Electronic Sound_September2015_PDF_Edition

£4
9
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SEPTEMBER 2015
E XC L U S I V E I N T E R V I E W
AMON TOBIN
T H E M AK I N G A N D B R E A K I N G O F I SA M
S PEC I A L I S S U E : TAK I N G E LECTR O N I C M U S I C L I V E
THE ORB. MART YN WARE . LONEL ADY. WR ANGLER . LUKE ’ S ANGER .
DAN TOMBS . HARDK I SS . JAM I E HARLEY. A GUY CALLED GER ALD.
Editor: Push
Deputy Editor: Mark Roland
Art Editor: Mark Hall
Commissioning Editor: Neil Mason
Graphic Designer: Giuliana Tammaro
Sub Editor: Rosie Morgan
Sales & Marketing: Yvette Chivers
Contributors: Andrew Holmes, Anthony Thornton, Ben Willmott, Bethan Cole,
Carl Griffin, Chris Roberts, Cosmo Godfree, Danny Turner, David Stubbs,
Ed Walker, Emma R Garwood, Fat Roland, Finlay Milligan, Grace Lake,
Heidegger Smith, Jack Dangers, Jools Stone, Kieran Wyatt, Kris Needs,
Luke Sanger, Mark Baker, Martin James, Mat Smith, Neil Kulkarni, Ngaire Ruth,
Patrick Nicholson, Paul Thompson, Robin Bresnark, Simon Price, Stephen Bennett,
Stephen Dalton, Steve Appleton, Tom Violence, Velimir Ilic, Wedaeli Chibelushi
Published by PAM Communications Limited
© Electronic Sound 2015. No part of this magazine may be used or reproduced in any way without the prior
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may be in that information.
With thanks to our Patrons:
Mark Fordyce, Gino Olivieri, Darren Norton, Mat Knox
HELLO
welcome
to Electronic Sound
SEPTEMBER 2015
As the summer festival season reaches its climax, we thought we’d turn over a chunk
of this issue to looking at how musicians armed with machines that make interesting
noises approach the prospect of playing live.
We have certainly moved on since Kraftwerk took to a stage with their knitting
needles drum machine. One of the most ambitious live electronic music projects is
Amon Tobin’s stunning ‘ISAM’ show and we talk exclusively to Amon in the wake
of his last ever ‘ISAM’ show in San Francisco just a couple of weeks ago. Elsewhere,
we meet LoneLady during her recent stint as artist-in-residence at the Barbican in
London and get the lowdown on her tight, hypnotic, locked-down grooves. We also
grab a word with Benge from Wrangler while we’re there, before helping Luke’s Anger
pack his bags as he heads off to perform his one-man wonky techno show in Poland.
We had hoped to chat to The Orb’s Alex Paterson about how playing live has changed
over the years too, but Alex being Alex, we managed to talk about everything but.
It’s very entertaining stuff, mind. We return to the theme of the issue with two other
interviews, one with Jamie Harley, the go-to sound engineer for artists such as Aphex
Twin, Autechre, Flying Lotus and Plaid, and the other with visual artist Dan Tombs,
who has worked with Factory Floor, Blanck Mass, Jon Hopkins and East India Youth.
Who knew that cornflour and water is this year’s must-have visual effect?
If all that’s not enough, we’ve also got BEF/Heaven 17 man Martyn Ware, acid pioneer
A Guy Called Gerald, a fabulous tale about digging reel-to-reel tapes out of a hole
under a house from Jack Dangers, and Kris Needs recalling some fine times in the
company of the late Scott Hardkiss. After an 18-year break, Kris has also resurrected
his legendarily off-the-wall Needs Must column specially for Electronic Sound, so get
ready for references to trance trousers and bath flatulence.
You want even more? Just as well we’ve got a jam-packed tech section and more
album reviews than you can shake a soldering iron at, then. This month’s albums
include Gary Numan, The Black Dog, Helena Hauff, Nicolas Godin, Pere Ubu, Hannah
Peel and Empress Of, plus anniversary compilations from Planet Mu and Skint.
You’d best swipe the page and get started.
Electronically yours,
Push & Mark
FE ATUR E S
CONTENTS
XXX
DAN TOMBS
AMON TOBIN
If you’ve seen live shows
by the likes of Jon Hopkins,
Blanck Mass or Factory
Floor of late, you will no
doubt have been wowed by
the inventive graphics that
accompany their sets. Meet
the man behind the visuals
His gobsmacking ‘ISAM’ show
threw the rule book for live
electronic music so far out
of the window, it landed in
the 22nd century. Just days
after the very last ‘ISAM’, the
great man hints at where he
might be heading next
LONELADY
LUKE’S ANGER
We join her Ladyship during
a week-long residency at
London’s Barbican Centre,
where she lived in a perspex
box and played with a
fabulous Moog belonging to
her mates in Wrangler (who
also get in on the interview)
Ever wondered what it takes
to get a solo live show on the
road? Here’s wonky techno
bod Luke Sanger’s rough guide
to his recent trip to Poland.
Which seems to mainly involve
eating and drinking
THE ORB
JAMIE HARLEY
We catch up with the huge,
ever-growing, pulsating brain
that is Alex Paterson for what
can only be described as a freerange chat about… well, what
you got? There isn’t much we
don’t cover, to be honest
The sound engineer of choice
for many of the world’s biggest
electronic music artists – Aphex
Twin, Autechre, Amon Tobin, Hot
Chip, Squarepusher and tons more
– reveals the sonic ins and outs of
taking machine music on the road
TECH
CME XKEY37
READERS’
SYNTHS
You what? Well, it’s a sleek
and swishy MIDI Mobile
Musical Keyboard and our
deputy editor can’t put the
bloody thing down. He even
took it away on holiday with
him. Yup
Forget your System 100s,
we’ve found someone who’s
waxing lyrical about Texas
Instruments’ Speak & Spell.
This has to be one of our
favourite Readers’ Synths so far
SYNTHESISER
DAVE
APPS OVERVIEW
Got an old synth that doesn’t
squonk quite like it used to?
We know a man who sails
the seven synthy seas in
search of squonk. Actually,
he just mends stuff but, you
know, big sell and all that
ALBUM R EV I EWS
GARY NUMAN, THE BLACK DOG, PERE
UBU, SUSUMU YOKOTA, NICOLAS
GODIN, HELENA HAUFF, DIE KRUPPS,
DAVE McCABE, SYNKRO, EMPRESS OF,
DAM-FUNK, OFFSHORE, plus SKINT
and PLANET MU 20th anniversary
compilations and a whole lot more…
Like vintage synths but
haven’t got the cash to
splash? Fret not, because
we’ve a bumper round-up in
which we take a squiz at the
best synth apps currently
doing the rounds
SUB SCR I BE
FREE VINYL &
FREE DOWNLOADS!
Not a subscriber? Tsk tsk. You
could save yourself a stack
of cash and get a free limited
edition clear vinyl seven-inch by
Wolfgang Flür & Jack Dangers,
plus a bunch of other free music
downloads. Sign up today!
WHAT’S
INSIDE
UP THE FRONT
OPENING SHOT
PORTISHEAD were joined
by a very special guest
during their headlining
slot at this year’s Latitude
Festival. Crash, bang,
wallop, what a picture. No,
it wasn’t Mary Poppins
LANDMARKS
MARTYN WARE talks us
through the making of
‘Groove Thang’ (later ‘Fascist
Groove Thang), the first
track recorded by B.E.F.
following their split from
The Human League. It’s got
guitars on it. Guitars!
PULSE
JACK DANGERS
How our man in San Fran
dug out a unique haul of
reel-to-reels that had once
belonged to 1950s tape
experimentalist HENRY
JACOBS from under a house.
It’s an extraordinary story
NEEDS MUST
We’re resurrecting the
one-time Echoes magazine
column after a break of 18
years, complete with original
owner KRIS NEEDS back at
the tiller. It’s probably going
to get a little weird
Need to refresh your
ears with some fine new
music? We’ve had a word
and we’ve got SHITWIFE,
ROSEAU, WILLIS EARL
BEAL and OFELIA K for
your delectation and delight
REMIX OF THE MONTH
BURIED TREASURE
ANATOMY of a
record sleeve
Buried Treasure is the name,
unearthing forgotten classic
albums is the game. This
time, we’re heading to
Vienna for SLUTS’N’STRINGS
& 909’s long-lost 1997
peach, ‘Carerra’
A new section featuring our
favourite remix of the month.
We’re kicking off with BOY
BEHIND THE CURTAIN’s gritty
and grinding overhaul of ETHAV’s
‘Warrior’ single
We cast our beady eye
over ADAMSKI’s ‘Doctor
Adamski’s Musical
Pharmacy’. Hard to believe,
but apparently he’s not a
real doctor
TIME MACHINE
FAT ROLAND
Whatever you do, don’t get
him started on DJs. No,
seriously, you really don’t
want to do that. Well, on
your own head be it
UNDER THE
INFLUENCE
Want to know what ingredients
you’ll need if you want to make
A GUY CALLED GERALD?
We’re talking about an activity,
a machine and a book. No
prizes for guessing the machine
You join us in San Francisco
in January 1995, with
HARDKISS storming the
BILLBOARD DANCE MUSIC
SUMMIT and inadvertently
helping to lay the foundations
of the American EDM scene
THE OPENING SHOT
PORTISHEAD
Latitude Festival, Suffolk
18 July 2015
Photo: MARC SETHI
This year’s Latitude Festival served up a fair number of treats
for fans of all things electronic, but it was undoubtedly the
Saturday night that had us all of a quiver. Portishead’s live
performances rarely disappoint and their headlining set was
no exception. They even served up a guest appearance from
Radiohead’s Thom Yorke.
Yorke came on stage for a rendition of ‘The Rip’ from
Portishead’s 2008 album ‘Third’, a record which marked the
Bristol band’s return to the fray after an 11-year hiatus. A late
edition to the Latitude bill, the Radiohead man seems to have
made a bit of a day of it, following his Portishead guest slot
with a set of his own solo material in the wee small hours of
Sunday morning.
‘The Rip’ has long been one of Thom Yorke’s favourite songs
and Radiohead often played it during their soundchecks on
their 2008 tour. Yorke and Jonny Greenwood even recorded an
acoustic version backstage in St Louis, which you can find on
YouTube if you’re of a mind.
THE FRONT
LANDMARKS
BRITISH ELECTRIC
FOUNDATION
‘GROOVE THANG’
You might know ‘(We Don’t Need This) Fascist Groove Thang’ as a Heaven
17 song, but it started life as ‘Groove Thang’, an instrumental on BEF’s
cassette-only debut, ‘Music For Stowaways’. MARTYN WARE explains how
the track liberated him from The Human League’s synth-only policy and
helped him uncover a very rare talent
Interview: NEIL MASON
Picture: JOHN STODDART
The story starts with the Sony Stowaway, which was what the
Sony Walkman was originally called. They changed the name
after about six months. I don’t think the name Walkman was
as good actually, I still like Stowaway better. See, a Stowaway
would be a great name for a tiny little MP3 player, wouldn’t it?
When the Walkmans came out, I distinctly remember thinking
that it meant you could design a soundtrack for your everyday
life for the first time and have it playing while you walked
around or whatever, which was very thrilling to me. So that became the theory behind BEF’s ‘Music For Stowaways’
album. It was about how you could play your music and
change your mood wherever you were. Basically, the Walkman
liberated music. And there we were, at the sharp end with this
cassette-only release. Lucky? Hey, no, it was deliberate! We
loved the device, so we wrote some stuff specifically for it. The
album was also partly inspired by Eno’s ‘Music For Films’. I’ve
always liked the idea of music written for a purpose – for a film
soundtrack, a theatre piece… I’ve always thought narrative was
important.
The appearance of the Walkman also coincided with recording
equipment getting smaller and more portable. We did have
a studio, of sorts, but Ian [Craig Marsh] and I were more
interested in the notion of going to people’s houses and being
able to record ideas and then feeding those back in. It’s like
we were interested in the popular technology as much as
the popular music, so that first BEF album was like a holy
triumvirate of art, music and technology.
‘Music For Stowaways’ came out in early 1981 and it included an
instrumental version of ‘(We Don’t Need This) Fascist Groove
Thang’. It was the first thing we did as BEF and it was just
called ‘Groove Thang’ at that point. After being in The Human
League, it was great to be able to use any instrumentation
we wanted. It was enormously liberating. I love electronics,
obviously, and I’ve always loved the concept of the futurist, but
I was also keen to spread my wings. And then along came John Wilson. That was a complete fluke
on our part. We were in the studio working on ‘Groove Thang’
and we were quite happy with how it was going, but you’ve
got to imagine what it sounded like before it had any bass
or guitar on it. Anyway, out of the blue I said, “In this middle
break, rather than some System 100 thing, wouldn’t it be great
if it had a really cool bass solo?” and everyone went “What!?”.
Then we sat down and thought, “Well, that’s all well and good,
but we don’t know any bass players…”. You’ve got to bear in mind The Human League were just three
young lads from Sheffield in a room doing shit. We were yet to
discover the world of session musicians. The only people we
knew were the guys in other local bands… and most of them
really weren’t very good. We’d just brought Glenn [Gregory]
into BEF at the time and he was working at The Crucible in
Sheffield as a stagehand, so I said to him, “Why don’t you ask
if anyone there knows someone who can play bass?”. So he did
and he found this 17-year-old lad called John Wilson. This lad
said, “I play a bit of bass, but I’m not really a bass player”. But
Glenn asked him if he could come down and try it out, just so
we could hear what a bass would sound like in this section.
John was a really quiet guy. He was frighteningly shy. He came
down to the studio with his bass, but he was left-handed so
he was playing it the wrong way round, like Hendrix. We said,
“We’re gonna count you in... One-two-three-four…” and when
he started playing the solo, we were all looking at each other
going, “This is fucking awesome”. Or words to that effect. We
couldn’t believe it. So we’re going, “Erm, do you want to have
a go at playing bass on the rest of the song, just to see what
that might sound like?”. So he played bass on the whole song,
which was just beautiful. Then when he was done he said, “I
hope it’s alright because bass isn’t really my main instrument”! When we heard that we said, ‘Soooo, what is your main
instrument?’. And he said, ‘Well, I mostly play guitar’. We
asked him where he lived and it turned out he was only 20
minutes away, so we said, “If we get a taxi, can you bring your
guitar in?”. So he went and got his guitar and he ended up
playing bass and guitar on the rest of the track. It was a bit
like something out of one of those clichéd biopics where they
say, “Son, you’re going to be a star!”. The guy was a virtuoso.
That had never happened to me before and it’s never happened
again, in 35 years of being in the music industry. We just got
lucky. And every single bass player we’ve ever worked with
since then, including a lot of very famous bass players, the
first question they always ask is, “Who played bass on ‘Fascist
Groove Thing’?”.
Where is John Wilson now? Dunno. I think he got stung a bit,
he got ripped off. He started doing sessions for various people
and someone refused to pay him. Some people can’t deal with
the rough and tumble of the music business and I think he
decided to go back to his bedroom. Rumour has it that he was
extremely religious and he just went back to that world. Later
on, he told us that his main instrument wasn’t really the guitar,
it was actually the violin, but we never heard him play it. I
don’t think we wanted to push our luck.
pulse
This time round, our bumps are getting goosed
by urban pop songstress ROSEAU, hammer ’n’ tongs
noiseniks SHITWIFE, squonky soul man WILLIS EARL
BEAL, and folktronica internet sensation OFELIA K
XXX FRONT
THE
ROSEAU
Ethereal urban dream pop – with teeth
WHO sHE?
Kerry Leatham’s the name and there’s
nothing to stand in the way of this mature
debutante. Her mum’s Irish and her dad’s
Dominican – she’s taken the name Roseau
from the capital city of Dominica – but her
cultural roots are in no way reflected in
her urban aesthetic or her broad London
accent.
WHY ROSEAU
Her debut album, ‘Salt’, doesn’t sound
like a debut album. It sounds like an
artist careering around electronic pop
curvatures that have been parboiled
over a good decade. Sultry melodies are
scattered across brittle song structures,
crafted from a fertile hotbed of parched
beats. The production gleams like it’s been
polished with Lemon Pledge. And Leatham
certainly knows how to sell a song: her
soulful metropolitan vocal chatters like a
nightingale, telling tales of lost love via
interloping harmonies and a technical
proficiency that shames typical synthpop.
TELL US MORE
Leatham’s grandfather improvised songs
out of stories, emboldening the cherub with
vivid images that later became teenage
experiments on guitar and tape. Demos
became gigs and gigs became a deal with
Tape Club Records.
Collaborating with her labelmates, she
soon discovered the power of software,
subtracted her acoustic heartbeat, placed
it on a laptop, and interpolated samples
from an abandoned warehouse. The result
is a very modern-sounding, not to mention
addictive, electronic pop record.
Kerry Leatham was signed by Big Dada
in 2013. Two years on and here we are: a
luscious inauguration, part Fleetwood Mac,
part MIA minus the attitude. Well, almost.
DANNY TURNER
‘Salt’ is out on Big Dada on 18
September
XXX FRONT
THE
SHITWIFE
Making Sleaford Mods look like Bucks Fizz
WHO THEY?
The word “versus” comes with a degree of
expectation. Pit anything against pretty
much anything else and a dust-up of some
description will almost certainly ensue. So
when a band line-up is billed as “Wayne
Adams (laptop) vs Henri Grimes (drums)”,
that’s bound to be a treat, right? Brightonbased Shitwife don’t disappoint.
WHY SHITWIFE?
You know the first time you saw
Motorhead perform ‘Ace Of Spades’? That.
Live electronic music can sometimes be
a bit of a nodding damp squib, but do it
like this pair et voila, instant spectacle.
They set up facing each other, often in
the middle of rooms, and blast away,
both barrels, non-stop. Why hit a drum
once slowly when you can batter the
living crap out of it really quickly. The
total visceral thrill of a drummer like
this up against a full-tilt breakneck
sonic assault is about as life-affirming as
things get electronically speaking.
a knack he has for a charming moniker),
while Henri Grimes is formerly of bluesy
post-rockers Shield Your Eyes. It’s a combo
that makes for absolute mayhem and
what’s more you can take it all home with
you on the new Shitwife album, ‘Big Lad’.
A proper corker of a record, favourites are
hard to nail down, but today we’re very
much enjoying the swirling oscillations of
‘Kablab’ and the frankly absurd 200mph
chiptune-isms of ‘Thomas Brewins’.
TELL US MORE
NEIL MASON
Wayne Adams is perhaps better known as
breakcore powerhouse Ladyscraper (what
‘Big Lad’ is on Sapien
XXX FRONT
THE
WILLIS EARL BEAL
Coming on like a ‘Twin Peaks’ version of Otis Redding
WHO HE?
Where to start? A former US soldier, Willis
Earl Beal’s ‘Noctunes’ album is one of the
most affecting releases you’ll hear all year,
such is its delicately intense ambient drift.
WHY WILLIS EARL BEAL?
Vocally, ‘Noctunes’ is silky. Musically, its
low hum, gentle plinks and rumbles in the
distance, making for a deep breath of a
record. And it’s that way because this is a
man with tales to tell.
Following a medical discharge from
the army, Willis ended up living in
Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he
made CDs of his lo-fi music (complete
with hand-drawn covers) and left them
in local coffee shops in the hope that
girls would find them and swoon. Sort of
worked out, because one such recording
made its way into the hands of the
sporadic Found magazine (a mag full of
articles about, erm, found stuff)... where
his tale was clocked by XL Recordings...
who signed him to the label’s Hot Charity
offshoot.
parting of the ways saw Willis retreat to
the woods and become a ‘Twin Peaks’
version of Otis. And so here he is with a
new label (Oregon’s Tender Loving Empire
record company/store) and one heck of a
new album.
“People had all these ideas about what I
was supposed to be,” he says. “I had only
ever wanted to make lullabies. This record,
to me, is a perfect record. I listen to that
thing a lot and it helps me.”
TELL US MORE
XL released two long-players (‘Acousmatic
Sorcery’, a collection of coffee shop
wooings, and ‘Nobody Knows’, an
ambitious full orchestra outing) before a
NEIL MASON
‘Noctunes’ is on Tender Loving Empire
XXX FRONT
THE
OFELIA K
Delicate warblings with vibrant electronic
twang included
WHO SHE?
On the back of just two tracks, Los
Angeles singer-songwriter Ofelia K has
become something of an online darling –
and quite rightly so. With a charming blend
of folk, pop and electronica, Ofelia K is
Lana Del Rey without the dramatics, Feist
with a dose of LA chill.
WHY OFELIA K?
Her rise is impressive considering she was
only signed as a solo artist in June. Her
label, Nashville’s South By Sea, claim
they “release your mom’s new favourite
records”, but with Ofelia on board, they’d
better get ready for rampant appeal.
The two tracks they’ve put out so far are
from Ofelia’s debut EP, the first of which,
‘White T-Shirt’, cut a swath through the
blogosphere, racking up 500,000 plays in
the blink of an eye. The darker rumblings
of her second outing, ‘As A Bell’, have
proved to be popular with the Annie Mac
Radio 1 demographic.
TELL US MORE
Ofelia clearly picks her partnerships wisely
(‘New Scene’, a collaboration with Felix
Cartal, was described as one of the best
dance records of 2013 by Billboard) and
she has some formidable allies, not least
her right-hand man, producer Doctor
Rosen Rosen. The duo serve up shadowy
electronica as Wanderhouse and it’s the
Doc’s dark synthpop sensibility – previously
working magic for the likes of Lady Gaga,
MIA, La Roux and Drake to name but a
few – that’s ensuring ‘As A Bell’ hits all the
right notes.
WEDAELI CHIBELUSHI
The ‘Ofelia K’ EP is on South By Sea
XXX FRONT
THE
BURIED
TREASURE
IN SEARCH OF ELECTRONIC GOLD
It was overlooked when it came out in 1997. It
remains overlooked now. But SLUTS’N’STRINGS &
909’s ‘Carrera’ album is the musical equivalent of an
enormous chest brimming with sparkly and glittery
things
Words: BEN WILLMOTT
In 1997, no doubt bolstered by the release of Daft
Punk’s ‘Homework’ album, the world’s media loudly
proclaimed Paris to be the new home of electronic
music. I would respectfully suggest, however, that
another Euro metropolis was responsible for a far more
prodigious and interesting output at the time.
Vienna in the late 1990s boasted lush lounge-house
duo Kruder & Dorfmeister and disco nerd Christopher
Just, along with the likes of DJ DSL, Autorepeat, Sofa
Surfers, Mego Records and a host of others. And it
always seemed like having fun and not taking yourself
too seriously were way more important to this lot than
courting fame.
Patrick Pulsinger and Erdem
Tunakan, aka Sluts’n’Strings &
909, were potential superstar
DJs, but they clearly weren’t
overly bothered by the idea.
They switched project names
with bewildering regularity
and were rarely photographed.
As such, they were extremely
frustrating for those critics
determined to bring them to a
wider audience.
You had to admire their “fuck
you” attitude, but that’s
nothing without the music to
back it up. And Sluts’n’Strings
& 909’s ‘Carrera’ has it in spades. Originally released
as a double 12-inch set, the album takes inspiration
from everywhere – disco, techno and especially electro
make up the foundations, but you’ll also hear a heavy
dollop of cheeky jazz-funk and some hip hop swagger,
as well as the strange, swirling atmospheres of the
chill-out room. Rather like an amalgamation of so much
of the great electronic music going on at the time, but
wrapped up and reworked into something with its own
distinct flavour.
So ‘Dear Trevor...’ sounds like Stevie Wonder jamming
on his Moog over some Luke Vibert drum machine
exercises and ‘Dig This!’ could be a long-lost Mo’
Wax trip hop classic. Indeed, James Lavelle was the
only figure in the mainstream music industry to back
Pulsinger and Tunakan, signing their sublime ‘Claire’
for his Excursions offshoot, albeit under yet another
alias (iO). ‘Puta’ meanwhile slows down one of the
funkier Pixies segments (listen closely and you’ll hear
a groggy Black Francis imploring you to “shake your
butt”) and layers it with digital watch bleepery and
an incomprehensible Mexican voice muttering away in
what is, depending on your frame of mind, either highly
amusing or genuinely terrifying in a
‘Breaking Bad’ kind of way.
Then, among such madness, there
are those moments where Pulsinger
and Tunakan claim the dancefloor
in ruthless fashion. Moments like
‘Put Me On!’, with its squashy
synth bassline and perky electro
groove. Moments like when a
crashing breakbeat kicks through
the front door of ‘Civilised’, instantly
transforming its earnest Plaid-style
polyrhythms into irresistible party
fodder.
It probably doesn’t matter that
‘Carrera’ was overlooked at the
time. Nor that it remains overlooked
today, as my slightly depressing recent discovery that
my favourite track had clocked up a total of just six
plays on YouTube confirms. No problem, because it still
sounds as good as the day it was driven off the garage
forecourt and the time will surely come when the public
will catch up with the gleaming Porsche that this album
truly is.
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FAT ROLAND
BANGS
ON
Our potentially award-winning
columnist is not easily impressed.
He is, in fact, easily unimpressed.
Ask him about DJs these days. Go
on, ask him and see what happens.
And yes, that is prune juice on his
cardigan
Words: FAT ROLAND
Illustration: STEVE APPLETON
See that anaemic drip of a DJ on
stage? The one with the Tesco Value
headphones around his scrawny neck?
Look at him dribbling onto his laptop
as he pretends to beat-match. He’s
pressing all the keyboard buttons: the
space bar, the left cursor, the one to
do with scrolling. As he prods “play” on
the DJ software, his face screws up in
concentration like a perished balloon.
See that feeble spittle of a kid on stage?
That’s what DJing is now. A withered,
gawping grunt armed with little more
than a workable PC and a Spotify
Premium account. These young DJs using
laptops? They make me sick.
Despite the fact I now own a rocking
chair, a prune-juiced cardigan and a stack
of VHS recordings of ‘Countryfile’, I used
to be a DJ.
A proper DJ. One with Sennheiser
headphones and metal record boxes and
pockets full of jack adaptors. I had a pair
of Technics 1210s and a Vestax mixer so
robust you could drop it into the seventh
circle of hell and it would still crank out
the decibels.
I was always that weird kid stood behind
the megastar DJ at club nights. Hovering,
watching, sucking in the talent with my
bloodshot glare. I’d tried my shaky hand
at CD decks – they were all the rage in
the late 90s – but always found them
clumsy and dumb, like trying to DJ with
a Chuckle Brother puppet on each hand.
