for Montreal’s airport, which has the international aviation code, YUL. The label was founded by Marc De Mouy, who also provided a platform for artists Cham-pang and Monty Cantsin. Besides the Cold War Night Life album, Rational Youth released a number of singles on YUL, which are collected on this volume with an emphasis on different versions from those previously included in other releases. From the initial 16-step sequence of “I Want to See the Light” to the masterful instrumental, “Pile ou Face,” the songs assembled here showcase the original path followed by Rational Youth, which went much further than anything else coming from North America at the time.
Interesting fact: there is no American equivalent to Rational Youth.
LP3: DEMOS, OBSCURE, LIVE & RARE
The Rational Youth archives have been properly raided for this album. Of fourteen tracks, seven are previously unreleased; two come from a cassette-only release; while the balance previously featured on the recent releases of live shows from 1983. There are demo versions of “Saturdays in Silesia,” “Just a Sound in the Night,” “Dancing on the Berlin Wall,” “In Your Eyes” and “Holiday in Bangkok,” as well as solos or duos by the original members, Tracy Howe, Bill Vorn and Kevin Komoda.
The question many fans have is, “What would have happened to Rational Youth if Bill Vorn hadn’t left before the 1983 tour?” We’ll never know, but these tracks give us a window into the Tesla-like creative energy that Vorn, Howe and Komoda were all discharging at the time. The demo of “Holiday in Bangkok,” in particular, shows off the way that sines, squares, triangles and saws could be combined by them to devastating effect, underpinning Tracy Howe’s distinctive vocal lines and innate sense of melody. The live tracks show that the band found a way to remain innovative and compelling even without Vorn to accompany them; but, without the rigid sense of electronic purity that Vorn took with him into the studio, many of the songs have a different feeling in live performance. It’s exciting to hear these recordings from the 1980s – and interesting to contemplate the immense creative distance that each version of the band could cover.
LP4: LIVE IN WINNIPEG, 1983
When Kevin Komoda looked into a box in his attic one day in 2013, he discovered two tape recordings from Rational Youth’s Vorn-less 1983 tour of Canada. The sound man had taken recordings straight from the board, and they lay for three decades forgotten in a box under some black-and-white pictures from Kraftwerk’s first performance in Montreal. A copy must have been made for a friend, at one point, because a bootleg tape of the Winnipeg show circulated as far afield as Sweden, but the master recordings sat in a lonely place until Nachos! Records released both the Winnipeg and Ottawa shows as cassettes. Artoffact Records then picked up the recordings for a CD release.
The Winnipeg show took place close to the famous intersection of Portage and Main, practically in the middle of North America. The venue, Wellingtons, closed down recently, but in 1983 it was a subterranean safe-harbour for alternative music. A local import record store organised the show, which was opened by local band, New Man Celebration. The warm reception given to Rational Youth comes through in the informal and friendly banter between Howe and unknown off-stage voices, but the legacy of their visit was to send synthesizer sales skyward at the local instrument shop. This record captures the energy and influence of Rational Youth, which sent prairie youths in double-breasted shirts and Phil Oakey haircuts in search of their own Moogs.
LP5: THE CAPITOL YEARS
It was probably inevitable that, given Rational Youth’s underground success, the major labels would eventually move in, looking for a host organism. Capitol Records was able to latch on, but had no clue how to develop and promote the band. Instead of taking them to the Pasadena Rose Bowl – as Mute and Sire did for Depeche Mode – Capitol led Rational Youth on a merry dance and eventually lost interest. It’s too bad, because while signed to Capitol Tracy Howe wrote and recorded some of his best material, including “In Your Eyes” and “Holiday in Bangkok.” The last volume of the box set draws on some of this great store of music, which set venues alight during the band’s recent Nordic adventure.
As with many other VOD releases, the box set includes a beautiful booklet, reproducing rare photographs, gig posters, lyric sheets and recollections from Howe. It’s a fascinating read and a compelling view of one of the most dynamic electronic artists from the early 1980s.
One of the things that has always made Wire stand out is the presence of oblique strategist and wordsmith Edvard Graham Lewis on bass. “On bass” is perhaps a strange way to describe his role, because it also encompasses graphic design, stage design, sound design, vocals – maybe it’s better to say, “as multimedia, polymath whirlwind.” As part of Dome, Duet Emmo and 27#11, and as solo artist He Said, he has pushed the boundaries of pop into achingly beautiful and unconventional realms. Wire are still reinventing themselves, but Lewis is also working up solo material from his base in Uppsala. Two albums are coming around midsummer from Editions Mego: All Over and All Under are days away from release.
The first track we’ve heard is “We’ve Lost Your Mind” from All Over. It’s unmistakably Lewis material, with an almost conventional start that ultimately dissolves into fractals of noise. Immense.