Vince Clarke

A New Proposal from Page

by coldwarnightlife
written by coldwarnightlife

The Swedish poptronica leaders, Page, are back with a new EP. Ett förslag [EN: A Proposal] features five tracks – including a remake, a remix, and a cover version – to ensure that the act does not settle into the groove charted by its last album.

The title track is deliciously crafted pop with a curtain of strings rippling behind ersatz guitars. It’s a trick Bengtsson has pulled before (including with the album, Hur så? [EN: How So?]); mixing indie and electro influences without the burden of six-string lugs. We look forward to picking up ironic pick merchandise at the next show. In the meantime, this is a magnificent demonstration of Eddie Bengtsson’s capacity to produce emotive and melodic material like no one else.

Page (Photo: Simon Helm)

A new version of the Page classic, “Mia och Tom,” goes the opposite way and channels early Vince Clarke with bouncy, monophonic synths and handclaps. An enduring favourite in their live performances, the song retains its characteristic charm while benefitting from some recalibration to make it a little less Speak & Spell.

“Glitzerstrahl” hints at Kraftwerk with its reference to the “glittering rays” of the Sun in “Autobahn” and insistent beat. The synths are certainly bright and full of momentum. Someone should collect Bengtsson’s instrumentals into an album for Deutsche Grammophon – they deserve to be enjoyed as a set.

“Om ett tag” [EN: “In a While”], from the last Page album, Inget motstånd, gets a remix from Anymachine, a Scandi act connected to Bengtsson. Retooled from its 8-bit origins, the song breathes comfortably while being faithful to Bengtsson’s playful intentions.

Compute, the project of Bengtsson’s collaborator in The Volt, Ulrika Mild, contributes a cover of another Page song from the same album. In her hands, “Ingenting som betyder någonting” takes on a different palette.

With Ett förslag, Page introduce us to some of their friends and reunite us with an old one. It’s a summer party that can run all year.

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Shine On: Dave Baker

by coldwarnightlife
written by coldwarnightlife

To some people, Dave Baker is that pub pianist who accompanies them on Carpenters and soul sing-alongs at North London venues. To others, he is that DJ with the eclectic collection and the wild hair. Those who read the credits on their record sleeves recognise him as a creator of some of the most elegant and emotionally-resonant synthpop and dance music ever recorded.

Baker is a cofounder of four acts that appeared on Daniel Miller’s Mute imprint. The first, I Start Counting, joined the label the same year that it released “People Are People” by Depeche Mode and “Collapsing New People” by Fad Gadget. Mute was riding a wave of international success and looking for the Next Big Thing. Baker and his musical partner, Simon Leonard, had been in Miller’s orbit for some time – Leonard was an early electronic music artist who, famously, broke up an on-stage fight between Miller and Robert Rental at a Paris show – and they arrived with a clutch of demos that combined pathos and minor key melodies in a way that suggested they could be it.

Miller took them into the studio with his trusty Synclavier. What emerged didn’t change pop chart history, but it was a remarkably creative product. “Letters to a Friend” had the same London creative team that worked on the “People Are People” releases – Trigger at Aosis Studios in NW1, John Fryer at Blackwing, TimTom mastering at CBS. It was a simple love song with a melancholy melody, layers of FM synthesis and sampling, and a quality that ought to have changed the world.

That was an important step for the former keyboard player with the otherwise obscure Sons of Cain. It marked the beginning of a long career with Mute that would see a supporting tour with Erasure, a shift into club territory as Fortran 5, the reinvention of Kraftwerk’s sound palette for Komputer, and various solo and collaborative projects under the names John Came (Ed: Allegedly.), OOO EEE OOO, and LonelyKlown. Through it all, Baker has maintained grounded and engaged. During the Covid lockdowns, he kept the pub singalongs going on Zoom from his base close to the landmarks described in “Looking Down on London.” He also uses special releases of his music to raise funds for stray cats (no, not Jennie Vee’s husband).

Baker and Leonard might not have hit the big time, commercially, but the work that they created has a reach and effect unmatched by many of the interlopers in the charts. Baker’s solo work continues to leave marks that reflect life on the 43 bus, leaving central London clubs, and feeling sentimental about old friends. It’s a growing legacy that can only be measured artistically.

10. I Start Counting – Letters to a Friend

Programmed on Daniel Miller’s Synclavier at his mother’s house in Decoy Avenue, the debut Mute single from I Start Counting announced a duo who were equally at home with pop hooks and experimental texture. Baker has said it was musically inspired by a Culture Club song and lyrically autobiographical – a combination that tells you something about the way the act always held pop and personal reflection in the same hand.

Miller’s production is clean and precise, giving Baker’s understated vocals room to breathe against a backdrop of sequenced synths and measured rhythm. It’s a modest record in the best sense: it doesn’t oversell itself, and it has lasted because of that restraint. Forty years on, it sounds like the confident beginning it was.

9. I Start Counting – Still Smiling

The follow-up single, also produced by and described by Baker as a sequel, deepened the I Start Counting template while sharpening the edges. The extended remix by Miller and Flood – a collaboration Baker has cited with evident pride – stretched the song into something more atmospheric and considered. On-U Sound’s Adrian Sherwood, then at the peak of his remixing powers, contributed a version that pushed the dub influences already latent in the original toward something stranger and more physical. The B-side, “There Is Always the Unexpected,” pointed toward the duo’s future experimentation. It is a rich artefact from an underappreciated moment in Mute’s history.

