Daniel Miller

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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Industrial Film for Industrial People

by coldwarnightlife
written by coldwarnightlife

BFI, London
8 May 2015

The world premiere of a new feature film about industrial music brought out members of Throbbing Gristle and Test Dept, along with a tattooed and booted audience keen to see footage of TG, Non and Z’ev. What they got was a 52 minute trawl through the archives, original interview footage, a live Q&A with the film-makers and Chris & Cosey, and a DJ set from the original British metal-bashers.

imageIndustrial Soundtrack for the Urban Decay is a French independent production, created by Amelie Ravalec and Travis Collins. Its premise is that industrial music – the experimental style that is characterised by harsh sounds, cut-up lyrics, the use of found sound, and so on – was born amidst urban decline as the counterculture of factory workers or unemployed youth. The story is told by many of the prime movers from the scene, including Genesis P-Orridge, Chris & Cosey, Boyd Rice, Stephen Mallinder, Graeme Revell and Dirk Ivens. Most of the interviewees are from the UK, so their reactions to the Thatchist police state of the 1980s are key to the narrative, but there is also space given to Vale from Re:Search and the Belgian founder of Sordide Sentimental, who publicised the industrial scene for the love of its art.

The term, industrial music, came from Throbbing Gristle, who created the Industrial Records label to issue their own music and that of artists like Thomas Leer and Robert Rental, Monte Cazzaza or Sweden’s Leather Nun. Adopting the communications style of corporations and popular culture reference points like Greatest Hits albums, they subverted the mainstream by injecting themselves into it. In the film, P-Orridge explains the coining of the term as a branding exercise, alongside the adoption of the band’s lightning flash logo, but the film and its participants steer clear of any pedantic discussion about what is truly industrial.

There is little in the film that will surprise long-time followers, and footage from the Rough Trade tour showing Robert Rental perfoming with Daniel Miller or clips of Cabaret Voltaire’s TV appearances, promoting their first album for a major label, can be easily found on Youtube. Fans who know the music will appreciate hearing “their” genre used in a feature film, but it rolls past quickly in a blizzard of clips that don’t always correspond to the soundtrack. Completists will point out that the film misses the chance to look at artists like Zoviet France, Muslimgauze or Severed Heads, so that the picture is somewhat distorted for less-informed viewers, but the producers explained that they were constrained by their budget and chose to focus on the artists they were able to interview.

The choice of several tracks from CV’s Crackdown album invites questions about the interface between industrial music and pop, but the opportunity is passed over. That is unfortunate, as many of the artists being highlighted made material intended for a more commercial audience – SPK’s “Metal Dance,” much of CV’s later output, Chris & Cosey’s “October Love Song” or Test Dept’s “New World Order” all provide examples – and it would have been interesting to hear their views about the creative limits of each genre.

Those quibbles aside, Industrial Soundtrack for the Urban Decay is an entertaining, accessible and informative run-through of industrial music’s history. Its running time means it can be squeezed onto Sky Arts, but for now look out for it on the festival circuit.

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Shine On: John Fryer

by coldwarnightlife
written by coldwarnightlife

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]When John Fryer knocked on the doors of Blackwing Studios in South London, looking for a job, he didn’t know that he was walking onto history’s stage. On his first day of work, Daniel Miller was using the space to record covers of rock standards for his Silicon Teens project. As Miller found more artists for his Mute Records label, Blackwing became his go-to studio and Fryer graduated from engineer (usually alongside studio boss Eric Radcliffe) to producer. Look closely at the credits for Depeche Mode’s Speak & Spell and A Broken Frame, Fad Gadget’s first three albums or Yazoo’s Upstairs at Eric’s – Fryer’s name is there. He wrote and performed on the seminal Fad Gadget album, Under the Flag, and provided the definitive mixes for numerous Depeche Mode recordings.

4AD, another independent label that played a key role in shaping the styles of the 1980s, also found its way to Blackwing and Fryer. While often given assignments to produce artists like Cocteau Twins, Lush (to whom he introduced the magic of distortion) and Clan of Xymox, Fryer was also one of only two permanent members of the 4AD house project, This Mortal Coil, together with label founder Ivo Watts-Russell. They redefined the sound of late night listening, fusing romanticism and darkness in a way that made love and pain part of the same sonic palette. The Mortal Coil project drew in key figures from 4AD’s roster, recast and reimagined its own songs or cover versions, and could be said to have been the label’s heartbeat.

ThisMortalCoil.ItllEndInTears.posterFryer’s work attracted the attention of Trent Reznor, who picked him out for production work on Pretty Hate Machine, the album that launched Nine Inch Nails. Other artists followed, from Vancouver’s Moev (who spawned the Nettwerk label, home to Skinny Puppy and Sarah McLachlan) to Sweden’s Ashbury Heights, looking for a touch of the studio magic that had made Fryer’s previous work so successful.

Fryer hasn’t stopped producing, but these days he’s also involved with some musical projects of his own. In 2011, he released Noise in My Head, an album with vocalist Rebecca Coseboom, as Dark Drive Clinic, which included the contagious “Silhouette.” His new project, Silver Ghost Shimmer, a duo with Pinky Turzo, has released two videos with songs infused with ultra-retro stylings.

Muricidae, a collaboration with Louise Fraser, offers a tantalising refresh of the chorus-and-delay sound that made This Mortal Coil and The Hope Blister so intriguing. The visuals for Muricidae were developed by Roxx of San Francisco-based 2spirit Tattoo. The choice of a tattoo artist over a commercial artist reflects the maverick spirit that Fryer brings to his creative work.

He is also working with Chrysta Bell, who has previously collaborated with David Lynch. A recent series of shows by the Czech cult band, Vanessa, found Fryer rocking out on stage, as well.

John Fryer is presenting a rare DJ set, covering his work for Mute and 4AD, at the upcoming event, A Secret Wish (London, 19 April 2015).

10. Depeche Mode – Just Can’t Get Enough

Fryer worked on the first two Depeche Mode albums, together with Eric Radcliffe, and provided mixing support on several later releases. Speak & Spell was the record that made them a global force, propelled by Vince Clarke’s infectious pop songs and a distinctive sound that distinguished them from the po-faced stoicism of Ballard’s synthetic children, John Foxx and Gary Numan. One of his distinguished credits is for the second single from Speak & Spell, which has become an 80s icon in its own right.

9. Fad Gadget – Life on the Line

Fryer produced two albums for Fad Gadget. Under the Flag, which came out in 1982, refined the instrumentation to keyboards, drum machine and voices, creating an organic sound that tied together a string of classic songs, including “Love Parasite,” “For Whom the Bells Toll” and this track, which Fryer co-wrote with Frank Tovey.