I found mixing with vinyl to be pleasingly
tactile. A gentle push to speed things
up, a tap to slow it down, a careful
brush to keep the beat locked in. It’s a
beautiful skill to learn. Unless some idiot
is deliberately flicking your needle (not a
euphemism) or flopping their boobs (not
a euphemism) on to the record, both of
which happened to me more than once.
I retired from DJing to write. I just
lost the energy. I am old, my body is
shrivelled, my innards hang out of my
sunken face. These days, my DJing
consists of me in my bedroom clicking
YouTube playlists and waging comment
wars with random teenagers: “This is
POST-dubstep, you knobscratch”. I sit
there dribbling, pressing all the buttons,
face scrunched in concentration. I have
become a withered, gawping grunt
armed with little more than a workable
PC and a YouTube account.
Anyway, back to those young DJs using
laptops. Jeez, they make me sick.
THE FRONT
UNDER
THE
INFLUENCE
Gerald Simpson, better known as A GUY CALLED
GERALD, reveals the inspirations and influences behind
his work going right back to his earliest days as a
pioneering force of the UK acid house scene
Interview: NGAIRE RUTH
THE FRONT
ROLAND TR-808
“
DANCING
It’s true that I still love the Roland TR-808. It had a really big
impact on my life, both growing up, as a young dancer, and
then later when I was with 808 State and working as A Guy
Called Gerald. It may be a machine but it’s had a life of its
own and has kind of morphed all the way through dance music
history. I believe it’s the backbone of electronic dance music,
going way back before acid house, and it even went on to be a
sampled bassline in jungle music.
From the age of 14, I was pretty serious about dancing. I used
to do classical, jazz and contemporary dance. I especially loved
to dance to jazz fusion artists like Herbie Hancock and Chick
Corea. It’s really freestyle music – very open and creative –
which was good because it gave me loads of scope to let my
imagination run wild. Some of the music had a story to it, so I’d
get caught up in the narratives too. I first heard the distinct 808 sound on soul and funk tracks. I
then heard it again in the early 80s, when the hip hop crowd
got hold of it. Afrika Bambaataa & The Soul Sonic Force were
among the first to use the 808 in a completely different way,
but you could still hear the familiar crisp hi-end beats and
the deep bassline. These were exciting times, with big studio
producers starting to make electronic pop, and it was just
mind-blowing for me. Later on, I used to do the rounds of the clubs in Manchester,
places like Legend and The Haçienda. I’d go along on my own,
just to dance and check out the moves. These places weren’t
just playing pop music, they were playing all sorts, including
experimental dance music. In Legend, the environment was
so compelling, with its big video screens and the lighting guys
scratching to the music. As a dancer, I was totally impressed
by the kind of energy I saw there and the way people moved
to the music. It seemed so choreographed. Everyone was very
friendly and you definitely felt part of something new, but I
used to just try to disappear into my own little world on the
dancefloor.
I used to tape stuff off the radio and play it over and over
again, trying to dissect it in my head. They were using real
sounds and re-triggering them in different ways, kind of like a
collage, grabbing bits and pieces and then building something
new. It was really clever. Along with Detroit’s Belleville Three
– Juan Atkins, Derrick May and Kevin Saunderson – who were
the first people I heard doing that crossover from electro-funk
to techno, these were my musical inspirations. It was all about
a new sound palette and how that linked in with the emerging
technology.
So I decided I had to get my own TR-808. They were
reasonably affordable, so I put a deposit down and went and
got a job in McDonald’s to pay for the rest. I was still living at
home at the time, but I began putting together a little studio in
my parents’ attic. With the success of ‘Voodoo Ray’, I was able
to get more equipment and go deeper and deeper into building
my own home studio. I didn’t actually start using a computer
until about 2004. To this day, I think I work differently to other
producers because I pretty much grew up in a studio.
‘SACRED SOUNDS’
‘Sacred Sounds: Transformation Through Music & Word’ is a
book by Ted Andrews, who was a teacher, a musician and
a mystic. Yes, it’s totally hippy at times, but it makes for
intriguing reading and I know how to be selective, taking the
bits I want from my influences. It’s second nature to me.
The book is about the creative and healing force of music.
Andrews talks about it in both a spiritual sense and also a
very real, physical sense. He has some interesting ideas and
theories, as well as exercises and methods to follow. I have
always understood the energy and the power that’s in music.
I experienced it as a dancer, then learned how to create it in
the studio by putting my heart into what I was doing, and I
work with it now as a live performer.
“
‘Sacred Sounds’ isn’t the sort of book you read from cover to
cover. It’s a book you want to browse until you find something
you relate to, or something that seems interesting, and before
you know it you’re hooked. I’m using it at the moment to help
me find my own tone.
XXX FRONT
THE
JACK DANGERS’
SCHOOL OF
ELECTRONIC MUSIC
How our resident archivist became the owner of HENRY JACOBS’ stash
of early electronic music reel-to-reel tapes, among them a piece by the
German-Argentine composer MAURICIO KAGEL, is one of the strangest
stories you’ll ever hear
Words: JACK DANGERS
I have a friend who was moving into a house close to where
I live in Mill Valley, which is just outside San Francisco. One
night, I was chatting to her about living here and mentioned
in passing that Henry Jacobs had once lived in Mill Valley too.
Henry Jacobs was an important figure in the development of
tape music in America, starting out by experimenting with reelto-reels in his home city of Chicago after the Second World
War before heading out to California in 1953.
goldmine. It was just incredible. It turned out that the house
had once belonged to Henry Jacobs and there had been a fire
in his studio in 1962, burning a hole in the floor which his tape
archive had fallen through. They’d then built a new floor over
the hole, leaving the tapes down there for 36 years. Jacobs and
his wife had continued to live at the house until they divorced,
when Jacobs moved out. His wife then sold the place to my
friend many years later.
Jacobs produced a series of concerts in San Francisco in the
late 1950s called ‘Vortex: Experiments In Sound And Light’.
They took place in the Planetarium at the Golden Gate
Park. The ‘Vortex’ events used the first ever surround sound
system, which Jacobs invented by syncing up multiple tape
machines and placing speakers around the auditorium. He
was subsequently invited to show the system at the 1958
World Expo in Brussels and he later came to the attention of
George Lucas, who asked him to help with the sound design for
‘THX1138’.
Among the tapes were two pieces entitled ‘Transition’, which
I found in a box stamped “1957”. They had been recorded by
the German/Argentine composer Mauricio Kagel at the famous
Cologne studio where Stockhausen worked and were made for
two tape machines. The tapes have sync tones at the beginning
and the idea was that you played them simultaneously on two
machines, giving you four tracks of audio that you could spread
across four speakers for a performance. It seems that Jacobs
called up the Cologne studio to order a copy of ’Transition’ for
one of his ‘Vortex’ shows. A lot of the electronic studios ran a
tape service like that, but most of the tapes are really obscure
because they were never meant for public release and never
appeared in record shops.
Anyway, I told my friend all this and I didn’t think any more
about it, until she contacted me to say that she’d found
some reel-to-reel tapes under her new house that I might
be interested in. She’d hired in a building firm to do a bit of
work and while the place was being knocked about, they’d
discovered a big hole beneath one of the basement rooms. The
houses up here are built on the side of a mountain, so they’re
all on stilts. Under the floors of the basement rooms, there’s
often a drop of maybe 15 feet or so down on to the muddy
mountainside. And through this hole, my friend could see some
tapes sticking up out of the mud below.
So I went over to the house and used a rope to drop into the
hole and start digging out these tapes. In the end, I pulled
out 64 reel-to-reels and a box of seven-inch records. It was a
‘Transition 1’ is quite a famous piece. You can find it on a lot
of the compilations of important early electronic music, but
the only place you can hear it as it was intended, in surround
sound, is on a DVD which I released in Dolby 5.1. And the only
reason I was able to release it at all was because I found these
tapes in the mud under my friend’s house. They could well be
the only copies in the world.
Mauricio Kagel died in Cologne in 2008 at the age of 76, but
Henry Jacobs is still alive and still living here in California. I see
him around from time to time.
THE FRONT
NEEDS
MUST
Our new monthly round-up of top
trackage – courtesy of the man
who invented the phrase “trance
trousers”
Words: KRIS NEEDS
Before I start, a word of explanation.
Throughout the 1990s, I wrote a weekly
column for the old Black Echoes
broadsheet in which I attempted to
review every dance record that came
my way. All on vinyl, sometimes up to
100 in a week, many of them exclusives
and often costing me a fortune in the
import shops. Taking my inspiration from
the great James Hamilton in Record
Mirror, who used ridiculous metaphors
to describe tunes in ways other than
“banging”, the column coined the
phrase “trance trousers” [among many
others – Ed] and never looked back as
it celebrated throwing unbridled passion
and toilet humour into dance music
writing.
GOD OF THE MACHINE
Warpaint
SPECIMEN
Founded by Mr C and Paul Rip in 1992, the Plink Plonk label
was a trailblazing fountain of techno innovation at a time when
we really needed it. Paul, who was also behind the legendary
Clink Street parties that kick-started acid house in London, has
now started Specimen as an outlet for his ongoing belief that
techno should be pure, atmospheric and constantly inventive,
as well as always adhering to that essential deep space party
ethos.
God Of The Machine’s ‘Warpaint’ is Specimen’s third release
and is a welcome showing from criminally overlooked Detroit
techno veteran Derrick Thompson, aka Drivetrain, who has
appeared on a myriad of imprints, including his own Soiree
label and Plink Plonk in 1996 and 1997. The original version
of ‘Warpaint’ homages Derrick’s Native American ancestry,
particularly Chief Quazi-Train, the son of Sioux legend Crazy
Horse. Those ancient spirits imbue a luminescent throbber
where hippo Y-fronts bass underpins a masterclass in edgy
groove tension.
The remixes are something of a Plink Plonk reunion, starting
with Hijacker (Megalon) uncorking a glacial electro hybrid laced
with deep strings and acid skidmarks, before Motor City master
Santonio unleashes a thunderous old school growler splattered
with robot bath flatulence and steely Detroit stabs. Mr C, who
has never stopped producing quality electronic music over the
last quarter century, then turns up in his Mantrac guise with
one of his spaced sci-fi outings, where classic old school tones
such as 808 cowbells rub circuits with hall-of-mirror vocal
flickers and a woozy bassline.
Finally, on the digital version, Paul Rip pops on his Black Art
hat and lets fly over the chant loop with a glorious collision
between contagious acid yelp patterns and simmering Basic
Channel riffage. Dynamic, panting, lysergic and sexy, it caps a
superb package.
JAMES KUMO
Yellow
KMUSIC
Now, at the kind invitation of Electronic
Sound, Needs Must returns after 18
years to a far different world, with much
more music out there and the thrill of
the chase practically trampled by the
internet. Hopefully we can still locate
that original spirit which fired those
seminal missives and helped shape
modern electronic music.
James Kumo first appeared in 2008 and has released sparkling
deep techno on labels such as Ann Aimee and Metamorphic,
as well as his own KMusic imprint. Here he uncurls a lustrous
floater marked by cloud-like synth swirls, under which he
constructs intricate webs of morphing riffs and cosmic latrine
detonation, plus a spacier dub version. Dan Curtin, another
inestimable Detroit legend and a man responsible for many
of the major electronic peaks of the 1990s, is on ferocious
form for his remix, steeling up the groove to bring out the
track’s central spectral ectoplasm. Liverpool’s Binny meanwhile
lovingly injects uncanny Detroit production touches into a
second remix, with tone bends, moth’s underpants percussion
tickles and flickering textures.
GARY MARTIN
We Get Down / Well
MOTECH
Gary Martin was another friend of the old Needs Must column
from Detroit, carving his own idiosyncratic flight path with
releases on his Teknotika imprint in the early 90s. These were
often distinguished by funked-up turbo-grooves, intergalactic
strings and underlying steam-heat pressure, occasionally timed
to go off with spectacular results on the more discerning
dancefloors. I remember his ‘Disco 2000’, recorded under his
Gigi Galaxy alias, positively laying waste to the late, lamented
Voodoo in Liverpool.
DETROIT’S FILTHIEST
Sounds Of The City
MOTOR CITY ELECTRO COMPANY
Julian Shamou, aka DJ Nasty, who recently enjoyed Disclosure
sampling his ‘Pass Out’ for their ‘Bang Out’ missive, revisits his
2004 Detroit mega-hit to provide two merciless prongs of raw
techno steel, honed to a sonic skeleton and charged with the
unique brand of energy that has imbued the Motor City since
the MC5 in the 1960s. The original is high on the bpm scale,
hijacking and speeding up Basic Channel motifs and ramming
white-hot electrodes ‘twixt its buttocks. No drop, vocal,
melodies, just a mutant disco string stab and scorching latent
groove power. There’s also a 125 bpm mix for more earthly
dancefloors.
MORGAN LOUIS
Only 1
WHITE MATERIAL
It’s good to see Gary still at it and releasing tracks on DJ
3000’s label. These two trailer his upcoming ‘Escape From
South Warren’ album, starting with a no holds barred killer
which will rip into the heart of the floor with its classic house
testifying, percolating tribal funk momentum, militant snares
and scrotum-esque suction motifs. It pushes all the buttons for
a guaranteed lift-off before DJ 3000 strips down for a heady
early hours treatment with his trademark sweeping strings.
‘Well’ cuts in with goat circumcising hi-hat action to become
an evocative Detroit night-stalker, which Robert Hood then
snatches and remoulds into one of his inimitable bare wired
cavorters with flicking hats, looped-up vocals and bison bowel
bass flatulence.
FLORIAN KUPFER
Explora
TECHNICOLOUR
For the last 25 years, Ninja Tune have maintained a barrage
of forward-looking tackle bent on pushing the boundaries
and causing mischief. A little while back, they started the
Technicolour offshoot to release 12-inch missiles of a techno
nature; like a radioactive tentacle with a direct link to the
original organic punk spirit of acid house, in particular.
For ‘Explora’, Florian Kupfer takes 10 minutes to build a
compelling web of analogue madness using just a mangled
vocal phrase, warped percussion and a vicious machine loop,
invoking an eerie glow-worm masturbation ritual as the pulse
swells from subliminal to snarling before climactic mayhem
is achieved with organic malevolence and precision. He then
continues his brand of circuit abusing foul play through three
further tracks, adding up to a blissfully cathartic sonic orgy.
One of the things I loved about doing this column back in the
day was when a new label found its way into the Fat Cat record
shop in London and suddenly became scorching hot, partly due
to its mystery and unavailability (or after Andrew Weatherall
had blown the roof off Sabresonic with one of the few copies).
I’m reminded of this because a huge buzz has recently swelled
around the White Material imprint started in Brooklyn by Young
Male and DJ Richard in 2012, not least because they’ve never
been able to afford to press more than a few 12-inch singles at
a time.
The fact that this music is shot with an indefinable element
that says techno is about to go somewhere else helps. It’s
astonishing to hear how much modern techno uses new
technology to simply retread and refine innovations made
over 20 years ago, but White Material records go back to the
basic electronic elements and fuck with them with gleeful
abandon. Morgan Louis’ latest EP is a case in point – aggressive,
savage, simple and jacking, a low-flying torpedo coming from
dangerous waters spiked with opiates and trunks-munching
groove sharks. Pure electricity harnessed for ill purposes.
It’s good to be back. And next month we might even see the
return of the Needs Must chart.
THE FRONT
XXX
THE
REMIX
REVIEW
In association with Prism Sound
Artist: ETHAV
Title: WARRIOR
Remixer: BOY BEHIND THE CURTAIN
The second solo single from London-based singer and
producer Ethav, ‘Warrior’ is a slow burning electro throbber
with a unique vocal performance – and a killer chorus – at
its heart. There are world music touches too, but it’s more
electronic than its predecessor, ‘Sleep’, which had an unhinged,
experimental feel closer to Ethav’s live performances, where
she’s been known to sing totally a capella or at the very least
with only a laptop for sonic company. Her vocals have, however,
already graced a big Stateside club anthem, ‘Wild Stray Cat’,
which was put together by LA producer Jonathan Morning.
Boy Behind The Curtain says: “I’m a big fan of Ethav. She’s not
afraid to be different, something I regard as vital in the music
industry. ‘Warrior’ is raw and full of emotion, almost like a
middle finger to a lot the conventional rubbish we hear all over
Radio 1 these days. When I first heard it, I have to admit I was
slightly taken aback and had no clue what to do with it. I just
felt it would be a big challenge to rework. After meeting with
Ethav, we came to the conclusion that we wanted a remix with
heaps of energy and my basic idea when approaching the track
was to make something that didn’t sound polished. I wanted to
keep the raw feel. I’m really happy with how it came out and I
hope it pleases all your ears.”
‘Warrior’ will be released on 18 September
on Inverted Music UK
ETHAV
Boy Behind The Curtain has taken on the track’s electro
essence but, in a bid to avoid simply copying the vibe of the
original, pushes his remix as far in the other direction as is
humanly possible. It might come as a bit of a surprise to learn
that Boy Behind The Curtain is Fred Davis, who started out
fronting much tipped indie rebels Team Waterpolo. A doomed
record deal with Epic and an NME tour with Crystal Castles,
Friendly Fires and White Lies later, the band split and Fred
embarked on a new career creating warped remixes and his
own leftfield dance grooves.
Boy Behind The Curtain’s reworking of ‘Warrior’ emerges out
of a sludge of gooey filters before announcing its arrival with
a crashing drum machine set to hip hop speed, the resulting
groove sounding like Björk’s ‘Army Of Me’ being given a
thorough ram-raiding by a ‘Fat Of The Land’-era Prodigy. A
piercing synth line becomes the central feature, rising and
falling as the tune ebbs and flows, while Ethav’s vocals are
time-stretched and squashed into tiny shards that pepper
the finely detailed, clever edits. They’re the only parts of the
original track that surface on the remix, which was created
using Logic Pro software on an Apple Mac.
Ethav says: “I first came across Boy Behind The Curtain when
I heard a remix he did for Cazzette for a competition. When I
approached him and asked if he would do a remix of ‘Warrior’,
he told me he didn’t know where to start, not because he
didn’t like the track, but because he thought it was completely
original. Fred has this extraordinary energy that he channeled
into the remix, bringing in a sound that is brimming with
excitement and gives the track a whole new perspective.”
BOY BEHIND THE CURTAIN
Listen to The Remix Review radio show on the first and third
Thursday of each month at 3-5pm GMT at www.hoxton.fm
Internationally renowned manufacturers of high quality
analogue and digital studio products, PRISM SOUND are
supporting the B-SIDE PROJECT, which promotes new artists
and provides additional platforms for live electronic music and
remix productions. To get involved with the B-Side Project
network, please visit www.b-sideproject.org
Prism Sound have also launched Mic To Monitor, a series of
free educational seminars and workshops taking place in key
cities across the UK and the US this autumn. Aimed at anyone
involved in music production, from students to professionals,
the Mic To Monitor events are designed to dispel the many
myths surrounding the recording process. Each seminar
features presentations from recording professionals, who will
answer audience questions about technology and techniques.
There will also be an opportunity to demo and win recording
equipment. For more information and to sign up, visit
http://www.prismsound.com/music_recording/studio_events.php
XXX FRONT
THE
ANATOMY OF A
In which our man FAT ROLAND uncovers the hidden meanings of classic electronic album
covers. This month, ‘Doctor Adamski’s Musical Pharmacy’. That’s by ADAMSKI, that is
Shame we never saw the
follow-up album, ‘Professor
Adamski’s Clockwork
Newsagent’
Genres: acid
house, euro
house, keyboard
farts, parpy beats,
sweaty honkers,
country ’n’ western
Don’t tell
Adamski, but
that’s not water
[zips up trousers]
It’s 5am, it’s sunrise at
a rave, and suddenly
Adamski’s album
makes sense: a box of
40 CDs makes a great
pillow
Named after a popular
yoghurt and now used as
a piles cream by ageing
clubbers
Not a real doctor. See also
Doctor & The Medics, Dr
Dre, Dr Finlay, Dr Foster
The first 500 copies came
with a free mind altering
powder that had a street
name of “Sherbert Dip”. OK,
it was a sherbert dip
Worst day at the aquarium
EVER
When people called him
a “keyboard wizard”, they
meant Jean Michel Jarre
meets Gandalf
Lick here. No reason, you
just have a nice tongue
“Yeah, wear the hat and
shades. You’ll look just like
the Chuckl—er, the Blues
Brothers”
Utah Saints have got this
album on tape. Oh wait,
no, they taped over it with
Haddaway
Not actually a theatre
musical. See also musical
chairs, musical statues,
Musical Youth
Things we still had when
this album came out: a
Thatcher government,
the Football League First
Division, Woolworths, our
dignity, our hair
If you neck a load of E’s
before listening to this,
it becomes ‘DEECTORE
ADAEMSKEE’S MUESEECAL
PHAERMACEEEEE’
Contains Adamski’s version
of ‘All Shook Up’, the second
best cover ever after Candy
Flip’s ‘Bring Your Daughter To
The Slaughter’
Adamski had a pet dog
called Dis who famously
became the Californian
rapper Snoop Doggity Dogg
Here lies Adamski’s drugs
stash (cough mixture, dog
biscuits and a pack of
cheesy Wotsits)
Contains vocals from Seal,
who told us we were never
gonna survive unless we got
a little Jay Z
We found the big fish.
The little fish and the
cardboard box are missing
presumed dead
Not available on
the NHS. See your
doctor for details.
No, not that doctor,
that’s Dr Dre
The guitar floats.
It’s a witch! Burn
it! BURN IT!
Scratch here to reveal a
naked Seal draped in liquid
gold. Hold on, sorry, that’s
Guru Josh
BORIS
BLANK
GETS
ELECTRONIC
SOUND
MAKE SURE
YOU DO TOO
subscribe and save money each month
www.electronicsound.co.uk/subscribe
XXX FRONT
THE
TIME MACHINE
HARDKISS
AT THE 1995
BILLBOARD
DANCE MUSIC
SUMMIT
HEN
BACK WGS
THIN ,
T
WEREN ARE
EY
HOW TH W
O
N
When the distinguished American music trade mag hosted its Dance Music
Summit in San Francisco in January 1995, little did they know that the
stars of the show would be HARDKISS, an underground outfit who would
inadvertently help lay the foundations of today’s EDM craze
Words: KRIS NEEDS
Although America revolutionised music by inventing disco in
the 1970s, followed by hip hop, house and techno the next
decade, it got off to a slow start trying to assimilate and
adapt to the hybrid uprising that had taken place in the UK
around 1988 under the name acid house. I was in the States
for much of the 80s and early 90s, and witnessed rapid,
seismic changes in the US dance music barometer from close
quarters, but I was quite surprised at the way the country
dealt with this latest electronic scene.
In 1988 America, dance music could still be boxed in alongside
strains such as heavy metal, punk and “alternative”. While
tens of thousands were traversing the motorways of Britain
looking for that weekend’s raves, the Stateside devotees
seeking having-it dance music in the underground clubs
numbered no more than a few hundred in even the biggest
US cities. As I saw at the small clubs and parties I managed to
find in the New York area, particularly in Brooklyn, there was
a strong sense of unity to be found in celebrating a kind of
music that would seemingly never catch on in the mainstream.
Such pockets of resistance could also be found in Detroit,
Chicago, LA and San Francisco.
By the mid-90s, however, an enormous rave scene had
grown in the US which inexorably planted the seeds of EDM’s
corporate takeover. First, the Brits had sent over Underworld,
The Chemical Brothers and The Prodigy, playing what the
Americans called “electronica”. Then Madonna got hold of
it for 1998’s ‘Ray Of Light’ album. Within a few years, the
excruciating cod-rock posturings churned out by the David
Guetta brigade was taking it to the stadiums and to Las Vegas.
As an unwitting crucible of this future movement in the early
90s, San Francisco had its own way of looking at things, which
was innately descended from the open-minded climate that had
spawned the original summer of love 30 years earlier. The city’s
party overlords, the Hardkiss brothers, actually hailed from the
East Coast, but when Scott, Gavin and Robbie were thrust into
the creative cauldron of southern California, they had found a
place where their imaginations and musical obsessions could run
riot, no matter how far out or against the current grain.
The brothers’ initial 12-inch releases on their own Hardkiss
label showed a virulently creative consciousness at play.
Hardkiss were the first American outfit to break dance music
constructed by electronic means out of the underground,
but they were more like an ectoplasmic party tornado at
Billboard’s Dance Music Summit, held in San Francisco
in January 1995. Was this one of the events that laid the
foundations for the coming EDM monster, as compounded
at subsequent Miami Winter Music Conferences? But if this
was an early attempt to legitimise the dance scene in the
eyes of an industry still trying to find the next ‘Thriller’, what
I observed there around the Hardkiss family was more of a
celebration and an affirmation of the original principles of
disco, dance music’s eternal mothership (whether it likes it or
not).
At the time, I had my own electronic disco band called Secret
Knowledge with blues chanteuse Wonder. We were signed
to Andrew Weatherall’s Sabres Of Paradise label, but we also
released tracks on Leftfield’s Hard Hands imprint as Delta
Lady (which included Leftfield in the studio). We had a US
deal for ‘Swamp Fever’, the new Delta Lady single, which had
been championed by Billboard columnist Larry Flick and sat
at number 33 in the magazine’s dance chart. It was enough
to shoehorn us into the mag’s big event at the San Francisco
summit, playing at a party for the Astralwerks label.
The trip got off to a good start. Off the plane, into a cab,
and a driver pouring out stories about the original acid tests
and Hendrix igniting Monterey. Haight Street, the 60s hippy
epicentre, still carried some of that peace ’n’ love ambience,
except the music in the record shops was mainly of the dance
variety. Walking into the bar of the Hotel Ana, we were
greeted with a hangin’ out scenario that might have caused
those into their garage music to spontaneously combust:
remix supremo David Morales lolled against a pillar looking
like Freddie Mercury, while various Chicago house legends and
divas high-fived and the dance biz elite schmoozed.
Then in strolled a larger-than-life figure who, thanks to his
broad grin and overly friendly demeanour, immediately stood
XXX FRONT
THE
out. Derrick Carter is one of the true giants of Chicago house
music, inventing the warped and funky “boompty” style as
heard via his Blue Cucharacha, Doghouse and Classic labels.
He was already renowned for epic DJ sets and spectacular
partying exploits. We hit it off immediately as Derrick was
far from the then usual fixed-smile career boy sizing me up
to see if I’d be useful. He lived this music and actually drank
alcohol, which was a novelty in these circles back then. It
made perfect sense that he was there with the Hardkiss posse.