8. I Start Counting – Million Headed Monster

From the debut album My Translucent Hands, coproduced with Paul Kendall, this track captures I Start Counting at their most compellingly strange. The production layers Baker’s characteristic deadpan delivery against a bed of interlocking sequencer lines that manage to sound both clinical and warm. Like much of Baker and Leonard’s early work, it rewards closer listening than its pop surface initially suggests: the arrangements are intricate; the lyrical observations sharp; and it is excellent played LOUD.

7. Fortran 5 – Time to Dream

“Time to Dream” is constructed around a sample from John Barry’s theme to the film, Midnight Cowboy. Although samples from soundtracks were not original, Fortran 5 married melancholy and momentum in a way that felt genuinely novel. Baker and Leonard always seemed more interested in the emotional charge of a piece of music than in just another 12″ for the clubs, and “Time to Dream” is one of the clearest demonstrations of that tendency. It is cinematic in the best sense: it makes you see something while you listen.

6. Fortran 5 – Heart on the Line

Originally demoed with a sample lifted from the opening of Blondie’s “X Offender,” Heart on the Line went through a significant transformation before release, with vocals provided by members of Miranda Sex Garden. The latter were originally engaged as backing dancers for a Fortran 5 tour; but, when the tour plans came apart, Baker discovered they could sing. He went on to produce the first MSG single in return.

5. Komputer – Valentina Tereshkova

When Baker and Leonard completed their transformation into Komputer in 1996, their stated mission was gleefully straightforward: if Oasis could spend a decade ripping off the Beatles, someone ought to rip off Kraftwerk. The song that announced them most completely was this hymn to Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space. They reframed her story through lyrics written in the biographical style of Boney M’s “Rasputin.”

The track went through an extraordinary early development: an original demo was made with Claudia Brücken, with an entirely different melody and lyric. What emerged on The World of Tomorrow album is pristine and unhurried; cycling through Tereshkova’s achievements with a reverence that feels entirely unironic. Tereshkova’s nationalism and support for Putin during the war with Ukraine has made her a controversial figure outside of Russia, but there was a time when her face appeared on stamps as an image of the future.

4. Erasure – Victim of Love (Komputer Mix)

Released on the Pop! Remixed compilation, this remix is an act of confident reinvention: Baker has recalled listening back to it for the first time in years and finding it “very good,” with the stated aim of making it “sound more Erasure than Erasure.” It’s a characteristically Baker-ish formulation: deadpan; self-deprecating; and also entirely accurate.

The Komputer treatment brings the song into tighter, more mechanical alignment. It reshapes Vince Clarke‘s original production through the Kraftwerkian templates that Baker developed with Leonard. It also closes a circle: Erasure had featured on Baker’s dancefloor radar since the Fortran 5 years, when Clarke provided a “Heart on the Line” remix. Mute is a small world.

3. OMD – The Right Side?

The most unexpected entry on this list comes via Liverpool’s favourite electronic act. When Komputer released a track titled “Looking Down From London,” Andy McCluskey of OMD encountered the recording and heard something in it that he wanted to build on. He contacted Baker to ask permission to use the piece as the foundation for a new OMD song, adding new vocals, lyrics, and melody. The result was “The Right Side?,” from OMD’s History of Modern album. The band kept the Komputer original essentially intact beneath the additions. Baker told ELECTRICITYCLUB.CO.UK that he was “very surprised and pleased” by what arrived.

2. LonelyKlown – Everything I Try to Do Is Wrong

During the Covid lockdowns (Ed: Thank you, Boris), Baker would walk from his home to Leonard’s flat in Crouch End to trade ideas. The song that emerged from one of those exchanges was put forward to Leonard as a Komputer track. Leonard disagreed. It was nice, but it just wasn’t Komputer. Baker asked if he could have it. The result became the most explicit statement of what Baker’s LonelyKlown project could be: exquisitely-wrought electronics over Baker’s own piano work, with a lyric that reads like a report from the funnier end of existential crisis. The deadpan voice that once sung about space stations could now be found contemplating, with serene resignation, the full sweep of man’s inadequacy.

1. Greenhaus feat. Dave Baker – I Can’t Escape Saturday

Greenhaus’ collaboration with Dave Baker on “I Can’t Escape Saturday” shows how comfortably he inhabits a more atmospheric, synth‑driven setting while keeping his songwriting fingerprints intact. The track plays as a story about being trapped in a looped weekend that never quite delivers its promised release. Baker leans on small inflections; turning the refrain into a subtle earworm and giving the song a late‑night intimacy. It’s another sign that the bloke on the piano leading a crowd on “Jungle Love,” down at The Winchester, has his own – and, at that, a remarkable – voice.

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Death and Praxis: The Mortality Tables Project

by coldwarnightlife
written by coldwarnightlife

The Mortality Tables project was born in Bloomsbury in 2019. The result of a conversation in a delicatessen, it has already led to a series of releases with Vince Clarke, Simon Fisher Turner, Rupert Lally, and other creatives. Their briefs from the label are often to take a found sound as a starting point and see where it leads them. The results are – in different weights, depending on the artist’s inspiration and the listener’s responses – charming, disturbing, and rewarding.

The driver behind Mortality Tables is Mat Smith, who splits his time between freelance music journalism and working with insurance companies. The name refers to the work of actuaries, who measure the statistical probability of life insurance payments needing to be made. It is inspired by the biography of Charles Ives, who also split his time between work for an insurance company and creative activity. Ives’ work was discovered and celebrated only after his death – something Smith has contemplated when thinking about the distance between his own creative outputs and the way he is seen by those close to him. Do they read his work? Do they listen to what he releases? Will they see it differently once time has taken him?

