Electronic Sound Issue 7

07

THE THE Matt Johnson’s Soul Mining

MARC HOULE

Inside the world of the techno outsider

NIGHTMARES ON WAX

George Evelyn reveals his influences

Birth of the Minimoog

FREE SAMPLE EDITION

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Editor: Push Deputy Editor: Mark Roland Art Editors: Anthony Bliss / Mark Hall Contributing Editor: Bill Bruce Contributors: Andrew Holmes, Andy Thomas, Bethan Cole, Carl Griffin, Chi Ming Lai, Danny Turner, Dave Mothersole, David Stubbs, Fat Roland, George Bass, Grace Lake, Heideggar Smith, Jack Dangers, Jason Bradbury, Johnny Mobius, Kieran Wyatt, Mark Baker, Martin James, Mat Smith, Miles Picard, Neil Kulkarni, Neil Mason, Ngaire Ruth, Patrick Nicholson, Paul Browne, Paul Connolly, Rob Fitzpatrick, Sam Smith, Steve Appleton, Tom Violence, Vader Evader, Vik Shirley Sales and Marketing: Yvette Chivers Published by Electonic Sound Š Electronic Sound 2014. No part of this magazine may be used or reproduced in any way without the prior written consent of the publisher. We may occasionally use material we believe has been placed in the public domain. Sometimes it is not possible to identify and contact the copyright holder. If you claim ownership of something published by us, we will be happy to make the correct acknowledgement. All information is believed to be correct at the time of publication and we cannot accept responsibility for any errors or inaccuracies there may be in that information.

WELCOME TO ELECTRONIC SOUND 07 Welcome to this free sample edition of Electronic Sound 07. If you’re new to us, it’s great to have you on board and we sincerely hope you enjoy what’s on offer here. If you do enjoy what you see here, you might want to get the full edition of the magazine. You can find the link to buy it at our website, www.electronicsound.co.uk. If you’re reading on an iPad, then you ought to check out the fully interactive version from Apple Newsstand; there’s a link for that at the website too.

The full magazine has lots more content, including interviews with Matt Berry, Luke Abbott, Luke Haines, Jochen Irmler from Faust, Xeno & Oaklander, Gazelle Twin, plus Mark Moore of S’Express, Manda Rin of Bis, our regular columnist Jack Dangers from Meat Beat Manifesto, and a big piece marking 20 years of trip hop. And that’s not mentioning the huge pile of album reviews and the many other bits and bobs.

Imagine the pleasure a Moog modular system filling an entire wall of your home would give you. It’s a bit like that, but a magazine.

Talking of Moogs, we’ve got a great article about the birth of the Minimoog in this sampler. The story begins at the Monterey Pop Festival in America in 1967, where the Moog Modular was demoed by Bernie Krause and Paul Beaver, and this piece gave us a great opportunity to chat to Moog Music in North Carolina about the company’s hugely significant legacy.

It’s not just us who have been looking back, though. Our cover star is Matt Johnson, who celebrates the 30th anniversary box set reissue of ‘Soul Mining’ with a rare interview about the making of the classic The The album. George Evelyn is on the retro path too, revealing the influences on his work as Nightmares On Wax and remembering the early days of the sound systems in Leeds with particular fondness, while we also talk to alt-techno maverick and one-time Richie Hawtin associate Marc Houle, who brings us firmly into the 21st century.

We’ve thrown a few album reviews and some other bits and pieces into this sampler, but do please check out the full version of the magazine if you like what you see. We’re a totally independent operation, so every sale keeps the wolf from our oscillators. You’ll find all of our editions at our website.

Did we say that already?

Electronically yours, Push and Mark

07

THE THE Matt Johnson’s Soul Mining

MARC HOULE

Inside the world of the

techno outsider

NIGHTMARES ON WAX George Evelyn reveals his influences

Birth of the Minim oog

FREE SAMPLE E DITION Cover photo of Matt Johnson

by JOELLE DUPONT

NEWS

HEADLINES NEWS FROM THE WORLD OF ELECTRONICITY

MARTYN WARE LAUNCHES SAMPLE LIBRARY Martyn Ware has made an exclusive selection of classic analogue synth and drum sounds from his archives available as a sample library via Spitfire Audio.

The founding member of The Human League and Heaven 17 has launched ‘No Illegal Connections’, a collection he has personally compiled which features many of the signature sounds that defined UK electronica and synthpop in the early 1980s. With over 10,000 samples, the library includes the much sought after Roland System 100, a machine that was given to Ware by Vince Clarke in return for his production work with Erasure, as well as his beloved Jupiter 8 and the distinctive Korg 700 drum machine. Alongside original sounds created by Ware, the

FAREWELL TO THE BEASTIES BOYS

award winning Spitfire team have also compiled a number of new creations inspired by his work.

‘No Illegal Connections’ is available from www.spitfireaudio.com for £99.

The Beastie Boys have officially announced their retirement. The statement that they will make no more music under the Beastie Boys name comes two years after the death of Adam Yauch, aka MCA, in 2012. It has been widely assumed that Mike D and Adam Horovitz would no longer record as the

GEORGE CLINTON RECORDS WITH RUDIMENTAL George Clinton has been working with Rudimental on several tracks destined for the group’s new album.

The P-funk legend has teamed up with the chart-topping Hackney collective, who picked up Best British Single at this year’s BRITs for ‘Waiting All Night’, guesting on two songs that are set to appear on the follow-up to their critically-acclaimed 2013 debut album ‘Home’. “It’s the best music we’ve made, ever,” says Rudimental’s Amir Amor. “We went to one of George’s gigs in London and we got to meet him afterwards. We sent him a couple tracks and he was really liking it.” George Clinton is also about to head out on a European tour, with a London date confirmed for The Forum on 26 July. Further UK shows are expected to be announced for October and November.

Beasties after Yauch lost his three-year battle with cancer, but the official announcement came during a recent court case in which the band won $1.7m in damages from energy drinks company Monster Beverage Corps, who had used a number of Beastie Boys’ songs without permission. During the trial, Mike D revealed he and Horovitz had made an agreement with Yauch that they wouldn’t continue without him. Taking the stand to give evidence, Mike D said: “We have not been able to tour since MCA, Adam Yauch, died.