A few hours later, Hardkiss were DJing at a party in a small
Italian restaurant for Traci Lords, the former porn star, who
Wonder had befriended when the pair worked on a song that
had appeared in the ‘Mortal Kombat’ movie and become a hit
in the US. Traci had visited Wonder and I in the studio and
was very pleasant. The restaurant was packed with liggers
and droolers jostling to have their photos taken with Miss
Lords, but my focus was on Hardkiss. At a time when many
DJs, particularly the conservative garage mob, were restricted
to a 120 bpm plod and watered down gospel vocals, Scott,
Gavin and Robbie straddled a mind-blowing range of musical
styles with the dancefloor uppermost in mind. They were
a revelation that evening and, in many ways, showed the
American music industry the next century.
Once Derrick Carter arrived, a riotous night got under
way, with San Fran’s psychedelic tradition upheld in fine
style. We ended up at a Deconstruction Records bash, but
something wasn’t right. The Dust Brothers (soon to be The
Chemical Brothers) were playing live but they didn’t seem
to be inspiring the type of crazed wall-scaling they did back
home, while Justin Robertson, one of the UK’s finest DJs,
was frustrated because lots of people split after the band
had been on. Someone had also nicked Justin’s beer stash.
Then the management raided our balcony vantage point and
confiscated ours. Apparently the police were clamping down.
So it was back to the hotel, Justin on a downer that his US
debut had been prematurely curtailed, but from here on in it
was utter carnage and I finally staggered out at around noon –
and Wonder and I had our own US debut to contend with that
evening!
The Astralwerks label night was at a place called the
Gardening Club, where there were various visually-boosted
rooms for disco, house and chill-out. Considering there was
stiff competition in the city with other Billboard events, we
managed to draw a respectable crowd. We were playing the
main room and I was DJing before we went on. I was nervous
but my set of acid techno, including tracks like Josh Wink’s
‘Don’t Laugh’, went down fine. After about 90 minutes, Wonder
took the stage, by which time the joint was rocking. Now I
could finally relax and, after the venue closed at around six the
following morning, we joined the Hardkiss contingent in a car
making its way to a house party getting underway across town.
The host, a kindly gent in his 60s, was apparently at the
forefront of the San Francisco gay scene in the 1970s and
his lovely old house – all wood panelling, antiques and
stained glass – had been a focal point. Many who’d attended
his gatherings in those days had been claimed by AIDs, but
tonight the doors were open to a discreet few who’d heard
the word. The Hardkiss crew were welcomed with open arms
and the whole affair was a cut above, with guests wiping
the furniture after minor spillages and emptying the ashtrays
halfway through the proceedings. Two rooms were decked out
for chilling and chatting as huge TVs blasted out psychedelic
images, while in the kitchen a nun with a beard was serving
until the next evening.
The large conservatory/dining room was designated for
dancing. During the following 12 hours, the DJ roster included
the Hardkiss squad, the then world famous DJ Keoki, and Mr
Derrick Carter, who was absolutely jaw-dropping in serious
disco mode. I’ve never seen anyone mix like that. At one
point, he made a flexi-disc of Diana Ross’ ‘Upside Down’ last
for 20 peak-filled minutes. Finally, a chill-out specialist called
Wolf took things down to a beautiful close with a slowmotion symphony, after which we repaired to Scott Hardkiss’
apartment for more activities, ending one of the most perfect
nights and days (and nights) I can remember.
Sadly, Scott is no longer with us. We lost his amazing talent
and vision in March 2013, but thankfully Gavin and Robbie
Hardkiss have returned to homage their rich past in loving
memory of their fallen brother, while once again looking at
future possibilities. And with Hardkiss leading a pocket of
underground resistance once again, the world of proper dance
music can only be a better place.
A 20th anniversary edition of Hardkiss’ 1995 ‘Delusions Of
Grandeur’ album is out now on Hardkiss Music
AMON TOBIN
AMON
LIVE AND
Superstar sonic boffin AMON TOBIN h
spectacular ‘ISAM’ live show for the ver
desert and burns it”, the revered master o
of the ‘ISAM’ concept and his unique app
encompassing l
Words: MAR
Pic: Calder Wilson
TOBIN:
D DIRECT
has just performed his head-spinningly
ry last time. Before he “takes it into the
of sound and light talks about the genesis
proach to making electronic music an alllive experience
RK ROLAND
AMON TOBIN
Brazilian-born, Brighton-raised Amon Adonai Santos de Araújo
Tobin first appeared on the musical radar in the mid-1990s
using a much shorter name. His one and only album as Cujo on
London’s Ninebar Records, 1996’s ‘Adventures In Foam’, was
quite enough to catch the ears of Ninja Tune, a label that has
since then presided over the release of everything under the
rather more manageable Amon Tobin moniker.
Ninja proved a natural home for Amon Tobin’s ever-inventive,
constantly evolving, manipulated electronica. ‘Bricolage’ from
1997 is widely regarded as a stone-cold classic, Tobin’s complex
compositions catching the ear of not only breakbeat aficionados
but also a raft of jazz freaks, while his groundbreaking 2005
soundtrack to the ‘Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory’
video game was arranged so it could change in real time
depending on the level of the action.
His live shows have followed a similarly innovative path, with
Tobin choosing to present his music in a DJ format rather than
taking live musicians on the road. But nodding along to his own
tunes this is not. Starting in 2011, he took to the road in support
of his acclaimed ‘ISAM’ album, performing inside an enormous
purpose-built stage set that used the latest in video mapping
technology to blow away audiences across the world.
With further tours and numerous one-off appearances over the
last four years, the ‘ISAM’ shows (and the ‘ISAM 2.0’ update)
have raised the bar for the live performance of electronic music
– or any music for that matter – but Amon Tobin has just played
what he says is the very last ‘ISAM’ show ever. And although he
has said that before, this time it looks like he means it.
Pic: Nathan Seabrook
What does the concept of live electronic music
mean to you, Amon?
The ‘ISAM’ show seems to have been defined as much by what
it couldn’t be as what it might be…
“You know, even the terminology is weird for me.
Live electronic music… it seems like an oxymoron.
You can’t really play electronic music live.”
“Right. Clearly not a DJ show. And not about the podium
DJ either.”
That’s quite a statement from the person who has
probably done more than any other artist to redefine
the live presentation of electronic music.
“I think it’s always been this amazing problem, at least coming
from my background. When I started out, you’d go out and
you’d DJ with some records and that was what it was all about.
If there was any kind of performance, it would be on the
scratch DJ side, they were the ones who were performing with
records. People like me were mixing in a corner in a club and
getting the crowd dancing. There was nothing to look at and
everybody knew and understood that. That’s what DJing meant
to me.”
So what changed?
“In the 1990s, we had the concept of the superstar DJ, so
we found ourselves more and more up on a stage and, to
be honest, it was a bit of a fish out of water situation. But
somehow we all tried to make it work [laughs]. So everybody’s
on stage playing records, and because you’re on stage people
are looking at you… because why wouldn’t they? You’re on a
stage! But you’re up there thinking, ‘Why are you looking at
me? I’m clearly just playing records! This doesn’t make any
sense!’. To me, it seemed like the biggest square peg in a
round hole. The idea of thousands of people watching a guy
playing records, I kept thinking it was crazy and something had
to change. And then you started getting other artists using
their laptops and trying as hard as they could to look like
they were doing something. But even so, you know, watching
someone fiddling around with a laptop on stage is about the
least compelling thing you can imagine.”
A laptop on a stage is never a pretty sight.
“The whole thing seems completely counter-intuitive to me, it
really does. Which is why, when I did my ‘ISAM’ album, I didn’t
think there was any way I was going to be able to perform it
live. I got into a particularly difficult spot because ‘ISAM’ wasn’t
a DJ record, so as well as there being no way that I could
really share it in a live environment, I also couldn’t share it
in a DJ environment. I had to try to come up with something
completely different, a way to present music that wasn’t dance
music but was still electronic. So not live show and not a DJ
set, but a sort of, I don’t know, a performance… film… thing…
that worked with the music of the album and was visually
engaging because it was happening on a stage.”
Did the people you approached to help you put the show
together immediately understand your initial idea?
“No, it took some discussion to get that across. Even when
I first started talking to Heather Shaw [CEO of Los Angeles
design company Vita Motus], who designed the cube things, her
first sketches came back and they still had me on a podium in
the middle. Which makes sense, of course. I mean, you’re the
DJ, you’re going to be in the middle, right? I had to say, ‘No,
inside the cube please, not on it, and I’m not going to appear
at all throughout the whole show’. The promoters weren’t too
keen on that, let me tell you!”
You really wanted to be inside a structure?
“I was just trying to think of different things. I’d seen Richie
Hawtin had that awesome set-up for his Plastikman set. Alright,
it was transparent and the visual aspect was fairly abstract, but
I did really like the idea of being inside something. So I tried
to find ways I might be able to do that. I looked at different
emerging technologies, some mechanical stuff, stuff with
strobes, stuff with different surfaces… oh God, I can’t even
remember now. In the end, I sort of stumbled on projection
mapping through endless YouTube searches, and then I had
to try to find the people who could actually do the mapping,
and they had to then find the people who could develop the
software to do it in a practical amount of time.”
XXX TOBIN
AMON
Projection mapping is a method of projecting images
precisely onto various surfaces using software to control the
projections. That’s right, isn’t it?
“Yeah, it had been around for a while in the world of corporate
and civic events – you could go and see the Eiffel Tower lit up
or some old building falling apart and coming back together –
and it was all a very city-centre-on-New-Year’s-Eve type of a
gig. I thought if could find a way to turn something like that
into a stage show, that could really work, because it had an
animation to it and I could then tell a little story through it,
and have the focus of the show on the visual interpretation of
the music as opposed to being on the performer. To me, that
was the key to it.”
And you wanted to build this enormous structure
in a new venue every night?
“That was the other thing. At that point, the big shows in the
city centres took weeks to set up and line up where images
were mapped to, so on a tour where you’re going to be in a
different city every night, we had to figure out how to do it in
roughly four hours. And that took a lot of development from
people like Leviathan [Chicago-based conceptual designers],
who figured out how to do that. It was a real collaborative
effort, finding people who had the technological know-how and
skills to realise what I was trying to put together.”
There must have been points where you wondered
whether it was ever going to work? Did you also worry
that it was going to cost a lot of money?
“There was so much to do and we really didn’t know how it
was going to turn out. Everything was complete guesswork,
including what it was going to cost. Kudos to Ninja Tune for
fronting the money for it. I didn’t have the money for it and I
couldn’t get any sponsorship, no fucker would sponsor me, so
Ninja advanced it. Obviously, I paid for it in the end [laughs],
but they had enough faith in the ‘ISAM’ album and the whole
idea of the show to take a gamble with me on it. That was a
huge thing and I couldn’t have done it without them.”
Were you involved throughout the whole process?
“People often have this idea that I hired a company and said,
‘Make me a fantastic show’, and off they went. Actually, it was
very different to that. I was very much directing every stage
because I was so nervous about it. There was so much was
riding on it, I felt I needed to micro-manage every single aspect
of it. I set out how the show would flow in terms of the music,
then I storyboarded each track with a theme and a colour
scheme. I did that with Vello Virkhaus [from Californian multimedia production firm V Squared Labs]. We spent a couple of
nights going through each track and I told Vello the story I’d
made up in the park the previous afternoon – some ridiculous
teenage fantasy about going into space and getting hit by a
meteorite and seeing aliens and how the aliens are actually
you... It was a pretty trippy idea.”
Was the overall narrative tightly scripted?
“It was actually very vague, which was important in the end.
A lot of what made it work was to do with the pacing of the
show. It wasn’t just about having a big flashy thing on the
stage, it was about having every moment that happened lead
into something else logically, and then pacing the sounds and
each new visual well enough that they didn’t linger too long
but weren’t over too quickly, and having enough detail that you
could see new things if you went to see the show again. This
is the sort of approach I usually apply to arranging music, so I
applied it to the show as well. It was a whole process. And we
didn’t know how people were going to react. We didn’t know
if the space would be dark enough, or if people would be too
close so the illusion wouldn’t work, or if they’d be at the wrong
angle… It was really nail-biting.”
Do you think ideas like logic, narrative and drama
are missing from live electronic music?
“Yes. Even V Squared were coming back with things like sea
creatures and bouncing balls, and I’d be looking at these
images and asking, ‘Why is there a fucking dolphin flying
around? What’s going on here?’. There has to be point to
what’s going on or it’s just eye candy. There are any number
of shows where you have this amazing production, but in the
end the content is effectively a series of screensavers or fancylooking images that don’t make any sense.”
Do you think your audience understood
everything you were trying to do?
“Mostly, but I did get some critical comments from people who
were expecting a more traditional show or had been to see Daft
Punk or… who’s that mouse guy?”
Deadmaus?
“Yes! Him! I was getting comments like, ‘Why can’t I dance to
this? Where’s the beat? This show looks great, but it would be
so much better if the music was like Deadmaus’. But the whole
point was that it wasn’t a club show. If it was, if it was just
about dancing, why put something massive on stage to look at?”
AMON TOBIN
Pic: Nathan Seabrook
Your music has always had that tension between being dance
music and lifting off into explorations of the nature of sound.
“It’s personal taste. I like techno and I like drum ’n’ bass, but
I separate them out. I have another outlet called Two Fingers,
which is really just music for DJing. With that, I try to play
small venues where I can set up with Traktor or whatever and
just play beats for people to get down to. It’s really good fun,
but my Amon Tobin stuff wouldn’t work like that.”
Some time ago, you said you were going to burn the cubes
in the desert. You obviously didn’t do that because you’ve
just played what was billed as the last ever ‘ISAM’ show at the
Outside Lands festival in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park.
“Yes, the last ever show… again [laughs]. I really didn’t know
how that was going to go. It had been a long time and I was
worried it might look dated. But it seemed kind of fitting to do
it there and people were asking for it, so I figured, OK, one last
show and then I’ll move on to the next thing. I’m already on to
the next thing, actually. I’m working on it now, but it will take
some time.”
Can you tell us what it is?
“Until I have it all in the bag and I know it’s going to work,
it would be a bit silly to talk about it. But I do feel that, in
general, the idea of these stage shows getting bigger and bigger
isn’t that exciting or interesting. it would be alright if there was
a point to it, but at the moment I just keep seeing enormous
productions without any compelling content.”
So are you heading in the opposite direction now?
“I’m almost hoping for a backlash against the massive shows
because they’re all so bloated now. As a music fan, I feel I
would be a bit turned off by going to a big stage show. I’d be
more interested in seeing something more intimate, or if it’s
going to be something big then it needs to be in a different
format, not just a huge thing you go and stare at.”
“It’s funny how it’s become an arms race, right? The stage
shows are all very competitive but I don’t know that it’s
particularly healthy because it just takes things further from
music. It becomes about who has the most money, who
can invest in something truly spectacular. It would cost an
enormous amount of money to come close to topping anything
that you’re seeing out there at the moment. It concerns me
that there are new kids coming up with really good music,
artists who are not necessarily fitting into the club format,
they’re not making dance music, and they don’t have a
platform because they can’t compete with these ridiculous
stage shows. It does all seem a bit corporate, a bit moneydriven. I do feel that if it gets to the point where your audience
is limited by your financial reach, that’s inherently wrong. I also
think that’s got a lot to do with the way music is listened to
and consumed now.”
You mean streaming and downloads?
“Well, yes. I think this problem could have been entirely
sidestepped if the music industry hadn’t gone the way it has in
the last 10 years. The fact is that there’s always been a lot of
music that was experimental and wasn’t necessarily ever meant
to be performed. The problem is that now music is basically
free, the main source of revenue for an artist is playing live.
It’s the only way artists can support themselves. So that factor
looms over all of us. If you’re not going to sell this music, you
have to perform it, and so the performance issue has become
much bigger than it otherwise would have been. I don’t know,
I’m talking like an old man! I’m not saying things shouldn’t be
how they are, or any of that shit, I’m just wondering how much
that affects the situation we’re in. How would things be if the
emphasis was less on performances and more on the actual
music. A lot of this is only an issue because we all have to go
on stage, so we’re wracking our brains about how the fuck to
do that when we don’t play instruments [laughs].”
Maybe it’ll take someone with the brass neck to create
something like, oh, I don’t know, ‘ISAM’ or ‘ISAM 2.0’, maybe?
“Foolish enough. But we need more fools.”
Have you seen Kraftwerk’s 3D show?
“I haven’t, no. I really envied them sending the robots out.
Genius!”
The 3D performance is fun. When you look around
at everyone wearing the 3D glasses, it’s like being in
a 1950s cinema or something.
“Excellent!”
Although when I first heard about the ‘ISAM’ gigs,
it did occur to me that Kraftwerk needed to take
a look at what you were doing.
Well, I wasn’t going to say that. Anyway, it’s worked out for you.
But you have rather torpedoed our idea of exploring
how electronic music works in a live context…
“Sorry about that. It’s true that it’s an odd thing, but that’s the
reality [laughs].”
Thanks Amon. That’s probably a good place to leave it.
“It probably is, isn’t it? Good speaking with you.”
Watch the Amon Tobin ‘ISAM’ live trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/embed/WLrt7-kIgIM
LONELADY
MUTUAL
ELECTRICIT
TY
Post-punky songstress LONELADY experienced a
Zen-like moment when she hooked up with vintage
electronic trio WRANGLER during her week-long
residency at the Barbican in London. The end result?
Analogue heaven
Words: DANNY TURNER
Pictures: ED WALKER
XXX
LONELADY
This is very bizarre. In a corner of the Barbican Centre in
London, sectioned between the building’s cold grey exterior,
a girl is sitting in a perspex box. She’s here as an artist-inresidence at Doug Aitken’s month-long ‘Station To Station’
living project, first established in 2013 to explore modern
creativity by enlisting a variety of cross-collaborators based
in major cities spread across the globe. The girl is from
Manchester and her name is Julie Campbell, but she’s better
known as LoneLady.
Surrounded by the tools of her trade, LoneLady has spent the
last week in her box recording a track called ‘Fear Colours’ for
the A-side of a vinyl-only 12-inch single to be released via The
Vinyl Factory, who have installed a mobile pressing facility in
a nearby workshop. The flip of the record features a remix of
‘Fear Colours’ by Stephen Mallinder, one-time Cabaret Voltaire
frontman and now a key member of the innovative electronic
trio Wrangler.
Despite almost universal acclaim for ‘Hinterland’, her second
LoneLady album for Warp, Julie Campbell is always looking to
experiment and assimilate new ideas. She’s currently getting
a little obsessed about integrating more analogue hardware
into her thrusting, guitars-meet-synths, post-punk influenced
BENGE ON WORKING
WITH LONELADY
“I first got involved with this Barbican
project through the modular synths.
LoneLady wanted to use some real
analogue modulars while she was here,
to get a few more sounds into her palette
as it were, and she approached me to
bring along a Moog Format Modular
synth. It’s a bit of a monster, so I set it
up for her and showed her how it worked.
“The Moog Format Modular is actually
quite a modern system, but it’s based on
a design from the 1960s. It’s essentially
a couple of oscillators, filters and
sequencers. There’s no keyboard and I
decided not bring one with me because
it makes you approach the instrument
in a completely different way. I set up a
giant patch on it, which is essentially a
three-part drum machine and bassline
electronic sound. Which is why she has been steered towards
Mallinder’s fellow Wrangler member Benge, who has kindly
loaned her a Moog Format Modular synth for her week at the
Barbican. LoneLady’s residency is set to end with her sharing a
live stage with Wrangler, but how did this union come about?
“Their manager got in touch with me and we started a
conversation,” says Julie, matter-of-factly. “I was very pleased
because I love Wrangler’s music and I’m also a huge Cabaret
Voltaire fan. I think Wrangler and LoneLady have quite a lot of
contrast actually, which will add something to the live event
rather than just having another version of me playing. They
bring something really different to the table, but there is a
crossover with our mutual interest in rhythm. Plus Benge is
teaching me a bit about the modular synth world, which is
something I’m hoping to pursue further. Benge gave me a quick
tutorial on the Moog Format Modular, which was brilliant, but
since then I’ve been exploring it on my own during the week.”
What did you learn from spending so much time toiling with
the complex-looking patch-based system?
“I think the main thing was not to be so uptight about needing
an end product and just allowing there to be a happening. I
sequencer that all syncs together. You
can create a whole track from that one
patch, but the modular does have a MIDI
interface so you can clock it directly from
your computer.
“On top of it, we’ve got an old 1970s
Korg Modular MS-50. It’s a really rare
one, but it uses all the same voltages
and connectors. One of the things about
modular synths is that one system often
won’t work with another, so if you’re
using modular you need to be able to put
stuff together that all works happily. The
MS-50 was designed to be an updated
version of the Moog and its purpose was
to continue the Moog legacy into the
future. It’s kind of equivalent to a big
Eurorack system and they’re really not
that expensive.”
“I THINK WRANGLER AND
LONELADY HAVE QUITE
A LOT OF CONTRAST
ACTUALLY, WHICH WILL
ADD SOMETHING TO THE
LIVE EVENT RATHER THAN
JUST HAVING ANOTHER
VERSION OF ME PLAYING”
want to work with more hardware, but it’s quite difficult to
get your hands on this old modular synth gear because it’s
expensive and it’s cumbersome. So this was a really nice
opportunity for me to spend a bit of time with one of those
machines, just to see if I got along with it, which I think l I did.
I just like the tactile quality of dials and faders and patch leads;
all that stuff works in my head and I think it makes what I’m
doing sound better. I’m going to be sorry to see Benge take it
back again!”
How did it feel to be on public display in the perspex box?
“I’ve just been trying to do what I do, but the fish tank scenario
was quite strange. Every time somebody came to watch what
I was doing and put the headphones on to have a listen, I felt
like I had to make sure there was some sort of sound there for
them to hear, which really pushed me out of my comfort zone.”
Listening to ‘Hinterland’, it’s obvious that LoneLady’s obsession
with electronics has gradually become integral to her sound,
albeit never at the expense of her more traditional use of
instruments. But it seems that her initial interest in electronic
music pre-dates her love of guitars.
“I’ve always enjoyed electronic music,” notes Julie. “In fact, I
had a keyboard before I had a guitar. What has stuck with me
from when I was growing up is pop music, which at that time
had a lot of electronic elements as well as being very melodic
and catchy. Later on, I discovered all the post-punk music from
the late 70s and early 80s and I really love how synthesisers
and technology were a part of that scene.
XXX
LONELADY
“Even my guitar influences, like Andy Gill [Gang Of Four] and
Keith Levene [PiL], are people who deconstruct the guitar and
don’t play it in any sort of rock ’n’ roll style. It kind of occurred
to me recently that the way I’ve been playing guitar – in a
percussive way – it’s almost like I’m trying to play it like a
sequencer. And I have to admit I’ve got a thing about drum
machines as well. I use the in-built drum machine on my really
cheap Yamaha keyboard all the time. I’m kind of obsessed with
trying to make drummers drum like machines.”
Those disparate elements come together effortlessly on
‘Hinterland’. Basslines coil and gyrate around spiky guitar
refrains and rough, mechanical-sounding percussion. The lo-fi
production is bare and gritty. The overall result sounds as
though it’s been written with the intention of being replicated
in a live setting as accurately as possible.
“My live set-up has changed over the two LoneLady albums,”
says Julie. “When I first started playing live, it was literally just
me and a drum machine, but for ‘Hinterland’ I really wanted
to get across a sense of organic rhythm and also a bit more
warmth. I wanted the audience to see people hitting drum
pads and tweaking dials, to see them actually generating the
“A BIG PART OF WHAT
I TAKE INSPIRATION
FROM IS BRUTALIST
ARCHITECTURE AND
CONCRETE, BECAUSE I’VE
LIVED IN A TOWER BLOCK
NEXT TO THE MANCUIAN
WAY FOR YEARS”
sounds, so the laptop approach was never going to be right
for me. There are four of us on stage now and I think having
more people up there has really helped in getting the groove
across. It’s also good for me to look around and see a few more
musicians alongside me.
“I wouldn’t say it is necessary for me to be able to replicate
the album live, because that would rely on too much playback
and I’d find that a bit sterile. I mean, it took a while for me
to figure out how we were going to play live. I did have an
Akai sampler last time around, but we’ve integrated samplers
more into the live set-up, so it’s been like a new language for
everybody to learn.”
As much as technology plays an important role in LoneLady’s
sound, the effect of the environment in which she works
cannot be underestimated. While some artists put a lot of time
and effort into fabricating a dystopian vision that resonates
with their listeners, harsh and challenging surroundings have
long been a part of Julie’s everyday existence – and that bleeds
through her music with a rigid authenticity.
“A big part of what I take inspiration from is brutalist
architecture and concrete, because I’ve lived in a tower block
A FISTFUL OF GEAR:
THE LIVE SET-UPS
LONELADY
“Gareth Smith is at the master
station,” says Julie Campbell. “He
uses an MPC500 for beats and the
new Akai MPX8, which is really
user-friendly, but I think we need
something a bit more hard-wearing
for the road. He also has an Alesis
reverb unit put through a Mackie
mixer. Running from that, we’ve
got the two drum pads and a
Roland SPD-20 Octapad, and a lot
of sounds come off that as well.
“On the other side of the stage,
Tom Long has an old Simmons
SDMP1 drum pad, which is a
next to the Mancuian Way for years,” explains Julie.
“That’s also where my home studio is, which I refer to as
my ‘concrete retreat’. Buildings like that can often be very
protective and feel like a bolthole, but they can feel like a bit
of a prison cell at the same time, so I’m coming at it from both
an architectural and a psychological place as well.
“I think you should always write about what you know, and
within the four walls of the tower block I tend to write about
materials, structures and spaces rather than people. It’s a
theme that keeps underpinning everything I do, so to wind
up at the Barbican, which is an iconic piece of brutalist
architecture, has been a continuation of that journey in a way
that makes sense and I find really pleasing.”
Do you fully embrace that environment or do you also feel the
need to escape from it?
“I’m torn between the two impulses. I never planned to
move into a tower block, to be surrounded by concrete, but
something that’s quite bleak and functional develops a kind of
beauty and language of its own over time. If you’re receptive
to that, it can be quite an inspirational force and I think that’s
what it is for me.”
bit wonky but sounds great,
and my old Yamaha PSR2. Its
bank of instruments is pretty
unsophisticated and it’s really
wobbly. It’s like a kind of ‘Sesame
Street’ version of a keyboard.”