Mat Smith

Mat Smith

These questions led Smith to write what he calls “a manifesto with a lower-case m.” On Mortality, Immortality & Charles Ives, which kicked the project off, featured Smith reading the manifesto in Gareth Jones’ studio with musical responses by Vince Clarke and venoztks. The Erasure man had met Smith through an interview with Electronic Sound magazine and stayed in touch.

In one of my many email exchanges with Vince, I said, “I’ve done this thing, would you be interested in putting sounds to it?” And he said, “Well, I’m not really doing very much at the moment. If you want some drones, I can give you some drones.” The idea of Vince Clarke doing drones really appealed. I think he said it in a kind of slightly sarcastic way, but I was really interested in this. What came back – very, very quickly – from him, was a piece that is distinctively Vince Clarke but distinctively not.

The results were a taster of the experimentation that ultimately became Clarke’s solo album, Songs of Silence. With good timing, Smith had found Clarke addressing his own isolation during lockdown through an exploration of new sounds and tools. A born collaborator, Clarke was able to take Smith’s recording to engage with and respond to.

There followed an album of processed samples for Cyclic Demonstrating – an anagram of Strictly Come Dancing – with Xqui. Cyclic Demonstrating took as its starting point the theme music for his family’s favourite TV talent show; the falseness of which also happens to trigger feelings of alienation and sadness in Smith.

A series of releases, linked as a numbered series of “LIFEFILES,” saw Dave Clarkson working on Smith’s recording from a flight to Scotland, Simon Fisher Turner responding to a field recording made in a Midlands church, and Andrew Spackman processing the sounds of clothes-hangers in a bedroom. In each of these, the starting point was something simple. Smith explains:

My field recordings are really basic. They’re pretty embarrassing. They’re basically recorded on the fly in different situations – like where we are [an Italian-themed café]. I have two recorded outside Liverpool Street station very late at night. This place has got its own sound character. I came out one night; there was a lady played mediaeval music outside – and so my natural instinct was to just pull out my phone and record it.

A recent album is a collaboration with Xqui that takes, as its spine, Smith’s reading of a list of the t-shirts that he wore during lockdown. It’s a bit eccentric, but it becomes a naming ritual – like The Dead Milkmen’s “You’ll Dance to Anything.” It describes a subculture that can recognise itself in an eyeball-graphic Residents shirt. Smith might have been isolated by public health concerns, but the t-shirts reflect a connection to a music movement outside of the mainstream – another step removed from the comfort of the herd. Music is invited in response, but there are no set parameters for contributors. “Habit is the input that you then delete,” Smith reflects.

Smith describes himself as “a frustrated creative person –  frustrated because I have ideas and I can’t execute them.” Nevertheless, he has started to revisit his own sounds. On Equilibrium, recorded under the name Sketching Venus in 2000, Smith puts a Casio VL-Tone and a Maplin echo unit to use to create a short piece. It was then copied to a 3.5” floppy disk with a picture file and an explanatory note. The number of copies is limited to the number of disks Smith found when clearing out shelf debris.

In the spirit of the season, Dave Clarkson’s Ghosts of Christmas Past (Music from Vintage Toys) combines recordings of Smith as a toddler with “wind-up toys, tin robots, glockenspiels, dolls, Speak and Spell machines, musical boxes, chimes, Meccano, clocks, clackers, squeaky toys plus more.” The results are a melange of disco and ambient influences. The deluxe CD edition sold out quickly – but whether as artefacts or as pre-wrapped Christmas presents it is hard to say.

To wrap up the year, many of the Mortality Tables contributors sent in their versions of the Strictly Come Dancing theme song that was chewed up by Smith and Xqui at the start of the journey. Cyclic Demonstrating 2023 features Simon Fisher Turner, Moray Newlands, Rupert Lally, Sound Effects Of Death And Horror, Pete Murphy, Audio Obscura, SAD MAN, Alka, venoztks and Ivy Nostrum. The results call to mind the Touch project to create new ringtones for Nokia phones. Play them back as answers to the mindless, alienating rituals of BBC game shows and reconnect to your musical family.

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The Top 23 of 2023

by coldwarnightlife
written by coldwarnightlife

This has been a difficult year for parts of the music industry. Bandcamp, owned by Epic Games, turned on its workers in an attempt to break its union and reduce its size. Moog was sold to inMusic, the owners of Akai and M-Audio, and started its own programme of layoffs. Spotify announced that it would stop paying artists for 2/3 of the songs it makes available. Glume and Xylo announced that they had turned to sex work to compensate for the challenges of making a living in music. Merchandise sales – the life-blood of touring acts – came under taxation by many venues. At the same time, overall revenues continued to rise – data from 2022 showing new record levels of cash flowing towards the monopolies that control live performances, publishing, and recorded music catalogues. Independent labels and self-releasing artists were squeezed for every last drop, while the grabbing hands grabbed all they could. To quote a California millionaire who contributed to a top-selling album this year, it’s a competitive world.

The misfortune is that exceptional music gets drowned out between the cacophony of TikTok and the sanitised celebrities of the Superbowl half-time show. Challenging sounds and radical ideas are marginalised, even as alternative venues are bulldozed to make way for new developments (goodbye, Iklectik). So, what is to be done?

Part of the answer is greater public funding of the arts – and not just the opera. By supporting festivals and other live events, resources can be used to keep venues and performing artists on their feet. Bursaries for artists to be able to meet their bills while creating new works can be an alternative to sex work or other last-ditch measures. Setting fair royalties for streaming of creative works can help to make up for the declines in physical sales. Rules against union-busting can keep skilled workers engaged. Streaming services should be treated like broadcasters and subjected to royalty regulations. None of these should be controversial measures, but the neoliberal assault on public life has, over decades, eroded the foundation on which culture industries stand. Without action, only Live Nation/Ticketmaster, Sony, and Spotify will be left standing. Breaking up those monopolies would be no bad thing, either.

