Reviews

Beatbox Live: Poptronica by the Water

by coldwarnightlife
written by coldwarnightlife

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Beatbox Live
Halmstad, SE
15 Oct 2016

img_2361Halmstad is half-way between Gothenburg and Malmo on Sweden’s west coast. A perfect meeting place, therefore, for the country’s most enthusiastic poptronica fans. A small venue on the edge of the water provides the setting for an amiable evening to host a mini-festival featuring Canada’s best-loved synthpop heroes, Rational Youth, a rare appearance by Italo legend Paul Rein, a tribute to the sorely missed Krister Petersson, and more.

img_2389Proving The Electricity Club’s dictum that “the best shows are the ones curated by fans,” Beatbox Live was an ambitious but carefully-organised event, combining nostalgia and novelty in equal measure. It began with Electric City Cowboys, a part-time act from Karlshamn, who warmed up the crowd with danceable songs, and Modiga Agenter [EN: Brave Agents], who provided evidence of the talent bubbling under the surface of the Swedish scene.

Then it was the turn of Candide, one of our favourite Swedish acts. The group consistently delivers a stylish, crafted form of poptronica, and they had hips and feet in motion throughout their set. They gave away one of their copies of the Heresy tribute to Rational Youth, which features their version of “City of Night,” delighting the winning fan at the front of the stage.

img_2386A special event took place in the middle of the programme to remember the sorely-missed Krister Petterson. Pettersson was the Swedish Italo scene’s most visible booster, and he was also a key part of the legendary Vision Talk. Richard Flow from Machinista, who co-founded Vision Talk with Pettersson, led proceedings with a short set of classic Vision Talk songs before being joined by vocalist John Lindqwister for an equally too-brief set of Machinista songs.

The group Italove from Stockholm took the stage next, showing off a high energy passion for Italo Disco. While a lot of Italo can sound same-same, Italove managed to keep the audience’s interest with solid beats and danceable melodies.

img_2353Paul Rein is known to some as the father of Joanna Rein, our favourite EBM warrior. While Rein the Younger was waiting to go on stage at Stockholm’s Bodyfest, pere Rein was treating a crowd of nostalgic fans to a set of his hits, including “Communicate” and “Hold Back Your Love”. He’s lost some hair but none of his capacity to belt out a solid dance track.

img_2350Then it was the turn of Rational Youth. The Canadian legends were making their first Swedish appearances since releasing Future Past Tense, this year’s EP. Despite some technical problems that raised the possibility of the event going unplugged, they ploughed on with a set of classics and the newer material. Tracy and Gaenor Howe had just warmed up for Midge Ure (Ultravox, Visage, The Rich Kids) in Toronto, but were as happy as clams to be amongst the black-clad poptronica fans of Wallander country.

img_2392During “Everything Is Vapour,” Howe lost his microphone to a superfan in the crowd, but there were plenty of voices singing along to carry the chorus without amplification. None of the new material was lost in the set, and equal love was shown for classic and recent songs. The boisterous set ran late into the frigid Swedish night, keeping the darkness away for a hall filled with happy syntare.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]

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Hannah Peel Touches a Nerve

by coldwarnightlife
written by coldwarnightlife

“I have neither desires nor fears,” the Khan declared, “and my dreams are composed either by my mind or by chance.” [Invisible Cities]

You are reading a review of Hannah Peel’s Awake But Always Dreaming. Or perhaps a map tracing the path between Irish folk music and experimental electronics. It opens with a reference to neurology.

Hannah Peel Like the brain, Hannah Peel’s latest release is divided into two halves. The first follows a poptastic pattern, filled with the folk-frosted, radio-friendly songs that make Peel one of the most compelling artists in Britain today. The other is an intensely personal set of adventurous material, raw to the touch and unnervingly beautiful. The neural pathway linking them is a track inspired by one of Italo Calvino’s postmodern stories.

“Invisible City” took shape under the spell of Calvino’s novel of similar name. A fantastical imagining of conversations between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan, the book breaks narrative rules and questions memory as an element of storytelling. It provides a key point in the trajectory of the album, as memory – and the loss of it – is the dominant theme of the second half.