8. Cocteau Twins – Sugar Hiccup

It’s not Fryer’s fault that Elizabeth Fraser sounds like she’s singing the line, “Sugar hiccup my Cheerios.” Her vocal style, while beautiful, can also be impenetrable. Apparently, the correct line is, “Suggar Hiccup, on she reels,” inspired by a racehorse of that name. In any event, the ethereal, misty guitar drones and soaring lead lines of Cocteau Twins owe a lot to Fryer’s studio craft.

7. He Said – Pump

The story is sometimes told that, among Wire’s members, Colin Newman was the conventional one balancing the uncommercial artistic experiments of Graham Lewis and Bruce Gilbert. That is a little too neat a description, which is probably based upon a comparison of Newman’s solo material to some of the Lewis-Gilbert releases as Dome, Kluba Kupol and P’o. The truth is that the three musicians are equally capable of recordings that fit pop structures, but they all resist conventions to different degrees at different times.

Of the group, Graham Lewis’ place along the continuum has most consistently been at the balancing point between beauty and obscurity. This single, released in 1986 as a He Said project, leans more to the former. With Angela Conway providing backing vocals (see AC Marias, below), “Pump” is a sophisticated but unpretentious pop track. Fryer’s studio work gives the song both warmth and room to breath.

6. Clan of Xymox – Stranger

Dark electro warriors Clan of Xymox were an important signing for 4AD, but it was through John Fryer’s remix work on two tracks – “A Day” and “Stranger” – in 1985 that the Dutch band found their way into the alternative dance clubs. Layered with sampled and processed choral lines and propelled by a rhythm track that is never tiring, “Stranger” is like “Blue Monday” for Goths.

As singer Ronny Moorings remembered for Unruhr, at the time of Xymox’s Best Of compilation:

The mixes were done in London’s Blackwing studios with John Fryer being a co-producer. These studios had already then a name for having bands like Depeche Mode and Erasure always recording their albums there. Nine Inch Nails even wanted to record with John Fryer after listening to our records!

5. Wire – Eardrum Buzz/Ahead

As a mixing engineer, Fryer has helped to shape the sound of many iconic records, from M/A/R/R/S’ “Pump Up the Volume” to Pete Murphy’s “Final Solution.” These two tracks show off Wire’s live sound and were released as part of a limited 12″ single to accompany “Eardrum Buzz” in 1989.

4. AC Marias – Just Talk

AC Marias was the short-lived project of Alison Conway, who recorded a single album for Mute, together with her then-boyfriend, Bruce Gilbert of Wire. The production credit for the album is given to a super-group of John Fryer, Paul Kendall, Gareth Jones and Bruce Gilbert. The roles aren’t elaborated, but Paul Kendall recalled to Wireviews:

One of my favorite records of all time. I was a bit sad that I didn’t get involved in the mixing process, but I think John Fryer did an absolutely marvelous job. The pecking order of involvement, if you discount Bruce, was Fryer, me and then Gareth Jones. I did a lot of recording and experimentation with the sound and Fryer just pulled the whole thing together. He also did all the vocal recording.

Gilbert was himself a significant influence on Fryer, and they worked on a number of iconic recordings together, including those of Dome and Duet Emmo. Fryer was also in the chair for the soundtrack commissioned from Gilbert by dancer Michael Clark, The Shivering Man.

Conway went on to focus on videography, making music videos for Mute and other artists, but she left behind a sterling sonic legacy of her own.

3. Muricidae – Away

With LA-based Louise Fraser on vocals, Fryer has refreshed the atmospherics of This Mortal Coil and The Hope Blister for a new project, Muricidae. Named after the rock snails that leave behind complex and attractive shells for interior designers to find, an EP is on the way in the spring. As this early release hints, there is more space(echo) to be explored.

2. Silver Ghost Shimmer – Soft Landing

The strength of Fryer’s own songwriting comes through clearly in another of his current projects, Silver Ghost Shimmer. Another California singer, Pinky Turzo, provides the vocals for SGS. “Soft Landing” was the first release for SGS, and it combines elements of The Shangri-Las with decayed glamour in a smudged-lipstick kind of way.

1. This Mortal Coil – Song to the Siren

Originally recorded by Tim Buckley, “Song to the Siren” in its This Mortal Coil incarnation is widely regarded as one of the most perfect pop songs ever released. Featuring Elizabeth Fraser of Cocteau Twins on vocals, the pain and poignancy of the original is lifted to serene heights in Fryer’s hands. It is immaculate iciness incarnate.

 

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Shine On: Frank Tovey

by coldwarnightlife
written by coldwarnightlife

fadgadget11

Frank Tovey made art ahead of its time but didn’t stay long enough to see the world catch up to it.

As Fad Gadget, his gadfly alter ego, Tovey came to attention by marrying electronic music to performance art, using it as a vehicle for biting political and social criticism. He wrote about the devastation of the environment (“Pedestrian.” “Wheels of Fortune”), the use of the working class as cannon fodder (“Life on the Line”), consumer manipulation (“Swallow It”) and patriarchy (“Saturday Night Special”) with cutting insight. Although, as the first signing to Daniel Miller‘s Mute Records imprint, he was closely associated with synth music, Tovey’s humanist instincts eventually led him to eschew keyboards and sequencers and wash off Fad’s stage face, searching for a musical form better aligned to his social concerns. Commercial success eluded him, though he left a trail of critical plaudits, and he could only look on as those he inspired overtook him in the charts.

As a live act, Tovey was notorious for total performance, and on occasion he would have to be helped from the venue with broken limbs or patched up after colliding with equipment. He gave the audience part of his soul but also his body, as he swang microphones around his head, tore hair from his body or leapt from speakers. This commitment made performing as Fad Gadget a punishing experience, but it also contrasted with the robotic alienation affected by many of his Futurist contemporaries. As a student of mime in the mid-70s, Tovey had learned to use physical movement to get his point across, and as a singer he put that experience to unrestrained use. Boyd Rice of NON noted:

He was a great performer. You know, the other people doing electronic music were kind of standing there cold and emotionless where he was being over the top, running around the audience screaming, yelling at people. I don’t think the like of that has been seen in electronic pop since.

Tovey passed away in 2002, shortly after reviving his Fad Gadget persona. He left behind a young family and a legacy of music characterised by both experimentation and integrity.

10. Fad Gadget – Pedestrian

The first Fad Gadget album, Fireside Favourites, was recorded at Blackwing Studios, which was the main base for many classic Mute recordings in the first half of the 1980s. Daniel Miller had discovered the studio, in a church south of the Thames, when looking for a facility with sufficient space to set up the synthesizers for Silicon Teens. The studio’s owner, Eric Radcliffe, and his assistant, John Fryer, are credited with performance on the album, as well as production and engineering duties.

