Author

Mat Smith

Ex-Display Model: Moments in Hove

by Mat Smith
written by Mat Smith

Ex-Display Model is a new project from Fujiya & Miyagi’s David Best with AK/DK’s Ed Chivers. The pair began working together in Brighton earlier this year, taking their inspiration from the DIY home recordings of Robert Rental and Thomas Leer, writing much of their debut self-titled, self-released album in David’s bedroom and the small studio space in Ed’s apartment.

“Initially the group began as a solo outlet for me to revisit the sort of records that made me fall in love with music in the first place,” says David. “Things like the first Modern Lovers record, The Velvet Underground, Harmonia, and an adolescence soundtracked by religiously listening to the John Peel show.”

The album displays David Best’s nous for creating leftfield pop songs with heavily introspective lyrics whose meaning is known only to their creator; pitched perfectly with music covering everything from shimmering electronics to the awkward funk gestures of classic Talking Heads. Like some of the best musical moments, the whole thing formed itself from a bunch of serendipitous moments.

“Once the songs were roughly formed, instruments would be layered on top of one another with no prior knowledge of what would be played,” Best continues. “The lyrics were constructed in a similar fashion, formulated and shaped while recording took place. Once Ed began contributing to the songs it was as if they went from being monochrome to technicolour.”

David gave Cold War Night Life an exclusive walk-through of the songs on what is assuredly one of 2018’s best and most understated electronically-infused crossover albums.

Immaculate Rip

The electronic noise you hear on the intro and during the chorus is a guitar pedal malfunctioning. Luckily, I managed to record it. Unfortunately, it works fine now. This is perhaps the song that sounds most like my other group. It’s something I attempted to avoid, but sometimes it’s unavoidable. “Immaculate Rip” is more abrasive, perhaps.

Torschlusspanik

I don’t like samples of voices from TV or radio on songs. It always reminds me of when Ned’s Atomic Dustbin sampled Die Hard.

The voice you hear at the beginning is a train announcement at Shanghai station that I recorded when I was out there. I think if you source it yourself it’s okay to use it.

This song is an amalgam of ideas from Neu! and Harmonia mixed with George Murray-esque basslines and Roxy Music fuzz. I was aiming for a cold, motorik funk.

Existential Crisis

When I was young, my dad used to drive me and my sister to every Arsenal home game. He had about three tapes in his Fiat Panda, one of which was a Gene Vincent album. I always liked it and always associate him with my dad. I tried to replicate a 50s rock ‘n’ roll guitar solo on this song, because I thought he might like it.

I was also trying to see how many times I could repeat the same sentence in a song without it getting boring. I’ve always liked that idea of getting the most from as little as possible.

Ed’s synths bring the song into today, and that creates a nice tension between the old and the new.

Autopilot

This is perhaps my favourite song on the album. It’s Ed’s favourite too. It started life aspiring to be a “Private Plane” or “Double Heart” or Smog’s “Bathysphere.” I don’t think it ended up like that.

I suspect that the lyrics are addressed to myself, like a self-help guide; or perhaps it’s better to think of this and the other songs as internal monologues let loose externally.

We asked Annie Hart from Au Revoir Simone to sing and play some keys on this. Ed built an Arp 2600, and it makes an appearance towards the end and also all over the album.

Pouring Cold Water On To Hot Glass

At the core of this song is the idea that there are numerous reasons and obstacles why you shouldn’t do something, but that shouldn’t stop you from trying. If you want to release a record “properly,” with radio and press and manufacturing, it costs thousands. This record, due to goodwill and lots of favours, cost £250 to record the vocals nicely plus another £48 to sort the cover out.

Other than the vocals, it was recorded in my bedroom and Ed’s little studio room in his flat. So the “cold water” is saying, “You can’t do it,” and the “hot glass” is saying, “Oh yes we can!” It’s also aspiring to be something. I can’t dance like James Brown and I can’t make a film as good as “Stalker,” but by striving to be that good you hopefully get a bit better than if you didn’t try.

Inferior Designs

Ed does this really lovely synth pattern on this song, which reminds me of Italo Disco at its most melancholy – something like “On & On” by Decadence or “Life With You” by Expansives.