We can’t make new music.”

GOLDFRAPP SCORE GREEK TRAGEDY

Goldfrapp are to provide the music for a National Theatre production starting at the end of July. The play, a new version of Euripides’ powerful tragedy ‘Medea’, opens at the National’s Olivier Theatre

on London’s South Bank on 21 July and stars Helen McCrory in the title role.

While this isn’t the first time Goldfrapp have been heard on the National Theatre stage – ‘Happiness’ featured in the NT production of ‘Earthquakes’ in London in 2010 – the duo of Alison Goldfrapp and Will Gregory have never written music specifically for a stage production before. The resulting score will be played live for the performances. For those who can’t make the London production, the show will be broadcast live to cinemas across the UK and internationally by National Theatre Live on 4 September.

FRANKIE RELEASES ‘PLEASUREDOME’ BOXSET Frankie Goes To Hollywood are releasing an ultra-deluxe boxset to celebrate the 30th anniversary of their ‘Welcome To The Pleasuredome’ double album. ‘Inside The Pleasuredome’, said to be the most detailed and ambitious release in the history of ZTT Records, has been crowdfunded via Pledge Music and includes many unreleased studio demos, remixes and instrumentals, as well as a 48-page hardback book and a DVD compilation of videos complete with 5.1 audio mixes. It also has a 13-track C90 cassette ‘Relax’ remix anthology and a 2014 vinyl edition of the album, remastered by the original producer Trevor Horn and pressed on 180g vinyl in a unique die-

cut sleeve that frames one of three accompanying prints by illustrator Lo Cole. The entire boxset costs £85, while a number of the individual elements are available for £15, with the remastered album retailing at £30. For more information visit www.pledgemusic.com/projects/ frankiegoestohollywood.

ANALOG SOLUTIONS BOSS MAKES ‘BEATZ’ FILM ‘Beatz – Divergences & Contradictions Of Electronic Music’ is a new electronic music documentary by Spanish techno producer/DJ and Analog Solutions label boss Eduardo De La Calle.

Three years in the making and shot on almost no budget, the film is a fascinating insight into the development of electronic dance music, charting the scene from its origins to the shift that has come with the digital age. De La Calle says it was born from “a fervent desire

to document an important piece of music history”. Filmed in Berlin, Paris, Amsterdam, Barcelona, New York and Tokyo, it features contributions from a host of prodcers and DJs, including Marshall Jefferson, Derrick May, Carl Craig, Laurent Garnier, François K, Seth Troxler, Nicolas Jaar, Kenny Larkin, Apparat, Craig Richards and many more. After premiering at this year’s Sonar Festival in Barcelona, ‘Beatz’ is now available to view online via www. eduardodelacalle.com/Beatz.

TOMÁS FORD PROMISES TO STOP KILLING PEOPLE Tomás Ford is bringing a new electronic cabaret show to this year’s Edinburgh Fringe. Following the success of his ‘Electric Cabaret’ set at last year’s festival, the award winning Aussie electrodisco showman will debut ‘Tomás Ford, Stop Killing People’ at this year’s Fringe. It tells the story of an assassin who realises murder isn’t a particularly ethical choice and lurks in a world of dark alleys, deadly seductresses and international intrigue through a combination of live beats, cabaret and video projections filmed all around the world. “The new show takes my music toward more minimal electro sounds, which at points feels like Bryan Ferry crooning over Suicide,” says Ford. You can catch him at Just The Tonic at The

Mash House in Edinburgh from 1 to 25 August. Tickets are available from the usual Fringe outlets.

SUMMER 2014 FESTIVAL HIGHLIGHTS Basement Jaxx, Simian Mobile Disco and a new Flaming Lips side project called Electric Würms, are set to release albums this summer.

Basement Jaxx return with their seventh studio album, ‘Junto’, on 25 August.

It’s their first full-length since 2009’s double bill of ‘Scars’ and ‘Zephyr’ and follows their 2011 ‘Attack The Block’ film soundtrack.

Simian Mobile Disco issue their fourth album, ‘Whorl’, on 8 September. Described as “like Tangerine Dream raised on Detroit techno”, the album was pieced

together over three days in April in the Southern California desert using two modular synths, two sequencers and a mixer. Electric Würms, a new outfit from Flaming Lips’ Wayne Coyne and Steven Drozd, release ‘Musik, Die Schwer Zu Twerk’ on 18 August. Working alongside Nashville psychrockers Linear Downfall, the album sets about deciphering the mysterious frequencies and rhythms sent back to earth by futuristic 70s acid freaks Electric Würms. Remember where you read it first. Righteous, man.

TIME MACHINE

THE EARLY DAYS OF THE MINIMOOG Back to when thin gs

weren’t ho they are n w ow

We’re spinning back to 1967, to the birth of Dr Bob’s Amazing Contraption, aka THE MINIMOOG, arguably the most famous synth of all time Words: MARK ROLAND

I

f you wanted to take a year out of history and hold it up in order to prove to an alien or a halfwit that pop music contains some of mankind’s finest achievements, 1967 would certainly fit the bill. The Beatles released ‘Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’, The Rolling Stones released ‘Their Satanic Majesties Request’, Pink Floyd and The Velvet Underground made their album debuts, Jimi Hendrix cranked out two records, and Brian Wilson gave up on The Beach Boys’ ‘Smile’ sessions. So far, so Wikipedia.

The summer of 1967, the Summer of Love, also saw the Monterey Pop Festival, a three-day event held at a county fairground in California.

The festival is a music landmark and is remembered for, among other things, Jimi Hendrix setting fire to his guitar, captured in the ‘Monterey Pop’ movie by DA Pennebaker (who, more than 20 years later, would make Depeche Mode’s ‘101’ film). It’s a nice thought that the iconic torching of a guitar may have a symbolic resonance for fans of electronic music, because Monterey was also the venue for a less flashy but no less auspicious appearance.

