Reviews

MODE: The Images that Defined Depeche Mode

by coldwarnightlife
written by coldwarnightlife

An ornamental swan wrapped in cellophane. A worker knocking down a mountain in Switzerland. A collective farmer in a field. A marriage in the lights of a Midlands factory. An imposing building covered in banners with a foreground of tulips. These are the images that defined the image of Depeche Mode through their first five album covers. All shot by the legendary photographer, Brian Griffin, they represented the band on the shelves of record shops, in the collections of fans, and in the music press. There were critics who (unfairly) thought the group’s pop lightweight, but their cover art was decidedly serious.

It was fine art, at a time when many record covers showed a band’s latest hairstyles. Griffin’s image for A Broken Frame – the album released into the gloom of 1982 after the departure of Vince Clarke – was selected by Life magazine to front its collection, The World’s Best Photographs (1980-1990). Daniel Miller had resolved to give the band the best resources he could, when he took on producing them for his Mute Records imprint, and his choice of Griffin gave them visuals as distinctive and iconic as their music.

Speak & Spell cover art by Brian Griffin

Speak & Spell cover art by Brian Griffin

Griffin came to Miller’s attention because his agent had an office above Mute’s. At the time, Griffin’s work was prominent in record shops, featuring on releases from Iggy Pop, Echo & The Bunnymen, Ian Dury, Simple Minds, and Elvis Costello. The commission to create an image for Depeche Mode’s first album, Speak & Spell, led to an abstract but striking image of a plastic-wrapped swan that has come to be interpreted, with hindsight, as a commentary on consumer capitalism. Griffin’s working class politics were given fuller reign with the next two albums, which featured the sickle (A Broken Frame) and hammer (Construction Time Again) as core elements of the cover photos. That led to an excited journalist at Melody Maker trying to get Dave Gahan to come out as a fellow traveller, when he was more interested in Kerrang! than the Communist Manifesto.

There have been other sources of confusion between the band and Griffin’s artwork. In 1982, some said that the peasant on the cover of A Broken Frame was a man – perhaps even Daniel Miller in Slavic farmer’s drag. In 1984, rumours circulated that the cover of Some Great Reward showed Alan Wilder getting married. Both were wrong. The hunger for information about the band, and the need to interpret the images in light of its evolution, led to pre-internet speculation fuelled by the multiple layers of meaning in Griffin’s work.

Depeche Mode promotional shot by Brian Griffin

There is a chance to set the record straight with the release of MODE, Griffin’s latest book. With a preface from Gareth Jones, an interview with Griffin that explores all of his work for the band, and an essay by Roger Butler that tells the story of the video for “Only When I Lose Myself,” it is the definitive history of a relationship that helped to define the image of the band.

Backed by fans of Depeche Mode and Griffin through a Kickstarter campaign, and with energy provided by DM-interpreter Vaughn George, MODE is designed by the same team who created Griffin’s biographical work, Black Country Dada. It collects previously unseen images from his shoots for the records and promotional materials, showing Griffin’s striking style. It also includes pictures of artefacts from the archives, which give Depeche Mode fans more of the context of the work. Photographers will be awed by the technical skills and creative techniques used by Griffin. Fans of the band will be enveloped in the experience of working with the band and label. It is an exquisite and badly-needed window into a period when one of the world’s most important bands was finding its voice and commercial success.

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Just Like Eddie: Page Return with the Spirit of ’78

by coldwarnightlife
written by coldwarnightlife
Page

Page (Photo: Jonas Karlsson)

When Gary Numan first encountered a synthesiser, it changed the way he made music. It was the same for Eddie Bengtsson, who traded in his new drum kit for two synthesisers after he heard Silicon Teens singles that had been imported to his native Sweden. The concept of four teens making covers of rock classics using only synthesisers inspired Bengtsson to start his own band, – giving one of the synthesisers to his girlfriend, Marina Schiptjenko, and inviting another friend to join the proceedings.