In that spirit, all of the artists in this year’s chart are on independent labels. We encourage you to buy their releases, rather than just stream them. Wear their merch. Go to their shows. Ignore events designed to suck all of the oxygen out of the scene, with “dynamic pricing” and £50 t-shirts sold by multinational corporations. You can do better, and these artists deserve it.

23. CAPPA – Hell of a Time

LA-based Carla Cappa has been working for years, knocking out dreamy pop music with to-the-minute touches. This track demonstrates CAPPA’s commercial sensibility and pop dynamics. One for the car or the dance floor.

22. Aux Animaux – Night

The long night has descended on Sweden, so it is a good time to highlight this track from Stockholm’s aux animaux, which appears on the new Body Horror album. It comes with a playful video and old-school gothic vibes that give a taste of Gözde Düzer’s style.

21. Elegiac – Meet My Stalker

The collaboration between Blurt’s Ted Milton and Wire’s Graham Lewis known as Elegiac first took shape in 2021, but their work was far from finished. This EP is their second release, pieced together by sound artist Sam Britton. It collects revised versions of three songs from the debut Elegiac album, married to this newly revealed piece. 

20. Container 90 – Grand PrixXx

This collection of songs by Container 90 is the duo’s fourth album. It comes as a comic book, instead of a traditional insert, with each page reflecting one of the tracks. Old school EBM lives on through Container 90, and this set draws together their “Eurovision Song Protest,” “EBM Way of Life,” and “Roller Derby Love Affair.” Solid.

19. Sunroof – Electronic Music Improvisations Live in London and Frankfurt

The really fun thing about Sunroof is that two of the most accomplished producers of our time balance on a knife’s edge with unpredictable modules to generate sounds together. There are psychological studies that show band members develop a hive-mind when playing together, but neither Daniel Miller nor Gareth Jones consider themselves musicians. Still, their process of engagement with the sounds (and silences) of the other yields compelling and finessed results. There is a danger with improvisations that threads are lost or egos compete, but neither of these risks has arisen during their performances. The evidence is on this album, which captures shows in London and Frankfurt. The vital flow of electrons, mediated through the hands of the two friends, is something to behold. 

18. Vince Clarke – Songs of Silence

Although Vince Clarke is best known for bouncy pop songs made on monophonic synthesisers, he has a long history of making music on the more experimental side. In particular, his collaborations with Martyn Ware as The Illustrious Company have dabbled in multidimensional sounscapes and material for installstions.

It shouldn’t have been such a surprise, therefore, that a break from Erasure work should have led to the development of Songs of Silence. Billed as Clarke’s first solo album, it is a collection of songs built from drones generated on the units incorporated into Clarke’s Eurorack modular system. It could be standard Cafe Oto/Wire Magazine fare, if it wasn’t for Clarke’s ear, which is tuned in an unusually sensitive way.

17. Lucy Gaffney – Daydream in Tokyo

From Belfast, Lucy Gaffney appeared with a style that recalls the much-missed Delays. Fusing guitar-based rhythms with touches of electronics and a very smooth vocal, Gaffney came up with several great songs this year, but this is our favourite.

16. NNHMN – Circle of Doom

The duo of Lee Margot and Michal Laudarg have worked out how to make dark electro tantalising. The current NNHMN album, Circle of Doom, is laden with elegant, charged and dynamic songs to keep the body moving.

15. Die Sexual – Tremble for Me

The US duo, Die Sexual, released a tremendous debut EP this year. Bound, I Rise is certain to make a number of year-end charts with its edgy grooves. We went for this later release, which goes to show that the EP wasn’t beginner’s luck.

14. Cosmic Garden Project – The Green Reverb

There are some artists who seem to be able to add magic to everything they touch. Dan Söderqvist, the Twice a Man singer, is one of those. This year, he has released two albums and still found time for the Cosmic Garden Project. Bringing together Söderqvist, Per Svensson and Pontus Torstensson, The Green Reverb is a poetic, enchanted journey through ancient forests to the sea. It has a psychedelic flow, but there is a reflective tone to the material, as it contemplates our connection to Mother Earth.

13. Lonelyklown – I Believe in Snow

The solo project of Dave Baker, Lonelyklown, was active this year with an album of remixes (Day Jar View), an ode to “All the Summers Gone,” and a pair of songs for the season. This is the last of them, and the proceeds go to support Care4Calais, a charity supporting refugees. It is a reminder that Baker’s songwriting talents and current fascination for the 70s can produce the most amazing gems.

12. John Foxx – The Arcades Project

Harold Budd’s The White Arcades is one of the best applications of reverb ever. John Foxx’s The Arcades Project calls that 1988 album to mind, and it certainly doesn’t stint on the processing. Inspired by a book by Walter Benjamin of the same name, it explores spaces and sights through ambience and presence. John Foxx is a national treasure, and this is an album that belongs in a gallery instead of the CD rack.

11. Strikkland – Enkelriktat

Representing Sweden’s West Coast, the body-pop fusion of Strikkland continues to charge ahead with its hard-edge rhythms. The duo have been picking up more live shows, and their style is like a set of shiny leather boots on the pavement of modern radio.