You don’t see the names Beaver & Krause in many Monterey Pop write-ups, but they were there. Paul Beaver and Bernie Krause were both well known on the Los Angeles music scene and they set up a booth at the festival to demonstrate the Moog Modular. Dr Robert Moog’s original company – R.A. Moog Co – was based in New York City at the time, but Beaver was their West Coast rep and his Monterey gamble paid off. This was the year that the Moog was first used on commercial pop recordings, usually played by

Beaver. Among the records that featured his Moog sounds were The Monkees’ ‘Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones Ltd’, which included the spectacularly bonkers ‘Daily Nightly’, and LA psych-rockers The Electric Flag’s soundtrack to Roger Corman’s film ‘The Trip’.

The following year, Bernie Krause showed the Moog system to George Harrison, who made his album ‘Electronic Sound’ with it (much of it played by Krause himself, although Krause later disowned the release). The Doors’ ‘Strange Days’, issued in early 1968, also boasted Paul Beaver’s Moog contributions, but when he later tried to put the machine through its paces for the band and their producer, recapturing sounds proved very difficult. The modular system, while sophisticated and clearly all kinds of awesome, was unwieldy and just too plain difficult for rock musicians to cope with. Patch cords?

On acid? Fuggetabahtit.

Back in New York, the guys at R.A. Moog Co were by now working on the Minimoog, a machine that would combine an exotic sound palette with something musicians, stoned or otherwise, demanded – playability and portability. The first Minimoog, the Model A, was built by Moog engineer Bill Hemsath from spare parts he found in his workshop during lunch breaks. The keyboard was rescued from what remained of the five-octave keyboard that was being cannibalised for replacement keys. It so happened there were just three octaves left. Where the mod wheel ended up was a blank space, which Hemsath decided needed something, so he put a pot there to bend the note.

TIME MACHINE

After several refinements and unreleased iterations, the final result of a fairly DIY process saw the light of day in 1970 – the monophonic Minimoog Model D. It came housed in a handsome walnut case and the control panel was propped up perpendicular to the threeand-a-half octave keyboard. The control panel could be dropped back into the box for storage and travel. “A Moog for the Road” was the advertising line and the marketing blurb also touted its “affordability”. Which at $1,495, close to $10,000 in today’s money, was stretching it a bit.

“When the Minimoog first came out in 1971 – only one was made in 1970 – it was a slow, tentative start,” says official Moog historian and archivist Brian Kehew. “They had trouble convincing many people of its worth. Some studio and traveling musicians accepted it at first, but it was only a few dozen.”

According to Brian Kehew, it was the tireless efforts of Moog salesman David Van Koevering that made the Minimoog a success.

“He was a touring musician who saw the public response to his own Moog demonstrations. He found that he could move from town to town with a stack of Minimoogs, using clever ideas to convince reluctant music stores to sell the unusual instrument. It’s hard to imagine, but nearly everyone felt a synthesiser was too difficult to understand and operate. Van Koevering showed musicians the sonic power and flexibility of the instrument at their local shows, then he’d take prospective customers to their nearest store to prove to the store

owners that there was a market for this odd piece of kit.”

Once prog superstars like Keith Emerson of ELP and Rick Wakeman of Yes started to tour with Minimoogs, its popularity was assured.

Before the decade’s end, the instrument had jumped the prog ship as it sank and become the heart of the new wave of electronic music that was building momentum. Kraftwerk were very early adopters of the Minimoog – it’s all over their breakthrough 1974 album ‘Autobahn’ – and when Gary Numan discovered one in the studio while trying to record ‘Replicas’, the follow-up to his ‘Tubeway Army’ debut, he used it to rewrite most of the album. Giorgio Moroder remodelled R&B with a Minimoog and gave the world disco, while jazz virtuosi like Herbie Hancock and Chick Corea were able to play dazzling solos on them. Even Bob Marley made use of the Minimoog.

There were other synthesisers out there, notably ARP in the USA and EMS in the UK, but the Minimoog is electronic music’s Hoover – a brand name that, for many people, may as well be what every synthesiser is actually called.

“The Minimoog became the cornerstone of the Moog company,” says Kehew. “Most later instruments were based upon the classic Minimoog set-up, a tradition that continues today.”

“The Minimoog Model D was the launchpad that propelled the company into studios, onto stages and into stores all over the world,”

says Mike Adams, the President and CEO of Moog Music. ‘It also single handedly transformed the sound of popular music and its system architecture is still the foundation of all Moog instruments that have followed. It is the legacy that we stand on and we work hard to preserve and advance that legacy every day.”

If you want to buy an original Model D, they fetch around £3,500 these days. For a similar wad you can get a brand spanking new Minimoog Voyager, designed by Dr Robert Moog himself, which won’t detune or get upset if you look at it in a funny way, unlike many of its vintage predecessors. The choice, as they say, is yours.

Visit the Moog Music Inc website at www.moogmusic.com

John Foxx limited edition art prints Prices start at ÂŁ18 plus p&p from www.duck-artshop.com/acatalog/John_Foxx.html

ANATOMY

FAT ROLAND, our Special Investigative Reporter with a special specialisation in special things, deconstructs the semantics of album cover art.

This time, it’s ‘Original Pirate Material’ by THE STREETS

Interior: 27% magnolia, 1% dado rail, 19% family photos, 53% heavy metal death cult

This is either KLF’s white room, The Orb’s blue room, or Kraftwerk’s apocryphal showroom. No idea which, we’ve lost the keys

Love don’t live here anymore. It moved to Urmston in 2006

Brian Eno’s spare room. Contains only grey matter, fractals and broken synths

Jean Michel Jarre’s three-bedroom apartment.

Will play you a personal lightshow in return for cigarettes

The apartment in which they filmed ‘Friends’. Do not enter: technically it’s a crime scene

MC Hammer lives here. Doorbell says “U can’t touch this”.

Doesn’t get many visitors

Minimalist flat.