The songs on the album are not exclusively synthetic, and Tovey’s approach to the vocals is engaging. This confounded the expectations of some who identified Fad Gadget with the machine-driven, stoic stylings of the Futurists like John Foxx, Gary Numan, and even Miller in his incarnation as The Normal. The general trend might have been towards Kraftwerkian alienation, but Tovey’s own tendency was towards humanisation: his “Pedestrian” hero is fighting for space in a world clogged with traffic, instead of watching cars burn in Ballardian images.

9. Fad Gadget – Ladyshave

“Ladyshave” was released as a double-A sided single in 1980, paired with “Make Room,” following the Fireside Favourites album. Named after a depilation device aimed at women, the song reflects a feminist critique of body image pressures. Its backbone is a repetitive sequence, based on a single note repeated eight times to a bar, over which layers of synth runs and a sinister bass line come in, while Tovey purrs his anticonsumerist message. It is a work of absolute genius that still stands up today.

8. Fad Gadget – Swallow It

Taken from the second Fad Gadget album, the John Fryer co-produced Incontinent, “Swallow It” is a bass groove with a serious message about accepting the authority of media and a social role as a consumer. Tovey’s lyrics cut to the quick, but it’s the rhythm section that carries the moment here, even if it does make it a little bit like dancing to Noam Chomsky.

7. Fad Gadget – Love Parasite

Under the Flag, which came out in 1982, in the shadow of the Falklands conflict, is arguably the Fad Gadget meisterwerk. Produced by John Fryer and featuring Anton Corbijn imagery before U2 and Depeche Mode got in on the act, the album is stripped back poptronica, balancing choral tones (with input, notably, from Yazoo’s Alison Moyet) and sequenced electronics to devastating effect. There were two singles released from Under the Flag, including “For Whom the Bells Toll,” which featured this track on the reverse. “Love Parasite” is a typically off-centre expression of Tovey’s experience of becoming a father, in which he is cast as a loving anthropologist.

6. Frank Tovey – Ricky’s Hand

The original version of “Ricky’s Hand” was released as a 7″ single in 1980. It is an essential step on the path of British electronic music, combining an octave-jumping sequencer and a Black & Decker power drill, glued together by unique sounds crafted from Daniel Miller’s ARP 2600. Tovey’s lyrics are in a simple story-telling tradition, charting the uses of a hand that was separated from its owner after an episode of drunk driving. The darkness of the theme was one of Tovey’s connections to the alternative music scene, which later found full expression with “Collapsing New People.”

This version is actually an acoustic rendering, released as the B-side of “Sam Hall” at a time when Tovey was exploring the traditions of rebellious folk songs, such as those popularised by Pete Seeger during the Great Depression. Adapting the track to the style of Irish rebel music gives it a curious feel, which highlights the attempt by Tovey to move in a popular direction – in a political rather than a commercial sense of the term.

As a bonus, here is Fad Gadget miming to the original single on Belgian television. If you look closely, you can see Jean-Marc Lederman of The Weathermen and Mari & The Ghost playing the role of a synth player. Lederman was part of Tovey’s original live band.

5. Frank Tovey & The Pyros – Worried Man

By 1992, Tovey had refined his post-electronic style into a fusion of blues, folk and rock. He recorded Worried Men in Second-Hand Suits, one of his finest albums, with The Pyros, an Irish bluegrass band that had relocated to London. “Worried Man” is premier-league material: Tovey’s vocal delivery is touched with a plaintive quality, while mournful guitars stretch out anxious notes. Given the tentative economic situation Tovey typically found himself in, it’s hard to imagine that there wasn’t an autobiographical impulse behind the song, but the richness of his poetry and story-telling comes through with a sense of wider sense of dread:

Wears a hat to protect him
from the sky
But there ain’t no leather
can protect him from the earth

4. Fad Gadget – Collapsing New People

The fourth Fad Gadget album, Gag, was recorded at West Berlin’s Hansa studios. Daniel Miller had discovered that recording in the walled city was economical, compared to arrangements back in the UK, and British engineer Gareth Jones (who had worked on John Foxx’s Metamatic album and was on-board for Depeche Mode’s Construction Time Again) liked it there. At that time, Berlin was an alternative music centre, with groups like Einstürzende Neubauten subverting pop music with an industrial aesthetic while hard drugs freely circulated. Tovey and team absorbed the environment and reflected it back through “Collapsing New People,” which celebrated the sounds of Neubauten while gently mocking the scene:

Takes hours of preparations
To get that wasted look

3. Frank Tovey – Luxury

“Collapsing New People” became an underground hit for Tovey, but he never managed to break out of the box that the music industry had put him in. A valiant attempt was made in 1986, when Tovey first shed Fad’s skin for Snakes & Ladders, an album made under his own name. Featuring songs written by Daniel Miller, and with Eric Radcliffe, Flood and Miller all playing studio roles, the album had clear commercial intent; but, despite the catchiness of the lead single, “Luxury,” it failed to penetrate the mainstream. It was the first and last time that Tovey aimed in that direction, and his subsequent work became part of a search for authenticity along completely different lines.

Some of Tovey’s frustration has been captured in this German TV clip, in which he reacts to being asked to mime to a recorded track.

2. Frank Tovey & Boyd Rice – Extraction 7

Back in 1981, Tovey found himself in Blackwing Studios with Boyd Rice of NON. Rice, a controversial figure in the industrial underground, was a friend of Daniel Miller and a fellow Mute artist. The results of their collaboration didn’t see the light of day until 1984, when Mute put out Easy Listening for the Hard of Hearing, and many were baffled by it. Rice explains that Tovey had wanted to do something more abstract than his poptronica work, while Rice was interested to make poppier music. They performed the material live in 1985, but this was deemed to be of specialist interest only and the project attracted little attention from the mainstream.

1. Frank Tovey – Back to Nature

The first Fad Gadget single was a science fiction-inspired commentary on the devastation of the environment. Ecological themes had come up in electronic music before – Cerrone’s “Supernature” being just one example – but Tovey’s approach was to write a love song set within the domes used to take refuge from the polluted world. It’s a dark, brooding track with Miller’s influence clearly in evidence in the instrumental lines, including rhythm sounds familiar from his live show as Robert Rental & The Normal. It’s just too bad the warning wasn’t heard in time.

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Shine On: Vince Clarke

by coldwarnightlife
written by coldwarnightlife

yazooBorn in the suburb of South Woodford and raised in Basildon, Vince Clarke could have ended up as a cab driver or worked at Ford’s Essex plant, but instead he founded three of the world’s most successful pop groups: Depeche Mode, Yazoo and Erasure.