10. KUNT – Unleashed

The first album from Sweden’s KUNT is a blast. The duo of Paula Lè Boss and Rickard Rosendahl have created a powerful, in-your-face sound that strikes with sequenced blows. This track, remixed by Cryo, gives a good taste of the emphatic, no-nonsense attitude the band delivers.

9. Kite – Don’t Take the Light Away SINGLE OF THE YEAR

Produced together with the Swedish team, Aasthma (Pär Grindvik and Peder Mannerfelt), Kite released this track back in April – just in time for their first live shows in London. Need we say that they were storming demonstrations of the duo’s capability to write outstanding tunes? This track adds to the evidence.

8. Psyche – Live in Sweden

Psyche returned to Europe from a nightmarish year with a storming and emotional show at the famous Dickens pub in Helsingborg. It was quickly released as a live recording, which is excellent, as it captures Darrin Huss at his rawest. The set includes “Prisoner to Desire,” “Uncivilised,” “Misery,” and “The Outsider” – classic Psyche tracks that show a European soul in a Canadian body.

7. The Weathermen – 40 Years REISSUE OF THE YEAR

Take the keyboard player from Fad Gadget’s first live band. Add the visuals director from Tuxedomoon. Stir in politics, cynicism, and a fondness for the absurd. Bake in some hard, minimal electronics. That gives you The Weathermen – Belgium’s iconic electro-jesters.

The band had a string of hits that moved the alternative dancefloor in the late 80s and early 90s. This year, PIAS, their label, marked their 40th anniversary with an EP collecting several of them in one place on vinyl. The throb of Jean-Marc Lederman’s bass synth on “Poison” shakes the walls as Suzanna Stammer (Bruce Geduldig) threatens your Bruce Springsteen records. “Barbie and Ken” is a reminder that Margot Robbie wasn’t the first to satirise the impossibly perfect dolls. “Bang!” is just terrific fun. This is an essential collection of timeless dance music with a knowing glint in its eye.

6. Zanias – Chrysalis

Berlin-based Alison Lewis has honed her alter-ego project into something very special. As Zanias, she released Chrysalis this year; combining personal and political viewpoints into a statement of hope. You don’t mess with Zanias – and you don’t mess with Mother Earth.

5. Pieces of Juno – Atlantis

The last of the Pieces of Juno works expected from Norway’s Juno Jensen, Atlantis struck us with its naturalistic touches. There are also glints of Nick Cave’s, Tom Waits’ and PJ Harvey’s influences. This is the perfect album for Sunday night listening with the lights down. If it doesn’t leave you touched, you are a psychopath.

4. Lau Nau – Aphrilis

Finland’s Lau Nau was very active again this year. She released 5×4 as summer approached, and then this album came towards year-end. Her tenth album, Aphrilis is a figure of beauty and wonder. There are lullabies and songs for the planet, and the material flows with sensual tension. Not a foot is set wrong across the seven songs. Lau Nau and her collaborators have taken the space to create them with a sense of connection with the natural world, and the results are lush.

3. Lucifer’s Aid – Destruction

The new album from Calle Nilsson’s solo project, Lucifer’s Aid, is an exciting career highlight. The previous four studio albums have shown great workmanship, but the craft on Destruction is next level. It sits neatly alongside the best work by Front Line Assembly and label-mates Cryo. This is seriously good dance floor-filling material.

2. REIN – God Is a Woman

In 2023, Stockholm’s REIN criss-crossed North America with Front Line Assembly, and opened for Nitzer Ebb and Front 242, but her new album showed a side several steps removed from her EBM roots. With her coproducer, Djedjotronic, REIN fused elements of Robyn, Janet Jackson, Eurythmics, and The Prodigy to create a dynamic and forward-looking set of songs.

1. Page – En ny våg ALBUM OF THE YEAR

When Daniel Miller released a series of records as Silicon Teens, he showed the future to a young Eddie Bengtsson. The Swedish skateboarder sold his drums and bought two cheap synths. One went to Marina Schiptjenko, and the result was a pioneering band that took over where ABBA left off.

More than four decades later, Page are still making innovative and dynamic sounds with their equipment. Both have been updated for the times, but the spirit of 1979-1980 runs through them. En ny våg is the concentrated extract of Synth Britannia, as imagined by Bengtsson and processed through Moog keyboards. The material is as rich as anything the duo have made, and proceedings are enhanced by the appearance of Chris Payne and Rrussell Bell from Gary Numan’s touring band and Dramatis. It is a match made in Heaven (at least, before Branson bought it).

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Any Second Now: Vince Clarke Goes Solo

by coldwarnightlife
written by coldwarnightlife

(Via Mute)

Vince Clarke has announced details of his debut solo album, Songs of Silence, a 10-track lyric-less album of uncategorisable ambient beauty. The album will be available on vinyl, CD and digitally via Mute on 17 November 2023, and launches today with ‘The Lamentations of Jeremiah’, the first piece of music to be shared from the project.

Listen to the track and watch the moving video – one of the first to be directed by Turkish-born NY-based portrait photographer Ebru Yildiz (Laurie Anderson, Mitski, A Place to Bury Strangers, Algiers) – which finds Clarke in a liminal space:

Ebru Yildiz explains, “When I first heard the song, I felt like it contained a whole lifetime within itself. All of the drama and peace, anxiousness and calmness, tension and hope, and everything in between. I wanted the visuals to feel like all those extremes as well.”

As the Ivor Novello winning songwriter behind countless chart-topping pop songs as co-founder of Erasure, Yazoo and Depeche Mode, Clarke has – unbelievably – waited until now to embark on a solo release.