It was at this point in her writing for the album that Peel started to respond artistically to the dementia that was claiming her grandmother. As her neural pathways began to be closed off, so did the established links between the two women; and the pain of the experience led Peel to change direction.

The cruelty of dementia is that it turns the familiar into the unknown and friends into strangers, and it does it again every day. As Polo says to Khan in Calvino’s novel of one city: “it knows only departures, not returns.”

Peel explains:

It started with Italo Calvino, just because it was a book that fascinated me with the mapping of the cities. Maybe part of the reason I was obsessed with these imaginary cities was that I was imagining where my grandmother was on the map in her mind. A lot of people, when they have dementia, often forget their way home. That tied in perfectly, and it became a bit of an epiphany into why I was obsessed with it.

4The suffering of those living with dementia is mirrored by the pain of those close to them. Both sides are reflected in Peel’s material, starting with “Octavia,” a track named for one of Calvino’s cities which happens to be strung over an abyss. In a way reminiscent of Test Dept’s combinations of industrial rhythms and folk songs in Shoulder to Shoulder, “Octavia” pulses and shudders under an angelic chorus. The crackle of electricity and the grinding of gears are straight from Russolo’s musical manifesto on the art of noises, but in Peel’s hands signal empathy rather than aggression; they might be the sounds of urban activity or inner chaos.

In the beginning, says a different album title, there was rhythm. According to neuroscientists, the response to the beat comes from a different part of the brain than melody or language. It belongs to the more primitive centres that are associated with instinct. The shift towards complex and pronounced rhythms in the second half of the album might have been an intuitive development. Peel reflects:

It just seemed to feel natural – the layering of things and not necessarily being completely straight in time was really important. Sound effects include things I’d recorded like doors and everyday sounds – there is a clock on there. It just felt like the natural way to go. It kind of blends in, so it doesn’t feel like you are listening to a heavy track. When you blend it with everything else, it becomes more trance-like – like a dream state.

This effect is most pronounced on “Foreverest,” which ultimately develops into a danceable groove treading similar ground to Goldfrapp. To get there, though, you have to pass through the title track, which is devastating.

“Awake But Always Dreaming” begins with manipulated voices, and it clearly represents the disorientation of the dementia sufferer. The crackling sounds now more directly evoke the firing (or misfiring) of synapses. Peel resists the temptation to take the literal route, applying sensitive piano passages instead of string stabs, and the effect is hallucinatory. The intensity of the listener’s response is provoked by the very deftness of Peel’s touch.

The sculpting of this material took place in London and Ireland with the help of Peel’s collaborator, Erland Cooper. Of Cooper, Peel says:

The relationship we have is so natural. If I say, I want to do this, I want to do that, he will find a way to interpret that and help me to record it and make it sound beautiful. I’m good at all that, and it’s great, but when you have someone to fire off ideas off to and talk to, it is so much better. He’s a great support to me and understands that I’m not necessarily going to write the classic hits.

There are potential hits on this album, however. “All That Matters,” the current single, opens proceedings with a cascading waterfall of sound that shows off Peel’s ability to craft the type of song that gets Radio 6 into a hormonal frenzy. It was a stand-out track at Peel’s recent show in London, and it’s a no-nonsense love song, but on the album it’s also the first step, Peel notes, “gradually leading you into the rabbit hole of the mind.”


Peel is soon to start a two year residency with the Wellcome Trust, which will allow her to interact with artists and researchers interested in dementia. She’s already been looking down the microscope of UCL’s Selina Wray, and the potential for musicians and scientists to influence each other opens intriguing possibilities – not unlike the conversations between Polo and Khan that were Peel’s initial inspiration for the album.

Which brings you to the end of a review of Hannah Peel’s Awake But Always Dreaming. You might have dreamt it, but you won’t forget it. Unless you already have.

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Electronic Summer 2016

by coldwarnightlife
written by coldwarnightlife

The festival trail leads, inevitably and inexorably, towards Gothenburg for Electronic Summer. In its five years, the annual event has acquired a reputation for mixing synth, poptronica, future pop and EBM in a cocktail as potent as the Jägerbombs consumed by attendees.

This year’s event was headlined by bitpop pioneers, Welle: Erdball, as well as dark wave favourites, Das Ich, which gave proceedings a Teutonic edge. Appearances by Solitary Experiments and Wolfgang Flür cemented the overall influence of German music.