135bpm. The walls are set at 45rpm

A room with a view. Sadly, that view is racist and offensive, like your grandmother on crack

Interior: Bedroom studio, Atari, Casio keyboard, fourtrack mixer, bottle of Blue Nun

Interior: 99% banisters, 1% eternal vacuum of space

Wall lighting has three options: full tilt, dimmer switch, depeche mode.

The last one’s broken

The occupant here is awake late, sorting out CDs according to the colour of the spine

Contains sofas only made from “original pirate material” (parrot feathers, eye patches, bottles of rum).

It’s super uncomfortable

Roxy Music museum. Made entirely of papier mache. No drinks allowed

The home of Magic from Yellow Magic Orchestra. Yellow and Orchestra are still on the missing person’s list

Where the Pet Shop Boys live.

The walls are a bourgeois construct, but the floors are cheap lino

Home is where the heart is. This is full of them, stolen from hospitals

A room within a room within a room within an enigma within a metaphor within an idiot

This room contains all your hopes and dreams. Or is that next door?

Is this the one with the alligators?

We forget

Max Headroom’s retirement flat.

Ironically has very high ceilings

This window represents the eyes to the soul and/or a special offer at Discount Glazing

Seven toilets, all belonging to Lil Louis. Will one day be auctioned for $16

GARY NUMAN GETS ELECTRONIC SOUND

MAKE SURE YOU DO TOO JOIN THE MAILING LIST AT ELECTRONICSOUND.CO.UK/SUBSCRIBE

THE ELECTRONIC SOUND WALL

We put a call out to all the electronic artists on Reverb Nation, inviting them to submit tracks for the Electronic Sound Wall.

We had 2,256 submissions. We’ve whittled them down to the best 100 or so, but that’s still quite a long shortlist. Anyway, here’s the next batch of tracks that have tickled our fancy in some way.

Have a listen and see what you think. Unfortunately you can’t vote for your favourite on this PDF version of the magazine, but iPad readers voted in the last issue, the winner was one-woman electropopster Dolls, and you can read an interview with her in this issue.

THE ELECTRONIC SOUND WALL

NWSPR ‘EXPRESSWAY’

ANEZMUSIC ‘TING-KANG’

NWSPR, aka New Wave Solar Powered Robots, are a Brooklyn four-piece with a love of synthpunk riffs and industrial lubricants. Heat ‘em up and watch ‘em go.

Anesz Szalai and her musical partner Zoltan Demeter are from Hungary and mix innovative downtempo electronica with theatrical visuals. Fascinating stuff.

FYU-JON ‘SOUL FIRE’

EURASIANEYES ‘FAR OFF LAND’

Brighton’s Fyu-Jon manages to craft a track that is simultaneously chilled and weighty. No mean feat.

There’s a cunning little earwormy melody in there too.

They’re two baldy blokes from Sunderland and they’re big 80s synthpop fans. This song is very Ure-era Ultravoxy, but who’s complaining about that? Not us.

HELEN ADOVE HAWK ‘CRYSTALHEART’

A stripped-down and squelched-up old skool garage tune with vocals redolent of one-time Shut Up And Dance and Massive Attack associate Nicolette. Lots to like, then.

IOKA ‘BLACK AND TAN FANTASY’

An experimental sample-fest from a talented young German producer. Imagine if DJ Shadow found a tape of a crackly old radio programme about the blues.

ZE! ‘BROKE’

Malaysian. Shouty. Funny. Annoying. Likes gaudy colours and men with zebra heads. “I’m so fucking glam, I’m pissing glitter all over the world,” she says.

NAAKUNTA LAAB ‘TAU=6.28’

THE ONES YOU LOVED ‘NIGHTMARE’

We can’t tell you anything about Naakunta Laab, but he/she/ they have a neat line in dirty and noisy dubtech soundscapes.

This one’s a particularly mean beastie.

Pure pop for now people! Something like that anyway.

A confident track from a Dallas indietronic trio who have so far resisted the pull of EDM. Good for them.

SLEATE SEVENTYTWO ‘MELEN KALE’

This haunting track from Glasgow’s Sleate SeventyTwo consists of little more than a piano and some electronic atmospherics. Ambient music to the max.

DOLLS

The latest winner of our Electronic Sound Wall vote is DOLLS, a Canadian girl with a smart synthpop sound, a strong DIY ethos, and a nod and a wink to Rimmel London Words: BILL BRUCE

GETTING THE LONDON LOOK

D

olls’ theatrical synthpop is influenced by Depeche Mode, New Order, Nine Inch Nails and 80s Madonna, combined with huge “talent crushes” on Prince, Kate Bush and The Cure, plus a visual style drawn from the films of David Lynch. Originally from Toronto and now living in London, she arrived in the UK having notched up two Top 20 singles in Canada as the singer of electronic trio The Royal Society. She released her debut album as Dolls, the self-produced ‘Secret Sulk’, in early 2013. It was, somewhat ironically, the by-product of a technology failure.

“I moved to London to start learning production and released the first album after a hard drive crash,” she explains. “Since I’d already walked away from two years of work in Canada, when the HD died I decided to put out the tracks regardless of them being in various states. So the initial ethos was very ‘fuck it’ and I guess I’ve just evolved it from there.”

In terms of both her look and her sound, it’s clear that Dolls is a glamour puss, so it’s unsurprising to learn that she soundtracked and appeared in a cosmetics advert for Rimmel London. However, unlike one or two other female synth artists with a strong visual flair, Dolls isn’t the puppet of some electro svengali working the controls in the background and she is deeply proud of the fact that she has complete control over all aspects of her music. Following on from ‘Secret Sulk’, she has recently released a single, ‘Limited Ltd’, which was the track featured on the Electronic Sound Wall.

“My tracks always start from a mood translated into synth,” she says.

“Until the last year, I’d just bashed whatever sounded OK into Logic fairly intuitively, but it was an annoyingly unreliable way to work.

I’d finish something and be like, ‘I have no idea how I got this result and can’t recreate it’. So I spent the last year eating up tutorials and learning by experimenting, which is reflected in ‘Limited Ltd’ and on my upcoming EP.