WRANGLER
“I have a really minimal set up,”
says Benge. “The drums are made
by Nord and the sound is based on
a Simmons from the 1980s. I run
backing tracks of the sequenced
stuff using Digital Performer, but
all the original sequenced material
is done with modular synths and
vintage gear.
“Phil uses an Arturia MiniBrute and
it’s awesome – really crispy, sharp
oscillators and envelopes, and
with a great filter on it. The Boss
Chromatic Tuner TU-3 is essential
and he’s also got an electro
harmonic phaser/flanger thing
called a Worm.
“Mal does lots of vocal
manipulation through the Korg
Kaoss Pad and a Roland voice
processor. He then goes straight
from the mic into a Roland
Voice Transformer and out to the
Kaoss Pad, so you’re doubling
up the effects. We’ve also got a
microKORG, which is a tacky little
thing but really light so it’s great
for sticking in hand luggage. We
nicked that off John Foxx, but
don’t tell him.”
LONELADY
Standing in a room propped up by a hideous six-by-six-foot
block of concrete is certainly the perfect setting for an evening
celebrating “brutalist architecture”. Wrangler are first to take
the stage for their 40-minute live set. Stephen Mallinder and
Phil Winter are hunched over two tables draped in black linen
and chock-a-block with analogue toys dispensing plenty of
snarling electronics. Benge completes the triangular formation,
vigorously striking a pair of drum pads.
Flickering LEDs flicker across the stage as a wasteland of
guttural noises and rhythmic metallic arpeggiators spring to
life. Mallinder’s Dalek-esque vocals are deliciously sinister,
especially on the highlight of the evening, a cover of John
Foxx’s ‘He’s A Liquid’. The green shapeshifting patterns on
the video screens that surround the packed hall of onlookers
are replaced by the slogan “Retreat or Danger” shortly after
Wrangler’s performance comes to a close.
“Have you heard of a book called ‘Bunker Archeology’ by Paul
Virilio?” asks Julie as she waits in the wings. “He explored
all these defunct military bunkers and reimagined them as
mysterious forms. The bunker thing ties in with where I live
in my concrete tower block in Manchester and that’s what
‘Retreat or Danger’ refers to.”
The four-piece LoneLady live group take their places on a
“A BIG PART OF WHAT
I TAKE INSPIRATION
FROM IS BRUTALIST
ARCHITECTURE AND
CONCRETE, BECAUSE
I’VE LIVED IN A
TOWER BLOCK NEXT
TO THE MANCUIAN
WAY FOR YEARS”
minimally lit stage. Splayed guitar notes break the silence as
electronic drum patterns collide with tribal percussion. Dressed
in black and with a guitar slung over her shoulder, the slightly
built Julie Campbell drills her way through a powerful, edgy
set without pausing for breath. The audience slowly envelops
the stage, becoming increasingly animated in tandem with
the band’s frequent bursts of kinetic post-punk energy, the
judicious use of analogue gear burning into their membranes.
Remember that you read it here first, folks.
LoneLady’s ‘Fear Colours’ is available from The Vinyl
Factory at www.vinylfactory.com and the ‘Hinterland’
album is out on Warp. Wrangler’s ‘LA Spark’ album is
on Memetune and the ‘Sparked’ remix set will follow
later in the year
In the aftermath of the gig, Julie talks about another
collaboration between LoneLady and Wrangler coming down
the pipe. As well as Stephen Mallinder’s remix of ‘Fear Colours’,
the two acts have been writing together and the results
should see the light of day after Wrangler have released their
upcoming modular remix album, ‘Sparked’, which will feature
reworkings from their ‘LA Spark’ debut. Julie is clearly excited
by the fruits of their joint labour.
“We’ve got some great material and it’s now a question of
finding the time in everyone’s schedule to finish it off and
decide how we want to present it. The process has been very
modern so far, I’m afraid, with Benge generating the sequences
and getting a bunch of grooves going, which he then sent
to me to put loads of guitar over. All we need now is some
finishing contribution from Phil and Stephen!”
WHEN THINGS
GO RANDOM!
LONELADY
“It was a specific decision of mine
to use older gear. I just think it
sounds better and it’s part of that
whole aesthetic that I’m quite
drawn to. But that does mean
that every show I play presents
its challenges – and the more old
electronic gear I acquire, the more
uncertainties there are going to be.
“I think there are more technical
problems now that we’ve got
samplers and old drum pads in the
mix. They’re constantly glitching
or failing or just generally acting
strangely. It’s sort of part of their
charm, but it can be maddening
as well. Something I’ve realised
is that you can never get the
levels perfect. We have continual
issues with the vocoder sample,
for instance. It’s boomingly loud
at some venues, but then it just
doesn’t cut through at all when we
play other places.”
BENGE
“It’s all part of the fun really. If
everything was always perfect, it
wouldn’t be interesting. Obviously
things breaking down and stopping
isn’t a good thing, but it doesn’t
happen that often. It makes it
more exciting on stage and it can
even sometimes sound better as
well, especially through a big PA
system.
“We did a gig with John Foxx
at The Roundhouse in London
and took along a load of vintage
modular gear and tape machines.
That was really mental, because
we also connected things together
with CV/gate, which is a pre-MIDI
system for hooking stuff up. It is
actually quite tight and reliable,
but it’s still 1970s technology. The
usual sort of things went wrong,
especially gear not triggering
properly. We did have back-ups
of everything and various ways of
getting ourselves out of trouble,
but it was a risk because it was in
front of quite a lot of people on a
massive stage.”
JAMIE HARLEY
SURF
ON T
SINE W
FING
THE
WAVES
JAMIE HARLEY
You won’t have heard of him before, but you will
have heard his work. JAMIE HARLEY is the sound
engineer that everyone from Aphex Twin and
Autechre to Fuck Buttons and Hot Chip turns to
when they’re doing a live show. And if you ever
need a room ringing out, Jamie is your man
Words: PUSH
Jamie Harley is lucky to be here. He’s one of the most
sought-after sound engineers in electronic music, working
with an absurdly long list of artists that includes Aphex Twin,
Amon Tobin and Autechre – and that’s just the A’s – but
he could just have easily been picking potatoes or stacking
shelves somewhere. Anything other than working in the
music business. Because if renowned film composer Michael
Kamen had had his way, Jamie wouldn’t be allowed within a
million miles of a tambourine let alone a synthesiser.
“I was working at a studio in London called Sam Therapy
and Michael Kamen came in with this massive keyboard,”
explains Jamie. “This was in the late 1980s and he was
already pretty famous, he’d done ‘Brazil’ and ‘Die Hard’,
whereas I was just starting out and was totally green about
everything. My job mainly involved making tea and setting
up mics, but while we were getting ready for this Michael
Kamen session I somehow managed to plug his timecode
into something I shouldn’t have done… and I blew his
keyboard up. It was some sort of sampling keyboard and he
lost all his samples. He was a huge guy – big hair, big beard
– and quite scary. And a whole lot scarier when he was angry.
And he was very angry with me.”
How many times have you plugged something into
something you shouldn’t since then?
“Not many. I suppose it taught me a lesson. I don’t tend to
blow things up these days.”
Most of you will probably have never heard of Jamie Harley
before. But when it comes to playing live, an awful lot of
today’s electronic musicians swear by his sonic skills. Just
going back to that list of artists he has worked with for a
moment, to the names Aphex and Amon and Autechre we
need to add Hot Chip, Fuck Buttons, Blanck Mass, Plaid,
808 State, Squarepusher, Flying Lotus, Matthew Herbert,
Oneohtrix Point Never…
“I’m lucky enough to be able to only work with people I’m
excited about and interested in,” says Jamie. “Artists have
lots of different ideas about how things should sound and
it’s my job to try to understand what they’re doing, what
they want to achieve, and recontextualise their music in
a live environment. So in one sense I’m a middle man, a
conduit, but I also have to have an input, I have to make
decisions for people. I take that responsibility very seriously,
because we’re talking about someone’s art and also
someone’s career.”
Once he’d saved his own career by convincing his boss
at Sam Therapy not to fire him over the Michael Kamen
incident, he graduated from making tea and setting up
mics to desk work. The studio was often used by Warner
Brothers and Jamie got his first major credit in 1989, as a
recording assistant to Alan Moulder on The Jesus & Mary
Chain’s ‘Automatic’ album. He made the jump into live
engineering in the mid-90s by volunteering his services
to ethno-ambient dubsters Loop Guru, whom he stayed
with on and off for several years while at the same time
further honing his trade with acts ranging from Terry Hall
to 90s shoegazers The Catherine Wheel to classical choral
ensemble The Mediaeval Baebes (he subsequently married
a Baebe). Later on, he played a part in the development
of Mogwai’s live sound, working with them for the first 18
months of their career.
A self-confessed audiophile with a collection of weird and
wonderful vintage hi-fi bits and bobs (when he was growing
up, his dad owned several Tandy electronic shops in the
Midlands), it’s perhaps not too far from the truth to suggest
that Jamie is generally more interested in the sound and
tone of music than elements like melody or rhythm. Which
is why he’s long been an enthusiast of the early electronic
music experimentalists. And why, in 2001, he was pleased
to get a call from Squarepusher’s booking agent.
“He said, ‘Hey Jamie, you like Stockhausen and all that
shit, don’t you?’. I couldn’t deny that I did indeed like
Stockhausen and all that shit, so he then said, ‘Thought so.
Squarepusher’s looking for a new sound guy. I’ll put you
in touch’. That marked the start of a long association with
Warp Records… which was great because I’d been collecting
Warp stuff for years. It’s like a family at Warp. The artists
have lots of time and respect for each other, but they’re all
JAMIE HARLEY
“FOR ME, HAVING A
INCREDIBLY IMPORTANT
THING BECAUSE I ALW
COLOURS AN
very idiosyncratic people, which is something I really like
about them.”
Does your role in the creation of these pictures change
from one artist to another?
Working with electronic music in the live environment
requires a different approach to working with rock music.
With rock music, a large part of the live experience is about
the unleashing of a power, an almost primal force. Push the
faders up and it’s not difficult to bluff it. With electronic
music, the actual sounds of each elements are crucially
important. It’s about the positioning of sounds, with great
precision and and clarity. Not that it isn’t about dynamics,
because it very much is, but it’s about harnessing those
dynamics in a much more considered way.
“Yes, but it also depends on the gig. So with Aphex Twin,
I can do two-channel gigs or I can do gigs where Richard
James has 70 string musicians or 20 swinging microphones.
For Autechre, it’s a two-channel gig, but what they’re
presenting me with is their mysterious and wonderful world
in the form of two well constructed and massively dynamic
channels of music. For Hot Chip, on the other hand, I’m
mixing on 46 channels, working with a lot of keyboards and
a lot of acoustic stuff, creating a space where they can sit
together and work as a whole. So one is the art of creating
a system that is flat enough for the music to be able to
exploit its full dynamic potential and the other is mixing on
that white canvas.
“Most of the people I work with have a deep understanding
of dynamics,” says Jamie. “The problem is a lot of music
is highly compressed now, so people’s idea of how it
should sound is governed by the fact they listen to MP3s
or they listen to stuff on the radio. It’s a sort of crushed
sound, which is ultimately boring to the ears. As soon as
you start playing with dynamics, your ears are like, ‘Oooh,
we’ve got to pay attention, something’s going to happen
here’. Big chunks of sound can come out of a very silent
space, which can be quite shocking. Tiny sounds can come
from an unexpected source and happen in a large way.
Once you start to work with those sorts of ideas, it gets
tremendously exciting.
“For me, having a white canvas is incredibly important. It’s
a synaesthetic thing because I always see sound as colours
and patterns. Without wanting to seem too pretentious, it’s
having a picture painted in front of me and if the canvas
isn’t white, if the sound system isn’t flat, then it’s not
ready to have sound put onto it because it will taint the
sound that the artist is sending you. So a big part of my
job is to provide that white canvas for the paint to go onto.
That’s all part of the art – or science, depending on how
you look at it – of what I do.”
“Either way, there are lots of challenges. With two channels,
I have to translate what the artist is doing into a larger
world and to do so in the most effective way that I can, so
it needs to come across as pure and bold as possible and
on a canvas that’s as white as possible. A lot of it is about
getting digital sources like samples to sound good in the
real world. If I’m dealing with electronics and acoustics
at the same time, it’s about blending and smoothing out
the juxtaposition. Acoustic sounds are quite wet sonically
because they’re created in a space, whereas a lot of
electronic sounds start off in a box, they start off in a
computer. So the trick is to mix them up, to try to make
acoustic things quite dry and electronic things quite wet.
As well as the different set-ups and what each artist wants
to achieve, there’s also the room itself to be taken into
consideration, right?
“For sure,” says Jamie. “The room lends itself to live sounds,
it lends itself to the finished product, but sometimes it can
determine the way those sounds occurs. Whatever you do,
you can never really get away from the room, you can’t
A WHITE CANVAS IS
T. IT’S A SYNAESTHETIC
WAYS SEE SOUND AS
ND PATTERNS”
fight it, so you have to be versatile in terms of being able
to work with it, negotiating its strengths and weaknesses in
terms of being able to sit a mix comfortably.”
piano backwards and forwards towards a microphone, which
is basically what we did. That’s definitely one I can put in
my back pocket and walk away with.”
Jamie Harley talks warmly about all of the artists he has
worked over the last 20 years. He has particularly fond
memories of criss-crossing the globe with Amon Tobin, just
the two of them and their somewhat volatile Serato DJing
software. He laughs when he reveals the thrill he got when
Amon first brought his spectacular ‘ISAM’ show over to
Europe.
The pendulum piece is the one that Jamie seems to have
been most excited about, though. Firstly because he’s got a
bit of thing about feedback. Secondly because Steve Reich
attended the Polish show and Jamie got to have a chinwag
with him.
“I set up the sound for him, but I had no idea what was
going to happen until the gig itself,” remembers Jamie. “I
thought it was the most amazing thing ever. Amon has
custom-built flight cases for all these ridiculously huge
pieces of kit, you know. Now he’s finished ‘ISAM’, it’ll
be interesting to see where the hell it’s all going to go. I
suspect someday I’ll be having a drink in a pub in Wales
and find myself sitting on a large slice of this ‘ISAM’
megalith that someone’s bought.”
But the shows that Jamie says he’s most proud to have
been associated with are Aphex Twin’s grand-scale ‘Remote
Orchestra’ performances in Poland and the UK 2011 and
2012, the core concept of which saw Richard James
directing an orchestra by sending tones via headphones
for each musician to interpret. A second piece was an
expansion of Steve Reich’s ‘Pendulum Music’ using 20
microphones suspended over speakers to create loops
of feedback (Reich’s original 1968 version used three
microphones) and a third involved a digitally controlled
grand piano being swung across the stage in a gigantic
cradle.
“Yes, I suppose you could say they were quite challenging for
me,” laughs Jamie. “Each one was very special in its own
way, but as a sound engineer I don’t think anybody else can
say they’ve created a Doppler effect by swinging a grand
“Part of the setting up I do to get the white canvas is taking
out the rings in the room and the system, which means
that you have to push certain frequencies to find what the
rings are and then you pull them out with equalisation.
And when you’re ringing out a room and pushing at these
feedbacks, you can create some beautiful sounds, so the
idea of doing that Reich experiment has always totally
appealed to me. Feedback is sometimes your enemy and
sometimes your friend – and it’s really good to have a big
session making friends with tons of feedback.”
And how was it meeting Steve Reich? Is he a bit of a hero of
yours?
“Just a bit. The promoter came over as I was busy working
away and he was like, ‘Oh, Jamie, this is Steve, Steve, this
is Jamie, Jamie’s working with Richard on this…’. I wouldn’t
profess to be his best friend after that, but we had a bit
of a chat. Which, having collected electronic music and
experimental music for years, was quite a mind-blowing
experience for me, you know. I really love my job and
special moments like that make me love it even more.”
watch the video
www.youtube.com/embed/PCzNEkL9zLQ
DAN TOMBS
VISI
O
ION
N
XXX TOMBS
DAN
Have you ever been to a live show and wondered where, as if by magic, the
images and graphics and fancy lights come from? If you’ve seen Jon Hopkins or
Blanck Mass this summer, you’ve been wowed by visual artist DAN TOMBS
Words: NEIL MASON
You know how it is. Stick a musician on a stage and they’re
the centre of attention, whether they like it or not. And
while what’s coming out of the speakers might be dynamite,
if there’s machine wrangling rather than posing with a
guitar, where do the adoring public put their eyes?
Many electronic acts have tried to address the situation
with a big old screen and some sort of film show or slide
show, but more often than not it’s just optical fluff. Say
hello then to Dan Tombs, a new breed of visual artist whose
work is as explosive as the tunes it rubs along with.
Dan is at the sharp end of conceptual visuals and his ideas
are shaking up the way that some of the most exciting
names in electronic music are approaching their live
performances. Working alongside the likes of Jon Hopkins,
Blanck Mass, Factory Floor, East India Youth, Luke Abbott
and even our guitar-toting pals The Charlatans, to name
but a few, what Dan does is truly mind-boggling stuff. But
before we boggle minds, a bit of a rewind.
Dan Tombs’ journey began with the toss of coin. What to
study at university, Geography or Art? Art won and, in the
early 2000s, a place at Norwich Art School, now Norwich
University of the Arts, was duly taken up.
“I was studying painting,” explains Dan. “I was copying
film stills and turning them into abstract works, but then I
realised that the photography and film I was using as source
material was much more interesting than my paintings, so
in my final year I worked entirely with Super 8.”
which over the course of the show began to disintegrate
due to the delicate nature of the format. In the end, there
was almost nothing left. Very structuralist.
It was at art school that Dan struck up a friendship with
Luke Abbott, who had set up an electronic music night in a
Norwich city centre bar with some friends and invited Dan
to bring along his projectors.
“I put some loops up, but then I thought, ‘That’s a bit
boring’,” says Dan. “So I wondered what would happen if I
started manipulating the film.”
With a row of projectors all pointing at the same spot, Dan
discovered he could “mix” live images by blocking off lenses
with his hands. It was almost like DJing but using images
rather than records. Around this time too, he became aware
of the chiptune and 8-bit scenes, hardware hacking and
punk electronics and the art of pulling keyboards apart. And
he started wondering if the sort of things you could do with
kit that made sounds, you might also be able to do with kit
that made pictures.
“I picked up a lot of games consoles,” he says. “Mainly
Segas and Nintendos, thinking they were roughly the visual
equivalent. They’re in that little bubble of electronics where
they’re complicated enough to do something interesting
with them, but not too complicated that you can’t interact
with the circuit boards.”
Must have been quite a thing when he first cracked a
console open and realised that by poking around inside,
shorting circuits, he could make a screen explode with
patterns and colours and interference?
Super 8 was an easy-to-use mass market film format
popular with home movie enthusiasts in the 1960s and 70s,
and much loved by experimental film-makers ever since
thanks to its lush, saturated images. Dan’s degree show
“It was incredible,” laughs Dan. “It was like liquid light! I
consisted of five Super 8 projectors, each with a 50-foot
remember one Sunday afternoon I went to this big secondloop of film. The loops were films of projectors, shot by Dan, hand shop with Luke Abbott and we bought a bunch of old
consoles, took them back to his, plugged them in, popped
the lids, and just stuck our fingers in. We were trying to run
the video signal through guitar pedals and I was thinking, ‘A
distortion pedal will distort the video... won’t it?’.”
It won’t, but a video synthesiser will, of which a hacked
games console can be a basic if essentially random version.
And now we arrive at the mind-blowing part of what Dan
Tombs does.
“In the same way that a sound oscillator makes a wave, a
video oscillator will make a visible wave,” he explains. “So
you have an oscillator for red, an oscillator for green, an
oscillator for blue, and then you can patch those together
and start making...”
Hang on. So you put your source material through a video
synth and manipulate the colours to make something new?
Nope.
“What a video synth does is generate images from nothing,”
he continues. “There is no actual live footage and nothing
is filmed, which is what I love. It’s why I am so interested
in circuit bending and structuralist film-making and lensless
photography...”
Right. Going to stop it there again. Lensless photography?
Pic: Brana Lalin
“It’s not animated because it’s not drawn and it’s not
filmed,” says Dan. “You’re working out how to create
imagery from what you have in front of you. Which is just a
bunch of boxes... and feedback. Feedback’s the thing that
really excites me.”
Struggling to keep up? Yup. So think of it like a photocopier.
Press the copy button, then put whatever comes out back
in, magnify it, and press the button again. And again. And
again. It picks up all the dust off the machine and the grain
in the paper, and after a while an abstract image starts to
appear.
“You can do it with sound and audio mixers,” explains Dan.
“You would wire an output to an input of an audio mixer,
start cranking the EQ and the gains, and suddenly you’d
get noises flowing around these mixers, and the shittier the
mixers the more interesting the noises they would make.”
After art school, Dan found himself working in galleries and
pondering how to use his new-found skills to survive as a
visual artist. His pal Luke Abbott was meanwhile snapped
up by Trevor
Jackson’s Output Recordings imprint and he invited Dan to
make a music video for his 2006 debut release, ‘B’,B,B,B,B,
B,B,B,B,B,B,B,B,B,B,B.
XXX TOMBS
DAN
“So I made a music video for Luke using all the Segas,” says
Dan. “Trevor Jackson was amazing and he got it straight on
to MTV2. Did I see it on the telly? I’ve never seen MTV2
in my life, but I really wanted a copy of it with the MTV
icon at the top of the screen. It made me realise there
were more opportunities for me in the music business than
there were in working in galleries. And also that there’s a
commercial aspect to visual work, which is sort of sad but
necessary.”
In a nutshell, you might get paid.
“Yeah,” nods Dan. “I remember around that time people
saying, ‘We would love you to come and show your work
in Germany’. I’d say, ‘Fantastic, that’s great, what budget
do you have for the show?’. And they’d say, ‘Oh, well, none
really’. And I’m like, ‘So I’m supposed to pay for my flights
and accommodation?’. But then when Luke signed to Border
Community, James Holden and the guys there took me
under their wing, which I’m really grateful for. They started
flying me around Europe to do the visuals for their parties,
which was a huge leg-up.”
Through the Border Community connection, Dan met
Factory Floor, which was the start of a new kind of
relationship. Rather than club nights and parties, Factory
Floor asked him to create something around specific live
shows. And rather than it being, “You set up over there and
don’t bother us”, it increasingly became a collaboration.
“That’s how I prefer to work,” says Dan. “It’s a long time
since I’ve done the improvised thing, turning up with a
whole bunch of content and winging it. I’m using analogue
gear, but I’m sampling it all at home. For a while, I was
traveling with loads of analogue video stuff, but now I’m
using the laptop to sequence everything.”
In most instances, Dan’s shows begin in the studio, first
by generating the raw visuals and then by cutting these
up into bar-length loops. He is able to sequence them live,
reacting to the changes in the music in the same way that
musicians do.
“I have a hotel room set-up and I often rehearse before
shows,” he says. “I’ve got really good at hacking tellies in
hotels.”
Dan provided the trippy graphics for Factory Floor’s
acclaimed ‘Two Different Ways’ video and then hooked up
with Jon Hopkins for the live shows around his Mercury
Prize nominated ‘Immunity’ album. Most recently, he’s been
working with Benjamin John Power, aka Blanck Mass, on
his European dates.
“Blanck Mass is a great project to be involved with,” offers
Dan. “We’ve got a lot of shared ideas and Benjamin lets
me be very self-indulgent. We spend hours talking on
Skype, developing ideas, him sending me bits of noises, me
sending him bits back, and slowly we decide what we want
to achieve. He wanted things to be quite disgusting, so I’ve
done a lot of work with cornflour and water solutions in
speaker cones. When you run a sine wave into that, it turns
into what’s called a non-Newtonian fluid, it turns into a
solid. It doesn’t follow the laws of physics. It breaks them.”
So it’s about filming again, not generating images from
boxes? That’s interesting.
“But it’s a very small microcosm. I mean, if you think
about it, the speaker cone is almost a video synth that’s
generating a wobbly colour. I’m trying to see if I can pull
that stuff off live, so setting up multiple speaker cones with
the cornflour and with cameras on rostrums...”
Whatever next? Record sleeves? The recent East India
Youth album, ‘Culture Of Volume’? That’s a Dan Tombs
image on the front.
“I hired a photographer to take the source material and
we got over 300 pictures of William Doyle in his suit,” he
explains. “We found the one that we liked, I gave him a
haircut in Photoshop, and then I manipulated the image
using video capture software on an old Commodore Amiga
1200.”
Which again is taking things to another level. A mashing
together of old and new tech resulting in a quantum shift
from creating visuals for entire nights down to one, single,
solitary image.
“It was about five months’ work, not solid, but from start to
finish,” he laughs. “William was inspired by the work that
Warhol did with the Amiga, especially the Debbie Harry
portraits. He’d read about it and then he came to me and
said, ‘How are you with Amigas?’. And I said, ‘Well, let’s
buy one and see!’.”
So are we at maximum visual now or is there more to
come?
“I want to do some really ambitious stuff,” he declares. “I’m
starting to work with lights more, which is really tantalising.
I’m starting to think there are going to be occasions when
I don’t do any video and I just work with lights. Video is a
way to do something that complements everything around
it, but being able to control the whole atmosphere of the
room, the whole environment, that really interests me.”
For more about Dan Tombs, visit www.dantombs.net
watch the video
WWW.player.vimeo.com/video/18762313
LUKE SANGER
AN
MANA
M
Our esteemed Tech section kit reviewer Luke Sanger doesn’t just talk the
talk, he walks the walk as techno producer LUKE’S ANGER. We hitch a
ride with him for a weekend in Poland to discover how he cuts his oneman rug live…
Words: NEIL MASON
The solo live show? Traditionally the
preserve of our guitar-wielding friends,
the rise and rise of increasingly portable
electronic kit means that artists such as
Luke’s Anger, aka top techno producer,
Bonus Round label boss and Electronic
Sound tech reviewer Luke Sanger, are
increasingly in demand on the live music
circuit.
GER
AGE
MENT
So how do you get to the point where
people are describing your sound as
“wonkier than a table with three legs and
grimier than an army truck” and you’re
being snapped up by promoters to play
to crowds across Europe on a regular
basis?
Luke Sanger’s tale began when he was a
teenager, cutting his teeth playing guitar
in bands at school. A friend’s cousin
was half of Nottingham-based rave duo
Nebula II and he’d knock acid house
and hardcore mixtapes in their direction.