What Bengtsson didn’t know was that there was only one member of Silicon Teens – the same man who had given the world “TVOD/Warm Leatherette” as The Normal. When he wrote to the Teens, in care of Mute Records, to share his admiration, Daniel Miller came clean and explained that Daryl, Jacki, Paul, and Diane were all him. Never mind – Sweden could have its own version in Page. Live shows and original songs followed, giving a Scandi twist to the sounds of Synth Britannia. Page became the house band of the local synth scene, creating world-class poptronica from their Baltic Sea base.

Page by Simon Helm

Page (Photo: Simon Helm)

Fast forward four decades, and Page are still carrying the torch for the sounds of 1978-1980. Over the years, Bengtsson’s compositions have acquired the distilled spirit of Ultravox! and Gary Numan; increasingly, channelling the feeling of those transitional days when post-punk was becoming something electronic. It is that moment that is captured across En ny våg [EN: A New Wave] – a feeling reinforced by the presence on the album of Chris Payne and Rrussell Bell. Two of the legends who helped to lead the transition from punk rock to poptronica, Payne and Bell have worked together previously as part of Gary Numan’s touring band and Dramatis. On the evidence of the material contributed here, the respect shown by Bengtsson and Schiptjenko for their British peers appears to be mutual.

The title track features Payne’s violin, which gives a minor key frisson to a classic slice of bouncy Page pop. The depth of Bengtsson’s well of melodies has never been plumbed, but his ability to draw dynamic and emotional lines is unmatched. “En ny våg” is laden with tension, mysterious beauty, and a presence that most electronic bands would struggle to reach in a lifetime of work.

The point is made dramatically with tracks like “Förloraren” [EN: “The Loser”], which tap into the ability of Bengtsson’s Moogs to resonate with both force and sensitivity. It comes up again on “Stopp-Vänta-Nu” [EN: “Stop-Wait-Now”], in which powerful strings and a growling funk bass signal the strength of the electricity fizzing through his instrumentation. It’s the kind of material that keeps crowds enthralled at Page’s live shows.

“Vi kommer tillbacka” [EN: “We Are Coming Back”] was our Single of the Year for 2022. As we wrote in our year-end review:

When John Foxx left Ultravox!, they lost more than their punctuation mark. Foxx’s presence gave the band bite. Midge Ure made excellent, soaring pop but left no teeth marks–well, apart from the time he kicked Warren Cann out of the band he had founded. Musically, at least, there is something to be said for having an edge.

Page could have reissued Glad and been happy with the enthusiastic response, but Eddie Bengtsson has some of that 1970s UV spirit in him. “Vi kommer tillbaka” [EN: “We Are Coming Back”] arrived as a single just as the year was running out, easily outpacing the competition with a slice of golden poptronica.

In “Det här är mitt sätt” [EN: ”This Is My Way”] there is something of the throbbing passion of Magazine and Pete Shelley. The song is also a statement, which captures Bengtsson’s determination to maintain his true path. “It can go wrong / It can go right / This is always – my way.”

Dramatis, from back in the day

“Korridoren” [EN: “The Corridor”] is the closest that Page have come to Kraftwerk, with the echo of “Hall of Mirrors” and the longing of OMD’s “Distance Fades Between Us” fusing to trigger the sympathetic nervous system. Fight, flight, or dance? None of them emerge with clarity, but each has a place.

“Frusen” [EN: “Frozen”] finds Rrussell Bell’s guitar completing Page’s phrases with intensity. Page have, from time to time, played with guitar sounds, but usually by exploiting the Moog’s filters. The Dramatis man lifts the dynamics of Bengtsson’s rhythms in a fierce, celebratory way. And this is rather the point of the album: after punk had burned itself into a parody of pub rock, young musicians needed new ways to express their alienation and raw energy. The synthesiser provided that opening, and the sounds of guitars were adapted to fit with them. Page and their guests are out of their teens, but they are still young lions. The flow of electricity doesn’t stop until they do.

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Stomp! The Sound of Container 90

by coldwarnightlife
written by coldwarnightlife

These boots were made for dancing. The stomp of DMs to old school EBM fills the new album from Container 90 – AirWare soles lending bounce to the Swedish duo’s latest offering.