“Finally performing the material that I wrote 100 per cent myself was big for me, since I didn’t know how it would be received. The UK and European audiences have been much more receptive to experimental synthpop and the blogs who’ve given me love have been incredible.

They’ve managed to repackage my project in concise and articulate terms, like ‘fairytale smut’. I’m like, ‘GOD, why didn’t I think of that?

Can I steal that?’. Singing on the Rimmel advert was pretty cute too.”

The way Dolls operates seems almost like a reaction against an industry that expects new artists to happily hand off responsibility for their music to other people. She agrees with this assessment.

“Having previously released music that was glossed up by ‘proper’ producers, suddenly I was doing the exact opposite to everything they’d preached. The combination of total freedom and no real framework for the business side meant I went through a phase of saying yes to everything, which led to some avoidable bullshit, but taught me a lot in a relatively short amount of time. The princess in me was used to having other people to do the legwork of booking, promotions and management, so it was humbling to start from scratch and DIY it, but also an opportunity to prove myself and see different sides of the industry.”

Dolls’ future plans include finishing off her new EP, playing more live shows and connecting with other artists for collaborations, while continuing to take part in photo and video shoots.

“I’m also hoping to incorporate more theatrical elements into my live show,” she adds. “And that should be a thrilling alternative to staring at a Logic session for 10,000 hours!”

‘Limited Ltd’ is available from iTunes. For more info, visit www.dollsxx.com

THE THE

THE

SOUL MINER

To mark the release of a special deluxe vinyl edition of ‘Soul Mining’, Matt Johnson reveals the inside story of the classic THE THE album – the drug highs, the wrecked hotel rooms, the fist fights, the dumped tracks, the works…

Words: NEIL MASON

Pic: Jack Monsoon

THE THE

“I

just thought, ‘This game is rigged, I don’t want to play anymore’,” says Matt Johnson, making himself comfortable on a huge old sofa in his East London HQ. “I did a show for David Bowie’s Meltdown Festival in 2002, then I put all my gear in storage, locked it up and walked away. I didn’t give it a second thought. I was just fed up with it all.”

Since he “retired”, The The’s enigmatic kingpin has kept himself pretty busy. He’s composed film soundtracks, launched his own Cineola record label and the offshoot Radio Cineola, an ongoing series of bite-sized music and chat podcasts, set up the 51st State Press book imprint, started work on a biography… In that time, he’s given precisely one interview, a freewheeling Q&A about politics for a Dutch magazine called 200% in 2007. So it’s been a while since he’s had a proper chat.

“You are perpetually in debt, still on the terrible record deals you signed when you were a teenager,” he continues. “My situation is not unusual, this is the standard. And when you are eventually out of contract, you don’t have the clout to get your catalogue back and that’s what was upsetting me. Walking away from that wasn’t hard.”

So what brings him back to the music industry now? His classic 1983 long-player ‘Soul Mining’. In particular, the newly minted 30th anniversary deluxe vinyl ‘Soul Mining’ boxset. And yes, 1983 plus 30 equals 2013, but a year late is small beer when the result is lovingly remastered, beautifully repackaged and features an extra slab of rarities.

You can take the man out the music industry…

M

att Johnson’s parents ran pubs. They took on their first, The Two Puddings in Stratford, in the 1960s. The Puddings was East London’s premier music venue and his Uncle Kenny one of the area’s top music promoters. The sounds filling Matt’s young ears through the floorboards of the flat above the boozer belonged to the likes of Howlin’ Wolf, Jerry Lee Lewis, Gene Vincent and The Kinks.

Matt and his older brother Andrew would sneak a go on the musical instruments left set up by the bands when the pub was closed and they relished the visit of the man who replaced the records in the jukebox, handing piles of worn-out singles to the boys.

It’s little surprise he formed his first band aged 11, his mate Nick on cardboard box drums while he twanged elastic bands wrapped round a tissue box. But although he showed a keen interest in music, Matt hated school. By his own admission, he was a pretty decent truant. His prospects weren’t helped when he failed all his exams.

“My parents wanted me to be a caterer,” he sighs. “I was, like, a caterer? Fuck. That.”

He borrowed some money from his brother to buy a book – ‘So You Want To Be In The Music Business’ by Tony Hatch, who penned countless hits for Petula Clark, as well as the TV themes for ‘Crossroads’ and ‘Neighbours’. The tome had pages of addresses in the back – recording studios, record companies, publishing houses – and Matt wrote to them all. Mostly, the replies were along the lines of “we’ll put your name on file”, but a recording studio called De Wolfe, based on Wardour Street in London’s glittering West End, gave him an apprenticeship. He started in the summer of 1977, a month before his 16th birthday, learning everything from winding up cables properly to working magic armed with little more than a reelto-reel, a Chinagraph pencil and a razorblade.

“I got £18 a week,” he recalls. “It was £10 a week on travel, a fiver to my mum, three quid for me. Not a lot of money even in those days, but the studio allowed me to do my own stuff out of hours.”

The first fruit of the De Wolfe studio downtime was a demo tape he called ‘See Without Being Seen’. The tracks included ‘Spaceship In My Garden’ and ‘Insect Children’, titles purloined from old American sci-fi comics.

“I also had my own studio in the pub cellar with a little tape recorder and a few effects pedals,” he says. “I’d work at De Wolfe, bring the tapes home to do the overdubs, then back to De Wolfe and so on.”

Another advantage of working at De Wolfe was that it was bang next door to the Marquee Club. Punk was at its peak, but Matt says he found the UK scene “a bit boring”. By contrast, he liked a lot of the US artists – Television, Patti Smith, Talking Heads, Pere Ubu – many of whom passed across the Marquee stage with Matt a permanent fixture in the audience, soaking it all up and turning his thoughts to putting together a live outfit of his own.

THE THE

R

ecruiting band members was traditionally done via the small ads in the back of Melody Maker, but Matt’s MM advert for The The, which cited Throbbing Gristle, The Residents and Syd Barrett as influences, only attracted jazz musos and assorted freaks.