Wasn’t long before Luke was wondering
how the tapes were put together and,
his guitar duly sold, he bought a pair of
cheap decks and a mixer and began to
find out.
By the mid-1990s, he was good enough
to secure a regular Sunday night chill-out
gig at a pub in his home city of Norwich.
From there, he quickly found himself
playing outdoor parties and raves across
East Anglia, before hooking up with a
few like-minded DJs to form the Molotov
Sound System.
After procuring their own rig from a
new-fangled website called eBay, Luke
and his pals were soon travelling further
afield. When they were playing parties
in and around London, they noticed that
other sound systems were increasingly
shoving samplers, sequencers and drum
machines through their speakers rather
than decks. So the Molotov boys began
scouring the second-hand stores, picking
up bits and pieces of kit, and started
playing sets revolving around jams prerecorded on MiniDisc and lots of mucking
about.
Reaching university age, the Molotov
crew headed in various directions to
study. Luke and fellow Norwich DJ Alec
Storey went to Bristol. Luke took an
Access To Music course, then studied
Creative Music Technology at Bath Spa
University. But before his first year at
Bath was out, his work caught the ear
of Jerome Hill from maverick techno
label Don’t Recordings, who released the
debut Luke’s Anger record, the ‘Fistful Of
Donkeys’ 12-inch, in 2006. Alec Storey
did alright too, recording as Al Tourettes
and Second Storey, as well as being half
of Also, who recently put out an album
on R&S.
“Two of us from the Molotov Sound
System have gone on to make music
as a career,” says Luke. “And a couple
of the other guys are still DJing, so it
was the beginning of something pretty
successful.”
LUKE SANGER
Since ‘Fistful Of Donkeys’, Luke
Sanger has released three albums
and almost 20 singles and EPs
as Luke’s Anger. Along the way,
he’s earned plenty of praise and
maximum respect for his exciting
one-man live performances. We
discover the ins and outs of playing
solo as he heads out to Poland for
the weekend to play a show in the
northern city of Szczecin.
L ANDING THE GIG
T H E L I V E S E T- U P
“Getting on Don’t Recordings for my first
release was really good. For the type of
techno I make, it was the go-to label.
It probably seems like a small niche of
a fairly niche genre, but it does have
a wide fan base around Europe. And
because there’s a circuit for that type of
techno, there tends to be a lot of repeat
bookings in places like Prague, Berlin and
Dublin, as well as London and Glasgow.
On top of that, I’ve played in America,
Scandinavia, Russia...
“At the centre of my current live setup is a Dave Smith Tempest six-voice
analogue drum machine, which handles
big analogue drum sounds and is an
excellent synthesiser too. The voice
architecture is based on their Prophet
series, so it has a similar character. Next
is the Elektron Octatrack, an eight-track
sampler which takes large audio files and
can do all sorts of effects and mangling
on the fly. I use this to trigger loops,
audio stems and process/re-sample other
equipment via the inputs.
“I have used booking agents, but by
far the most common way I get hired
is through someone contacting me via
Facebook or Soundcloud or an email
and then booking me directly. I have set
fees for DJing and for live work, but it
all depends on the size of the gig. My
normal requirements would be flights
and a hotel plus the fee. Sometimes
promoters say, ‘We can do flights and
the fee, but would you mind staying in
a spare room in so-and-so’s house?’. It
usually works out, but I’ll politely decline
if there’s any inkling that I’ll be in the
middle of an after-party at so-and-so’s
house.
“Antwerp was one of the first European
live shows I did, a night called BombO-Matic. I had a pretty good idea of
how I wanted to do it. They said they
wanted to see loads of equipment, so I
took it all in a big suitcase. I remember
seeing a picture of Neil Landstrumm’s
suitcase after it had been run over by an
airport baggage truck, with all his drum
machines crushed on the tarmac, so I use
Pelican cases now because they’re almost
indestructible. You can throw them out
of helicopters into shark-infested waters
and your gear will stay safe.”
“The strange-looking circuit board with a
nine-volt battery is the BugBrand Board
Weevil. BugBrand are a UK manufacturer
known for their modular synths, but
they also make noise gadgets like this
one. It’s a drone machine that constantly
outputs a mixed, three-oscillator signal.
It gets weird quite quickly, as all the
oscillators can be synced and FM’d to one
another, and is further manipulated by
touching the circuit board. It really does
sound completely bonkers. It’s always a
surprise what comes out of it.
“Finally, the white box is a Rigsmith Dub
Siren, a classic effect which I use to add
some atmosphere. It has a built-in digital
delay and the feedback is crunchy as hell.
If you’ve ever been to a dub reggae gig,
it’s what makes that bleeping, echoing
sound. You just press a button and it’ll
bleep, and then it has some knobs to
control the echoes and the intensity,
which is really fun. It’s built by a guy
from Plymouth who also makes sound
systems.”
PAC K I N G A N D T R AV EL L I N G
S H OW T I M E
D OW N T I M E
“I don’t have a checklist, but I do lay all
my kit out before I pack it. I set it all
up and have a test to make sure it’s all
working, then I unplug everything and
pack it, and then the night before I’ll just
double-check it’s all there. The Tempest,
the Octatrack and cables go into a Peli
case, which gets checked in at the airport
like a regular suitcase. The other smaller
bits go into my carry-on bag along with
the rest of my travel stuff.
“There isn’t a keyboard in my gig set-up,
so most of my live playing I tend to do
by hitting pads rather than keys. The
drum machine has pads and you can
trigger sounds by hitting those, so I do
a bit of that in the set. But the Luke’s
Anger stuff uses a lot of samples and is
very rhythmical. It’s not really something
you’d jam out some chords over the top,
it’s more like tweaking.
“I still get a buzz about visiting different
countries. Travelling on your own can be
a bit dull, but I’ll sometimes get booked
with someone else and we’ll travel
together, which is always a lot more fun.
Most of the promoters are really friendly
and want to be accommodating, but with
language barriers and loud nightclubs,
it’s never like you can have a proper
conversation.
“From doing raves and parties in my early
days, I’ve had my fair share of playing
to empty rooms and equipment not
working. There’s not much that can go
wrong that hasn’t already gone wrong at
some point over the years. The biggest
problems tend to be logistical rather than
technical, things like missing a flight, for
instance.
“I can get quite touristy when I’m away. If
there is any chance I’ll have three or four
hours spare in a place, then I’ll just walk
around the streets. In Poland, I got to
see quite a lot of Szczecin on the Sunday,
which was really nice. I’ll generally go
and have a beer somewhere and try to
experience a bit of the culture.
“Anything I forget to pack can be tricky
to replace when I get to another country.
I tend to take a couple of EU adapters
and a back-up of my Octatrack set on
separate flash card. I get stopped at
security most times I travel. They always
like to have a good look in my hand
luggage. I tell them it’s music stuff, but
I’ll invariably have to unpack everything
and then pack it all back in again.
“I had a few tech gremlins during my
set in Poland, but mainly it was timing
“I usually listen to podcasts when I’m
between one piece of equipment and
travelling. I listen to a lot of old Adam
another one, meaning the kit kept losing
And Joe podcasts, I find them quite good
sync. It sounded a bit like a DJ doing
for travelling for some reason. In the past, a bad mix. I tend to notice before the
I’ve tried loading up an iPad with films,
audience do, so it’s a quick stop and start
but I’ve almost always ended up not
and it syncs up again. I’m pretty sure it
watching anything. I also often take apps
happened because I was tweaking one
with the intention of getting some ideas
bit of equipment too much. Thankfully,
out, but again I never really use them.”
catastrophic technical problems are
pretty uncommon.”
“Most promoters will take you out for a
meal and maybe meet up with you the
next day to eat. If it’s the first time I’ve
been somewhere, I’m always keen to try
the local produce. When I went to Russia,
the food was strange, very grey looking,
but it didn’t taste too bad. It was a
cold, lardy, pasta-ish thing and so unlike
anything I’d ever eaten before. It did
have meat in it, I’m just not sure what
kind. The food in Poland was amazing
and I always enjoy going to Germany.
Sausages and beer!”
Luke’s Anger’s latest release is the
‘Filas & Undercuts EP’, which is out
now on Sneaker Social Club
LUKE SANGER
LUKE’S PHOTO DIARY
Saturday, 4pm
Arrive at
Stansted Airport
Queuing and more queuing. Enduring
being treated like cattle for a while.
Grabbed something to eat, including
what was supposed to be a lamb kofte
salad, although I struggled to locate the
meat. Had the obligatory pre-flight pint
in the Stansted “local”. They serve Doom
Bar, which is a bonus.
Saturday, 9pm
Arrive in Szczecin
and check
into the hotel
The Ibis hotels aren’t too bad,
kind of one up from a Travelodge.
And you get free wifi, so that’s another
bonus!
Saturday, 10pm
Arrive at the venue
and soundcheck
As Ryan Air cancelled my booked flight
and gave me a much later departure
time, there wasn’t much chance for a
proper soundcheck. It was more of a
frantic plug-everything-in-and-hopeit-works vibe.
Saturday, 11pm
BBQ time
What I love about parties in mainland
Europe is how people will quite often
get to the venue in time to have some
food before the rave. All very civilised
and totally different to the UK, where
you’d probably get arrested on terrorism
charges for starting up a BBQ.
Saturday, midnight
Party time
The party itself was excellent and went
on until 5am. As well as playing my live
set, I did a bit of DJing later in the night
using someone else’s records.
Sunday, 2pm
Lunch, Polish style
After a bit more sleep, I met up with
the promoters at a restaurant for more
food and, yes, more beer. The morning’s
breakfast was still haunting me so I was
a little wary, but things started to look
up as I ordered an awesome traditional
Polish beef stew with fried potato bread.
Happy me, happy promoters and yet
more beer. Na zdrowie!
THE ORB
MOO
TUN
ONY
NES
THE ORB
Alex Paterson has been Chief Space Cadet of THE ORB for more than 25 years, piloting the
chill-out pioneers to parts of the universe nobody else even knew existed. Following the
release of their ‘Moonbuilding 2703 AD’ album, Paterson talks Ralf Hütter, Johnny Rotten,
Chuck D, cosmic horizons, concrete slabs, dead drums, public toilets in the 1970s
and a lot more besides
Words: DAVID STUBBS
“I know this is the umpteenth Orb album but it feels as
exciting as making the first one,” says an ebullient Alex
Paterson from across a garden table on a blisteringly
hot day in Dalston. “And I think that’s because Thomas
[Fehlmann] and I are completely locked in with one
another. We don’t need to talk about things too much, just
a couple of words over dinner, then get off and do it. It’s
uncanny. We don’t want to break that magic, that natural
phenomenon. Thomas loves jazz, I hate jazz. It’s a happy
medium. And because we live in different countries, we’re
always bringing each other fresh ideas, things the other
person hasn’t necessarily heard before.”
Thomas Fehlmann, Alex Paterson’s musical partner in
The Orb, unfortunately cannot be with us today as he is
recuperating from a rather nasty hand injury. I last spoke
to the pair of them together in the bitterly cold, beautifully
expansive setting of the Cairngorms, around the release of
‘Orblivion’ in 1997. Back then, The Orb seemed to exist in
the culmination of a vast cultural time and space, from dub
to prog, post-punk, funk and all points beyond.
It’s astonishing to think that they have clocked up almost
20 further years of starship mileage since then, both in the
studio and on the road, whether performing live or DJing.
Technologies have evolved or passed on. And yet, for The
Orb, the methodology, the songlessness, remains the same.
The new Orb album Paterson is talking about is
‘Moonbuilding 2703 AD’. It is based loosely around the
concept of future space travel, in which mankind discovers
its root element in the ancient rocks on solar moons.
“It’s music that mutates into an eight-legged lunar Land
Rover and takes off into a cosmic horizon of a million
sounds, patterns and textures,” he says cheerfully. “It spins
the listener on his or her head, rewiring their brains to
maximum capacity, then brings them home, sweet home.”
‘Moonbuilding 2703 AD’ ventures to zones not unfamiliar to
Orb fans, going boldly where they have gone before (the
length and range of its pieces reminds me of 1995’s unfairly
maligned ‘Orbus Terrarum’). But it is no less luxurious for
that, taking in as it does The Orb’s legendary interplanetary
eclecticism in more vividly pixellated detail than ever
before. And space, I suggest, has become a speculative
place again, now that we are in the post-Apollo age and no
longer visit the moon.
“If they actually went there,” mutters Paterson. “I mean, if
they’ve got such powerful cameras, how come they don’t
show us the bits where they landed? They don’t do that.
Maybe there are colonies on the other side... but we never
see the other side. This is where the conspiracy comes
in that there are aliens on the other side to stop us from
landing there.”
As I narrow my eyes at this, Paterson generously concedes
that it is just a theory. Indisputably, ‘Moonbuilding 2703 AD’
is the ideal travelling companion for speculative voyages
into inner mental space.
For all the far-reaching, futuristic scope of the new album,
there is much to look back on with The Orb. Alongside
various co-pilots, Alex Paterson has taken in a journey that
started more than 35 years ago and in 2015 has fetched up
on the outer fringes of EDM.
These days, Paterson has relocated to West Norwood in
south London, a new 21st century electronic vortex what
with analogue maestros Metamono living nearby. He’s
recently started a new online radio station with Metamono’s
Paul Conboy, WNBC London, which goes out Thursday
daytimes between 10am and 6pm. It’s just the latest form of
dissemination of the Orb sound that began way back in the
grim mists of post-punk time when he worked as a roadie for
Killing Joke.
“Ah, the dark, depressing 70s,” chuckles Paterson. “Don’t go
out, you’ll get mugged. Don’t go to those toilets, you’ll get
your cock cut off.”
“WE KIND OF STUMBLED ACROSS
THIS IDEA OF NAMING OUR
MUSIC, CALLING IT SOMETHING
THAT WAS DIFFERENT, SO WE
BECAME THE PIONEERS OF OUR
OWN MUSIC”
THE ORB
Although Paterson had come through punk, he never wore
an “I Hate Pink Floyd” T-shirt. In fact, he worked with the
Floyd’s David Gilmour on The Orb’s ‘Metallic Spheres’ album
in 2010. But he had never been a proggie either.
“Punk was the first radical change,” he declares. “It died
out within two years but what came out of it, what it freed,
made the world a lot more colourful.”
Like many of his contemporaries, his essentially punk
attitude was fed through an immersion in krautrock, dub,
and the ambient music of Brian Eno and Gavin Bryars, all of
which were antithetical to the very English 1970s idea that
“advanced” music meant pseudo-classical, elongated soloing.
Paterson was especially influenced by Cluster and the
production methods of the late Conny Plank, who achieved
21st century sound results in a pre-technological age.
“That instilled a lot of great ideas in The Orb,” says Paterson.
“I remember we once ended up deading a whole room using
foam, putting a drum kit in the foam, taking all the metal
off the kit, and then getting Big Paul [Ferguson] to play a
set of dead drums and collect the sounds.”
And the Germanic influence was warmly reciprocated when
The Orb supported Kraftwerk in Australia.
“Ralf Hütter asked to have his photo taken with me, which
I don’t get a lot, but then he looks at the picture and says,
‘Alex, we have to go outside, there are no little fluffy clouds
in this picture’. So deadpan, those guys!”
Through his links with Killing Joke, Paterson got a job in
the A&R department at EG Records, but it wasn’t until the
late 1980s and the rave era that he found the musical times
and the technological wherewithal to seize his moment and
launch The Orb. To begin with, his Orb partner was Jimmy
Cauty from The Justified Ancients Of Mu Mu and The KLF.
“Samplers had just appeared on the scene – about 1985,
1986 – and by 1988 you could just about afford to get
yourself a 750 Echo. They crashed all the time, you had
to remember to save things and put them on a DAT, but
my luck was in when Jimmy bought an Oberheim OB-X...
which he didn’t know how to turn on, bless him. I suppose
that was understandable because they’re big monsters.
Lots of knobs. Killing Joke had one and I knew how to turn
the fucker on. So the next thing we knew, there we were
making an Orb record.
“From there, we sort of said, ‘Let’s be in a band’. Because
that’s what it was like in 1988. We were all waddling
around, completely titted, enjoying ourselves with what
was going on. We had the freedom to take something away,
copy it, make it our own without thinking about copyright
infringements. That was ‘A Huge Ever Growing Pulsating
Brain’. Just 1,000 copies on vinyl to begin with. It was only
when it got big that other people wanted their bit. Sounds
magazine said Minnie Riperton must be turning in her
grave. I thought, ‘I don’t think so’. I imagined her having
the biggest smile in the world, her voice on one of the most
requested sessions ever on John Peel.”
By this point, punk’s imperative to keep things curt and
tapered and tight-arsed was wearing thin. The Orb found
a way of making music expansive in a manner that was
in line with the punk spirit – by revisiting the minimalism
of ambient and adding their own, facetious twist. They
thrived by creating extended soundtracks for the comedown
period experienced by ravers in the wee hours. Chill was
born and The Orb took up a residency at Heaven in London,
brought in by Paul Oakenfold as part of his Land Of Oz club
nights. But what was to become the stuff of legend initially
appealed to a very small if attentive coterie.
“It wasn’t huge at all,” says Paterson. “It was a builder. We
put ‘Pulsating Brain’ out in February 1989 but we’d been
demo-ing it to friends during the summer of 1988. We kind
of stumbled across this idea of naming our music, calling it
something that was different, so we became the pioneers of
our own music. The KLF did it too, but they stopped, and I
know Jimmy Cauty has always kicked himself for that. He
always wished me well for sticking with it.”
What kind of kit did you use in the early days? And are you
nostalgic for the old ways?
“It’s fucking easier now. Much easier. Time was when I had
records, CDs, cassette machines, old TVs, old video players
– this was back in the Land Of Oz days – but now you can
get all of that on a couple of laptops. Actually, today I
use CD players. It was getting worse and worse with vinyl
when I was touring, especially in America. It would have to
be turned down, have the bass end taken out, they never
understood that I needed a concrete slab, even though it
was on the rider. They’d be saying, ‘What you need that for,
man?’.
“Then one night, I tried three CD players. That was it. I
suddenly fell in love with three CD players. The precision of
what you can do with them is quite stunningly scary. You
can link CD players together so they read each other and
then they can play in time with each other. This is just in
the last five years. So that’s what I use now.”
“Rickie loved the song, she just asked for $5,000 for the
vocal,” he shrugs.
Paterson is still a believer in the lost merits of vinyl, though. It was as a comment on outdated notions of effort and
He’s currently revelling in his new favourite record shop in
authenticity in modern music that The Orb famously sat
West Norwood and he’s excited that The Orb’s 1991 debut
and played chess when appearing on ‘Top Of The Pops’ in
album, ‘The Orb’s Adventures In The Ultraworld’, is about
1992 to “perform” their extended single ‘The Blue Room’.
to be reissued as a quadruple vinyl set. But despite the
vinyl resurgence, he believes such enterprises are becoming “My brother used to be in a band who supported Blue Mink
increasingly difficult.
in the 70s, and I remember watching ‘Top Of The Pops’
when Blue Mink were on and my brother was just laughing,”
“The record pressing plants are all in the Czech Republic
says Paterson. “I asked him what was so funny and he said,
these days – and there’s a waiting list,” he says. “Then
‘Well, that’s the singer and he’s drumming, that’s the bass
there are the lathes that cut the music onto the vinyl.
player and he’s playing guitar’. So I said, ‘How can they do
There’s only about five or six of these left in the country. In
that?’. And he said, ‘Because they’re miming’, and then he
about 20 years time, there’ll be no one left who’s able to
told me how the musicians used to swap positions if they
make these things.
thought they could get away with it. That was my first
A lost craft.
inkling of that.”
“You’re getting young people coming into record shops
saying, ‘Can I get a record player?’. Then they say, ‘How
does it work?’. I was thinking about how jungle is actually
just reggae speeded up – put an old reggae album on at
45 rpm and you have drum ’n’ bass – but young people
wouldn’t know that because they don’t have record players!
I’ve got decks that pitch down to zero. Down to zero and
then up to 360 bpm. And they can go backwards. You
can focus on tiny little milliseconds that enable you to
put a pinprick in the song you’re making. And then those
pinpricks become a sketch.”
Sketching and sampling are as important to The Orb’s
creative process in 2015 as they were at the outset. As with
DJ Shadow and the late J Dilla (to whom Paterson pays
tribute on ‘Dilla’s Moon Quake’, a bonus track on the vinyl
version of ‘Moonbuilding 2703 AD’ which features 15 of
Dilla’s loops), Paterson has always regarded sampling as an
art form, rather than pilfering.
“Can I let you into a secret?” he grins, leaning in like Max
Miller about to deliver a particularly blue gag at a variety
show. “The whole of the new album is made of samples.
Every last bit. Every last note. It’s assembled from other
things. It doesn’t have to be other records, you know.”
Paterson takes pride in the obscurity of his samples, often
so micro that they are undetectable to the copyright police,
but he was caught bang to rights by Steve Reich and
Rickie Lee Jones with ‘Little Fluffy Clouds’. The two artists
demanded financial cuts from the release, but Paterson says
they both came to like what he’d done with the track.
An awful lot of today’s technology is smaller than a
chessboard. Which means that, when it comes to playing
live, everything is much more manageable than it used to
be.
“We used to have 40-foot stacks with lighting, but now
we only need a laptop,” says Paterson. “We used to
have 24-track mixers, but now we only need a couple
of outboard boxes and computers with a couple of
programmes like Ableton.”
Getting in front of audiences, whether DJing or performing
live, has helped The Orb maintain a steady profile over the
years, especially during the period when they were left in
the lurch by their record label at the very tail end of the
90s. And it’s in the live environment that Paterson has
genially crossed swords with many of his contemporaries,
even if he didn’t always recognise them.
“Last time I played Glastonbury, I came off the stage and
saw this bloke and had a bit of a chat with him, American
geezer he was, and at the end he said, ‘Hey man, here’s
my card, stay in touch’. It was only Chuck D out of Public
Enemy. And I didn’t know who he was. But he was great
about that. Contrast with another time when I’m backstage
at this Laurent Garnier gig in Italy and this guy starts asking
me what I’m doing, you know, like I’ve no business being
there. I tell him who I am and suddenly he’s fawning all
over me. Why do people have to be like that?”
THE ORB
Paterson suffered another adverse experience in Italy,
when he decided to conduct an experiment in sexual
equality.
“It was at a club in Rimini, full of all these beautiful women
with body paint on. They were all naked from the waist
up. So I decided to take my shirt off too, just before I go
on stage. And someone says, ‘Ey! What are you doing? Put
your shirt back on!’. And I’m, like, ‘What’s the difference?
Well, alright, fair enough’. At the end of the night, I was
queuing up, waiting to get paid, and all these women were
queuing as well, waiting to get paid too.”
Paterson adds that The Orb have had some of their best
live experiences in Japan.
“We’ve been going every year since 1991. We did Fuji a lot
last year. Went down a storm there. They invited me to DJ
at the Tokyo Dome to 55,000 people a night, which scared
the living daylights out of me. A beautiful sound system
– hear a pin drop yet with a sub-bass that’ll knock your
knees out. When it comes to festivals, we could learn from
the Japanese about keeping our environment clean and
how to be proud of what we are instead of worrying about
the government cleaning up after us. It’s our mess, so we
should do it. The Japanese are very good at it. Everything
is recyclable.”
Talking about recycling, how do The Orb see themselves in
relation to EDM? Curse or blessing?
“It’ll shoot itself in the foot eventually and then the cycle
will begin all over again. For us, it doesn’t really have any
effect because we have our selection of hits that people
come back to. Even our recent stuff with Lee ‘Scratch’
Perry. ‘Fluffy’ is always going to be at the top, I’m afraid.
I’m used to it now!”
Immense as is the space they have traversed, ultimately,
The Orb are what The Orb are.
“Johnny Rotten came and saw us play one night,” says
Paterson. “I’d had some history with him – our paths had
crossed during my Killing Joke days – and he came up to
me and said, ‘Alex, I think The Orb are beautifully boring’.
And that about sums it up! That’s the whole idea, really. It
gives you the time and space to unclutter your mind.”
‘Moonbuilding 2073 AD’ is out now on Kompakt and the
‘Adventures Beyond The Ultraworld’ vinyl reissue follows
later in the year. Check out Alex Paterson’s WNBC
London online radio station at www.wnbc.london
XXX
CME XKEY 37
SYNTHESISER DAVE
REMIX OF THE MONTH
READERS’ SYNTHS
APPS OVERVIEW
TECH
KEYBO
WIZAR
OARD
RDRY
TECH
It’s super-slim, super-light, and it comes in a box with a wizard on the
front. And not just any old wizard either. So does CME’s new XKEY 37 live
up to its advertising billing as the ultimate MIDI mobile keyboard?
Words: MARK ROLAND
The box that this natty ultra-slim MIDI keyboard comes in
features a picture of a guy with a wispy beard wearing a purple
wizard’s hat. With a star on it.
Make of that what you will, but the man is one Jordan Rudess,
he of American prog rockers Dream Theater. He clearly loves
the CME Xkey 37 because, well, why else would he be OK with
having a picture of himself in a wizard’s hat on the box? Maybe
because he’s involved in the cross promotion for his own series
of iPad apps, which have a pretty strong wizard theme going
on? There’s HarmonyWiz, EarWizard, MorphWiz, SampleWiz...
You get the idea, right?
It also makes sense for Dream Theater’s entrepreneurial
keyboard guy to hook up with the Xkey people, because these
keys unlock the potential of tablet and phone synth apps in
a way that’s both sleek and extremely portable. There are
other little keyboards on the market, like the Korg NanoKey,
but that looks like a bloated Fisher Price Casio VL-Tone and is
still relatively chunky (although at £35 it is as cheap as chips).
Same deal with the Akai LPK25. And unlike the Xkey, neither
have full size keys.
To hook the Xkey 37 up to an iPad, you will need to buy
Apple’s Lightning To USB Camera Adapter which, at a mere
£25, is excellent value for money* for what is a USB port on
the end of three-inch Lightning cable. Once that pain barrier
has been passed through, just fire up the app of your choice,
and you suddenly have three octaves of full-sized keys with
which to play it.
There are six rubberised buttons to the left of the bottom C
offering octave selection (up and down), sustain, modulation
and pitch bend (a plus pad and a minus pad). It’s fun to see
the pitch wheel modulation wheels waggle around on the
iPad screen as you subtly change the pressure on the pads.