Grand PrixXx is the fourth studio album from Ronny Larsson and Jonas Rundberg. It contains some previous single releases, as well as new sounds to bring the train of sequenced bass further along the tracks. As usual, it takes extra motor power from the band’s no-nonsense, anti-fascist politics. From the opening “Eurovision Song Protest” to the Test Dept-esque “New World Disorder,” there are no punches pulled in the lyrics or the rhythms.

When you live in a society where the second largest political party (by votes) is led by synth-loving fascists, programming the machines to fight back makes all kinds of sense. In lieu of a regular package, Container 90 offer a sixteen-page comic book that has content for each song.  In a time of universal streaming, that is a revolutionary act.

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Great Meditations: From the Silver Box to the Sea with Söderqvist

by coldwarnightlife
written by coldwarnightlife

Dan Söderqvist is best known as the singer in Twice a Man. He is also a prolific artist in his own right, with not one but two new albums on release. A New Victorian Age captures some of Söderqvist’s unreleased instrumental music from the 1990s, demonstrating his work for video games and dance. Murmures is an installation work that was created to accompany the art exhibition of the same name in the summer of 2023. Between them is a space, both temporal and stylistic, that illuminates Söderqvist’s creative range.

A New Victorian Age includes early versions of the material that found its way into the soundtrack used in the three-dimensional video game, Kula World. Made by a Swedish studio for the PlayStation One in 1997, the game involved navigating a ball in a puzzle maze that grew in complexity as the player progressed. Söderqvist’s sound design was more progressive and trippier than a lot of soundtracks from that time, making extensive use of the Roland TB-303. It might have said “computer controlled” on the face, but the silver box was able to respond very well to human interaction. Söderqvist married it to soaring quitars and keyboards for an electro-acoustic journey that was a whole lot hipper than Mario’s own backing music.

The Kula World sketches are collected on the album together with material originally intended for the computer game, OBAFGKM, and the dance performance, Pleiades. Fans of Ozric Tentacles and Juno Reactor will find a lot to like in this set, but it is also essential for any follower of Twice a Man.

Murmures was originally recorded for the show of the same name at the gallery, La Part du Rève, in Perpignan, France. Consisting of twelve pieces, based upon portraits of 19th-century persons, the installation was created together with the French visual artist, Tempora Flow (aka Jenny van den Arend). Intended to be played in a quiet room at low volume, the material is based upon field recordings, gathered at a variety of locations, ranging from a fountain in Salamanca, Spain, a church in Greffeil, in the south of France, the Swedish island of Öland, and other sites across Europe. Over them is read a poem in Swedish by Eric Johan Stagnelius, “The Poet.” Each of the sections is based upon a graphic piece, reflecting the appropriate theme by Tempora Flow, which can be seen online at temporaflow.eu

Murmures contains contributions from Tempora Flow, Noiz Elfje, and Maria Ericsson. The field recordings flow into each other, while Söderqvist mixes them with synthesisers and reverb. Insect musicians call to each other while bells chime and water splashes. Birds and bees combine with voices and what might be sampled strings. The results are deftly handled, and Söderqvist’s sensitivity to both natural and human sounds keeps them in balance. It is a tightrope walk, but there is serenity on the other side.

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Lau Nau Goes West (Coast)

by coldwarnightlife
written by coldwarnightlife

Lau Nau normally divides her activity between recordings in a remote corner of Finland and performances in towns across the globe. Her music draws on the influences of the wind through the pines and the flow of high-voltage power lines. It combines the overwhelming drama of isolation and the sensitivity of crowded cities. From these tensions emerge works of delicacy and beauty, which grow like crystals or float on the wind like dandelion seeds.

5×4 finds Lau Nau engaged with that great West Coast synthesiser, the Buchla 200. Installed at EMS in Stockholm, Lau Nau added an AKG BX20 spring reverb to frame the distinctive sound of the vintage equipment. The title refers to the Buchla’s sequencer, which has five steps and four tracks, but what emerges is an organic, drifting series of pieces based on different moods. The Buchla’s flexible patching parameters have been shaped to generate songs that respond to the flow of current with emotional resonances.