It was his charismatic, blue-eyed friend, Robert Marlow, who was expected to make it big amongst their Basildon contemporaries, but Simon & Garfunkel fan Clarke proved to be more adept at writing sparkly pop songs. He turned underemployment to his advantage during the early days of Depeche Mode, programming future hits into a sequencer on the sofa or practicing keyboard riffs with headphones on (to avoid annoying his mum).

Today, he lives and works in New York, surrounded by one of the world’s greatest collections of vintage synthesizers, and is revered as the musical genius behind more than three decades of chart-bothering electronic pop hits – from Depeche Mode’s “Dreaming of Me” in 1981 to the latest Erasure album, The Violet Flame.

Along the way, Clarke’s interests have broadened into ambient soundscapes, soundtracks and remixing work. In 2012, he released Ssss, an album of techno-driven instrumentals, with his former Depeche Mode bandmate, Martin Gore. The same year saw a 10 CD box set, The House of Illustrious, compiling more instrumental works – many of them designed for art galleries and dance companies – with Heaven 17’s Martyn Ware.

vinceandericHaving settled into the Erasure groove thirty years ago, it is almost forgotten how the ambitious but impatient Clarke left Depeche Mode just as they were on the cusp of world domination, or that his working relationship with Alison Moyet was so difficult that Yazoo’s second album was recorded in separate studio sessions. Of the latter experience, Clarke told an interviewer from Songfacts, “It was sad, but I don’t think we could have continued working together without probably strangling each other.”

A natural collaborator who likes to work alone; a synthesizer master who composes on acoustic instruments (guitar or piano) – Clarke is a man of contradictions, and some of his best work arguably has been generated by the tension between his pop instincts and the contrasting styles of his musical partners.

10. West India Company – Ave Maria

Blancmange was a duo that came to prominence about the same time as Depeche Mode. They became friendly with Clarke through supporting Depeche on their Speak & Spell tour. In the summer of 1984, Blancmange’s Stephen Luscombe put together this East-meets-West fusion track under the name, West India Company, with vocals being provided by the popular Bollywood singer, Asha Bhosle (who was later name-checked in a popular song by Cornershop). It was recorded at Splendid Studios, set up with Eric Radcliffe on the site of Blackwing Studios, where he worked following the break-up of Yazoo. Clarke set to work with his Fairlight CMI synthesizer, getting credit on the sleeve for “pyrotechnics.”

For the technically-minded, it will be of interest that, in the same year, Clarke showed off the capabilities of his Fairlight CMI for Electronic Soundmaker and Computer Music magazine. His presentation included samples of tablas recorded with percussionist Pandit Dinesh, who had contributed to West India Company’s recording.

9. Billy Ray Martin – Sweet Suburban Disco (Vince Clarke Mix)

Former S-Express and Electribe 101 vocalist, Billy Ray Martin, pulled in Clarke for a remix of her 2011 solo single, “Sweet Suburban Disco.” With Erasure, Clarke has perfected the adaptation of the disco template to contemporary danceable pop, so he would have been an apparent candidate for remixing duties. Less obvious was his match-up with Happy Mondays, for whom he provided one of the remixes of “Wrote for Luck” (the other coming from Paul Oakenfold) that signaled the transformation of Manchester indie into the Madchester rave scene. Clarke has been selective about his remixing assignments, but he almost always finds the sweet spot that infuses a great song with dancefloor magic.

8. Dome – To Speak

Dome was the experimental project of Bruce Gilbert and Graham Lewis, on hiatus from their roles in Wire. Their output features little by way of melody or traditional song structure, but Clarke appeared on their fourth album, Will You Speak This Word, as the operator of his rare and expensive Fairlight CMI synthesizer. The story goes that Clarke didn’t feel comfortable turning over his Fairlight CMI to Gilbert and Lewis, fearing it could be messed up by inexperienced operators, so he found himself on the album as a manipulator of sounds. This track also features the voice of his then-girlfriend, Deb, who was one of the prime movers behind the Depeche Mode and Yazoo Information Services.

7. Absolute – T.V. Glare

After the break-up of Yazoo, Clarke set up his own record label, Reset Records, together with the owner of Blackwing Studios, Eric Radcliffe. The artists released on Reset included Robert Marlow, Peter Hewson, Hardware and Absolute. Robert Marlow was the best-known of the Reset stable, but his Clarke-produced album, The Peter Pan Effect, didn’t see commercial release until 1999. Absolute’s effort is in a similar vein, and is interesting for the recognisable sounds and accents that were extracted from Clarke’s equipment.

6. Vince Clarke & Paul Quinn – One Day

“One Day” veered from Clarke’s usual formula. It was sung by Paul Quinn, the singer from Bourgie Bourgie, and incorporated a synthetic string sound that is a rare reminder of Clarke’s childhood violin training. The Cold War-influenced video featured the unlikely image of Clarke holding a semi-automatic rifle and manning a border post. The single just dented the Top 100 on its release in 1985, but its moody, brooding feeling has made it an enduring favourite for fans of Clarke’s music.

5. The Clarke & Ware Experiment – House of Illustrious (Extract Three)

In 1999, Clarke released Pretentious with Martyn Ware. A second collaboration appeared in 2001, Spectrum Pursuit Vehicle. In 2012, a box set of their joint work appeared, gathering both albums and adding to them no less than eight CDs of material accumulated from commissioned works. Clarke has described the early Human League albums, before Ware left to start Heaven 17, as key influences on him, which showed how electronic music didn’t have to be emotionally cold.

4. Erasure – Stop!

The project with which Clarke has been most closely associated for three decades, Erasure, was not initially a great success. Andy Bell, a women’s shoe salesman, auditioned for Clarke, producer Flood and Mute Records boss, Daniel Miller, after dozens of other singers had been rejected. Their first album together, Wonderland, made it into the lower rungs of the Top 100 in the UK, but the band’s first three singles failed to achieve the commercial success or reap the critical praise that Yazoo had won. Touring and refinement of their sound built up Erasure’s profile, and a string of chart-topping releases firmly established them as a world-class act.

The Crackers International EP came out in time for Christmas in 1988, sporting a sleeve inspired by a Soviet propaganda poster and led by a high energy track that has become a crowd favourite. With its bright, synthetic brass and seasonal bells, pulsing synths and layered vocals, it’s iconic Erasure.

3. The Assembly – Never Never

Clarke’s original plan for The Assembly was to record an album of songs with different vocalists – a concept that doesn’t sound dissimilar to the British Electric Foundation project of future collaborator, Martyn Ware. Together with Eric Radcliffe, Clarke worked out a scheme for the album, but they were reportedly defeated by the complex licensing and exclusivity practices of the recording industry. The only material to make it to release was 1983’s “Never Never,” which featured The Undertones’ vocalist, Feargal Sharkey, and the instrumental B-side, “Start Stop.”