Recorded in his home studio in New York, and featuring photography and artwork by the award-winning Magnum photojournalist Eugene Richards, work on the album began as a distraction during lockdown, a chance to finally get his head around the possibilities of Eurorack, a modular synthesiser format famed for its addictive and limitless configurations. “I could have gone on forever, I could have not stopped,” explains Vince, “I was enjoying the process so much and wasn’t thinking about anyone else hearing it. But hearing it develop in my studio, in my head, learning new tricks – that’s been the best thing about this. I was in a state of shock, actually, when Mute said they wanted to release this album.”

Alone in the studio, Clarke set himself two rules: first, that the sounds he generated for the album would come solely from Eurorack, and second, that each track would be based around one note, maintaining a single key throughout. “Nobody in my household is particularly interested in what I get up to in the studio” says Vince. “Even the cat used to leave after an hour or so of listening to drones.”

The resultant album’s mood of synth-generated, cosmic remoteness is interrupted by stark interventions, reminders of the human hand at work amid this machinery – a scrambled sample like a distressed transmission from a fighter pilot, the wordless operatic contributions of Caroline Joy, the sawing brimstone of composer Reed Hays’ cello on ‘The Lamentations of Jeremiah’, and the album’s centrepiece which builds around the 1844 anti-scab folk song ‘Blackleg Miner’, glowing with resonance and relevance. Elsewhere on the album Clarke manifests relentless sequencer patterns, gradual accelerations, Moog-style drones, glistening droplets of synth, and burgeoning swells of processed guitars, with Clarke describing the tracks as “having a sense of sadness, of things going bad, things crumbling”.

Not content to rest on his considerable pop legacy, Vince Clarke has instead opened up exciting new electronic vistas for himself, and for the rest of us, in which the permutations and possibilities are limitless, Clarke declaring “The infinite shades of sounds you can create with just the tiniest tweak of a knob or slider continues to fascinate me.”

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Reed & Caroline: Track by Track

by coldwarnightlife
written by coldwarnightlife

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]America is the home of several of the world’s most iconic synthesizer manufacturers, but it has failed to produce many world class artists who really put the instrument to work. Many have dabbled, but few have taken the step of replacing guitars with keyboards as European artists did.

It is unique, therefore, that Reed & Caroline, the duo of Reed Hays and Caroline Schutz, have emerged to present their second album of synthpop. Hays is known as a Buchla fan, but lives on the Moog coast and doesn’t limit himself to ambient pulsations. Schutz and Hays are both mates with Vince Clarke, formerly of Essex and the owner of a keyboard collection to die for. Erasure’s stoic synth man has put them on his label, Very Records, and on tour with his band.

We caught up with Reed (RH) and Caroline (CS) on their recent tour dates supporting Erasure to find out about their latest album, Hello Science. They kindly provided some input on each of the tracks.

Before

CS: I sang a lot of Christian hymns growing up. I don’t know why, because I was Jewish, but for some reason at my school we sang Christian hymns all the time. I loved them and still love them, and that’s what ‘Before’ feels like to me. That song is very profound and it’s both scientific and philosophical. And I think putting those two together in a very simple way shows how good Reed is at using science as a parallel for other bigger issues, like dealing with death and that sort of thing.

RH: Vince really likes that song and he remixed the track as a bonus track on the album. Right now he’s into this whole inspirational anthemic thing, which is why he’s really loved working with Jack Antonoff from Bleachers, and he approached “Before” in that style. He added these little countermelodies. It’s like, the guy who wrote “Only You” came in and played keyboards on my song. That’s kind of amazing.

CS: To me, “Before” is kind of sad and happy at the same time: it’s in a pretty major key so it feels kind of resolved and straightforward, but it also has a sadness to it.

Dark Matter

RH: How can you not want to write a song where the chorus goes, “Does dark matter matter?”

CS: I have some other music projects I do here and there, and I also do some writing. Before Reed played me that song, I had written some lyrics and one of them was “Does the dark matter?” And then he wrote this at the same time, which was so funny.

RH: When I came up with this song I just couldn’t get the bass right. I played it to Caroline in Berkeley but said so I was gonna throw it out because the bass wasn’t working, but she said I had to keep it. I just tried everything, every possible bass idea on the Buchla, and it just sounded like crap.

Right when I was flying back to New York, I got a text from one of the members of Kite Base, Ayse Hassan, who’s also the bass player for Savages. Kendra Frost and Ayse from Kite Base had been at a little PR show we’d for the last album, and I’d stayed in touch with them. It turned out they were coming to New York the day after I was flying back, and so I set them both up with the song, which was basically just a drum section at the time, and I recorded them both playing bass and singing. They really made that song. It’s a little less synth pop than other things on the record, at least in the way it formed together in my head. To me it’s more of a Joy Division or B-52s type of thing.

CS: I really love that song. I grew up on rock ‘n’ roll and I think that’s why I connected with it immediately. That’s kind of my comfort zone. This one isn’t quite as dark. It’s quite whimsical, a neat play on words.

I have twin daughters – they’re 11. They’ve heard a bunch of songs from Hello Science and they’ve heard “Dark Matter” a few times, and they love it. I haven’t played them everything because I’m still their mom and they don’t really want to hear me singing, but if they catch it and they don’t realise it’s me, they’re like, “Oh, what’s this?” When they hear it’s me, they’re like, “Turn it off!”

Buoyancy

RH: This is going to sound really mundane, but that was just something where I came up with a little groove and thought about buoyancy going up and gravity coming down, and the lyrics mimic that. There’s not a lot more to it than that!

CS: I keep thinking that’s the dance hit but the structure of it is interesting. I mean, there’s no clear chorus. The lyrics just keep coming the whole time. There’s not even an instrumental break.