This is an album that took years to create, as Lau Nau left her island home to visit the EMS and explore the creative possibilities of the Buchla. It’s safe to say that it will stay with the listener even longer.

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Scratched and Warped: The Weathermen on Vinyl Again

by coldwarnightlife
written by coldwarnightlife

We are in the year of the fortieth anniversary of Play It Again Sam Records. It is also the year that Bruce Geduldig, Tuxedomoon’s visuals artist, would have turned 70. Fitting, then, to find a six-track EP of songs by The Weathermen on release from PIAS.

A collaboration between Geduldig and Jean-Marc Lederman from Fad Gadget’s first touring band, The Weathermen leaped onto the stage with “Deep Down South” in 1985. From their base in Brussels, they combined the electro-intensity of Front 242 and Kraftwerk with a sense of humour that mercilessly mocked rock tropes and the lovers of Svetlana Alliluyeva. Named after a group of middle-class American radicals, who used to recruit youth by attacking them in the street and were known for blowing themselves up, The Weathermen took nothing seriously except the mixing of their samples and heavy-duty beats.

For their third communique, John F. Kennedy had been roped in for lead vocals on “Let Them Come to Berlin.” Using the cut-up tape style of Cabaret Voltaire, The Weathermen managed to turn the dead president’s anti-communist speech into a dancefloor classic. It set a template for subversion, both on and off the dancefloor, and anticipated Berghain decades before the queues started to form.

The 40 EP collects these songs with four others from the band’s very respectable back catalogue. The stand-out track, and the one that had the greatest reach for the duo, is “Poison,” in which Geduldig plays the role of stalking groupie, Suzanna Stammer. Over Lederman’s classic electro track, which featured sampled metal and a menacing bass line, Stammer leaves a series of threatening voice messages. The scary part is that there are real Suzanna Stammers, from Plan K to Pustervik. Thanks to The Weathermen, you can dance to genius tracks like “Bang!” in the club while she scratches up your Bruce Springsteen records back at home. Best have a word with your drummer about who he lets in.

It’s 2023. Bruce is gone, but the beats remain.

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Viva Jack Vegas

by coldwarnightlife
written by coldwarnightlife

Sweden’s Agent Side Grinder have supported Suicide, and it is the American duo’s influence that first strikes the listener of “Waiting Room,” the lead track from their new album, Jack Vegas. The chick-a-boom rhythm and dirty organ lead owe more than a little to Martin Rev’s instrumental style, even as the voice of Bill Burroughs pierces the track like a shotgun blast to the face.

This is ASG’s Americana phase, and they draw upon the beat poets and proto-electro pioneers as an escape from the walls of their own continent. Jan Myrdal once achieved fame as a Disloyal European, and ASG follow him; diving head-first into the post-war American dream. The irony is that it was only made tolerable for those who experienced it through the injection of large doses of narcotics. Seedy hotels and basement clubs were where the marks lived, and the sounds and words that crawled from them stained a trail that the decades have not erased.

The sixth studio album from ASG, Jack Vegas is named after an online casino and a line of gambling machines found in Sweden. The title track is the longest in the set, and its groove provides a structure for the whole. It’s not for the hard of thinking. As Burroughs once growled, “Open your mind and let the pictures out”

(Photos: Krichan Wihlborg)

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Recalling the Future with Twice a Man

by coldwarnightlife
written by coldwarnightlife

Sweden’s legendary act, Twice a Man, have released a tour of their output between the years 1982 and 2022. The material is collected on Songs of Future Memories, a 3-CD compilation from Germany’s Dependent label, with two new songs and thirty-two from the band’s extensive back catalogue. The physical edition also includes a 72-page hardcover book with notes from Ecki Stieg.

The importance of Twice a Man to Swedish and European pop and theatrical music cannot be overstated. From the point at which they transformed from Cosmic Overdose, at the insistence of New Order’s promoter, the band has led from the front; both in terms of their styling and in their messages about the social and natural environment. They might have changed their name, but the group – organised around the core of Karl Gasleben and Dan Söderqvist – didn’t give up their affinity for psychedelic soundscapes or explosions of surrealistic energy. Instead, they set up structures within which new sounds could be formed and social concerns could be channelled.