The theme was initiated with a Q&A with Flür, who spoke about his experiences as Kraftwerk’s drummer before showing off his DJ set and video presentation.

Wolfgang Flür

Wolfgang Flür

In his book about that time, Flür laments that, although the band adopted the status of “music workers,” rather than musicians, only he and keyboardist Karl Bartos were actually treated as workers: Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider held management positions and treated the other half of the band as their employees. I Was a Robot is partly the painful story of a man who expected some level of humanity and respect from his colleagues, who turned out to have taken from Metropolis not only the combination of man and machine but also the gulf between the classes. He is said (by others – chill out, Ralf) to be under constant legal threat to maintain a distance between his current and past activity, which just reinforces the tragedy for fans who associate him with Kraftwerk’s classic line-up.

Flür had a life after Kraftwerk, and his DJ set is partly a trip through the highlights of his ever-expanding catalogue. It is also a travelogue drawn from his scrapbook, including photos of his time with Kraftwerk and home movies shot by his partner. Those who made it out for his talk and stage show were treated to a rare glimpse behind the veil that set the tone for the rest of the festival.

It has been a year since Sweden’s Ashbury Heights released The Looking Glass Society, so it was great to see them on stage in front of a Swedish audience. The exotic-electronic sound of Ashbury Heights is the most radio-friendly of the artists at Electronic Summer, and songs like “Glow” should be bang up-to-date for receptive progammers.

Anders Hagström’s long-running project has been through several iterations; and, while we still miss Kari Berg’s soaring voice, there is no doubting that alt-model Tea Thimé has settled in as the XX to Hagström’s XY in the line-up.

Leaether Strip are the gentlest, nicest Danes you could ever hope to meet – a couple of teddy bears from the other side of the Öresund Bridge – but once on stage they unleash the Furies. At Electronic Summer, Claus Larsen roamed the front of the stage while his husband, Kurt Hansen, manned the keyboards.

Larsen rolled out a crowd-pleasing set, opening with 1993’s “Don’t Tame Your Soul” and wrapping eleven songs later with another early favourite, “Antius.” In between, the black-clad Swedish audience received a master-class in hard electronics, taking in classic tracks like “Strap Me Down” and The Klinik’s “Black Leather.”

You would never know from the stage show that Larsen was first inspired to dabble with synthesizers by attending a performance of Sweden’s Twice a Man(!).

From Norway, Chinese Detectives entertained the crowds with covers of hits by Divine, Men Without Hats and Pet Shop Boys, among others. Besides Dr Marten’s boots, the one thing that unites the Electronic Summer crowd is a love of classic poptronica, and Desirée Grandahl and Karin Marie Ulvestad-Grandahl held together fashion’s factions with some belting vocals while Per Aksel Lundgreen ran the machines in his tennis kit.

Saft divided some of the audience. The Swedish act dissolved at the beginning of the century, but they reappeared last year with a new single. The reception for the new material and a smattering of live shows encouraged Carl Steinmarck sufficiently to return with a new album in the can. Norrbacka, which came out earlier this year, is a fine set of pop material, and Steinmarck clearly has not lost his touch.

Welle: Erdball wrapped proceedings on the first night. Known for their slightly eccentric appearances and videos, W:E’s music clearly traces its lineage back to the classic Kraftwerk sound, mangled through C64 chips. They had the crowd popping throughout a twenty song performance, which was capped with an encore of “Monoton & Minimal” and “Es Geht Voran.”

The next night, it was Das Ich’s turn to close the live shows, and they did not disappoint their fans with inspired theatrics and heavy-duty beats. Even though their lyrics are in German, there were plenty of voices helping to lift Stefan Ackermann on a comradely cushion.

If anything was missing from this year’s festival, it was a dose of classic Swedish poptronica. Acts like Page and Sista mannen på jorden have been favourites at previous Electronic <Insert season here> events, and their presence offers a foil to the more aggressive EBM flavours on the menu. Consider this an early vote for next year’s programme.