Another Solar System

RH: That was a late entry. I was reading in the newspaper about all these exoplanets they were discovering, and the words, “another solar system,” went into my head. I was seeing Vince later on that week and so I went over to his house and played it for him on a piano. I said, “Should this even turn into anything?” And he was like, “I like it, but just don’t make it into a march.”

CS: I think that song takes on a special significance in the age of Trump. It’s supposed to be funny, but it’s also not so funny – we’ve discovered another planet so we can leave Earth now that this one’s all worn out. Which is kind of how Trump and other Republicans act. They don’t need to preserve the planet because they’re really not worried about it: they’re just worried about business.

I’ve never even talked about the meaning behind the lyrics with Reed but the chorus feels to me like it’s about having another world to go to when this one has been exhausted. He captures it in a funny way, but it is pretty terrifying.

It’s Science

CS: This one is literally only about science! Although I do think this one is really funny as it’s dominated by the cello, and it’s the least electronic track on an electronic album. It’s very dramatic too this one, because of Reed’s cello playing. He’s been playing cello for a long time. That was his primary instrument.

RH: A friend said to me that NWA would have called this “straight outta the conservatory” because of the cello, which I thought was fun. This is kind of loosely based on an étude that someone wrote in the 19th century that’s made of up rapid arpeggios and it sounds all fancy-pants. I still practice cello a lot in my spare time, and while I was practising this thing over and over again I started singing, “It’s science, it’s all about science,” and I decided that I might as well try it out.

There’s one Buchla note at the very end of the song, a chiming “bongggg” sound. I figured it could still make it onto an electronic record if there was one Buchla note on it! The funniest part was sitting at dinner with Caroline and her daughters when I went out there and one of her daughters said ‘So what are you going to sing on these songs?’ And I said, “I’m going to have your mother sing, ‘Formulate hypotheses and gather all the facts,’” and they just burst out laughing.

Digital Trash

RH: The string sounds on this are all pretend. That’s me playing the Buchla touch plates that are so darn expressive. I did about twenty tracks, a violin sound, a viola sound, a cello sound and I just kept stacking them on one another until it sounded like something, and fortunately that worked.

CS: This one is all about companies abusing your personal data. I’ve always been very cynical about technology – not for music, but more in terms of privacy. Whenever a company has assured me that my privacy is guaranteed, I’ve never believed them. I’ve worked at those companies before as a graphic designer and I know how they work. I know that they’re not infallible and I know they screw up. So it’s kinda funny to me that it’s finally all coming out. Once you put something out there on the internet it’s going to be out there forever, even if you put it in a private chat room. Privacy has become a quaint, old-fashioned notion.

My mom has Alexa in her house and I’m like, “Mom, you realise you have no privacy now? They’re listening to your conversations.” And she’s like, “What do I care? I’m 88 years old.”

Ocean

CS: This one doesn’t exist on a million different levels. It’s just a soulful, joyful song.

RH: People really like the handclaps on that one. They’re from the Buchla 100.

CS: My 11-year old daughter Amalia wrote the melody for “Ocean.” She’s like, “Where are my royalties?” I’m like, “You don’t even get an allowance!” Amalia plays piano but she also has a keyboard in her room, and she was messing around on that one day and came up with this nice intro that I really liked, and that became the intro to “Ocean.”

Entropy

RH: This is one of my favourite songs on the record. I wrote it in a real hurry, right before I went out to record Caroline singing something else. I thought she wouldn’t be into it because it’s kinda dark. The way it ties into the Reed & Caroline thing is that it’s mainly about me missing my friend Rene. There’s a song about him on our first album called “John & Rene.” We played “Entropy” at a show, thinking we were taking a risk, but people really liked it. I originally thought that would be the song we put in the set so people could go order drinks at the bar, but instead they listened.

CS: “Entropy” is one of my favourite songs on there too. It’s very dark, and emotional, and I connect to that. We all deal with loss in our lives so anyone can relate to it. It’s an intense song but people really do stop and listen to it. In all my other music, with Folksongs for the Afterlife and The Inner Banks, the songs are in minor key and depressing, just like “Entropy.”

Computers

CS: This is an ode to women – particularly African-American women – who have been involved in science and aeronautics but not been given credit. Not a lot of people knew that the people behind the scenes doing a lot of the hard calculations in some really important scientific endeavours were actually African-American women who were segregated, working in a separate space from the white people, and they were doing the math to get rockets to launch.

RH: They were genuinely women who computed, and they were actually called computers. At Harvard, way back in the early twentieth century when astronomers were taking in information about stars through telescopes, they had women catalogue everything and run the numbers. They were called computers because they were literally computing. I also knew that NASA employed women to run the math while space flights were underway, because mechanical computers weren’t as fast as real computers back then. Those women were indispensable to so many things.

Vince loves the squelchy bass sound on this one. The original track was much goofier. I did it over it and gave it more of an aggressive edge, or the closest I can get to aggressive anyway.

Internet of Things

RH: I was trying to read the New York Times online one day and I couldn’t reach the Web site for about an hour. It turned out that all these little gadgets had all been hacked and had overwhelmed a server in New Hampshire. It was because so many of these mundane gadgets had computers with no password at all or a password like “password123” or whatever, so I thought I’d write a song about it. Right in the middle of the song, I got my mother – who just recently passed away – to record some words in Russian, because I thought that would be topical. She says, “All the toys and tools conspire to work together.” It seemed appropriate.