A similar ad in the less frequented NME back pages proved more fruitful, unearthing keyboarder Keith Laws, Professor of Cognitive Neuropsychology at the University of Hertfordshire these days. It’s a common thread in those early, constantly shifting The The lineups – bass player Tom Johnston, a cartoonist for the London Evening Standard, drummer Peter Ashworth, a hugely successful music and fashion photographer…

“I played the demo to one A&R guy and he just sat there, stone faced,” says Matt. “He turned it off halfway through, said ‘This isn’t very good is it?’, and threw me out of the office.”

It was a demo of ‘Cold Spell Ahead’, a track with a simple repetitive chord progression, a bright tsk-tsk-tsk drum machine and an unmistakable lyric: “I’ve got you under my skin where the rain can’t get in / But if the sweat pours out / Just shout / I’ll try to swim and haul you out”. In September 1981, with Matt Johnson’s ‘Burning Blue Soul’ album about to hit the shops via 4AD, Some Bizarre released ‘Cold Spell Ahead’ as the second The The single. And Some Bizarre boss Stevo was giving it the big ’un.

“I don’t consider myself a great musician,” explains Matt. “I’m a songwriter who uses an instrument to write songs, but those guys weren’t songwriters or musicians. They were great guys who liked music, who liked the idea of being in a band.”

“I was getting frustrated,” says Matt. “I had two records out at the same time, but I was on the dole, living in a bedsit, and he just kept saying he could get me a major label deal.”

Another set of demos proved the catalyst for change. Although The The was supposed to be a band, Matt realised he was not only writing all the songs, he was playing everything too. A new plan was afoot and he needed a record deal.

Having landed Soft Cell as Number One recording artists, Stevo certainly had plenty of new-found clout. He used it to talk London Records into funding studio time for Matt, a deal sealed with a handshake.

“I was in the offices of independent labels all the time,” he says.

“Cherry Red, Rough Trade, 4AD. The ones who kicked me back horribly were the majors, but the indies were really nice. They’d sit and listen to the tapes, encourage me to keep at it.”

Matt was sent to New York to work with go-to producer Mike Thorne. The plan was to re-record ‘Cold Spell Ahead’, the resulting version becoming ‘Uncertain Smile’. A major label was taking Matt seriously. He was on his way. What could possibly go wrong?

Ivo Watts-Russell was the first to blink and The The’s debut single, ‘Controversial Subject’, appeared on Ivo’s 4AD label in August 1980.

It was produced by Wire’s Bruce Gilbert and Graham Lewis, but a further session with Gilbert and Lewis fell flat, so Ivo suggested Matt should produce himself and release an album under his own name rather than The The. The result was 1981’s ‘Burning Blue Soul’, an arty racket full of everything Matt had learnt at De Wolfe – tape loops, electronic experiments, heavily effected guitar riff-ola and distorted vocals.

“The session went really, really well,” he recalls. “And because Stevo had managed to get the whole thing paid for without signing any contracts, he took the track around to everyone else. Fuck the handshake.”

Sit ‘Burning Blue Soul’ alongside ‘Soul Mining’ and there’s a devil at the crossroads at work, right? The two records are light years apart, but there’s a missing link, an unreleased album that bridges the gap between them. It was called ‘The Pornography Of Despair’ and one of the songs on it really stood out. Well, to most people anyway.

“I wasn’t even there,” laughs Matt. “I don’t know why, I think Stevo wanted all the publicity for himself. Or I was too embarrassed…”

It was a brassy move that could have easily backfired. But the skulduggery paid off and CBS offered The The a deal, with largerthan-life CBS big chief Maurice Oberstein inking the contract sitting astride one of the lion statues in Trafalgar Square. At 3am.

Pic: Nicola Tyson

THE THE

M

att Johnson’s work on ‘Soul Mining’ got off to a false start.

Several false starts, actually. The first was in the autumn of 1982, when he returned to New York to meet with

Mike Thorne again, this time to record a new track, ‘Perfect’. On a personal level, things were different for Matt now.

“From being on the dole with no money to suddenly…” he says, trailing off at the mention of The The’s reported £80,000 CBS advance.

Less than 24 hours after arriving in New York, Matt had “hooked up with a young lady” and disappeared into Alphabet City, the arse end of Manhattan’s Lower East Side. At the time, the area was a mix of immigrant families with a slow drip of musicians, b-boys and graffiti artists, arriving to take up the low rents associated with the insalubrious surroundings.

“It was very rough, very on edge,” he says. “But when you’re young, you are much more fearless, it makes you feel alive.”

Until you chug down a fat one rolled with pure Hawaiian grass.

“I was used to the weak stuff we smoked at De Wolfe. But this… I had a three-day bad trip. It was awful. I told Stevo I couldn’t go into the studio, so he said ‘Try some of this’ and gave me a couple of ecstasy tablets.”

The Some Bizarre crew – and Soft Cell in particular – were into ecstasy way before the Hacienda crowd turned gurning into a mass market pastime.

“There was a lady who used to come over, Cindy Ecstasy, a friend of Soft Cell’s,” says Matt. “It was a private little thing, only a couple of dozen of us knew about it. We were doing it long before everyone else.”

That said, if you’re off your gourd on grass, ecstasy probably

Pic: Alessandra Sartore

isn’t the answer. Propped up by Quaaludes in a final attempt to straighten him out, it was clear the recording session was going nowhere.

“In this weird state of mind, me and Stevo smashed up our hotel rooms and decided to rent a car. We were like, ‘Where’s the roughest place we can go?’. So we went to Detroit. I was in such a frazzled state, full of testosterone and drugs… It was very, very intense.”

When he arrived back in London, he had little to show beyond a sizeable hotel bill.

“CBS said, ‘Right, what else do you have?’. I’d got ‘The Pornography Of Despair’, but it was quite raw… They asked if I could re-record the tracks in line with what I’d done with ‘Cold Spell Ahead’, but the reworkings lost the magic of the originals – the edginess, the experimentation. They were no longer experimental, but they weren’t commercial either.”