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Black Needle Noise with Kendra Frost – Warning Sign

by coldwarnightlife
written by coldwarnightlife

a1903859190_10John Fryer‘s Black Needle Noise project has picked out many of the best singers from a number of different scenes. The legendary producer and songsmith, who is best known as one-half of This Mortal Coil’s permanent line-up and for his studio work with Depeche Mode, MARRS, Clan of Xymox and others, has been on a tear, working up new songs with spirit, space and sensuality. Featured vocalists and lyricists for BNN have included Jarboe, Elena Alice Fossi and Attasalina, who have impressed Fryer’s songs with new shades of feeling.

BNN’s latest offering is “Warning Sign,” featuring Kendra Frost. The London-based singer is normally found with a bass guitar in hand, alongside fellow bassist Ayşe Hassan (also of Savages), in Kite Base. We spotted the duo warming up for Hannah Peel at an intimate show last year, but it was their video for a cover of Nine Inch Nails’ “Something I Can Never Have” that brought them to Fryer’s attention.

Fryer produced the NIN original, and when he got wind of Kite Base’s version he was taken by Frost’s treatment of the vocals. An invitation to work on a BNN track followed, and the resulting transmission from Fryer’s studio is a mighty signal from the North. The stylisation of This Mortal Coil is the resonance of Fryer’s soul, and it continues to flow into BNN: “Warning Sign” combines the lightest synthetic filaments with flying shards of guitar and depleted uranium beats. The sonic alchemist that he is, Fryer seamlessly blends ecstacy and agony, holding them together with a touch of reverb.

Frost’s contribution is outstanding. Her lyrics are a raw description of anxiety, reduced to its purest elements. Her voice betrays no sense of panic, however, as it flows in layers, soars over Fryer’s driving rhythms, or stretches out to reveal rich textures. Fight or flight might be the normal response to a warning sign, but the better one here is to listen and enjoy.

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Back to the Future with Rational Youth

by coldwarnightlife
written by coldwarnightlife

13776006_1122954561109046_3754904247847262781_nLittle Britain might have decided they have had enough of the European project, but Tracy Howe’s heart still belongs to the continent. The Canadian synth legend’s musical heritage traces a direct line back to Kraftwerk, and his Kling Klang vibe hasn’t weakened since the days when he formed Rational Youth together with Bill Vorn in the early 1980s.

Back then, Montréal was a guitar and black leather jacket kind of place, but Rational Youth were a synthesiser and double-breasted shirt kind of band. They reflected the experience of the Cold War with electronics – at that time, a cultural heresy to match their status as political provocateurs. The gritty, grainy images of missiles, Solidarity’s flag and love inside the Warsaw Pact filled their artwork or lyrics, while Kraftwerkian sequences echoed the anxiety that spread from the fault line between two Germanies.

Their first album, Cold War Night Life, was a synthetic masterpiece. It sat neatly alongside contemporary classics like John Foxx’s Metamatic and Depeche Mode’s Speak & Spell, pioneering a new kind of pop music from electronic circuits. While Kraftwerk had opened the path, Rational Youth developed their own sound, which included Howe’s sing-speak vocal style and fizzing electronics that owed little to the disco template.

Three decades later, as things heat up for Cold War II, Rational Youth are back with a new set of original material. Future Past Tense (Artoffact) represents their first release of new songs since 1999’s To the Goddess Electricity. On the evidence of this EP, the intervening years as a languages specialist and donkey farmer have not cost Howe his deft touch at composing melodies and synthetic hooks. He has also kept a political slant in his lyrics, which have always been prescient rather than didactic – this is, after all, the writer who gave us “Dancing on the Berlin Wall” a decade before German reunification became possible.

The band has evolved over the years. It’s been pared down now to Howe and his partner, Gaenor, who delights with excellent vocals on ”This Side of the Border,” a clever track destined to be part of the classic RY repertoire. Howe is a keen observer of the differences between his own country and the superpower to his south, and it is not only the better standard of chocolate that has caught his attention.

Howe’s deft sense of humour comes through in ”Western Man.” Pointing his (special edition merch laser) finger at the arrogance of empire builders, Howe spies them trying to impose their failed systems on other countries and retorts with driving beats and synth lines in his classic style.

Howe’s style has always been closer to spoken word than power ballad belter, and that is the space he continues to occupy on “In the Future.” A smooth number that easily fits into the later RY canon, it’s another highlight of the EP. This is mature pop that couldn’t be written by Hoxton hipsters for love or money.