As with “Immaculate Rip” and “Pouring Cold Water…,” Ben Faresvedt plays bass on this. It also has a post-punk dubby feel to it, due to the delay on the guitar. Most of the guitar was recorded without knowing what I was going to play beforehand. I like to think it gives it a feeling of imminent collapse, which I like.

Swing Of Things

As with the last song on the record, I was trying to sing like Bryan Ferry on this and failing. Ed sings on a lot of the album, which i think takes it away from my other group and sweetens it too.

I’m excited about our next record, which will be completely collaborative from the beginning. It feels like this is a good platform to build something exciting upon.

Ex-Display Model

As with all the songs this uses drum machines rather than acoustic drums. The song is about getting older. There’s a really nice repeated pattern at the end which reminds me of Terry Riley, which is something we’ll explore further on our next album I reckon. I think sometimes my other group’s records sound too nice, and so this was an opportunity to leave the creases unironed.

Ex-Display Model by Ex-Display Model is out now. Listen to the full album on Bandcamp or Spotify.
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Blonde But Not Forgotten

by Mat Smith
written by Mat Smith

Like most musical scenes, early synth-pop was littered with groups that didn’t quite make it; bands who should have been more successful than they were but who ultimately watched groups perceived as more deserving of acclaim have huge success and marketing energy bestowed upon them, while they were relegated to the role of mere footnotes – at best.

Such was the case with Glasgow’s Berlin Blondes, who wound up on the sidelines of the 80s synth dawn, already mostly broken up before their solitary album was in the can.

It shouldn’t have been this way. The band had all the right vital statistics: modish alien synths, a robotic sheen from employing a drum machine instead of a real drummer, spiky post-punk guitars, a pinch of Kraftwerk, a large dose of Bowie, and the obligatory New Romantic eyeliner. Their songs sat comfortably alongside everything from the semi-industrial sounds of early Mute to the ambitious gestures of Ultravox and Simple Minds, whom they supported in their early days.

Central to the Berlin Blondes sound were the arch stylings of vocalist and frontman Steve Bonomi and the swirling synths of future Altered Images / One Dove member, Jim McKinven, whose playing sat somewhere between the icy minimalism of Tubeway Army and Dave Formula’s more grandiose playing for Magazine. David Rudden’s bass and Robert Farrell’s guitar acted as foils to McKinven’s synths, humanising the electronics while McKinven, in turn, roboticised their playing.

A cult live following in Glasgow led to a deal with EMI – a remarkable achievement for a band little known outside their home city and with limited original material. With a working title of Building In The Sand, they recorded rough versions of the tracks at Numan’s Rock City studio in Shepperton with producer Mike Thorne, and the story goes that some sounds from Numan’s expansive Moog collection found their way into the recorded Berlin Blondes tracks.

Thorne would cement his central role within the nascent synth-pop scene with Soft Cell’s Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret, but he cut his (electronic) teeth with Berlin Blondes, including bringing an expensive Synclavier to the table which also turned up on the first Soft Cell LP. Thorne handed the tapes off to Harvey Goldberg at New York’s Media Sound for mixing duties, just as he would later do with Soft Cell’s first LP. By the time the LP was completed, Paul Rudden had departed to establish his band Endgames, and Jim McKinven left before EMI released the album in 1980, taking his synths and signature playing with him.

While it may lack the sonic fidelity or crispness of Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret, even after a timely remaster, Berlin Blondes remains a strong, under-appreciated early synth-pop gem. The songs are good, yielding singles in the form of “Science” and “Framework”, both possessing a hyperactive edge and the same intense focus on technological progress that was the muse of many an early synth-pop group. “Trail To Istanbul” similarly deals with another 80s lyrical concern – namely the glamour and mystique of world travel and foreign cultures – here working off a fantastic gridwork of synths and unswervingly spare drum machine pulses that nodded firmly in the direction of Thomas Leer’s “Private Plane”.