Matt had another attempt at producing himself but it just wasn’t working, although some of those tracks later resurfaced as B-sides – ‘Three Orange Kisses From Kazan’, ‘Mental Healing Process’, ‘Nature Of Virtue’, ‘Waiting For The Upturn’. So he decided to bring in a co-producer, settling on Paul Hardiman, an engineer who’d worked with Mike Thorne and was ready to make the step up. The next job was to find a studio.

“We looked at lots of places and came across John Foxx’s studio,” says Matt. “Paul and I both loved The Garden. Even though it was a basement, it had a fantastic atmosphere.”

They block-booked the Shoreditch studio and Matt set about writing a bunch of new songs, demoing them on a new-fangled four-track Fostex Portastudio. He already had ‘Uncertain Smile’ and ‘Perfect’, albeit not recorded to his liking, and also ‘The Sinking Feeling’, the only cut to survive the ‘The Pornography Of Despair’ cull.

“Some of them, like ‘The Sinking Feeling’, ‘This Is The Day’ and ‘Soul Mining’, were song based, but ‘Waiting For Tomorrow’ and ‘Giant’ were a different process,” he explains. “I would record 10 minutes of the same thing all the way through, all played by hand because there were no sequencers. The 24-track was layered with these different parts and the arrangement was created by using the mute buttons on the mixing desk.”

MEET THE FAMILY GERARD JOHNSON Matt’s kid brother Gerard has a growing reputation as an up and coming film director. His debut feature, ‘Tony’, a brutal black-humoured thriller, was released in 2009 to critical acclaim. The soundtrack is by The The and was released on Matt’s Cineola imprint. Gerard’s latest flick, a crime drama called ‘Hyena’, premiered as the opening movie at this year’s Edinburgh International Film Festival, with the festival director saying it “clearly establishes Gerard Johnson as a major talent in British film-making”.

The soundtrack, yup, again by The The, will be released on Cineola later this year.

ANDREW JOHNSON You may know Matt’s big brother as Andy Dog, the illustrator who created many of the distinctive The The record sleeves. The cover of ‘Soul Mining’, while striking, perhaps shouldn’t have been. “It’s a picture of one of Fela Kuti’s wives,” explains Matt. “I just really liked the look of it.

I remember at the time my brother said, ‘Are you sure?’. It didn’t really fit with the previous covers he’d done, but I was quite insistent. I’m not sure I made the right choice, though.

He did do an alternative version, a profile of my head with me screaming. Looking at the two pictures now, that really should have been the cover.”

EDDIE JOHNSON Matt’s dad Eddie has written a memoir about his time as the licensee of one of East London’s best known boozers.

The book, ‘Tales From The Two Puddings’, is a fascinating, richly drawn insight into 1960s London. It was published by 51st State Press, which is Matt’s book company. The name comes from The The’s ‘Heartland’, where “This is the 51st state of USA”.

THE THE

I

n the spring of 1983, Matt instigated a project that would further shape the direction of ‘Soul Mining’. Looking back, it was a gathering of the troops before the recording started in earnest.

Every Thursday night for a month, ‘Rock And Roll With The The’ took to the stage at the Marquee, the sticky-floored venue Matt had virtually lived in during his time at De Wolfe.

Enlisting a dozen musician friends, The The became a supergroup for one month only. The cast was impressive – Soft Cell’s Marc Almond, Cabaret Voltaire’s Stephen Mallinder, Orange Juice’s Edwyn Collins and Zeke Manyika, early electronic pioneer Thomas Leer, Jim “Foetus” Thirlwell, Simon Fischer Turner… They were split into two bands, one mellow and one aggressive, with a further solo set from Matt and a grand finale featuring a dozen guitars chiming out an E chord, the musicians all dressed in black and wearing balaclavas.

On the last night, some bright spark in the crowd took it upon themselves to attack the band during the finale.

“They started throwing bottles and glasses at the stage,” says Matt.

“A big fight kicked off and the band disappeared pretty quickly, apart from three of us who were left fighting with the audience.”

The three? Jim Thirlwell is a shoo-in.

“It was Jim, yeah…”

Mallinder? Zeke? No, wait… Marc Almond! Handy with his fists, then?

“I’ll tell you what, Marc has got quite a temper and he will not stand for any nonsense,” marvels Matt. “He took his guitar off and swung it, hit someone, but we got the wrong people. He was so apologetic after.”

From the residency, Matt figured out who would best suit the songs he was currently working on. Leer and Thirlwell (credited as Frank Want) made significant contributions, as did session bass player Camille Hinds, but they were all eclipsed by one guest in particular.

He was brought in to help out on a new version of ‘Uncertain Smile’, its third incarnation and a remarkable triumph.

“The early versions of ‘Uncertain Smile’ had a saxophone solo, but The Garden had a wonderful live room, with a beautiful Yamaha C3 baby grand, which I later bought and still own. We just thought the track needed something on the long outro. The piano seemed the obvious choice.”

But who to play it? How about Jools Holland, who’d left Squeeze a couple of years earlier and was now better known for presenting ‘The Tube’, the Channel 4 music show, than for his abilities on the ivories?

“It was an inspired suggestion,” says Matt. “It was a hot day and he turned up on his motorbike in full leathers, but he was as cool as a cucumber. He sat down, put the headphones on, ‘Could I have a runthrough please?’. Even before the track was finished he said, ‘OK. Got it. Ready’.”

Pic: Alessandra Sartore

He had got it too. Jools’ contribution was laid down in one take apart from a drop-in “to fix a couple of dodgy notes” towards the end.

“We went to dinner with him afterwards,” says Matt. “It was only to a café round the corner, but I didn’t have any money so he ended up buying his own dinner.”

‘S

oul Mining’ is a rite of passage album about that time in young lives where everything seems to be against you. Hello love and lust, meet loss and self-doubt and self-loathing. But it also offers hope, often dashed admittedly, but hope none the less.

“It is quite a personal set of songs,” confirms Matt. “Someone once said it was a record for small rooms but big imaginations.”

The album was released in October 1983 and was widely praised by the music press. The warm, rich quality of traditional instruments – piano, marimba, harmonica, accordion – sitting against a wash of new electronic sounds was quite unusual at that time.