2. Depeche Mode – Puppets

Everyone has their own view on Clarke’s work with Depeche Mode, which makes it difficult to pick out just one song. While “Just Can’t Get Enough” has become a mainstream classic, more experimental works from Clarke’s time with the band, like “Shout” and “Any Second Now,” have their own appeal. There are some who would argue that “Ice Machine” should have been the A-side of their first single, instead of “Dreaming of Me,” while debate continues whether the version of “Photographic” that appeared on the Some Bizarre compilation was better than the one on Speak & Spell. We selected “Puppets” because it captures the essence of the sound that Clarke designed for the band: simple, repetitive phrases building into elegant, interlocking sections, allowing room for Dave Gahan’s vocals to breathe. They took a different direction when he left, leaving fans to dream of what might have happened if he had stayed.

1. Yazoo – Softly Over

Given the fractious relationship between Clarke and Alison Moyet during the recording of You and Me Both, one might think that there is a reference to their working arrangements behind the opening line: “It’s over, there’s nothing more to say.” Actually, this song is a sweet story of love passing beyond reach, in which the warmth of the electronics contrasts with Moyet’s pained, blues-tinged vocals – just the combination that made an ex-punk and a Simon & Garfunkel fan such a potent combination.

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Shine On: Daniel Miller

by coldwarnightlife
written by coldwarnightlife

Daniel Miller is best known as the owner of Mute Artists (formerly Mute Records, but the original name didn’t come with the sale by EMI) and as The Normal, the artist name used for the release of “TVOD”/”Warm Leatherette.”

The son of Austrian refugees, Miller grew up in North London with a love of Kraftwerk, Can and Neu! and worked as a DJ before buying a Korg 700s and recording his first single. Modest and uncomfortable in the limelight, Miller performed as The Normal with Scottish electronics pioneer, Robert Rental, but found himself happier in the studio and working behind the scenes with his record label than standing on the stage himself.

He discovered and propelled the careers of Depeche Mode and others, but over the years has also been seen lending a technical hand to Thomas Dolby and Soft Cell or producing The House of Love. Miller still records as Sunroof! with his close friend and Mute producer, Gareth Jones.

To launch our new feature, Shine On, we’ve picked out a number of songs to reflect the breadth of Miller’s work as a producer, composer and performer. The constants are a well-developed sense of arrangement, an instinct for unique sounds that are often detuned or shaped in unexpected ways, and a feeling for driving rhythms. These reflect his Krautrock influences but also the effort that comes with closely reading the manuals to his collected synthesizers and then throwing them away.

10. Missing Scientists – Big City Bright Lights

The synthesizer credit on this 1980 release is granted to one “Jacki” and a co-production credit on the A-side goes to “Larry Least,” but both are pseudonyms for Miller. “Jacki” was one of the mythical players in Miller’s Silicon Teens fantasy pop group, while “Larry Least” was a name he adopted as a reference to the producer, Mickey Most.

The reggaetronica style is one that is not commonly associated with Miller, though he was later to contribute to On-U Sounds’ legendary Pay It All Back compilation a few years later.

9. Voice of Authority – Fuh Fuh

When On-U Sound released their first sampler album, Pay It All Back, in 1985, it cost the same as a single and was packed with the juiciest reggae/experimental tracks from Adrian Sherwood’s burgeoning stable of artists. It also contained this short and peculiar composition by Miller, featuring early sampling technology.

8. Thomas Dolby – Radio Silence

In the early 1980s, it was known that, if an artist needed help with some complicated synthesizer set-ups, or the use of a Synclavier, Miller was the go-to person. He did production work with Soft Cell, but less well known is his contribution to this 1982 Thomas Dolby song.

7. Alex Fergusson – Stay with Me Tonight

Another 1980 production effort credited to “Larry Least,” this single from Alex Fergusson (Alternative TV, Psychic TV) is clearly programmed/performed by Miller. At the time, Ferguson was experimenting with the move from punk to electro-pop, a path charted by Mute Records. This single appeared on the Red Records label.

6. Silicon Teens – Sun Flight

Miller’s Silicon Teens project was, for the most part, a series of covers of rock standards, like “Memphis, Tennessee” and “Just Like Eddie,” but it also yielded a couple of original Miller compositions. “Sun Flight” is the one that gets remembered best, as it combines themes of space travel and synths in a way that was not totally dissimilar to a later Mute release, “Fred vom Jupiter” by Die Doraus und Die Marinas.

5. Fad Gadget – Lady Shave

The strength of Miller’s songwriting and production work came out most strongly in his work with Frank Tovey (aka Fad Gadget). Miller took songs written by Tovey and turned them into brooding electronic classics with the menace of punk but a style of their own. The early Fad Gadget singles became an outlet for Miller’s creativity, where he could stretch his one-fingered compositional style to the limits.

“Lady Shave” is an exceptional song from a number of standpoints: the sequenced bassline that carries the song is electro-minimalism incarnate; the studio itself is played to generate tones based on an electric shaver; and the unconventional top line is distinctively Miller.

4. Duet Emmo – Or So It Seems

The most achingly beautiful pop song ever made, we’ve called “Or So It Seems” before, and this collaboration between Miller and Wire refugees, B.C. Gilbert and Graham Lewis, shows Miller at his one-fingered best. Lewis’ vocals are like threads of glass spun around the core of a grumbling bass-line and bells, but the build-up and release of tension in the song is 1982 shot-through.

3. Sunroof – Hero

Miller’s occasional project with Gareth Jones, Sunroof has largely been responsible for covers of Krautrock classics, like this legendary Neu! track. The vocals here are provided by the extraordinarily beautiful Alison Conway, who has appeared as A.C. Marias on Mute and made a number of videos for the label.

2. The Normal – TVOD

If you put out a record by yourself, while living in your mum’s house, the last thing you’d expect is for it to be covered by Grace Jones and adopted as the title for her album. Such was Miller’s luck with “Warm Leatherette,” which Jones’ producer probably heard played by DJ Rusty Egan at the Blitz club.

An attempt to make punk music with synthesizers, “TVOD”/”Warm Leatherette” came out in 1979, while the DIY spirit was still strong, and it is the springboard for everything that followed. We’ve picked “TVOD” for this list, because it gets less attention but shows off techniques like tape cut-up that link the single to the industrial scene that was taking shape at the time.

1. Depeche Mode – Shout

The influence of Miller on early Depeche Mode is very clear from their recordings. While a major label would have polished their sound and image beyond recognition, Mute and Miller brought out the experimental side of the band and gave them room to explore sounds and rhythms that were less obviously commercial. One of the best examples is on this B-side to 1981’s “New Life,” which is driven by sequenced drum-like sounds and the simplest synth line ever.