As this compilation shows, Twice a Man have taken a much wider perspective than many of their peers; adapting to the shifting sands of fashion while maintaining a Brechtian distance that prevents them from being pigeon-holed. Are they prog or new wave? For the theatre or the dancefloor? Do they look at internal psychology or social movements? The answer is: any and all of the above, depending on the moment. There is no one truth about Twice a Man, but there is an organising principle to their material: it isn’t like anything else.

From the proto-techno of “Russian Tractors” to the pulsing symphonic movements of “High in the Clouds,” this collection is a master-class in European electronic music. Spanning forty years of work, Songs of Future Memories draws on an exceptional tradition of experimentation and composition. The two new songs presented here, “Lotus” and “Dahlia,” emerge from that crib impressed with a unique inheritance. Twice a Man remain a work in progress.

 

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Soul Music for Zombies

by coldwarnightlife
written by coldwarnightlife

Jean-Marc Lederman’s concept albums are a diverse set. Experimentation is at their core, but so is a cinematic sense of space and time. Whether exploiting the unpredictable qualities of The Bad Tempered Synthesizer or exploring the aquatic world of Night Music for Seahorses and Manatees, Lederman creates collections of stories in sound.

Soul Music for Zombies is the latest project from Lederman (Fad Gadget, The Weathermen, Kid Montana). Over eleven songs, it mines a rich vein of soul and blues; testing their elements in combinations with industrial, electronic and ambient tracks. If Screaming Jay Hawkins had access to a bank of synths, he might have come up with a take on “I Put a Spell on You” like Lederman’s, but only if he had spent decades absorbing the back catalogue of Front 242. Laurie Anderson is name-checked in “O Super​(​wo​)​man (nod to Laurie),” but Lederman hasn’t left the tracks: the song features a loop over a dance beat that belongs more to Soul Train than the Barbican.

Emileigh Rohn (Chiasma), Lederman’s partner on the recent Rage! album, appears for “The Music Walks Again.” Subtitled “The Robert Johnson Story,” the track features guitar samples and a take on the Faustian transaction undertaken by the influential guitarist. The Johnson origin story has a strong pull that reaches through the decades, but does the Dark Prince do similar deals for VSTs? Has Lederman met him at the intersection of Leopold II and Rue de Ribaucourt? That has been left to legend.

Soul Music for Zombies isn’t another version of Moby’s Play or Recoil’s Bloodline, but it shares their respect for the sounds of the original American underground. It also tests combinations of other styles, in a very European collision designed for both the undead and the living.

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On Their Feet: Black Needle Noise Rise Up

by coldwarnightlife
written by coldwarnightlife

What is the point of pain, if not to lead to healing? Andra Day’s “Rise Up” is about dispersing the clouds of doubt and despair; finding the fighter inside who gets you back on your feet and ready for another round. It is an inspirational and stirring song, which helped win a Grammy for its creators.

It has been given an adrenalin shot by John Fryer’s Black Needle Noise project. Lisa Kekaula (The Bellfrays, Basement Jaxx) takes lead vocals; shaking the foundations with an uplifting, gospel-infused turn that is full of confidence and drive. Fryer’s instrumentation is perfectly-formed scaffolding for Kekaula’s performance; allowing her voice to ascend to heights of power and emotional clarity. The Pixies made a career of the quiet-LOUD template, but Fryer has repurposed it for piano, strings and hand-claps with a joyousness that will move hearts.

Fryer’s history (This Mortal Coil, Fad Gadget, Nine Inch Nails, Cocteau Twins) proves that this is not just a happy accident. “Rise Up” is part of a long line of songs that the legendary producer has invested with a delicate power, balancing on a knife’s edge between the energetic and the ethereal. The tension is electrifying, and in the chorus Kekaula’s voice floats and winds like the arc from a Tesla coil. Fryer’s magic box harnesses the power, but make no mistake: it is inside you, too.

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