Aftertouch and velocity sensitivity are supported, so there’s
quite a bit of control too. The keyboard itself takes some
getting used to, because the travel when you press a key is
so short, but it’s not unlike the shift from clanky old school
computer keyboard to the lower profiled (and much better)
Apple model.
With its brushed aluminium and bevel, the Xkey is clearly
inspired by Apple’s design aesthetics. It’s slim, lightweight
and unobtrusive, sitting on your desk without cluttering the
place up and making it the ideal keyboard to sketch out ideas
during your lunch break. If you go for the two-octave version,
it will fit into a backpack no problem. Long flights, train trips,
walks by the river and the like will never be the same again.
And no one will look at you like you’re a prize twat if you start
composing when you’re on the tube. Honest**.
One minor disappointment is that the Xkey 37 isn’t compatible
with the iVCS3, but given that the original VCS3 was often
used without a keyboard, perhaps that’s fair enough. We tried
it with all our Korg and Arturia apps and it worked without any
fuss. It also works with GarageBand. You can plug it straight
into your computer with the supplied cables and it will work
with many compatible software programmes. We also plugged
it into an iMac running Logic and were able to use it for all the
synths we have on board.
If you’ve ever been frustrated by the limitations of onscreen keyboards, the Xkey 37 could be the answer. There’s
a bluetooth version on the way too, being funded (OK, let’s
face it, gathering pre-orders) via Indiegogo. And with a latency
of just seven milliseconds and the lack of wires, it might just
become one of our favourite MIDI keyboards.
* Actually not excellent value for money at all
** Not honest. They will look at you like you’re a prize twat
The Xkey 37 retails at £149.
For more information go to www.cme-pro.com
XXX
TECH
SYNTH
ESISER
DAVE
Synthesiser Dave’s synthesiser mending facility (his shed, which has been artfully
attached to his house) is full of synths. In many ways, it’s like a weird synthesiser
hospital. Some synths are working, albeit not at peak fitness, but some are decidedly
unwell and are awaiting Doctor Dave’s skilled surgical interventions. Some are donors,
beyond help themselves, giving what they have left so that others may live. And
some are long-time residents, needing the sort of treatment often prescribed by
doctors in the 1920s to wealthy people suffering from a non-specific lurgy that made
them pale and tired and necessitated them having to go to live in Venice for a year.
Such has been the fate of this ROLAND JUPITER 4.
A small complaint, left unattended, has become a
life-threatening condition. Can Synthesiser Dave save the elderly Japanese patient?
Our deputy editor bloody hopes so, because it belongs to him.
watch the video
https://www.youtube.com/embed/z3qt9dCwrPQ
READERS'
SYNTHS
Need an excuse to wax lyrical about your most prized
possession? Take some pictures and send your story to
info@electronicsound.co.uk with “Readers’ Synths” as
the subject line
TEXAS INSTRUMENTS’ SPEAK & SPELL
Owner: Karl Heard
Where: Enfield, UK
Year Purchased: 1979
Amount Paid: £19.99
“I own a dozen Speak & Spell and Speak & Maths machines, two
of which I circuit bent myself,” says Karl Heard. “They are a
key part of my songwriting and my live set-up under the name
Kalkulus, so I like to keep a few in reserve as the parts are hard
to source. They do break down from time to time, which is
understandable for machines that are approaching 40 years old,
especially as I’m asking them to do crazy things they weren’t
originally designed for.
“I got my first Speak & Spell for Christmas in 1979 and
immediately fell in love with it. My parents bought it at the local
Woolworths in Enfield Town for £19.99, which was a hell
of a lot of money for a toy in those days. The robotic voice
reminded me of Kraftwerk and I used to type out ‘The Man
Machine’ on the Speak & Spell and record it saying it back to me.
“For my birthday the following year, I got the Speak & Maths.
I used to play them both at the same time, recording miniloops that I would put a beat to. This was around the time that
Kraftwerk put out ‘Numbers’, though I was mixing zeros and
ones rather than multi-lingual digits. Little did I know that I’d
repeat my Speak & Spell and Speak & Maths improvisations
years later as a professional musician, culminating in the
Kalkulus track and music film ‘Speak And Spell’.
“Having grown up in the 1970s and 80s, I was able to witness
first-hand when electronic music was brought to the attention
of the wider world with Tubeway Army performing ‘Are “Friends”
Electric?’ on the ‘Old Grey Whistle Test’ and ‘Top Of The Pops’ in
the same week. I was completely blown away by the sound and
the look, and I immediately became a huge fan of Gary Numan
and all the new electronic bands, especially the artists that had
predated Numan, like Fad Gadget, John Foxx, OMD and, of
course, Kraftwerk.
“Although the Speak & Spell has been used in music before, it
has never had a whole song created around it or featured heavily
in a film. That was why I decided to try to merge my love of
electronic gadgets and toys with my love for electronic music,
and I knew circuit bending was the way to go. The biggest thrill
is being able to perform with them on stage and show people
how cool these early electronic toys are.”
XXX
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EVERYBODY’S
APPY
NOWADAYS
Want a bunch of vintage kit but don’t have
the dollar? We round up the best IPAD
SYNTHESISER APPS that could make your
dreams (virtually) come true…
Words: MARK ROLAND
If the synth apps I’ve got tucked away on my iPad were the
real, three-dimensional items sourced from eBay and the
like, I would have dumped something like £15,000 on my
vintage synth obsession. As it is, they cost me just shy of
£100. Bringing an iPad into a live or studio set-up is becoming
increasingly straightforward with products like the CME XKey
ultra-slim MIDI keyboard, and free apps like TableTop, which
integrates your compatible synth apps into an intuitive signal
path and includes sequencing and recording facilities.
Apps are never going to replicate the pleasure of having a
real vintage synth collection sitting in a climate controlled,
custom-built studio, but let’s face it, are you ever going to be
able to splash out £15,000 on synths? Add the stability and
21st century features, not to mention the intense space-saving
– you can take the lot on holiday with you and compose on the
beach – and iPad synth apps are a compelling offer. Even if you
never record with them or use them live, it’s got to be better
than Candy Crush, right?
Here’s a round-up of some of our current favourites.
TECH
ARTURIA iSEM
Arturia
WHAT WAS IT ORIGINALLY?
The Oberheim SEM (Synthesiser Expander Module) was
originally intended to be used as single sound source with
no keyboard, which was to be connected to a main synth to
thicken your sound. Tom Oberheim soon expanded (sorry) the
idea by combining two SEMs into the Oberheim Two Voice, a
duophonic synth of extreme loveliness. But then there was the
Four Voice, and then the massive Eight Voice. It was a fabulous
synthesiser, with an onboard sequencer. Tom Oberheim
launched the beautiful SEM Pro five years ago now, which is
essentially a SEM module with added MIDI/CV conversion. It’s
great, but it’s around £700.
Prog page. This allows you to set different parameter controls
for each note, over an eight-note span. It’s intuitive to use,
and can introduce a lot of movement into sounds. But above
all, together with the arpeggiator, it’s so inspiring to play with.
The iSEM has a ton of sounds on board, and creating and saving
new ones is an absolute breeze.
BEST FEATURE?
The Voice Prog page, together with the arpeggiator. Oh, and it’s
white. Which everyone knows is hella cool on a synth.
DOWNSIDE?
WHAT IS IT NOW?
Hmm, well, there’s no sequencer, which would have been nice.
Holy moly, the iSEM is nothing short of miraculous. Of all
the iSynths we’ve played around with, this one remains the
favourite. It looks like a Two Voice, but it’s polyphonic. The
main panel has an arpeggiator and an effects section with
overdrive, chorus and delay. The overdrive is a soft and subtle
affair and can colour the sound quite nicely, rather than turn it
into a snarling lead machine, but more often it just adds some
white noisy sibilance. Arturia have added a Mod Matrix that
allows you to create eight different modulations by choosing a
source from a range of performance parameters (mod wheel,
pitch bend, after touch etc) and a destination from loads of
filters and treatments for some fun performance options.
HOW MUCH?
It also has a Performance panel, which gives you four swipeable
columns you can assign to almost any parameter and mess with
to your heart’s content. The real killer, though, is the Voice
£7.99
View iTunes Appstore
https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/arturia-isem/id673921187
KORG iMS-20
Korg Inc
WHAT WAS IT ORIGINALLY?
BEST FEATURE?
The MS-20 was launched by Korg in 1978 along with the
stripped down MS-10. It was Korg’s original breakthrough synth
with a design and sound that has proved popular for most of its
history (bar the 1980s), as evidenced by the multiple versions
– software and hardware – that have come since. Its L-shaped
box, which echoed the EMS VCS3 design, and a patch bay
that allowed routing of signals all over the shop, appealed to
many a budding electronics enthusiast and Time Lord. There
was something perfectly sci-fi about the way it looked, and it
was slightly challenging to use, which led to it falling out of
favour in the 1980s, when everything became slick and preset.
But it’s these very qualities which have led to its repeated
regenerations. Besides, most of the early Human League tunes
leaned heavily on the MS-20, and you can’t argue with that.
Ditto DAF.
The analogue sequencer firing off all sorts of commands at the
various parameters of the synth – you’re deep in hardcore EBM
territory pretty fast: “Beweg’ deinen Hintern / Klatsch’ in die
Hände / Tanz’ den Jesus Christus!”.
WHAT IS IT NOW?
What was a monophonic synth in real life is a multi-headed
monster on the iPad. It’s an MS-20 with a patch bay and wiring
up is a doddle. Press on one of the inputs/outputs and a wobbly
yellow patch cable appears under your finger, ready to be
dragged and dropped into its destination. But also hiding away
in the slightly fiddly buttons across the top of the screen is a
drum machine, a mixing desk, a Kaoss Pad and a sequencer,
which looks a lot like the SQ-10 analogue sequencer that was
the original partner to the MS-20. The iMS-20 is a massively
featured and complex beast that has the potential to be the
heart of your performance set-up in itself, if you can spend the
time needed to get to know it.
DOWNSIDE?
It’s not the cheapest app in the world and to get the most out
of it you’re going to have to really do some learning about
patching semi-modular synths.
HOW MUCH? £22.99
View iTunes Appstore
https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/korg-ims-20/id401142966
TECH
DXi FM SYNTHESISER
Takashi Mizuhiki
WHAT WAS IT ORIGINALLY?
BEST FEATURE?
The Yamaha DX7! The synth that killed analogue, the machine
that was so beloved of both Brian Eno and Jellybean Benitez.
The sound of almost every pop hit of the post-DX7 1980s
and of Tokyo’s train station announcements to this day. It
is probably the best-selling synth ever made and Yamaha
owned the 1980s with it. Its little brother, the DX100, also
figured largely in the creation of Detroit techno as many of
the emerging producers couldn’t afford the DX7. The DX range
ditched the concepts of analogue subtractive synthesis for
digital FM synthesis and was organised with new concepts of
operators and algorithms. It gave producers a whole shiny new
palette of sounds, and its piano preset and other percussive
noises became staples of pop music until affordable samplers
changed the game again towards the end of the 1980s.
Its simplicity is its charm, making a complex concept
approachable and usable. It’s also very cheap.
WHAT IS IT NOW?
Usually vintage synth emulation is a big brand’s game, but
here we have a small developer making a rather good stab
at re-imagining the DX7 for the iPad. The great thing about
this app is that it makes what once was the almost impossibly
daunting task of editing a sound on the DX7 as easy as fiddling
around with a few parameters, and it almost demystifies the
phase distortion (aka FM) process at the root of the DX7. It also
features a little sequencer (introduced on later DX7 models)
and a very simple way of changing the waveforms, with
Oscillator Frequency and Feedback sliders to edit sounds, as
well as four large windows showing the envelope waveforms,
which can be altered by dragging them, and there is a further
window with alternative algorithms for each sound. DOWNSIDE?
Well, it is a DX7 emulator, and those crispy digital sounds
aren’t everyone’s cup of tea.
HOW MUCH?
£1.49
View iTunes Appstore
https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/dxi-fm-synthesizer/
id370138065
IVCS3
apeSoft
WHAT WAS IT ORIGINALLY?
This eccentric machine marked the birth of British synthesis.
Created by EMS and designed by David Cockerill, Peter
Zinovieff and Tristram Cary, the VCS3 was an attempt to
combine and miniaturise the individual oscillators and filters
that Zinovieff and Cary had been using to compose their
highbrow, academic electronic music. Instead of a roomful of
the stuff, the VCS3 reduced it down to an elegant wooden box
with a very clever patch bay that allowed for complex signal
paths between the various elements hidden in the case. It was
used by Cary and Zinovieff in various compositions and live
performances, but found fame when it was taken up by the
likes of Pink Floyd and Brian Eno. The company lasted for a
decade and made some innovative products, particularly in the
area of digital sequencing. Any kit with EMS written on it is
now worth an absolute mint.
WHAT IS IT NOW?
We reviewed the iVCS3 a few months ago, and loved it. It’s
as unpredictable and odd as the original, and puts a very rare
machine into the hands of oiks the world over to mess around
with. And the VCS3 is the ultimate messing-around synth with
its big dials and ability to suddenly change the sound quite
radically when all you did was look at it funny. It’s like that,
the VCS3, a bit touchy. While you can just load up one of the
many presets and edit it, you do need to grasp the logic of
patch board (or matrix) to get the most out of it.
The great thing about it is you soon find you slow down
and start to approach the process methodically, carefully
considering the impact of the introduction of a pin on the
matrix board which connects, say, the white noise generator
to the output. The app throws in a keyboard, similar to the
original optional DK-1 keyboard, as well as a sequencer, which
looks much like the later synth-in-a-suitcase EMS Synthi AKS
(standing for Attaché Keyboard Sequencer). The app remains
unparalleled in the satisfaction ratings for creating truly spacey
sounds, just like a Radiophonic Workshop regular.
BEST FEATURE?
The matrix is what really marks the VCS3 out, as well as
the joystick control for Eno-esque soundscaping. The sheer
weirdness of many of the noises this thing makes is a constant
pleasure.
DOWNSIDE?
Not easy to use, for sure, and some people used to all-singing,
all-dancing apps (like the Korg iMS-20) may find it limiting.
HOW MUCH?
£10.99
View iTunes Appstore
https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/ivcs3/id665703927
ALBUM
REVIEWS
ALBUM REVIEWS
as the majority of the tracks are dated
in the last year or two. The future is
certainly bright on this evidence, with
producers like Jlin and Mr Mitch serving
up experimental takes on footwork and
grime, and promising newcomers such as
Herva and Silk Road Assassins ramping
up the anticipation for their first proper
releases on the label.
VARIOUS ARTISTS
μ20
PLANET MU
The iconic label marks its 20th
anniversary with a bumper
compilation
Two decades of releasing boundary
pushing electronic music is certainly
something to be celebrated. Although
in typical Planet Mu style, this is no
self-congratulatory “best of” package.
Instead, we get a 50-track compilation
of unreleased material and remixes from
throughout the label’s history, but with a
focus on the new and unfamiliar.
If you’re weighing up whether or not
to get the box set version, here’s what
might swing it for you. Disc three (not
available with the standard edition) goes
further back in time and focuses on
some of the less contemporary artists
in Planet Mu’s stable. Most of these
previously unreleased tracks are thrilling
in their own right – particularly Tim
Tetlow’s ‘Stelophane 101’ – but what’s
really exciting to hear is just how much
territory they share with the first two
discs. The melding of noise and beauty,
hedonism and contemplation: it’s all
been there since the beginning.
The main reason to buy the deluxe
version is Rory Gibb’s 100-page book
charting the history of the label. It’s
seriously extensive and very well
researched, offering up revealing insights
from Paradinas as well as artists such
as Ekoplekz, Remarc, Boxcutter and RP
Boo. Your understanding of the Planet
Mu catalogue will be all the richer for
having read it.
There’s such a lot of good material here,
it’s easy to forget that this is essentially
a rarities collection rather than an edition
of ‘Now That’s What I Call Planet Mu!’.
The issue of quality is elucidated in
the liner notes by Jamie Teesdale (aka
Kuedo), who says, “Mike doesn’t consider
much else other than whether the thing’s
good”.
Paradinas’ singular approach to running
a record label – finding something you’re
passionate about and trusting the public
to get it – has resulted in the release of
some wonderful music over the years.
Music that floors you with its beauty,
music that makes you want to lose it in
the rave. It’s great that Paradinas has
taken time out to properly mark this
anniversary, but you just know his focus
is already back to finding that special
new sound. Here’s to another 20 years.
COSMO GODFREE
The various strands that make up Planet
Mu’s DNA are all here – from the early
days of IDM and breakcore to label head
Mike Paradinas’ later embrace of grime,
dubstep and footwork, and of course
plenty of tracks that don’t fall easily into
this reductionist narrative. Discs one
and two largely draw from the current
decade, and listening to these strange,
disparate selections, it’s remarkable
how they feel perfectly at home on this
sprawling set, from Ekoplekz’s swampy
analogue techno to the synaptic overload
of Venetian Snares.
Rather than a time capsule cementing
20 years of Planet Mu, ‘µ20’ is actually
more concerned with looking forward,
VENETIAN SNARES
two minutes of his biggest hit record to
them.
GARY NUMAN &
TUBEWAY ARMY
Premier Hits
BEGGARS BANQUET/ARKIVE
Remember when ‘Cars’ was the
music for a TV booze ad?
‘Premier Hits’ originally appeared in the
mid-1990s thanks to ‘Cars’ being used
on an advert for Carling Premier lager.
Hence the album title.
The lager, lager, lager mix of the track
isn’t actually on this double vinyl set
(the first time ‘Premier Hits’ has been
released on vinyl), which is probably for
the best. Instead, four prime Gary Numan
cuts have been added: ‘Metal’, ‘We Are
So Fragile’, ‘Films’ and ‘Me, I Disconnect
From You’. But it is a jolt to remember
that Numan’s stock in the 90s was in
a very weird place indeed, his music
shilling booze while Britpop ruled the
roost and bouncing him back into the Top
20 yet again.
‘Cars’, though, eh? It is possibly the most
peculiar Number One single of all time.
The song is essentially over in a couple of
minutes. It has no chorus, just two parts
– the verse and the, erm, other bit. But
Numan was all too aware of the power
he could pull out of those ARPs and
Moogs, so he hands over the remaining
This strange song structure marks out a
lot of Numan’s work. He happily eschews
traditional forms, almost like he isn’t
particularly aware of their existence in
the first place. ‘Metal’ is another one; a
killer bass riff, some lyrics about clones
or some such sci-fi claptrap that come
in across the beat (“The sound of metal”), line upon line of unsettling synth
atmospheres, a key change, and that’s
it, song over. Go home now. Numan has
finished with that idea. A little perverse
and quite brilliant, much like the man
himself.
If you’re looking for the ultimate
Numan-as-isolated-synth-god argument,
‘Films’ may well be the place to go.
The growling soundscape is perhaps the
ultimate musical representation of our
man’s paranoid rejection of those things
his peers seemed to enjoy. “I don’t like
the film,” he shrieks, audibly affronted.
“And I don’t like the scenery / And I don’t
like the set / So pull it all down…”
The squashy 80s production standards
that gradually pulled Numan under as the
decade took its grotesque turn for the
yuppy initially emerged on the fretless
bass semi-funk of ‘We Take Mystery (To
Bed)’. It’s a pretty successful attempt
to fuse his own signature icy synth
sound to the emerging value system
of night clubs, flick perms, popping
bass and saxophones. It sounds like he
figured that, since Japan had split up,
there was a fan base he could swallow
whole. Which also explains ‘She’s Got
Claws’ (featuring Japan’s Mick Karn on
the aforementioned sax) and especially
‘Music For Chameleons’.
The sequencing of the album is also
interesting: it’s non-linear, pulling up
tracks from Numan’s pre-synth Tubeway
Army days and throwing them into
the pot halfway through. Inevitably, it
leaves the hard-to-love material like
‘Sister Surprise’ and Paul Gardiner’s
funereal ‘Stormtrooper In Drag’ in the
twilight zone at the end of disc two, but
‘Premier Hits’ is a reminder that Numan
has a fierce and loyal following for good
reason.
MARK ROLAND
ALBUM REVIEWS
music harboured a similar sense of
discovery and reckless innocence as that
which draped the earliest acid tracks sent
from Chicago bedrooms in the mid-80s.
Unbound by electronic trends and the
kind of gadgets that make the creation of
music too easy for too many, she simply
turned on her analogue machines and
saw where they were going to take her.
This ethos has continued since, with an
album appearing on Texan cassette label
Handmade Birds and collaborations with
F#X as Black Sites, plus gigs with James
Dean Brown’s legendary live analogue
squad Hypnobeat.
HELENA HAUFF
Discreet Desires
WERKDISCS/NINJA TUNE
Mysterious landmark debut from
Hamburg machine seditionist and
sonic seductress
Helena Hauff doesn’t so much play her
array of analogue synths but coaxes,
gouges and strokes them into venting
sounds of a depth and resonance rarely
found in today’s shiny electronic strata.
Though still in her 20s, she grew up
without a TV or the internet, and
discovered music by taping sounds she
liked off the radio or from records she
got out of the local library. Whether Joy
Division or Stockhausen, it didn’t make
any difference if the sound itself grabbed
her imagination.
Helena decided she wanted to be a DJ
after experiencing a warehouse party, so
she acquired the necessary equipment
and set about carving a name for hardhitting techno and electro sets; her
obsession further developed at her Birds
And Other Instruments residency at
Hamburg’s Golden Pudel club. She made
her recorded debut a couple of years ago
with the three-track ‘Actio Reactio’ EP on
Actress’ Werkdiscs imprint through Ninja
Tune.
I remember thinking then how Helena’s
Now comes Helena’s first widely released
long-player – and ‘Discreet Desires’ is
the expected (and hoped for) master
manifesto of her unfettered future
visions and desire to stand out on her
own terms. From the title and the cover
shot of Helena kissing her reflection in a
mirror, to the atmospheric mood pieces
that link some tracks, a distinct shadow
of cinematic noir haunts the album.
Tracks such as ‘Sworn To Secrecy Part
1’ recall Giorgio Moroder’s ‘Cat People’
soundtrack in their mix of austere
electrolysis and forebodingly resonant
depths. There aren’t many albums
whose music could backdrop both the
bedroom and stricken cities, but the
likes of ‘L’Homme Mort’ manage to
evoke the desolation of Detroit via
sensuous featherlight electro pulsings
– albeit clawed with scathing static and
monstrous rearing riffs. The sub-aquatic Motor City electro thrum
continues to underpin tracks such as
the twitteringly acidic ‘Tryst’ and the
clattering ‘Funereal Morality’, recalling
Underground Resistance’s missives of the
last decade or Helena’s beloved Drexciya,
who provided one of her flight paths
into techno. By ‘Sworn To Secrecy Part
2’, she is throwing distorted vocals into
the sheet metal rampages rearing out of
her machines. After this glut of futuristic
electro-carnage, she takes ‘Discreet
Desires’ out on the post-apocalyptic calm
of ‘Dreams In Colour’ (complete with
haunted melodies) and ‘Silver Sand And
Boxes Of Mould’, which brings down the
curtain with skin-scraping static, string
swells and dramatic motifs.
Like a good film, the impact remains
afterwards; here with the knowledge that
electronic music has also just witnessed a
major new talent.
KRIS NEEDS
thrown in for good measure. There’s
also a vinyl release, which is spread
across eight sides of the shiny black stuff
with a celebratory fanzine and some
early Slim tunes (’Sunset 303’ and ‘Eat,
Sleep, Rave, Repeat’) that haven’t been
available for a while.
VARIOUS ARTISTS
20 Years Of Being Skint
SKINT
Celebrating two decades of the
Brighton label that led the Big
Beat charge
Seems like there have been a fair few
label anniversaries of late, but 20 years
of this little south coast seaside imprint
will resonate more than most. First
things first though, a bit of myth busting.
While Skint is home to one Fatboy Slim,
Fatboy Slim’s label it is not.
Skint arrived as an offshoot of JC Reid
and Tim Jeffery’s Loaded Records with
the addition of a third pair of hands,
Damian Harris, who brought with him
a demo tape by his old pal from their
Brighton music shop days. The pal was,
of course, Norman Cook and it was his
‘Santa Cruz’ single as Fatboy Slim that
carried the catalogue number SKINT 1.
For a 20th anniversary compilation you’d
expect that track to feature. Nope.
Despite dropping what appears to be
quite a clanger, ‘20 Years Of Being Skint’
is a bit of a treat precisely because it
doesn’t do what you’d think it would.
And for the life of me, I can’t figure out
if that’s by accident or design. The CD
version comes as two discs – one of
old tunes, one of new – with a mix CD
Skint was bought out last year by BMG
and looking at the first CD, ‘The Classics’,
you can see there’s an eye on the mass
market. The Fatboy Slim trio of ‘Praise
You’, ‘The Rockafeller Skank’ and ‘Right
Here, Right Now’ are obvious scorchers,
but Skint is far more than a one-trick
Fatboy pony; it’s a delightfully varied
box of fun and games and here we get a
proper slice of the action.
The old school is quite a list: Indian
Ropeman, Cut La Roc, Hardknox, FC
Kahuna, X-Press 2, Midfield General,
Lo-Fidelity Allstars and Space Raiders
are all present and correct. The second
CD meanwhile does quite a job of
showcasing the new generation, most of
whom retain that unmissable Skint leftfield appeal. Goose’s Black Grapey ‘Bring
It On’, Kidda’s infectious ‘Under The
Sun’ singalong and Moguai & Westbam’s
does-what-it-says-on-the-tin ‘Original
Hardcore’ romp are particular treats.
Which brings me back to the accident
or design. One of the oddest inclusions
is the Lo-Fidelity Allstars’ rubdown of
Pigeonhed’s ‘Battleflag’, a true belter
that appears here as what can only be a
radio edit, fudging every last mention of
the word “motherfucking”, which comes
up a dozen times. As a lyric, it’s integral
to the song as a whole, so why pick this
doctored version? The Lo-Fis weren’t
exactly short on tunes that could have
made it on here: buy the vinyl and the
epic ‘Disco Machine Gun’ features.
Minor gripes aside, ‘20 Years Of Being
Skint’ reminds you just how good this
label was and still is. You don’t hear
Skint mentioned in the same breath as
Warp or Ninja, but you should. You forget
how very decent X-Press 2 and David
Byrne’s ‘Lazy’ is, or that Dave Clarke
was signed to the label. Most of all, you
forget just how good Norman Cook is,
just how smart and joyous and full and
rich his productions are. So while Skint
isn’t his own label, it is moulded in his
image, and this hugely enjoyable package
reinforces that by the bucketload.