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Suzi Quatro – Warm Leatherette

by coldwarnightlife
written by coldwarnightlife

So, if 70s glam rock icon and object of Fonzie’s affection, Leather Tuscadero (ok, Suzi Quatro, but that’s how we best remember her), made a version of Daniel Miller’s first single, what would you expect it to sound like? Lots of guitars, some feedback, a stomping beat? Nope.

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Duet Emmo – Or So It Seems

by coldwarnightlife
written by coldwarnightlife

Duet Emmo was a collaboration between Daniel Miller of Mute Records and Graham Lewis and Bruce Gilbert of Dome. One of the most beautiful and haunting tracks ever made, it freezes the feeling of 1982 in 12 inches of vinyl. Lewis and Gilbert’s own post-Wire experimental work was extraordinary in its own right, but when the synthetic expertise and detuned sounds of Miller are added, the result is much more than the sum of its parts.

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At Home with Page, Sweden’s Original Synthers

by coldwarnightlife
written by coldwarnightlife

To viewers of Nordic Noir detective stories, the south of Sweden is a place occupied by disillusioned and lonely policemen, living in houses filled with wooden furniture, surrounded by endless fields of yellow rapeseed. To listeners of Swedish alternative music, it is a region brimming with creative artists, carrying forward the spirit of early European synthesizer bands like Kraftwerk, The Human League and Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark; a place where the flow of electricity from the country’s power-stations keeps analogue keyboards and drum machines humming. Now that a British audience has embraced Wallander on television, through the original Swedish films, surely the time has also come to discover that Skåne’s finest songwriters and musicians don’t just live in the collective shadow of Agnetha, Benny, Björn and Anni-Frid.

page - back in the dayTake Page, the original Swedish synthpop act. Founded in the suburbs of Malmö in 1980, Page were inspired to take up keyboards by Silicon Teens, the alter-ego of Mute Records’ founder, Daniel Miller. The back-story is that, before he discovered Depeche Mode, Miller had dreamed of a teenaged pop group based entirely around the synthesizers that were starting to become more compact and affordable at the end of the 1970s. He set out his vision through a series of singles and an album of rock standards re-conceived using analogue synths, which were attributed to a fictitious quartet of youthful musicians. When these records reached Sweden, Miller’s idea was turned into reality by 18-year old skateboarder Eddie Bengtsson, who was inspired to sell his drum set and buy two Korg synthesizers: one for himself and one for 15-year old Marina Schiptjenko, a classically-trained pianist who had fallen in love with electronic music when she saw Gary Numan playing on Swedish television. Together, Bengtsson and Schiptjenko created a new template for electronic pop, and Page became the house band for a growing audience of dedicated syntare (synthers).

Page’s first recording was the single for which they are best known within Sweden. Dansande man (Dancing Man) was written by Bengtsson and Anders Eliasson, who had joined the band shortly after it was founded. Released on the band’s own label in 1983, the record featured a distinctive hook, which was impressed with the feeling of Slavic folk music. Up-tempo and catchy, Dansande Man caught the attention of the Swedish media as a home-grown version of the synthpop wave then being led by Depeche Mode and Yazoo. Sung entirely in Swedish and released in a limited edition with quaintly hand-painted artwork, the record didn’t reach a wide public outside of Scandinavia, initially, but it has become a synthpop classic for the Minimal Wave generation. If you can find a copy for sale, it won’t be cheap: rare Page records are held onto tightly by collectors.

page2010

The departure of Eliasson for other projects reduced Page to the original duo of Bengtsson and Schiptjenko. Page continued as a live act, frequently appearing on-stage at the Stadt Hamburg venue in Malmö, which was the regional ground-zero for synth music and culture. Because the club lacked a liquor licence, teens were able to attend Page shows, which meant that the growing and youthful base of Swedish synthpop fans had a band to call their own. Even if Page would find commercial success at the level of Depeche Mode or the Pet Shop Boys elusive, within Sweden they shared much of the same audience – and are as highly regarded by many.

After Dansande man, the band released three singles on the Accelerating Blue Fish label. These were collected and updated for their first album, the eponymous Page, together with new tracks and a previously unreleased demo. Put out by Energy Rekords in 1991, Page represents a decade’s work, showing off the rapid and skilful development of the band’s songwriting. Although Eliasson’s legacy is also present, through Dansande man and the delightful Hus av glas (House of Glass), the album is really a showcase for Bengtsson’s pop sensibility. With strong tracks like Mia och Tom (Mia and Tom) and En dag på zoo (A Day at the Zoo), Page were firmly established in the premier league of Scandinavian synthpop. However, by the time the album came out, a credible songbook was no guarantee of commercial success. Without radio support or video play on MTV, Page wasn’t going to be able to compete with U2 and Genesis in the charts. For the band’s syntare fan-base, however, the release of a full album, collecting their favourite songs, was a major event.

Critics greeted the album warmly. Backlash magazine gave it a 4/5 rating, noting:

The style of music is easily danceable synth pop which has its roots in the beginning of the 80s. It’s hard to find any comparators, because Page’s music is its own. Moreover, Eddie Bengtsson sings in Swedish, which is not very common among the Swedish synth bands. He doesn’t just sing well; he also writes great lyrics.

Writing in Zero Magazine, Alexander Elofsson later recalled seeing the release celebrated on home turf:

Stadt Hamburg was totally packed on the evening of the show, and the atmosphere was boiling when Page stood behind their synths and gave one of the most highly-acclaimed concerts in Stadt Hamburg’s history. […] Page were kings of the Skåne synth scene.

They might have been electronic royalty, but Page didn’t rest on their laurels. It took another three years to put the follow-up album together, but Hallå!  (Hey!) was a step change from Page in both the quality and consistency of production. With songs like Fredag för dig (Friday for You) and Nr:12 (Number 12), the band showed that it could keep ahead of the pack stylistically, while maintaining its integrity.

The lead track on the album, Bilmusik (Car Music), was released as a CD-single, and it quickly found a groove with Swedish radio. The single paired the album recording with a dub version, as well as a new dance track called Acid Skate. The latter married the bubbling basslines of acid house to samples from a documentary on skateboarding, which had enjoyed a revival in the 1990s. Bengtsson’s love for boarding is no secret: when he lifts his arms during concerts, he reveals a tattoo showing the evolution of man from ape into a free-style skater. However, he is less committed to making what in America is now known as “electronic dance music,” seeing it as “too easy” and too far removed from the pop aesthetic that interests him. Acid Skate therefore remains a lonely example of 1990s dance music’s influence on Bengtsson’s output.