“Here It Comes Again” brings Gaenor back into the frame, as the Howes duet in a track that bounces with an 80s pop feel, while “Prison of Flesh” finds Howe developing territory first explored in “Merry Christmas Mary Ann,” a track he dedicated to Gaenor when they were just a couple outside of the studio.

The EP closes with a revamped version of Psyche’s alternative Eurodance hit, “Unveiling the Secret.” Written by the original lineup of Darrin and Stephen Huss, it is signature Psyche, but the song gains a distinctive RY makeover here. It’s a tribute, not only to Canada’s other innovative synth band, but also to the black-clad fans who have kept the flame flickering for electronic music in the years since Cold War Night Life.

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A Whale of a Tale: Moby’s Porcelain

by coldwarnightlife
written by coldwarnightlife

Richard Melville Hall grew up in Connecticut, a beautiful and somewhat tranquil state within commuting distance of Manhattan. Today, it is where hedge fund managers live to escape the crime, grime and taxes of New York; but, for a local teenager growing up in the 1970s, a passion for music meant a trip in the opposite direction.

Hall got his nickname and DJ moniker through a family connection to the author of Moby Dick, a widely read novel about the savagery of the whale trade. Did that have anything to do with Moby the DJ becoming a vegan and animal rights activist? Hard to say definitely, on the account given in Porcelain, his recent autobiography, but abstention and the internalisation of suffering are recurring themes in his life story.

Before there was Moby the global superstar of sync rights, there was Moby the teenaged American punk. This kid was straight edge – a subculture influenced by Christian strictures, which made it big in Salt Lake City – and lived in an abandoned building with no running water. He prayed for forgiveness after having sex and drank soda at gigs.  He smelled bad and didn’t have any ambitions for a proper job, living on oranges and the occasional box of soy milk.

So he started to DJ. Moby got a tape into the right hands and started to play NY clubs. One thing led to another, and pretty soon he was knocking out rave anthems of his own. In the UK, he became known as Moby Go, after his first hit, and for a while things were on the up.

Then he put out an album of American punk songs called Animal Rights. Its sales stank as bad as he did in his abandoned factory days. Rave music died away, along with his audience, and that was almost the end of that dream.

It would have been the end of the road, if Moby didn’t have an accidental ace up his sleeve: Play. An album of mostly danceable pop music with sampled black artists providing the vocals, Play was unconventional but timely. It was just the thing that advertising companies were looking for: the soundtrack for marketing perfumes, cars and real estate agencies.

He doesn’t mention it in the book, but Moby played two shows at London’s Scala when Play came out. The first was half full, attracting some faithful fans and a flock of Daniel Miller’s young acolytes. The second was rammed. The difference between the two shows was advertising – rather, the use of Play in advertisements shown endlessly in movie theatres and on television. Moby reached a new audience through the licensing of Play’s tracks, rather than radio airplay, and the cross-over appeal of his new material was given a turbocharge through this channel.

The rest of Moby’s story, as told in Porcelain, is a series of bad dates, breaking up with nice girls and dabbling in alcohol. The book goes to some lengths to show why Hall’s nickname should have been Dick, as he seems obsessed with recounting where he has put it over his career. Like a defrocked monk, Moby stepped over the lines he had drawn for himself and discovered that there is life outside that imaginary box. Whether the reader needs to know so much about those experiences is a question his editor seems not to have asked.

What is missing from the story, one suspects, is the part of Moby he didn’t think we wanted to hear about: the songwriter who is so prolific he needs to be chased out of his record company’s offices; the performer who plays Joy Division tracks in his sets and gives his own material punk make-overs. Porcelain is the story of a guy who went from the trailer parks of North-Eastern America to trailers parked at the world’s biggest festivals, but there is more still to be told.

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No Strings Attached: Highasakite Live in London

by coldwarnightlife
written by coldwarnightlife

HIGHASAKITE
Village Underground, London
24 May 2016

Highasakite7117_1290_1000There will be a blue plaque mounted on the exterior of the Village Underground one day. It will read, “The site of Britain’s first mass shushing of men blocking the bar and talking over the music to their mates through an entire show.” If there is space, it could mention that this sitting room rebellion took place during a performance of “God Don’t Leave Me” by Highasakite.