NEIL MASON
ALBUM REVIEWS
surprise that in 2015, with corruption
and misinformation never more prevalent
in society, Downie and the Dust boys’
latest expedition is no less bristling with
abrasive attitude.
THE BLACK DOG
Neither/Neither
DUST SCIENCE
The shapeshifting electronic outfit
reach new peaks with these dark
and dangerous soundscapes
If any pioneers of the inappropriately
named IDM genre have retained their
identity and upheld the quality of their
output, it’s surely The Black Dog.
Dangerous times call for dangerous
music. So with ‘Neither/Neither’, The
Black Dog’s antidote is to furnish us
with an auditory overload of subliminal
messaging via some pretty haunting
post-apocalyptic soundscapes. The
opening ‘Non Linear Information
Life’ shudders as a cold wind blows
menacingly across a scorched land before
blending into the nihilistic radio chatter
of ‘Phil 3 To 5 To 3’.
By comparison, the earthy beats of the
title track puncture the dusky mood,
the melodic bass grooves swelling
and uplifted by journeying, seductivesounding synths. ‘Them (Everyone Is
A Liar But)’ is meanwhile surprisingly
softened, its bubbling patterns
overlapping with an optimistic verve.
The gates are then slammed shut
with renewed gusto on the grinding,
mechanised faux-techno of ‘Shut Eye’,
but The Black Dog expertly toy with
our emotions once again, transferring
oppression for emancipation with the
beautifully subtle melodies of ‘The
Frequency Ov Thee Truthers’.
For The Black Dog, anything resembling
stasis is simply an act of preparation,
as ‘Self Organising Sealed Systems’
changes the album’s direction and
embarks on a series of industrialised club
bangers. This almost sounds like a call
to arms, with the insistent and bruising
‘Commodification’ being the commander
in the trench. Elsewhere, ‘Platform Lvl
6’ threatens to erupt into hands-inthe-air rave territory, but intellectual
restraint always reins in any impulse to
overindulge.
On ‘Neither/Neither’, The Black Dog
deliver the complete package. Absorbing,
refining and honing everything they
have come to stand for over the past 20
years, the album is a wholly impressive
amalgam of explorative yet finely tuned
ideas, resulting in what is arguably the
group’s most involving and entertaining
work to date.
DANNY TURNER
First with the assistance of Ed Handley
and Andy Turner during the group’s Warp
years, later with Martin and Richard
Dust from Dust Science Recordings, Ken
Downie has kept The Black Dog on its
dark path throughout, ever-revising the
project by cross-pollinating the best that
hip hop, jungle and electronica had
to offer without ever submitting to
populism. By the time those genres
had become saturated via the usual
crude attempts to wedge them into the
mainstream, Downie had left them for
dead.
Therein lay The Black Dog’s ability
to shapeshift through the past two
decades. Their dense, non-figurative
sound became increasingly emboldened
by political cynicism on albums such as
‘Further Vexations’. No need for lyrics,
the music crackled and sandblasted the
listener enough. It’s therefore of little
Pic: Shaun Bloodworth
HeCTA
The Diet
CITY SLANG
Alt-country collective turns to
electronica and a new name for an
exciting debut release
Nashville’s amorphous Lambchop
collective started life as a country outfit
but since then have veered stylistically
from post-rock to lounge music and many
things in between. So it shouldn’t be that
much of a surprise that three of its key
members eventually hit upon the idea of
making some electronic music together.
Perhaps a bigger mystery is
why frontman Kurt Wagner and
bandmates Scott Martin and Ryan
Norris have chosen to release ‘The Diet’
under the banner of HeCTA rather than
their usual name. There are definitely
some quality electronic manoeuvres here,
but what ultimately shines through is the
same distinctive songwriting and dark,
understated vocals that make Lambchop
such an enthralling prospect.
We start with the brutal thud of kick
drums, and opening track ‘Till Someone
Gets Hurt’ draws inevitable comparisons
with classic Underworld, Wagner’s vocals
on monotone mode and stuck through
a close echo a la Karl Hyde. It’s not
until ‘Sympathy For The Auto Industry’
that it really begins to breathe synthpop
simplicity and Wagner delivers a hearttugging, sugarsweet chorus.
‘Prettyghetto’ introduces more organic,
live elements into the mix, incorporating
clipped guitar licks, swirling organ and
an ingenious use of handclaps. It’s
still hyper-edited and contained, but
there’s a funkier feel to it, one that
slowly but surely develops and opens
up as the album continues across its
nine tracks. ‘Like You’re Worth It’
has a subtle, soulful edge, as well as
Wagner’s most intimate, confessional
vocal delivery, swaddled in synths and
snippets of woodwind. It’s a breather, if
a melancholy one, and good preparation
for
‘The Concept’. Built around American
comedian Buddy Hackett’s selfdepreciating Brooklyn rasping, this
was apparently the starting point for
the album. Set to some samples of
gorgeously clattering live drums, an
Orbital-esque chord sequence and simple
strings, it’s another unexpected twist
that keeps you listening on for the next
development.
‘Change Is In Our Pocket’ evokes Tortoise
at their loosest with a lightly employed,
but nevertheless driving groove, lounge
lizard keyboard luxury and a cunning
vocal hook that creeps up on you and
refuses to let go. ‘We Are Glistening’
pushes Wagner’s voice to the fore once
more, sounding here like the emotionheavy cross between Ian Curtis and
Johnny Cash, and is definitely one of the
LP’s high points. From this fluidity we
head back into the frantic machinations
of ‘Give Us Your Names’, which is more
like Prince and Squarepusher combining
disparate forces.
Fortunately, it transpires that the last
track, ‘We Bitched, We Bovvered And
We Buildered’, is as delightfully direct
as its title is convoluted. It proves a
truly satisfying close, less of a climax
than a resolution of the veering moods
we’ve travelled through. A simple
electro backbone, some serenely
oozing layers of backing vocals and an
uplifting, optimistic vibe, it’s the final
proof that – as if we needed it – this is
not the sound of a band “trying their
hand” at electronica, this is a formidable
songwriting unit finding yet another form
through which to express their unique
talent. ‘The Diet’? A feast for the ears
more like.
BEN WILLMOTT
ALBUM REVIEWS
track.
HARDKISS
Delusions Of Grandeur
PLEDGEMUSIC
20th anniversary reissue for the
landmark double album that
crystallised mid-90s Stateside
electronic dance music
Such was the rapid turnover of fads and
technology besieging dance music in the
early 1990s, “timeless” is not a word
that can applied to much that sprang out
of those tumultuous years. As original
sounds bombarded the marketplace
every week, some forged new genres
or became epoch-making anthems, but
many others often just watered down
formulas for commercial crossover. Now,
with once futuristic music deemed retro,
only landmarks of the highest quality and
distinction have survived to stand tall,
while the bulk have sunk into charity
shop oblivion or landfill status.
As one of the first US labels started by
DJs to release music they wanted to play,
Hardkiss caused revolutions all round
after their first records started filtering
into Europe in 1993. Setting up shop
in San Francisco, the Hardkiss brothers
– Scott, Gavin and Robbie – adopted
aliases under which they pursued their
idiosyncratic quests for untainted postacid euphoria, unafraid and unashamed
to reference classic rock if it enhanced a
Scott recorded as God Within and scored
the label’s first major success with the
delirious breakbeat incantations of
‘Raincry’, which he continued to hone
on soaring, lustrous beauties such as
‘Daylight’ and ‘The Phoenix’. Gavin
worked as Hawke, whose gorgeous
‘3 Nudes In A Purple Garden’ echoed
the catharsis of jazz and was further
heightened by Scott’s sublime ‘3 Nudes
Having Sax On Acid’ revamp. Robbie
became Little Wing for the label’s
furtherest-out but most reflective
explorations, such as ‘Mercy, Mercy’ and
‘Diazepam Jam’.
There was a rare spirit at work in the
Hardkiss tunes, which could sound deeply
ancient or beamed in from the 21st
century. Whether wantonly hedonistic or
emotionally pure, if dropped at the right
time during a night of no holds barred
acid house abandon they’d bring a crowd
to tears of joy. These tracks and more
were joined by like-minded labelmate
Rabbit In The Moon’s aptly-titled ‘Out
Of Body Experience’ and the Hardkiss
rework of the Drum Club’s ‘Drums Are
Dangerous’ on the original ‘Delusions Of
Grandeur’ double album, which is now
getting a 20th anniversary re-release.
After Scott’s tragic death in March 2013,
Gavin and Robbie regrouped with his
widow Stephanie to revive the Hardkiss
name and fly this inimitable flag again.
Since the success of last year’s stellar
‘1991’ album, they have turned their
attention to their mighty back catalogue,
using a PledgeMusic campaign to reissue
‘Delusions Of Grandeur’ along with a funpacked booklet.
Gavin and Robbie have also thrown open
the online Hardkiss vault, a veritable
treasure trove containing first forays,
demos, B-sides and releases from Gavin’s
Sunburn offshoot. There are remixes
too, including some hallucinogenic reimaginings of Elton John. There are also
fabulous curios such as Scott’s volcanic
‘The Phoenix’, which was stifled at birth
by ELO’s short-sighted Jeff Lynne getting
antsy about his guitar riff appearing in
the kind of musical hothouse he could
only dream of.
For those who profess to love electronic
music and have never experienced the
transcendental mischief of Hardkiss
at play, this stuff is beyond essential
listening. For those who know, prepare to
explode all over again. Timeless indeed.
KRIS NEEDS
off at a studio where
The Ramifications – namely Viktor
Voltage,
MF Doom collaborator Mr Chop, and
Dave’s mate Ray – worked their Moogy
magic.
History doesn’t record how much
influence Dave had over the final
product, and to be fair it doesn’t
especially matter because he seems like
a smashing chap, but everything that’s a
bit guff about this record sounds like it’s
coming from him.
DAVE McCABE
& THE
RAMIFICATIONS
Church Of Miami
1965
Former Zutons frontman unplugs
the guitars and turns on the synths
for his first solo album
Dave McCabe has, in his own words,
been doing “fuck all” for the past
five years. Nice work if you can get
it and, let’s be honest, Mark Ronson
and Amy Winehouse’s cover of his old
band’s ‘Valerie’ probably cash-cowed
enough royalties to keep him in gainful
unemployment until the Second Coming.
So it’s surprising that a) he should
emerge from his coma to release new
music at all and b) the music in question
should be so entirely different to what
made his name the first time around.
But this marauding, Morodering electro
funhouse of a record is to The Zutons’
sweetly stodgy soul-rock what ‘Mars
Attacks!’ is to marzipan. The downside?
I’m not 100 per cent sure our Dave had
much to do with it.
From what I can glean, here’s how it
worked: Mr McC wrote the songs at
home on his guitar, then dropped them
The lumpy songwriting, the hackneyed AIgone-aye-aye-aye storyline that conceptalbums its way through the 10 songs
like a worm rotting out an apple, the
closing track where pompous psychedelia
threatens to suffocate the listener with
a sweaty, tie-dyed T-shirt… Previous
form suggests that stuff came from
Dave. But the rest of it? The bits where
The Ramifications set fire to a million
analogue synths in the kitchen sink while
devil-dancing up an army of evil space
invaders? They’re tremendous.
‘Trust Me’ is three ways George Clinton
funk, Knife City chiptune and Bowie’s
‘Fame’, before diving head first into a
glorious THX Deep Note crescendo. The
Gorillaz-esque ‘204’ comes across like
Ace Of Base’s ‘The Sign’ on dog food.
Not acid. Dog food. A bit disgusting
and entirely barking. ‘Too Damn Good’
does its risky title justice, slamming its
head like Dallas Austin-era Sugababes
reworked by The Chemical Brothers,
while ‘Intertwine’ sees a moody Depeche
Mode popping the bubble-wrapped
shroud of a six-week washed-up corpse.
Only more fun. Slightly.
So, yeah. The actual songs? Other than
the oddly Foo Fighting ‘Time And Place’
and the soulfully Sparklehorsing ‘Let
Me Go (You’re Only A Fake)’, they’re
ever so slightly crap. But the sounds?
My, oh my, they’re wonderful. And it’s
enough. Just because you’re flying to
Benidorm, doesn’t make aviation any less
miraculous. Just because you’re vomiting
up your fifth pack of Pom-Bears, doesn’t
make the global industrial-agricultural
complex any less mind-blowing. And just
because you’re listening to 10 songs that
probably sounded god-awful when they
were dropped off on a wing and a prayer,
doesn’t make ‘Church
Of Miami’ any less deserving of your
worship.
ROBIN BRESNARK
ALBUM REVIEWS
derives from his own meticulous creative
vision, so do the spacious ambiences and
judiciously nominated tones that combine
to craft what is a highly perfected album,
full of dewy introspection.
The short opener ‘Flying The Nest’ sets
the agenda, as grumbling radio waves
crackle atop the glowing haunt of
melancholy synths. While the album is
an ode to the calm resplendence of the
sylvan valley, Hidden Rivers’ synthesiser
expressions point to a more sinister
undercurrent: there’s a brooding tension
to this entry point of ‘Where Moss
Grows’.
HIDDEN RIVERS
Where Moss Grows
SEREIN
Alluring ambient debut release
from Serein label owner
Huw Roberts founded Serein Records
in 2005, initially as a net label, with
all releases available for free under the
Creative Commons licence. In 2009,
Serein shifted to selling physical products
and the label’s name – a meteorological
term meaning “fine rain falling from a
clear sky after sunset” – has always been
reflected in the atmospheric cover art for
these records.
Roberts was introduced to the world of
acoustics from an early age. Piano and
violin lessons may well have acted as a
sensitising agent and gateway into the
world of production but, as is the case for
many children, pop culture soon overrode
musical academia. Instead, Roberts
found he was in his element exploring
the possibilities of modern recording
techniques, most notably sampling.
As he himself says, “I just love making
something from nothing, crafting it,
refining it and completing it”. Indeed,
you don’t have to look too far to see
this ethos in operation on Roberts’ first
release as Hidden Rivers, ‘Where Moss
Grows’. Just as Serein’s entire aesthetic
This mellows on ‘In And Out Of Days’, as
bright melodies and solitary claps provide
a hint of sun-speckled warmth. However,
Roberts’ penchant for murky interludes
demonstrates a palpable influence; the
opulent ‘Sunday’s Child’ reeks of Boards
Of Canada-style subliminal menace. He
enjoys toying with juxtaposing moods
too, even within tracks themselves, as
on ‘White Light Peak’, where lightness
breaks through the shrouded darkness via
steamy synth pads and a compendium of
shifting, accented timbres.
As ‘Where Moss Grows’ unfolds, it
becomes more sustained in its use of
melody, with crisp beats enveloping a
series of longer, more involving tracks.
The closing ‘Futureproof’ sets itself
apart through its heightened tempo and
burbling bass notations. Its chugging
‘Trans Europe Express’-style analogue
refrains end the album with a slight
sense of bemusement, as for all of
Roberts’ obsessive attention to detail,
the final track indicates how he might
have pushed the envelope a bit further
and used a wider palette of sounds.
From the album title, one might imagine
“moss” acting as a metaphor for hope
springing from concrete darkness,
but this could have been transmitted
more effectively had Roberts’ acoustic
background been allowed to bring a
more emotive element. The production
is spotless to the point where even
the measured insertion of background
“interference” appears a little too
deliberated, but this cleanliness is also
part of the album’s appeal.
DANNY TURNER
But in the likes of the heavenly ‘Your
Final Dream’, Andrenachrome offers
something more lush and seductive than
PSB’s bookishness, with a stronger strain
of sexuality. In ‘Odyssee De L’Espace’,
for example, Eyre gradually builds on
a simple disco beat, starting off with a
bouncing, honking synth, to which he
then adds an electronic choir of beautiful
voices, until you’re about fit to steer your
ship on to the rocks.
ANDRENACHROME
New Beginnings
SILENT SMILE
A sensual and seductive psychedelic
voyage into electronic waters
If you’re going to name your electronic/
distorto-bass/80s synth project after
the drug that Hunter S Thompson claims
to be sucking from vials in the opening
pages of ‘Fear And Loathing In Las
Vegas’, then it had better be good. For
the most part, Andrenachrome’s ‘New
Beginnings’ is exactly that.
Andrenachrome is rookie musician/
producer Steve Eyre, who wins favour in
the first instance through a mix of fuzz
and fizz. The opener proper of ‘New
Beginnings’ is ‘Golden Gates’, a pretty
astonishing workout to introduce yourself
with. There’s a big battering beat, the
distorted bass takes the spotlight, and
the voice swirls in a cloud of reverb and
jangling electronics. It’s even reminiscent
of The Flaming Lips in its tremulous
vocalising and powering sense of forward
motion, combined with a psychedelic
tendency to shift the frequencies to
produce out-of-body experiences.
At other points, there are shades of
Public Service Broadcasting, another act
whose use of vocal samples transports
their music to different times and places.
The first half of ‘New Beginnings’ really
doesn’t put a foot wrong. It’s solidly
inventive, highly appealing and great
fun, with each song bringing a fresh
dimension to the party. By the end of the
title track, which delivers an emotive,
soulful vocal over a nervous, bubbling
synth bassline, you’re about as convinced
as you need to be that you’re listening to
your new favourite artist.
But while the album doesn’t ever lose
the plot, there is a growing sense that
this is two records jammed together, one
a top-drawer collection of psychedelic
electronica, the other a hodge-podge
of instrumental bedroom experiments,
some of which don’t quite work. ‘Divide
& Funk’ is entertaining but sounds a
little perfunctory. It has all the hallmarks
of an undeveloped idea with a pretty
ropey organ improvising throughout.
And although ‘Go Tropo’ pulls off
some beautiful moments despite its
unpromising title, it possibly gets a bit
overwrought in its Avalanches-esque
good-times stew.
Steve Eyre is from Lincolnshire, an
English county of peculiarly savage
flatness in places. It would be nice to
imagine this collection of spacious,
driving electronic music being produced
under its vast sky, perhaps as an attempt
to escape the imposed reality of the
dismal low-lying agri-biz warehouses of
Sleaford. If that was the intent, then full
marks, job done.
MARK ROLAND
ALBUM REVIEWS
HANNAS PEEL
Rebox 2
MY OWN PLEASURE
A second collection of glorious
covers from Our Lady of the
Music Box
Irish born and Liverpool based Hannah
Peel might be best known as the synth
playing violinist and singer of John
Foxx & The Maths, and you might
have caught her on tour with OMD
or East India Youth, but on her new
mini-album, ‘Rebox 2’, her roots feel
closer to electronic/folk musicians like
Patrick Wolf or Owen Pallett. And you
can’t help feeling that she’s toying with
representations of femininity here,
perhaps most obviously by choosing
to work with music boxes. These
instruments recall clockwork jewellery
boxes, tiny ballerinas revolving on
springs, never stepping outside of
their prescribed ornamental role. Peel
mathematically hole-punches her
own music box cards, subverting the
restrictive connotations of the form to
create intricate, unique compositions.
This set comes as a follow up to 2010’s
‘Rebox’ EP, which featured covers of
Soft Cell, New Order, OMD and the
Cocteau Twins, all reinterpreted in
Peel’s idiosyncratic style. After this, she
released her acclaimed debut solo album,
‘The Broken Wave’, followed by two
further EPs. Now, with ‘Rebox 2’, she’s
turning her attentions to some rather
more contemporary songs, punctuated by
some truly beautiful instrumental segues.
East India Youth track and adds soaring
violins: where the original felt like a
wind-up, this version is a cooling down,
an opening out, a cathartic close to the
record.
Anyone of lesser talent would probably
have made covers like these sound twee,
but Peel’s compositions are on another
level entirely. ‘Rebox 2’ opens with a
version of Perfume Genius’ ‘Queen’,
which sets out her direction here very
clearly: the cutting homophobic insults
that form the lyrics are contrasted
delicately with a melody played on a
hand-cranked music box.
The songs selected here were all
originally recorded by men and hearing
the lyrics from a woman’s perspective
can shift our perception of the meaning
drastically, but the instrumental
pieces also play with gender roles and
expectations. In ‘Let The Laughter In’,
Peel’s chuckle becomes a rickety beat,
contorting the girlishness of her giggling
through rhythmic repetition. The result is
infectious and the laughter falls further
into artificiality; yet still the track
retains a vitality and a freshness that
can so often be absent from beat-based
electronic music.
The music box comes to the fore in ‘Pale
Green Ghosts’ too, defiantly standing
out amongst synths and keyboards,
brash against the fuzzy percussion. John
Grant’s song is all harsh sounds and
chugging rhythm; this adaptation takes
on the spectres of the title, creating
a haunting atmosphere with layered
vocals in echoes upon echoes, yet still
retaining a sparseness that reflects the
insubstantiality of spirits and memories.
‘Palace’, from Wild Beasts’ ‘Present
Tense’ album, lends itself perfectly to
Peel’s minimalist treatment, and in
‘Heaven, How Long’ she takes on an
Hannah Peel has made something very
rare in ‘Rebox 2’ and her forthcoming
full-length should by strongly anticipated.
This is a collection with heart and soul
and intelligence – and because of all
these things, it knows exactly how to
draw you into its world. And how to keep
you there.
ROSIE MORGAN
and assuming the role of curator rather
than sole composer, Power handed
his contributors – himself included – a
free-reigning brief to score given scenes
without any knowledge of what the
others were planning. And it’s quite the
masterstroke. New York’s C Spencer Yeh,
Stockholm’s Roll The Dice, Glasgow’s
Konx-Om-Pax and London’s Helm, Moon
Gangs and Phil Julian, thrill, enthrall and
creep us out in equal measure, all the
way along.
BLANCK MASS &
ASSOCIATES
The Strange Colour Of Your
Body’s Tears Re-Score
DEATH WALTZ ORIGINALS
Fuck Buttons man leads a
powerfully dense electronic re-score
for Italo-horror homage
Fuck Buttons’ Benjamin John Power,
more latterly active in his impressive
Blanck Mass guise, has recruited an
international cast of collaborators for this
intriguing re-score to a new-ish movie
that honours the lurid old Italian giallo
horror flicks of Dario Argento (‘Suspiria’)
and Mario Brava (‘Hatchet For The
Honeymoon’).
Roll The Dice set the portentous tone
with an appropriately atmospheric
builder that peaks with thrilling beatdriven energy before giving way to Helm.
Their claustrophobic synth drones and
burning, low frequency foreboding recalls
Broadcast’s recent eerie soundtrack for
another Italian homage piece, Peter
Strickland’s 2012 cult hit ‘Berberian
Sound Studio’, creating a degree of
tension that hardly needs visualising.
There’s real space in Helm’s pieces too,
which benefit from well-considered
production values that are maintained
throughout. Distant cymbals clash
against diabolic organs and rolling,
looped, bell-like sounds. For whom they
toll, of course, remains to be seen…
So far so good, and so far so horror
OST. But for so much creative weight to
have been thrown behind this work, the
listener’s ears need variety. Thankfully
this is duly provided by both Moon
Gangs, who lighten the tone with their
outstanding analogue-heavy Popol Vuhlike dreamscapes, and C Spencer Yeh,
whose beat-heavy percussive crashings
introduce an unexpectedly Neu!-esque
momentum. Konx-Om-Pax meanwhile
weigh in with perhaps the most loosely
arranged and impressive passage,
throwing in plenty of abstract ambience
and unsettling Radiophonic sounds to
great effect.
And then comes the curator himself.
Sounding very much at home in
an oeuvre seemingly made for his
desecrated cathedral-dark visions,
Power’s gargantuan, granite-dense
sound edifices are way more Fuck
Buttons than Blanck Mass here, and
appropriately so – highly intimidating
and hugely impressive. After that, Phil
Julian’s closers are fittingly climactic and
adrenalinised. Wild synths squall and
howl, distorted strings arpeggiate to an
almost unbearable point before a heavily
reiterated wall of pure electronic noise is
brought to a sudden, stunning halt. It’s
superb stuff, and wholly worthy of your
attention whether you see the film or
not.
CARL GRIFFIN
Bruno Forzani and Hélène Cattet’s ‘The
Strange Colour Of Your Body’s Tears’ is
a 2013 homage to those widely admired
(though sexually suspect) films. Originally
scored with music culled from original
giallo features, the directors decided to
commission a new soundtrack exclusively
for the East End Film Festival, choosing
Power as their man.
It was an inspired choice as he has
evidently put all of his considerable
creative energies into the project.
Casting a list of electronic innovators
from his impressive array of associates
Pic: Alex De Mora
ALBUM REVIEWS
theatrical sensibility (and we’re not
talking theatrics here, no clowning
around – we’re talking theatre theatre,
Russian theatre).
PERE UBU
Elitism For The People 1975-1978
FIRE
A brand new box set of reissues
from the iconic American
avant-garde pioneers
Pere Ubu should be monumental. There
should be statues of them outside the
City Hall in Cleveland, the town in which
they formed in 1975. They should have
their own corridor in the Rock ’n’ Roll
Hall of Fame. Ubu Studies should be
compulsory in schools for students aged
12 upwards. Maybe a century or so hence
all this will come to pass. For it remains
one of the great crimes of rock music’s
insipid conservatism that Pere Ubu are
overlooked in the annals of greatness in
favour of skinnier and more conventional
leather punk contemporaries. Ubu are
bigger and better than the rest put
together.
Ubu are both pre- and post-punk, as
the timespan of this collection implies.
‘Elitism For The People’ takes in their
earliest singles for the Hearpen label,
and their first two albums, ‘The Modern
Dance’ and ‘Dub Housing’, both released
in 1978. There’s also ‘Manhattan’, a set
from Max’s Kansas City in 1977, whose
raucous, roaring excellence brings home
that in frontman David Thomas they
had someone with a highly developed
Ubu were a truly great rock band, no
doubt, rumbling and propulsive and
featuring the shredding genius of Tom
Herman on guitar.
But they were also multi-dimensional.
Thomas adopted a fearsome, fearful,
quivering, anti-rocking, meandering
persona that was fully formed even
on embryonic tracks like ‘My Dark
Ages’, pacing in circles around his own
existential quandary: “I don’t get around
/ I don’t fall in love much”.