CS: The dark humour in that song is just so Reed. I think it’s the B-52s influence. But actually it’s more than dark – it’s sinister. It’s about the sinister nature of the tech, and questioning the concept of what progress really represents in the digital world. Is it just where it’s expanding into everyone’s home or is it actually ever going to be something that is helpful to humanity? I think it’s all market driven and people are just going along with it. Of course, Reed would never try to believe in the next thing, given the Buchla he plays is from forty years ago…

RH: That song was also a source of our identity crisis. That’s one of the first songs I wrote, and we started to worry we were getting too dark about this stuff given we were supposed to be optimists. I think the way around it in the end was to just make it playful.

Continuous Interfold

CS: Do I even sing on this one?

RH: I sampled your vocal from “Computers.” I ran it through a module on the Buchla called the Frequency Shifter that alters the harmonic content of things. It’s kind of like a ring modulator, and so every time you hear “computers” it sounds a little different from the time before, because I’m doing different things to the feed. It’s the kind of thing that could be put on a continuous loop.

I wouldn’t have known this either, but Continuous Interfold is a brand of computer printer paper from the early 1970s. The only reason I know that is because I was looking through some old stuff that a cousin had given me and there was some drawings that I had done when I was three or four, and they were on the backs of computer printouts from my father. They had choo-choo trains on one side and on the other side these little lines of computer code with notes by my dad. I looked down at the bottom and it said, “Copyright Continuous Interfold.” And I thought, “What a great song title!”

Metatron

RH: This is about the astronomer, Johannes Kepler. He spent a lot of his life unsuccessfully trying to prove that the Platonic solids all somehow fit together in harmony, or were some sort of key to the universe. To prove that, he would make these wooden models of dodecahedrons and other shapes on string to synthesise the effect. He was looking for a unified theory, but particle physics hadn’t been invented yet, so he was going with shapes instead. It didn’t work, but then a lot of things didn’t work out for him.

When I wrote this, I was basically just playing around on the Orchestron with a choir patch. For a moment, I felt like an actual keyboard player, which is scary because I can’t really play keyboards. I put this thing called the Buchla Music Easel on top of the Orchestron, and I played one melody on the Buchla and another on the Orchestron and just kind of cooked up the track that way.

Hello Science is out now on Very Records.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]

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Erasure Go Classical

by coldwarnightlife
written by coldwarnightlife

Synth legends, Erasure, have revealed the reconstruction of their album, World Be Gone. The recording gets a classical makeover by the Belgian Echo Collective.

Long-time Erasure collaborator, Gareth Jones, mixed the album, and Andy Bell returned to the studio for vocal duties.

Neil Leiter from the Echo Collective explains:

The process of this project was really deconstruction and re-purposing. We started by listening to each track layer by layer, and then, using the layers that inspired us or we found essential, we reconstructed the tracks instrumentally. Each of the instruments in the band setup were chosen for their inherent capacities and roles. Often choosing which layer to put with each instrument was a question of matching roles and colours. By stripping so much away, we were able to find a new space for Andy to fill. The text of the songs became much more important in the overall construction of the songs, and Andy was free to explore more dynamics and vocal range.

Although he didn’t take part in the recording, the initiative for the project came from Vince Clarke. He is enthusiastic about the results:

It was great to talk through ideas with Echo Collective and then see how their arrangements took shape. The collaboration has given elements of the album a whole new feel and Andy’s vocals remain as powerful and uplifting as ever.

Mute have provided a view into the recording process in this video:

Erasure are currently on tour in Europe.
World Beyond comes out on 9 March 2018.
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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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Everybody Is (Dancing to Jeddie 3)

by coldwarnightlife
written by coldwarnightlife

In the 70s, everyone was a winner (babe, yeah it’s true). In the 80s, everybody wanted to rule the world. Fast forward to the 20-teens and everybody is a DJ. At the end of history (as Fukuyama would have it), even Z-list celebrities with smartphones are being billed as DJs, tapping the pots on mixing decks in a kind of mime show. Pre-recorded shows are becoming standard, allowing anyone with a backwards baseball hat to call themselves a DJ if they stand in the appropriate place.

So, when Jeddie 3 say, “Everybody Is (a DJ),” they aren’t kidding. Or maybe they are: the talent behind the tag is Eddie Bengtsson, Sweden’s answer to Vince Clarke, and he has a sense of humour a Nordic mile wide. Bengtsson will have noticed the move by Vince Clarke and Martin Gore into the world of Beatport, and Jeddie 3’s release might be seen as an exercise in one-upmanship. Beating VCMG (or just MG) in the quality stakes would be like shooting fish in a barrel for a composer of Bengtsson’s experience, however, so there is likely more going on.

Taken at face value, “Everybody Is (a DJ)” is a thumping piece of dance music, designed for the dancefloor. It will find its way into a Boiler Room mix soon, prompting Millennials to twitch around the DJ table, dreaming of the moment when they can play with their own Traktor 2 set-ups. If they were smart, they would learn some chords and how to extract the coolest filter sweeps from a Moog, so that they could be just like Eddie.

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Martin Gore Reveals Solo Album

by coldwarnightlife
written by coldwarnightlife

Martin Gore has taken time out from Depeche Mode to release solo recordings before, as well as an album of techno made with Vince Clarke, but the emphasis has been on covers of classics from other genres. From Mute comes the news that an album called MG is on the way, loaded with 16 electronic instrumentals. The first taste is “Europa Hymn,” which loops pads luxuriously and might be said to follow the template of the House of Illustrious recordings of Vince Clarke and Martyn Ware. The full album is out on 17 April 2015, just in time for A Secret Wish.

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