You couldn’t hear the less considerate part of the audience during “Deep Sea Diver” or “Golden Ticket,” because the Norwegian band capably filled the venue with danceable rhythms, carrying the vocals of Ingrid Helene Håvi into every corner. The capacity crowd reveled in these and other songs from Camp Echo, their politically-charged third album. A reference to part of the Guantanamo Bay concentration camp, Camp Echo also touches on themes of PTSD and nuclear accidents, but the audience was happy to bounce to beats as heavy as the lyrics.

Håvi’s vocal style bears some comparison to Karin Dreijer’s, but she’s not afraid to explore the ethereal spaces previously inhabited by Elizabeth Fraser. Highasakite’s instrumentation and compositions also cross genres, and there are even touches of folk music evident in the mix. Those long winter nights in Trondheim must provide plenty of opportunity to explore new combinations.

Highasakite remained tethered throughout the show, but they soared with deft melodies and high-impact rhythms that kept people moving through a well-paced programme.

Hands and mobile phones rose in recognition of “Since Last Wednesday,” a single lifted from Silent Treatment, their previous album and a chart-topping smash in native Norway. It would be nice to think that the men at the bar stopped sharing the minutiae of their lives long enough to enjoy it together with the happy punters who made it to the front of the stage, but, you know, this is London.

LINKS:

Highasakite Web site

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Post-Punk’s Not Dead: Here Come The Lines

by coldwarnightlife
written by coldwarnightlife

hull downDepeche Mode fans will know Rico Conning’s name best from the Blind Mix of “Strangelove” or the Black Tulip Mix of “A Question of Time.” Nick Cash will come to mind first as Fad Gadget’s drummer. Jo Forty’s name is less bound up with the heroes of early electronic music; but, together with Conning, Cash and ex-Alternative TV guitarist Mick Linehan, he formed the core of The Lines, a celebrated post-post incubator.

Founded in London in the immediate wake of punk and its DIY culture, The Lines came together when Conning and Forty met on an English literature course. As Conning tells the story:

We both had a strong interest in music. For me, music was probably a stronger interest than English literature. I found the study of music very boring. I didn’t like to study it; just to play it. We decided to start a band. This was around ’76, and a lot of other people in London were focused on the same thing about the same time. It took us a couple of years to get to where we thought we were good enough to put a record out, and we put out “White Night” in 1978.

whitenight_back“White Night” had a long shelf life: besides The Lines’ original, it was covered by both Torch Song and Adult Net. Although Laurie Mayer, the third member of Torch Song, together with Conning and William Orbit, sang the version that appeared on their album, a version also exists with Sarah Blackwood of Dubstar and Client. Adult Net, the band launched by Brix Smith after she left The Fall, took a more indie route with its version.

Although major success proved elusive, The Lines or its members crossed paths with many of the key players in the city’s independent music scene. Recording at Blackwing Studios, they returned one time to find Vince Clarke and Alison Moyet concluding the first Yazoo single, “Only You.” The band had been drawn to Blackwing by the sound of Dome, the Lewis-Gilbert side project, and Conning went on to work with all of Wire as a mixing engineer for “Eardrum Buzz.” That was only one of many assignments given by Daniel Miller to Conning, who became one of Mute Records’ house studio gurus, recording or mixing Depeche Mode, Erasure, Laibach, Renegade Soundwave and Frank Tovey.

Conning recalls:

I had known Daniel, anyway, from the late 1970s, and The Lines were gigging at about the same time, and our drummer was in Fad Gadget’s band. I did know Daniel vaguely, and one day he turned up at Guerilla, where I worked, to mix some Depeche Mode live tapes. He asked me to do a few of the mixes by myself. He asked me to do “Black Celebration.” After that, he asked me to do “A Question of Time.” They were both good mixes, and then the one I did with Daniel after that was a really good mix which I think actually affected the career of the band – the Blind Mix of “Strangelove” – was a pretty important mix for them. It was the main single out here in the States.