That’s not to say that the dancefloor wasn’t in Page’s sights. The next proper album, Glad (Happy), followed quickly (by Page standards) in 1995. The opening, electrifying chords of Står i din väg (Stand in Your Way) signalled that, despite the title, the band wasn’t standing still – and neither would the feet of its listeners. Songs like Tiden går (Time Flies) and Jag väntar (I’m Waiting) were dazzling pop tracks, flecked with glam and space disco influences. A close listening to Jag väntar reveals phrasing that owes a debt to the Sex Pistols, put through a set of Korg and Yamaha filters. There just wasn’t (and, arguably, still isn’t) another band making pop music that is so sophisticated in its stylings.

A creative triumph but commercial disappointment, Glad marked a fork in the road for Page. Schiptjenko left to join the philosopher (and future Swedish Idol judge) Alexander Bard in his new band, Vacuum, while Bengtsson’s attention also turned to other projects.

Vacuum was born for radio play, and the group achieved rapid success. Their first single, I Breathe, was released at the end of 1996 and reached number 2 in the Swedish charts within weeks. The album that followed climbed into the Top 20, with Europe-wide airplay and tour dates, including several former Soviet republics. For Schiptjenko, a modest “syntare från Malmö” (“synther from Malmö”) whose relatives emigrated from Ukraine to Sweden after the Second World War, the experience must have been other-worldly. Bard was playing by different rules than the synthpop fans that she had grown up with musically: Schiptjenko describes his style of writing as collaborative but with “hyper-commercial” ambitions.

When Bard started a new band, Bodies Without Organs, in 2003, Schiptjenko was invited on-board. Backed by a major label from the beginning, BWO was wildly popular by Swedish and European standards, reaching pole position in the charts with the single, Temple of Love. The style was amped-up commercial pop, treading ground previously broken by other Scandinavian acts, like Aqua and Dr Alban, but with a knowing wink and a heavy dose of humour. The band achieved heady success, but its members kept their feet on the ground: while Bard had his day job as an academic, Schiptjenko was already established as a dealer of contemporary art through the gallery she owns in Stockholm with Ciléne Andréhn. At the peak of BWO’s popularity, when they narrowly missed out on representing Sweden at the Eurovision Song Contest, she recalls overwhelmed fans coming into the gallery to seek her autograph (“It was cute!” says Schiptjenko).

Meanwhile, back in Skåne, Bengtsson was continuing to build on his reputation as a first-rate songwriter, juggling music with his day job as a teacher. While still in Page, he had started a side project, called Sista Mannen på Jorden (The Last Man on Earth), initially with collaborator Mats Wiberg. The name was taken from the Swedish translation of I Am Legend, the post-apocalyptic novel from Richard Matheson, and its songs reflected Bengtsson’s interest in science-fiction themes. Between 1998 and 2007, SMPJ released four albums of advanced pop music, with futuristic sounds teased from Bengtsson’s collection of analogue synthesizers. While the influences of Giorgio Moroder and Space can be happily detected in many songs, the music of SMPJ is strikingly original and often moving. Bengtsson is creatively fearless: he comfortably sings in a higher register, enhancing the emotional vulnerability expressed in his lyrics, which touch on themes of love and longing; and there aren’t many pop artists who would set the first song of their first release in waltz time with a theremin backing, as he did for En blå planet (A Blue Planet) on Först i rymden (First in Space).

Another channel for Bengtsson’s output was S.P.O.C.K, a science-fiction themed party band that had been put together in 1988 for a friend’s birthday celebration. The original plan had been only to write some songs to be enjoyed by friends, but the concept was hugely popular in the local scene. Live dates and foreign tours followed, with Alexander Hoffman on voal duty. Bengtsson’s involvement was originally limited to writing songs for the band, but by 1993 he had joined the group as “Captain Eddie B. Kirk” and took part in live shows. S.P.O.C.K’s touring schedule became more demanding, and in 1997 Bengtsson gave up his place on stage in order to spend time with his young family and focus on both Page and SMPJ.

In 2004, Bengtsson launched another project, This Fish Needs a Bike. Musically, it was consistent with the SMPJ line of albums, with the difference that the lyrics were in English for an international audience. One popular SMPJ song, Luft (Air), was rewritten, and songs like Putting My Suit On were unmistakably in the SMPJ style. After one album, From A to B, This Fish Needs a Bike ceased trading, and in 2007 Bengtsson returned to SMPJ for Tredje våningen (Third Floor). With a number of different balls in the air at any one time, how did he know whether a new song belonged to one project or another? Bengtsson explains:

It was always hard to know what I was doing – is this a Page song or a Sista Mannen song? Is this a S.P.O.C.K song? But I really tried, every time I was going to do a song – like, with Sista Mannen, I was trying to get into a certain mood for that. When I was doing a Page song, I was trying to get into a certain mood for that. Just to try to make some order for what was what. Sometimes it was hard, but I think, when I look back, that I managed it. If it was Sista Mannen, I tried to do a more spacey sound and the lyrics were about space, but also the style of the sound of the music was more dreamy and space-ish. For Page, it was more pop with a bit of punk and rock influence. And with S.P.O.C.K, there were more Euro and more Star Trek influences.

There is a reasonable case for comparing Bengtsson to Vince Clarke, who had launched Depeche Mode, made two albums with Yazoo and attempted a number of projects, before settling into a long-term relationship with Erasure. Like Clarke, Bengtsson has an instinctive ear for a pop song, as well as the technical skills to draw sounds from analogue circuits with emotional qualities of their own. Their careers in music began at approximately the same time, and they have each spent more than thirty years writing danceable pop without compromising to chase the trends of the day. Both are in demand as remixers – indeed, both have produced mixes for Robert Marlow’s forthcoming remix album – and are known for working alone in their studios to shape electricity into distinctive and catchy rhythms and melodies. Further comparison is perhaps unfair to both artists, because they have followed their own trajectories, but Sweden has not produced another songwriter or musician who comes as close to the influential role played by Clarke in British electronic music.

This much was recognised when, in 2010, designer Johan Wejedel released Tiden går – En hylnning till Page (Time Flies – A Tribute to Page). To the surprise of a humble Bengtsson, a cross-section of Swedish electronic artists recorded enough covers of their favourite Page songs to fill two CDs. Contributors included Candide, PA Tronic, Vision Talk, Norator, New Modern Angels and Diskodiktator. Bengtsson had previously made his own covers for tribute albums, but those were versions of songs by Depeche Mode and OMD – bands whose influence on the synthpop scene was universally acknowledged. With the tribute album, artists wanted to show their love and respect for Page’s music and the band’s place beside those internationally-known bands for the Swedish scene. Maybe Page wasn’t going to crash the file-sharing networks, but it continued to reach and touch music lovers and creators in disproportion to its performance in the charts.