Elsewhere, “Secret Days” acted as a neat bridge between the angular shapes of post-punk and the emerging synth movement, all feisty guitars and shouty energy, held in check by glittering synth layers. “Mannequin” was openly informed by Kraftwerk’s “Showroom Dummies”, containing some brilliantly synchronised synth interplay with Rudden’s bass and a jerky rhythm akin to posing and re-posing lifeless plastic display models in a store window. The central synth melody here is a strange wonder to behold, unadorned as it is by layers and layers of complementary sound, as might have been the temptation of the day. Closing track “Zero Song” is absolutely astonishing – a futuristic nine minute evolving epic that has begins in soundtrack territory before moving on into a haunting, melodic direction that nods to the profoundly uplifting qualities of Bowie’s “Heroes”.

Throughout the album, it’s Steve Bonomi’s peculiar vocal that stands out most prominently. He definitely has that Bowie thing going on, but it’s a voice filtered through the wryness of Howard Devoto: occasionally shrill, occasionally more spoken than sung; positioned on the central reservation between the evocative Bowie and the emotionless Numan. He claimed to be influenced by Bryan Ferry’s louche delivery, but any traces of Ferry’s unintentional croonerishness are buried deep under Bonomi’s punk hangover.

Despite all the right ingredients and some genuinely stand-out moments, the band’s self-titled album failed to register and what was left of the band were unceremoniously dropped by EMI. With the addition of a human drummer, they released a solitary follow-up single, “Marseille”, for independent imprint Scratch, wherein Bonomi manages to out-Jim Kerr Jim Kerr with a stadium-ready vocal, but that was really the end of the Berlin Blondes story.

A new compilation on Barney Ashton’s Strike Force Entertainment seeks to address Berlin Blondes’s almost entirely forgotten history. The set brings together the remastered LP and the band’s singles, marking their first time on CD for the first time; their small and overlooked legacy framed by a definitive history, written lovingly by Ashton through the lens of him evidently being a fan. Like their career itself, this release will more than likely be overshadowed by other, more copious and much more expansive retrospectives – Soft Cell’s Keychains & Snowstorms springs to mind – but as a window into the music of a bunch of unsung Glaswegians with songs every bit as good as more successful acts of the day, The Complete Recordings 1980 – 81 is an arresting but altogether too brief endeavour.

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Sound from Vision: The Adventures of Rupert Lally

by Mat Smith
written by Mat Smith

Over the years, Switzerland-based electronic musician and sound designer Rupert Lally has released a slew of albums covering everything from ambient sparseness to glitch to fantasy soundtracks; his score for Ballard’s High Rise giving Clint Mansell’s music for the film a run for its money.

For his latest album, Lally has embraced his roots in jazz more comprehensively; fusing his elaborate, carefully-wrought electronic compositions with an orderly looseness that working with synths and digital tools too often limits. On the evidence of the fourteen tracks on This Is An Adventure, it’s territory that he is extremely well-adapted to, making this one of his most compelling and sonically diverse albums to date.

In addition to his Bandcamp releases, Lally maintains a film blog, and that gives him an insider’s knowledge of what makes a good, evocative score. That means a track like the restless “Reindeer Flotilla” might have been recorded to accompany a desolate post-apocalyptic scene, while “Where Are You Going With This” features a futuristic–but not exactly optimistic–momentum, a lot like careering through the wrecked Earth of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner and coming to terms with being among the last humans opting to stick it out on the home planet. The beatific “Siren Song” is plaintive and loaded with contemplation, driven gently forward on expressive, wandering guitar enveloped by sultry late-night echo and unobtrusive synths.

The finest moments on This Is An Adventure are where Lally lets his improvisational instinct take charge. “Box Of Rocks” is reminiscent of some of the finest noir moments in the Barry Adamson catalogue: all chunky beats, jangly guitars, churning bass lines and organ-led chords. “Gone To Persia” finds Lally dropping proggy tabla rhythms and rich, pulsing analogue synth arpeggios.

The highlight among highlights is “Miles Brings The Voodoo Back”; its title and architecture nodding to “Miles Runs the Voodoo Down” from the seminal Bitches Brew. Lally’s ode to the centrepiece of Miles’s 70s electronic experiments is a long form, constantly-evolving piece full of shuffling kitwork, vintage synth layers and watery, FX-laden horns, being both reverential and yet unique in its vision.

Mat Smith presents the Documentary Evidence blog.
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