It was another Mute favourite, John Fryer, who did a lot of the studio work on The Lines’ first two full-length albums, Therapy and Ultramarine, together with studio boss Eric Radcliffe. Fryer, one of two permanent members of This Mortal Coil, had developed a reputation as an experimental engineer, and his ability to cope with reel-to-reel tape loops, wrapped around the studio premises, was one of the attractions for the band. Like Dome, The Lines played the studio as an instrument, and their sound owes a lot to the creative setting in Southwark.

After those albums, the band went on hiatus. It was never officially dissolved, but the band members all went in different directions: Conning assumed a job as engineer at William Orbit‘s Guerilla Studios and as a member of Torch Song (just listen to his work on S-Express’ glorious “Mantra for a State of Mind” with Orbit to see where he was going); Cash had his Fad Gadget responsibilities; and Forty and Linehan each went on Eastern travels. Although tracks were in demand for compilations and a retrospective was issued in 2008, it seemed a remote prospect that new material would be forthcoming from The Lines.

300x300Fast forward to 2016, then, and one of the surprises of the year is the release of hull down, the third album from The Lines. Although the original demos had been recorded in 1982-3, and some attempt had been made to improve the recordings in 1987 for a potential release through IRS, the material had to be parked until 2004. That’s when Conning digitised the tracks and started to play with them in Pro Tools; blending the versions to create something new and potent.

We tracked down Conning at his Los Angeles base to learn something about the story of the album. He told us:

This is an attempt to realise what we were trying to realise back then, with the benefit of hindsight. All I did, on some of the tracks, was blend very early demos with much later, much more polished, 8-track versions. When I did that, it was a bit of a revelation. In a couple of cases, particularly – I would say “Flat Feet” and “Archway” – I had no idea what to do with those two until I blended the earliest demo with the later thing. With a couple of others – “Raffle” and “Haberdasher” – it was a similar thing, but in those cases the demo starts and finishes the track and the later development is in the middle.

Although the product of work that began in the 1980s, the sound of hull down remains fresh. “Flat Feet,” the lead track, is rhythmically vigorous and filled with enough authentically snappy analogue sounds to stump even the most jaded hipster. “Single Engine Duster” could be a later-era Wire track, albeit with trombone, Linn drum and Chakk-like funk in the mix. “Nicky Boy’s Groove” features Cash’s TB-303 actually playing a bass line – its sound sitting on the cusp of acid house while guitars and synths drift around in dark, apocalyptic swirls.

Proceedings enter ACR territory with “Zoko Am3,” a track based on a live jam. Conning describes his contribution as a duet with a Watkins Copicat echo unit, and the lines-out soar with a prog-like effect, comparable to the early material from Nash the Slash or Steve Hillage. The use of effects continues with “Where Is the World,” a track that was originally laid down to test out various new gear, including the then-current TR-808. Come “Raffle” and the sound is not a million miles from the Guerilla template: arpeggiators glistening over brilliant, dancefloor-friendly bass lines, while Conning’s vocals come and go as needed.

The pace slows down again for “Archway,” which incorporates Cash’s vibraphone and a Hammond organ in a tribute to the road running under Suicide Bridge. It doesn’t lift for the run-out track, “Haberdashers,” but the sound is much more easily located in its time, using Laurie Mayer’s Juno 60 for arpeggiation. The experimentation at the heart of the The Lines is in the clearest relief here, and it is remarkable that IRS didn’t go for it as part of their No Speak series of instrumental albums.

Three decades after the original tracks were laid down to tape, hull down is partly a sign of what could have been for The Lines, but it also contains traces of what has been for its members. More than an artifact, the album is a document for the present, and it’s dense with rich, experimental music that is even better suited to our time.

LINKS:

Rico’s Reel blog

Buy hull down at Carpark Records

The Lines on Facebook

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Random Acts of Synthesis

by coldwarnightlife
written by coldwarnightlife

_Gt2r-9cEric Random‘s role in alternative music is sometimes lost in the liner notes: here he is playing tablas on Cabaret Voltaire’s Micro-Phonies; there he is adding adding texture on the Cabs’ 2×45. He pops up as a percussionist on Psychic TV’s “Love, War, Riot,” producing and playing on the feted Some Bizarre compilation, and standing next to Nico on her tour of Eastern Europe.