The departure of Schiptjenko had not meant the end for Page. In 1996, Bengtsson made the first album without Schiptjenko, bringing in a drummer and another keyboard player to round out the band. Hur så? (How So? or How’s That?) came out only a year after Glad, but with a shift in its sonic structure that disoriented the public. While the integrity of his songs was firmly maintained, Bengtsson started to introduce fuzzy feedback sounds that replicated the tones of electric guitars. A follow-up, 1998’s Helt nära (So Close), moved even further along that path. Bengtsson explains that the listening public didn’t know what to make of the shift, even though mixing synths and guitars was by then a common pop practice:

I feel like, on those two albums without Marina, I was trying to do something different. I was trying to make more guitar-influenced music, but using only electronics. On the first of those albums, we used no guitars, but people thought it was guitar. So, for the album after that, I thought I might as well use guitars in the music, too. But, for that album, those who liked synthesizers said, “Too much guitar!” The other audience, which liked pop music, said, “Too much synthesizer!” We didn’t reach anyone, really, which was very, very sad because it was good music. It feels like everybody can mix guitars – look at Depeche Mode and other bands – but when we do it, it is very, very naughty, and that is a shame.

The situation was essentially the reverse of Neil Young’s experience with Trans. While the Canadian axe hero had bravely experimented with synthesizers, a large part of his existing fan base was implacably hostile, as they associated synths with sequenced disco music. On the other side, followers of Kraftwerk and Jarre didn’t know what to make of Young’s adoption of their favourite tools.

While there wasn’t a Dylanesque “Judas!” moment, Bengtsson had underestimated the wall separating the subcultures of syntare and hårdrockare (hard rockers). Though there was never any danger of Page turning into Rush or Cheap Trick, neither side was ready for Page to broaden its sonic palette so radically. In fact, both Hur så? and Helt nära contain exceptionally strong songs – like Trans, they are just waiting for their audience, and will in due course be recognised for their exceptional content.

The experience with those two albums convinced Bengtsson to focus on his other projects. Page went quiet, until a live performance at the Swedish Alternative Music Awards in 2000 reunited Bengtsson, Schiptjenko and Eliasson. Intended as a farewell wave to their fans, the show was recorded and issued as a limited-edition CD. With a final “Cha, cha, cha!” and the cheers of dedicated syntare filling their ears, Page had left the stage for good.

Or so the story would have ended, had Schiptjenko not looked at the calendar in 2010 and felt the pull of her roots. BWO was coming to an end. It had been fifteen years since she worked together with Bengtsson, and thirty since two teens in a suburb of Malmö plugged in a pair of Korgs and learned to make music using oscillators and keyboards. Wasn’t it time to make another album? Bengtsson happened to have one in him, and the result was a collection of grown-up pop, made without any pretences or pressure.

Nu (Now) was unashamedly electronic, and this time the album didn’t fall between two cultural stools. The synth scene paid attention again, and TV appearances and live dates followed. Radio, however, struggled to find a place for Nu between the latest Lady Gaga and Coldplay songs, despite the album climbing its way into the Top 40. Schiptjenko explains that this was not a new challenge:

We had a little peak in Sweden in the 90s with some radio hits, but it’s never been super-big. We had always been very popular on the alternative scene, and always among the fans, but we’ve never been a band played a lot on Swedish radio.

It doesn’t bother her a great deal:

I think the reason we are loved so much by the scene is that we were among the first, and we have stayed true to our roots, even if we have developed. We sing in Swedish, we have a certain sound. A big part of it is nostalgia. We created the scene, in a way. We were the first. The syntare and hårdrockare are really loyal to their bands. I also think that the fact that we are not played on Swedish radio is down to two things: it is a little bit prejudice – they don’t really listen – and I also think it is our age. I know for a fact, because I have been talking to those who decide what is going to be played, we are too old. We are not new. They want to find the young audience all the time.

hemma - cover

In September 2013, Page are releasing a new album, called Hemma (At Home). If anything, the sound is more mature than Nu, with songs achieving yet another level of development from the days of Glad. Teasers that have been released on the group’s Facebook page reveal pronounced glam-rock stomping – a trend that began with Page’s cover of Slade’s Coz I Love You for The Seventies Revisited, a charity compilation that came out last year, and continued with the “Glamtronica” remix prepared by Bengtsson of a new Robert Marlow song. New promotional pictures show the duo posed next to a classic synthesizer in an early-20th century drawing room – a synthesis of the modern and the vintage. Bengtsson describes Hemma in these terms:

I think it is even more mature [than Nu], because I am maturing as an individual and a person, so the music is doing that, too – especially the lyrics. The music is actually the kind of electronic music I like. I can’t really say that I like electronic music, because electronic music is such a big genre, and my interest in electronic music is so very, very small. That small piece, that small bit, that’s like what I am doing. I am doing what I like, really, so there is no need for me to take a different direction. I am doing just exactly what I like. Electronic pop music stuff – that is what I like.

Hemma doesn’t completely shy away from the sounds of previous albums, but the guitars have been put back in their cases. Bengtsson again:

This album is purely electronic – like Nu, which was purely electronic, too. I tried to make it even more electronic and some of the songs are very electronic-sounding. Some of the songs are more guitar feeling, because I like that punk attitude and trying to make synthesizers sound like guitars – the arrangement of it. Instead of using Popcorn-ish sounds, I tried to do more grungy electronic sounds that sound like guitars. The way you play a guitar – I try to do that on synthesizers. I think it is very, very funny to do that, really, and nice. There are songs that sound like that, and songs that sound more like Giorgio Moroder – sequencer-oriented songs. All the songs seem to fit together in a way. They really make a whole body.

Will this be the time that Swedish radio finally grasps that they are sitting on a rich vein of home-grown pop music, just waiting for them to mine? Schiptjenko is stoic:

You never know – with this material, perhaps it will come through on Swedish radio, but I don’t think so. We do it for the love of the music and the scene, and it is so much fun, but it is not our main career.

A full tour is not planned, but a video is in the works and live dates are being lined up, starting with a performance at Gothenburg’s Electronic Summer festival. Schiptjenko will also be there with her “pet project”, an “electro-crooner” act called Julian & Marina, which is planning to release its own album shortly. Bengtsson is busy preparing another compilation of cover songs – this time, with a focus on punk rock done in an electronic style – together with artists from the south of Sweden. Page might not be the main career of its members, but only because their creative work is so broad and takes so many forms. It is a wonder that they are ever hemma at all!

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Kord – Tv Poison

by coldwarnightlife
written by coldwarnightlife

Television is a common reference point for electronic music. Mute Records’ Daniel Miller’s early projects often made critical points about its influence (for example, T.V.O.D. by The Normal or TV Playtime by Silicon Teens). Karlskrona’s Kord also have some thoughts, as revealed on this exemplary cold electronic track.

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