But then there were the abstract
synthesiser stylings of Allen Ravenstine,
achieved on the ElectroComp EML 200,
acquired at great expense. It’s like
audible synaptic activity; it was once
described as “the sound of Pere Ubu’s
brain”. His is the adrenaline, siren screech
which opens ‘Non-Alignment Pact’
on ‘The Modern Dance’, which signals
the sudden moments of eruption and
deflation of the title track, which zigzags wildly like a blip on a monitor on
‘Humor Me’. Elsewhere, he simulates the
sudden “whoof” of nuclear destruction,
or engages in abstract rattles and sheet
waves of electronics which are nonimagistic and defy description, but vividly
capture the moody undertow of Ubu’s
songs.
The brilliance of ‘Dub Housing’ is often
unfairly overshadowed by its predecessor.
Take the opener, ‘Navvy’, whose
desperate exuberance is like nothing
else in rock ’n’ roll, yet quintessential.
As Ravenstine’s synth ebbs and glows
red hot, Thomas chants, as if having just
emerged from the sea, “I’ve got these
arms and legs / Flip-flap, flip-flap!”,
before a sardonic counter puts him down
– “Boy, that sounds swell” – and, like a
baby who first experiences smiling at an
adult only for them not to smile back, a
lifetime of deflation ensues.
‘Caligari’s Mirror’ lurches and lists, the
synth almost seeming to throw up over
the side as Thomas rewrites the ‘Drunken
Sailor’ shanty to deeply disquieting
effect. The gloomy, melancholic arcs of
‘Codex’ are grimly bracing, its irregular
rock structures again enhanced by
Ravenstine’s interventions, like sonic
x-rays of the mind and gut in despair.
‘Thriller!’, meanwhile, is rock concrète,
a pitch-black ambient swirl of muffled
voices, culminating in an unearthly
passage of squelching, frugging
electronics, resembling nothing you’ve
ever heard before or since.
For all their abstraction and headlong
plunges into the bulging heart of
darkness, who at Max’s in 1977 could not
have suffered life-long radiation benefit
from exposure to Ubu’s immortal ’30
Seconds Over Tokyo’ or the magnificent,
toxic terseness of ‘Life Stinks’, composed
by the late Peter Laughner? If this is
your first taste of Ubu, it’s a great place
to start; but then follow with ‘New
Picnic Time’, ‘The Tenement Year’, and
the present-day line-up, still the best,
darkest night of rock theatre in town.
DAVID STUBBS
DIE KRUPPS
V – Metal Machine Music
SLEDGEHAMMER/OBLIVION
Iconic industrial pioneers keep
ploughing their thrash metal furrow
Die Krupps were at the hammerhead
end of what was later termed the Neue
Deutsche Welle scene that sprang up
in West Germany in the wake of punk.
With a mordant irony similar to that
of contemporaries like Einstürzende
Neubauten, Der Plan and DAF, they
named themselves after the industrialist
dynasty who were infamous supporters
of Hitler. Their finest moment was
probably 1981’s ‘Wahre Arbeit Wahrer
Lohn’ (‘A Fair Day’s Work For A Fair Day’s
Pay’), whose minimal electronics and
muscular, disciplinarian metal bashing
were a precursor to groups like Test Dept.
Founder member Ralf Dörper went on
to form Propaganda, but returned to the
band as they took a turn towards a heavy
metal/industrial fusion in the 1990s, a la
Nine Inch Nails.
Die Krupps share the title of their latest
album with Lou Reed’s infamous anticommercial noisenik venture. This is quite
the opposite, though: it’s an expedient
play for a mass market, understandable
from the point of view of surviving as
a group, disappointing to those whose
philosophy is avant-garde über alles.
Die Krupps are now leaders in a
movement that has become known as
the Neue Deutsche Härte (New German
Hardness). This “hardness” is evident on
opening tracks ‘Die Verdammten’ and
‘Kaltes Herz’. They’re pile-driving enough,
bristling with Rammstein-esque portent,
a metal guitar underpinned by electronic
girders. There is something immediately
and inherently disappointing about
said guitar, however. For all its heavy
bombing power, compared to the tonal
and textural possibilities of electronics it
is only capably of the thudding, ritualistic
familiar, pounding you black and blue,
but offering little more variegation on the
colour spectrum.
But this is Die Krupps 2015, and the
only way of extracting pleasure from
‘V – Metal Machine Music’ is to accept
it on its own terms, ignoring the general
air of adolescent nonsense about
post-apocalyptic cyberwars to come.
‘Battle Extreme’ is pretty good, with
its irregular, rat-a-tat strafing, while
the relentless waves of chevrons that
blacken the skies of ‘Fly Martyrs Fly’ are
formidable also. The scurrying synths of
‘Road Rage Warrior’ are reminiscent of
Pink Floyd’s ‘On The Run’ and, as the
album progresses, it increasingly reveals
its synthesised wiring. ‘Kaos Reigns’
carries strong reminiscences of the band’s
more radical days, while ‘The Red Line’ is
more subtly delineated than some of the
dandruff-dislodging fare that prevails on
earlier stretches of the album.
This is enjoyable and well-turned enough
within its genre. For long-standing fans
of the group though, it does feel like a
shame that Die Krupps appear to have
abandoned the brutal satire and social
interrogation of their earliest work
in favour of fantasy scenarios for an
audience who probably play too much
‘World Of Warcraft’ and would prefer to
headbang rather than get their heads
around genuine artistic challenges. Die
Krupps have it in them to extend both
themselves and their fans. Next time
around, I hope they do so.
DAVID STUBBS
ALBUM REVIEWS
and squelchy basslines that take us back
to the heady days – but the rest of the
album makes forays into unconventional
territory. This music is incredibly versatile
– and Dam wants to be sure we know it.
Take ‘Floating On Air’, for example. With
a deft incision, Dam replaces traditional
funk drumming with ambient trip hop
percussion. Featuring Flea and Computer
Jay, it revives what Dam has dubbed
“head-nodding” modern funk. “Floating
on air, dying,” he breathes over chiptune
strains, while haunting synths keep it
extra weird. In contrast, ‘O.B.E.’ flirts
with house, another “black sheep of
black music”.
DAM-FUNK
Invite The Light
STONES THROW
Funk’s chief physician is back with a
star-studded surgical procedure
On the opening track of ‘Invite The
Light’, Junie Morrison of ParliamentFunkadelic fame broadcasts from a
dystopian, futuristic outer space. Junie’s
transmission brings bad news: there’s
a future without funk and my god is it
bleak. Intergalactic dystopia, however, is
an oversubscribed theme. So how come
Dam-Funk’s latest album is so difficult to
dismiss?
“Funk is the underdog, the black sheep
of black music,” says Damon Riddick,
the quote generator, 70s baby and
self-professed “funksta” who has been
tasked with keeping the genre alive. He’s
been doing a stellar job so far. Under
the moniker Dam-Funk, Riddick has
produced a stack of entertaining records,
including the self-titled 7 Days Of Funk
album, his acclaimed 2013 collaboration
with Snoop Dogg. His first full-length
since then, ‘Invite the Light’ further
flaunts Dam’s funky chops.
From danceable grooves to sub-genre
explorations, Dam forces 70s funk under
the knife. ‘We Continue’ boasts P-funk’s
most celebrated features – spacey synths
Then there’s the G-funk. Dam enlists
Snoop Dogg in the archetypal ‘Just Ease
Your Mind From All Negativity’ and
Snoop’s lackadaisical technique steals
the show. As far as the guest rappers
on the album go, he comes second
only to Q-Tip, who features on ‘I’m
Just Tryna Survive (In The Big City)’,
discussing the trials of urban America.
“Who’s carving the apple pie we eating?”
spits Q-Tip, in keeping with P-funk’s
sociopolitical streak. Like ‘Acting’ and
‘Surveillance Escape’, ‘I’m Just Tryna
Survive’ projects contemporary concerns
into a different dimension, but serious
thought is eventually grounded with a
dose of cool. In true funk style, ‘I’m Just
Tryna Survive’ reprises later on with a
danceable “party version”.
‘Invite The Light’ is a big album. Not only
are there 20 tracks, it’s also musically
and thematically sweeping. According
to his label, it is a “beginning to end”
vision of Damon Riddick’s life in the last
six years, but it has other layers too.
Throughout the record, Dam emphasises
positivity in his listeners – inviting
the light – and issues dire warnings of
what could happen in a world in which
mankind has “lost its awareness of funk”.
Thankfully, Dam-Funk is here to show
us the way. “If we invite the funk, it will
never let us down,” he declares. You
know it.
WEDAELI CHIBELUSHI
EMPRESS OF
Me
TERRIBLE/XL
Brooklyn synthpop newcomer
shows she’s already ruling over the
competition
Lorely Rodriguez stands dead centre on
her album cover, framed simply by the
confines of the square. She covers her
mouth with her fist, but stares directly
outwards at the viewer, her pose a
mixture of shyness and confrontation.
The album is titled ‘Me’ and the music
contained within is equally demanding of
your attention.
Rodriguez is a Brooklyn musician who
records using the name Empress Of.
As was the vogue in late 2012, she
first emerged under a certain cloud
of mystery. Her ‘Colorminutes’ series,
uploaded anonymously to YouTube, was
composed of 13 aural fragments, each
a minute long and accompanied by an
image of a block of pure colour. The
format sounds difficult and experimental,
but these were pop gems in miniature,
recalling the Cocteau Twins and Dirty
Projectors. ‘Colorminutes’ was followed
swiftly by the ‘Champagne’/‘Don’t Tell
Me’ single (the latter is still one of her
best tracks), while the ‘Systems’ EP in
2013 featured a pair of Spanish language
songs.
Thankfully it’s 2015 and the whole
unknown artist shtick has been done
to death – just in time for Rodriguez to
come up with a bold debut album that
shows her increased mastery of the
form. The production is a huge step up,
committing fully to the dance trajectory
suggested on last year’s ‘Realize You’.
While there’s an aqueous quality to ‘Me’
– Rodriguez’s synths can frequently be
described in terms of washes or bubbling
– the dreamy haze of ‘Don’t Tell Me’
has given way to clarity and sharpness.
Check out the wiggling synth line on
‘How Do You Do It’ or the wild Caribou
rave-up of ‘Threat’.
Rodriguez wrote, recorded and produced
this entire album herself. Sadly, only
minutes after I saw that in the press
release, I read a suggestion that there
must be another (presumably male)
figure behind the boards. Perhaps the
title wasn’t enough of a clue. Fittingly,
a lot of the lyrics here are to do with
independence. The most arresting track
is ‘Kitty Kat’, whose refrain of “Let me
walk away” addresses catcalling and
unwanted interest. ‘Need Myself’ is a
series of assertions where “I don’t need
this love, not from you” eventually
becomes “I just need myself to love
myself”.
Rodriguez’s increased confidence comes
through in her voice as well as her
production. It’s pushed to the front, still
retaining a touch of Liz Fraser, but now
more grounded and less obscured than
on her earlier releases. She changes it
subtly to suit each track – on ‘Everything
Is You’, the breezy opening track, she
sounds like Angel Deradoorian and by
‘Water Water’ she’s already coming off
like Bjork circa ‘Post’.
Admittedly, ‘Me’ is buoyed by a handful
of particularly strong tracks, but Lorely
Rodriguez still manages to lift the whole
album way above the rest of the field
through an inventive sonic architecture
and superb command of her voice. It
might have been nice to get one or two
Spanish language tracks like on the back
half of ‘Systems’, but that’s probably
just being greedy. ‘Me’ is a great debut
and certainly one of the best synthpop
albums of the year.
Not that it should need pointing out, but
COSMO GODFREE
Pic: Tonje Thilesen
ALBUM REVIEWS
OFFSHORE
Offshore
BIG DADA
This posthumous release of Ewan
Robertson’s last album is a
testament to his skill and creativity
Offshore may not be a household name,
but it’s one that anyone who spent time
in the shady world of the free party
circuit will know. As the scene developed
into harder and harder techno sounds,
the Offshore Sound System was always
a welcome haven of chilled-out sanity at
any event it parked up at.
Sadly, Offshore himself – real name
Ewan Robertson – passed on extremely
prematurely two and a half years ago,
cruelly thwarting his attempts to turn
his expertise behind the decks into
a sustained recording career with Big
Dada. This album was on the verge of
completion when the Aberdonian died,
and has been finished by his partner
and label as a tribute to him, as well as
a way of raising funds for research into
Marfan syndrome, the disease that Ewan
suffered from.
And a fitting tribute ‘Offshore’ is too.
Those who knew Ewan personally will
surely recognise a gentle friendliness
and optimism across the 15 tracks here,
and equally those who only knew him
through his music will see the same
free-form, anything goes agenda his
sound system reflected in its playlist.
Take the first two tracks as an example.
The opening tune, ‘J Bouncey’, plays dry,
Oriental-sounding synths and electronic
drums off against a human voice
scatting along wordlessly. Then ‘Make
It Up’ follows with brash and scratchy
guitar riffs reminiscent of Joy Division
at their most rough-edged, minimally
embellished with keyboard sweetness.
The two couldn’t be more different in
style, but both have the same innocent
playfulness at their heart.
We continue with ‘Barden’s Burden’,
certainly a little smoother, with a
vivacious slap bass and a carpet of
subdued organ horns, while ‘Church
Rhythm’ builds up around a sleek,
panther-like bassline and razor-sharp
psychedelic guitar. If Syd Barrett had
ever come out of retirement with the
sole intention of remaking ‘Smokebelch’
by The Sabres Of Paradise in his own
acid-soaked image, then the results
surely wouldn’t have been too far from
this. ‘Flickbook’ and ‘NY In A Minute’
are closer to the house or techno
template, but they’re far from formulaic,
the former crying out for a remix as it
clocks in at under two minutes, the latter
especially dramatic with its lush string
arrangements and LFO-esque bleepery.
Other highlights include ‘Turn That
Down Upside Frown’, echoing the
primitive industrial funk adventures
of 23 Skidoo or Cabaret Voltaire, and
‘Off Peak’, which is probably the most
accomplished and fully realised piece
on the whole collection. It’s here, as
spiralling arpeggios play a game of cat
and mouse with impeccably chopped up
and filtered beats, that you’re left with
the impression that Ewan Robertson had
so much more to contribute.
The project doesn’t end here. Artists
including Amon Tobin, Ikonika, Blue
Daisy, Slugabed, Mamiko Moto, Lockah
and Enchanté have all been working on
remixes of tracks from the album and a
number of long-time collaborators have
also contributed videos and photographs.
And while ‘Offshore’ can be a slightly
scrappy listen in places and one that, as
you might imagine in the circumstances,
lacks a little polish here and there,
it’s definitely not lacking in charm or
ingenuity.
BEN WILLMOTT
composition as its basis, but refracts
it over and over through the lens of
popular culture of the last 50 or so years.
‘Orca’ is half 8-bit prog rock, half the
record store in ‘A Clockwork Orange’.
There’s the beautifully suave ‘Clara’,
complete with seductive vocals from
Marcelo Camelo over some gentle jazz
bar instrumentation; ‘Bach Off’ is driven
by confrontational drumming punctuated
by bursts of sound that recall video game
transitions; ‘Glenn’, a nod to Godin’s
muse, features a synth riff to rival
‘Together In Electric Dreams’. The video
to ‘Widerstehe Doch Der Sünde’ stars
surfing zombies.
NICOLAS GODIN
Contrepoint
BECAUSE MUSIC
Debut solo release from ex-Air
member is a sweet lesson on the
classical and the contemporary
“Contrepoint”, or “counterpoint”: the
relationship between voices that rely
on each other for harmony but are
independent in terms of rhythm and
contour. Two ideas cohabiting in the
same piece of music, complete on their
own but needing the other to make
sense of their existence.
This album began, according to Nicolas
Godin, quondam member of Air, with the
master of counterpoint – Bach. Or, more
specifically, with renowned Canadian
pianist Glenn Gould playing Bach. Gould’s
interpretations of the baroque composer
are charming and totally individual,
and this inspired Godin to start playing
some JS of his own, progressing through
’18 Little Preludes And Fugues’ to the
fiendish ‘The Well-Tempered Clavier’.
Godin then turned his attention from
attempting to make an album of Bach
to reinterpreting JS from a modern
perspective, incorporating video game
soundtracks, pop ballads, jazz, bossa
nova, film scores, and more.
Each track on ‘Contrepoint’ uses a Bach
Listening to ‘Contrepoint’ is a somewhat
disjointed experience, in that it’s like
viewing the internet on a Bach-themed
browser. You flick between tabs,
constantly redirecting your attention
from one place to another. Everything
is connected, but at the same time
disparate. Someone sends you a link to a
Glenn Gould documentary and elsewhere
you’re reblogging a post about spaceship
aesthetics – all with the faint glimmer
of a classical heritage twinkling in the
background.
This isn’t a patronising or snobbish
approach to bringing classical music
to a new audience. Like Horace’s idea
that the best poetry mixes the ‘utile’
(beneficial) with the ‘dulci’ (sweet), or
Lucretius describing his aims presenting
difficult philosophy in poetic verse
with the image of a doctor sweetening
medicine with honey to make it more
palatable, Godin isn’t forcing us to listen
to Bach against our will. He is slipping
little passages to us, dressed in much
more familiar trappings.
It’s an accepted idea in literary theory
that all works produced now are
amalgamations of previous texts, that
nothing truly new can be written, that
today’s texts are to some extent just
permutations of texts that already exist.
In conceiving ‘Contrepoint’, Nicolas Godin
seems to be working within a similar
vein, fully embracing the fragmented
nature of this take on composition. The
baroque and the modern become totally
interdependent on ‘Contrepoint’. As we
engage with it, we ourselves are resting
in the counterpoint.
ROSIE MORGAN
ALBUM REVIEWS
bubbling and luxurious synths, just
building up the anticipation levels. The
second track, ‘Shoreline’, introduces
soulful vocals to the mix, and with the
faintest of echoes of drum ’n’ bass and
dubstep in the ultra-skeletal, hyperprocessed drums, hints again at what’s
to come.
SYNKRO
Changes
APOLLO
Debut release from cult favourite
Manchester bass producer
This may be Mancunian producer Joe
McBride’s debut solo offering, but he’s
no rookie. Having already chalked up
an impressive array of 40-odd releases,
McBride started life making dubstep and
then honing his own individual sound,
drawing on influences as diverse as
dBridge and Boards Of Canada.
The ‘Changes’ project has its roots in a
trip to Japan last year, when McBride got
“addicted” to vintage synths, the Juno6 and SH-101 he returned with having
a dramatic effect on the development
of the album’s flavour. The result is a
10 track delight that follows firmly in
the horizontal, spaced-out tradition
of its label, the ambient offshoot of
the legendary R&S Records, while also
bringing more than a little of the urban
flavour of his musical background.
McBride is also someone who’s clearly
grasped how to put together a coherent
album, because ‘Changes’ starts slow
and gradually takes shape, picking up
in pace and atmosphere along the way.
There’s almost nothing to its opener
‘Overture’ beyond radioactive analogue
Tinkling electric pianos lend ‘Your Heart’
a slightly more organic feel, as a plaintive
vocal refrain echoes in the background,
drenched in reverb to the point it’s
almost ghost-like. The title track and
‘Let Me Go’ both see McBride introducing
a clipped drum ’n’ bass groove – the
influence of former Bad Company
innovator dBridge probably at its most
prominent here – and upping the energy
by just a tiny notch each time. ‘Holding
On’, with its gushing ambient cascades,
brings The KLF’s milestone ‘Chill Out’
session to mind, only hitched to the
pendulum swing of slow motion dubstep.
‘Body Close’ is the most traditionally
arranged piece on the album, with a
simple, almost jungle beat driving it
along. It’s all about making space for
the song itself, as guest singer Lyves
delivers a stunning vocal, suggesting the
heights of Massive Attack’s ‘Blue Lines’
or the majestically swooping voicebox
theatrics of Kate Bush. It’s a definite
highlight here. And it’s followed by the
short and minimal ‘Empty Walls’, which
is like a modern revisiting of Erik Satie’s
spatial piano experiments, and then
‘Midnight Sun’ with its friendly warmth
and blissfully stoned hip hop shuffle.
Finally there’s ‘Harbour’, bringing things
to a close with a nod to early electronic
pioneers like Tangerine Dream and
Vangelis.
McBride has often been praised for
the technical wizardry of his sounds,
especially in his recent work with fellow
Mancunian Indigo under the Akkord
banner. While ‘Changes’ offers absolutely
no compromise on that front and will
surely delight the “headz”, it also proves
it is possible to squeeze tons of soul and
emotion out of icy electronic ingredients.
A unique and original concoction for sure.
BEN WILLMOTT
Pic: Jody Hartley
Most surprisingly, this is a vocal album.
Not a pop album, at least not pop by
today’s rigid measure, but a record
whose structures make it a more
accessible affair than others in their
back catalogue. Jörgensen, whose voice
peppers this set, sometimes sounds
like he is talking in the same detached
manner as the narrator of a Bret Easton
Ellis novel, unsure as to whether what
he is witnessing and commenting on is
the true reality or not. Elsewhere, his
expression swings with a looseness that’s
neatly matched to Lally’s roots as a
grafting jazz musician.
RUPERT LALLY &
ESPEN J
JÖRGENSEN
Paradise Once
NO STUDIO
Long-time long-distance
collaborators prove again that being
anti-social isn’t a bad thing
To describe the duo of soundtrack
composer/jazzer Rupert Lally and
documentary film-maker/circuit-bent
instrument fan Espen J Jörgensen
as electronic music’s Odd Couple is
perhaps an understatement. Theirs is
a partnership that has produced a slew
of albums, each of them markedly and
stylistically different from the other,
underlined by the fact that the Britishborn, Switzerland-residing Lally and the
Norwegian Jörgensen have never actually
met.
Those familiar with this pairing are likely
to find ‘Paradise Once’ a significant
departure. Gone are the playful ambient
moments. Gone are the imagined
soundtrack cues. Gone also is the notion
of the listeners acting as voyeuristic
observers while Lally and Jörgensen
figure out exactly how to work with one
another.
Then there’s the music. From the off,
with the emotive strings and sound
world of ‘She Lies’, ‘Paradise Once’ is a
many-layered, complex affair. Melodies
percolate and circle around the stereo
field with subtle insouciance, while
rhythms that skitter around on glitchy
broken circuit paths offset any impression
of beauty. The stand-out, ‘Broken
Fingers’, is one of the fullest pieces here,
finding the duo developing a jazz rhythm
beneath synths, distorted guitars and a
vocal that sounds heavy with sadness.
They do the same on the mysterious
‘Spider’, which carries a strange sexuality
about it, with Jörgensen coming across
like a saucy easy listening cabaret singer.
‘Noise For Nothing’, though, is the
track that pierces a hole in any notion
that this is the pair’s pop swansong.
“We don’t need another song about
nothing,” declares Jörgensen at the
start, as preposterously big guitar riffs –
we’re talking ZZ Top here – manoeuvre
gleefully into view. Like a lot of things
about this duo, especially when set
against the fragile beauty of many of
the other tracks here, including the
plinky-plonk synths and fractured noises
of ‘Folds’ that immediately follows, it
really shouldn’t work. But then again,
when you’ve never met, perhaps you
can make music as idiosyncratic and
unselfconscious as you want.
Despite both Lally and Jörgensen hinting
that their creative enterprise had run
its course, ‘Paradise Once’ is a bold,
refreshing album from two artists using
the supposedly cold and not-to-betrusted nature of the internet to their
absolute advantage. Because of that,
we need to hope that they never feel
compelled to meet.
MAT SMITH
XXX
ALBUM REVIEWS
1970s recordings, hailed variously as
“pretty much flawless” and “powerfully
emotional”, and lauded for its sheer
physical and intellectual power, ‘Sakura’
was no one-off. Incredibly, more than
30 albums have appeared since then,
including a few releases under aliases
and the occasional collaborative piece.
Most of them are brilliant.
SUSUMU YOKOTA
My Energy
LO/THE LEAF
Subtly stunning tribute to a
Japanese master of ambient
electronics
The sad news of the untimely passing of
Japanese producer Susuma Yokota at the
age of just 54 earlier this year reached
the music press via a brief statement
issued by his family in July. Tributes and
testimonials to the one-time house DJ
turned laptop composer followed quickly,
their ripple effects reminding us of what
a singular talent we’ve lost.
The most notable accolade has come
in the form of this sampler of Yokota’s
sublime work, put together by his
two long-time UK record labels, Lo
Recordings and The Leaf Label. ‘My
Energy’ – a “pay what you can” download
mini-album with all proceeds going to
Animal Refuge Kansai at the request
of Yokota’s family – features selected
highlights from the producer’s hugely
varied and widely acclaimed output,
which began back in 1994 with ‘Acid Mt
Fuji’.
It took another six years, however,
with the 2000 release of his ‘Sakura’
album, for Yokota to reach a wider
audience. Compared to Eno’s finest
Indicative of Yokota’s prodigious talent
was his ability to incorporate so much
into his warmly eclectic and exploratory
world. From cyclic, Reich-like minimalism
and contemplative neo-classicism, to
summer-light pastoralism and accessible
house music, he always carried things
off with delicate, well-judged poise,
balancing melodic flights of nuanced
keyboard inventiveness alongside more
insistent percussively-driven elements.
Much of this is showcased on the
opener here, ‘Love Bird’ (taken from
2001’s ‘Grinning Cat’), which is the
perfect way to start to this impressive
selection. Equally beguiling is the wistful,
Boards Of Canada-like melancholy of
‘Kodomotachi’ (from ‘Sakura’), a gently
cascading beauty of near-devastating
bittersweetness.
An environmentalist and animal
lover, Yokota’s music is informed and
underpinned by a reverence for nature
and a strong spiritual sentiment, which
perhaps explains the emotionally
and historically-charged depth of his
references. Sampling the hissy graininess
of ancient piano recordings or introducing
delicately played strings at several
points on ‘Grinning Cat’, for example,
grounds his work firmly in classicallyrooted Japan, a country he seldom left.
But in placing these against the more
familiar sounds of programmed beats,
digital synth chords or the breathy,
half-whispered vocals of Caroline Ross
on the lovely ‘Meltwater’ (from 2009’s
‘Mother’), he served up a unique and
peerless brand of Nihon-flavoured
traditionalism, instinctively infused with
the characteristic flavours of western
electronica.
The sum of all this amounts to so much
more than mere clever juxtaposition,
though. Explore Susumu Yokota’s legacy
and discover a modern puzzle solved:
timeless classical, fuzzy dream pop,
hypnotic ambient and dancefloor friendly
strands are seamlessly woven together
with the deft hand of a once-in-ageneration master, presenting us with
quite the life-enhancing gift.
CARL GRIFFIN
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