That’s a resume of distinction, but the limelight hasn’t shone directly on Random very often. After some dabbling in a band and being a roadie for local heroes, Buzzcocks, he started his recording career in The Tiller Boys, a post-punk incubator that played on the same bill as Joy Division and also counted Peter Shelley as a member. Needless to say, it was Shelley, on his way from being a Buzzcock to a Homosapien, who got most of the attention.

Random’s first solo release, an EP called That’s What I Like About Me (reversing a line from a hit by The Knack that was then in the charts), was named Single of the Week by the NME in 1980. It was a promising start, but critical acclaim and commercial achievement took divergent paths. Random’s style was deeply underground, and what success he enjoyed was entirely subterranean. Subsequent releases included albums on New Hormones, Cabaret Voltaire’s Doublevision imprint and FON, as well as a smattering of tracks for Plurex and Touch. The people he connected with were more ACR than A&R, and after travels abroad his interest veered from the industrial to the Indian; the trail of recordings never leading towards the charts aimed for by label-mates like Chakk or Krush.

That isn’t to say that Random didn’t have an eye on the dancefloor. The proto-acid 12″ single, “Mad as Mankind,” recorded with Richard H. Kirk and Stephen Mallinder in 1984, was as funky as it was ahead of its time. A synthetic bass sequence and basic drum pattern provided a pulsing framework around which Random erected layers of keyboards, bass guitar, tabla and processed vocals. It was never designed to sit next to Heaven 17’s “Let Me Go,” but it was no less sophisticated.

Fast forward to 2016, skipping over tales of compilations and live work only for brevity, and Random has again set his sights on the alternative dancefloor. Words Made Flesh provides a dozen slices of exceptional dance material. The real reason Avicii retired might be that he decided he couldn’t do anything as groovy as “Phobic,” and William Orbit would probably find affinity with “Arc Light.”

The year isn’t half over, but Words Made Flesh is a serious contender for the album of the year. The acid bites of “Let It Go” are a reminder of the power of the accent in an 8-step sequence, while there is real magic in the more sinister “Go Figure” – the latter a collaboration with Stephen Mallinder. There are Eastern influences in “Conspiracy Complete” that represent a complete update of the experimental sound that came from the Cabs camp back in the 80s. Will this break Random’s pattern of excellent material being given more recognition from peers than the public? Only if there is any justice left.

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Wire’s Psychedelic Interlude

by coldwarnightlife
written by coldwarnightlife

5ac18287-b443-466a-9c30-686ba909c7cdWire‘s residency in Islington last year, as headliners for the DRILL:Lexington festival, showed off the songs sculpted into their eponymous, fourteenth studio album. Hewn from sonic granite, Wire was a unique out-take from the art-rock outfit’s forty-year career; but then, each of the preceding releases has followed a different course. Change Becomes Us, said the title of the thirteenth studio album, and change is the only constant in the band’s trajectory. Even if there is a distinctive Wire sound and they inhabit the same planet as the rest of us, they follow a less predictable orbit and make better use of space.

The proof is in the pressing: Nocturnal Koreans, the fifteenth studio album, is a breezy set, floating on gentle whispers and propelled by more insistent gusts. There are folk-psychedelic airs blowing through the vents of “Dead Weight,” on which vocal tasks are shared by Colin Newman and Graham Lewis, and the material is far from the post-industrial urgency of their Send-era tracks. There might be echoes of Newman’s Wiltshire upbringing in the studio work, as even the fuzz of “Still” opens up into plains as wide as a cloudless English sky.

The songs on Nocturnal Koreans started life as songs left over from the Wire sessions, but they were subjected to revision in the studio until they emerged from their hard-drive chrysalis. Newman explains:

The WIRE album was quite respectful of the band, and Nocturnal Koreans is less respectful of the band—or, more accurately, it’s the band being less respectful to itself—in that it’s more created in the studio, rather than recorded basically as the band played it, which was mostly the case with WIRE. A general rule for this record was: any trickery is fair game, if it makes it sound better.

As heard in songs like “Pilgrim Trade,” the studio wizardry that Newman has mastered in his years as a producer is spell-binding. There are dreampop artists who can only imagine the spectral conjuring that Wire are capable of. At 25:57, Nocturnal Koreans is the briefest of trips, but it bears repeated listening to appreciate the subtle shades of psychedelia embedded in “Fishes Bones” alone.

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