“With most regular groups, the instrumentation is quite standard from song to song,” says Matt. “I didn’t have that restriction and I wanted to make use of that freedom.”

And make use of it he did. The album closer, ‘Giant’, is pure

dancefloor, with a repetitive locked groove, a monster breakdown and an extended run out. It features Orange Juice sticksman Zeke Manyika in a drumming bonanza that wears its African influence at a spectacularly jaunty angle.

“All the drums are live,” says Matt. “There is a synthetic element because we ran some of the sounds into a Simmons kit, but they’re live drums, with me, Zeke and Paul Hardiman multi-tracking ourselves to build up the massive wall of chanting.”

It’s a gobsmacking finish to the record. Which bring us to ‘Perfect’.

Despite his best efforts, Matt felt that none of the recorded versions of the track worked sufficiently well for it to make the final cut – on the UK version of the album at least.

“I didn’t find out until I went to America,” he says of the “idiot A&R man” who tacked ‘Perfect’ on the end of the US version. “I was in the CBS offices and I remember picking up a finished copy of the album and… ‘What? There are eight tracks on this. What the fuck is this…?’

‘Well, so-and-so thinks it would help…’ ‘Well, it’s not so-and-so’s fucking album, it’s my album.’ It took me until 2002 to get ‘Perfect’ taken off, by which point the American fans are going, ‘What the fuck? “Perfect” is missing. This is not the proper album’.”

Whichever version of ‘Soul Mining’ we’re talking about, the highlight for many people is ‘This Is The Day’. It’s quite probably The The’s most enduring song.

THE THE

“Ultimately, I am an optimistic person,” says Matt. “I have faith in the human spirit, even if I do tend to write about the darker elements of human nature. ‘This Is The Day’ is a positive song, though.”

Over the years, it has taken on a life of its own. It’s got people through exams, weddings, births, funerals, life in general…

“That is the most wonderful payback you can have,” he says. “You put a lot of work into creating these little songs, and the fact that they go out there, into other people’s lives and get them through difficult and important times, it’s a fantastic feeling. For me, that’s the real reward of being a songwriter.”

Pic: AJ Barratt

‘Soul Mining (30th Anniversary Deluxe Edition)’ is out now on Sony

WHAT’S IN THE BOX? This 30th anniversary reissue of ‘Soul Mining’ is the fourth time the album has been mastered, the first being at Martin Rushent’s Genetic Studios in 1983.

“There were no CDs in those days, so you just mastered for vinyl and cassette,” says Matt Johnson. “When it was re-released on CD, probably 1985 or 1986, it sounded a bit flat and it needed brightening up.”

In 2002, Matt called on the services of legendary New York mastering engineer Harry Weinburg to tinker again, this time making the album sound louder by using an extreme compression technique that was in vogue at the time.

“We did rather go over the top,” admits Matt, “While it sounded good and lively, it is over compressed and it sounds quite different to the original.”

For the 2014 reissue, Matt oversaw the project personally and the process was very different.

“We went back to the original master tapes and after a day’s baking they were almost as good as new,” he says. “We ran it through the original EMI TG mastering desk at Abbey Road. To make it as analogue as possible, we decided to use no compression at all and only very small amounts of EQ. It was a very gentle mastering process.”

The result is that, for the first time, the album can now be heard as it was intended.

“Because the first vinyl release would have been compressed and put through EQ, what you get with this new version is actually closer to what you would have heard when I finished the album in the studio.”

MARC HOULE

TECHNO OUTSIDER He started his career buying vintage synths from Detroit pawn shops and became a key member of Richie Hawtin’s Minus family. But as his latest album proves, MARC HOULE is every bit the techno maverick Words: PUSH Pictures: MAXIME CHERMAT

MARC HOULE

I

s Marc Houle a techno artist?

“I guess I am. Well, sometimes I am. That question comes up a lot actually. I don’t mean people asking me in interviews, I mean it comes up a lot in my head. I’m always wondering what kind of music I make. I’m always wondering where I fit in.”

Let’s park that there for a moment. I’ll come back to it again in a little while. For now, I want to quickly make sure you’re up to speed on the Marc Houle story. Take a deep breath.

Born in 1972 in Windsor, Ontario, Canada’s southernmost city, which sits right across the river from Detroit. Started playing drums at the age of five. Also learnt piano as a child. Bought his first synth, a Roland JX-3P, in 1991. Spent the next few years scouring Detroit pawn shops for analogue gear and making endless electronic tracks in his bedroom. Worked as a graphic designer throughout the 90s.

Set up Outputs, one of the earliest web design companies. Ran a gaming night called Atari Adventures at Club 13 in Windsor, where he met Richie Hawtin in 1997. Started DJing at Hawtin’s nights at Club 13, but never mixed records. Never even tried to mix records.

Not remotely interested in mixing records. Still making endless electronic tracks in his bedroom, though. Released his first album on Hawtin’s Minus label in 2004. Set up a Minus offshoot imprint called Items & Things with his old friends Magda and Troy Pierce in 2006.

Moved to Berlin in 2008. Released three more albums via Minus before leaving to run Items & Things as a separate label in 2011.

Marc Houle’s new album – his sixth overall, his second on Items & Things – is ‘Cola Party’ and it’s further proof that Houle is treading a radically different path to his techno peers and contemporaries.

‘Cola Party’ is built on strong techno foundations, but ‘Jackn’ Jill’ is a warped house track, ‘Alpha Bit’ sounds like a pitched down new beat tune peppered with heavy showers of fuzz, and ‘Gimme Gimme’ boasts crashing guitars and a bassline reminiscent of Duane Eddy’s ‘Peter Gunn’ riff. The superb ‘I Don’t Want To Know About You’ is minimalism to the max and ‘Raybans In Bahrain’ has the makings of a 22nd century funk classic 100 years ahead of its time.

“It is all over the map,” chuckles Houle. “My first couple of albums were just collections of tracks. They were just dance tracks, party tracks. Later on, I started getting more into themes – ‘Drift’ has this dark, winter storm vibe, for instance – but this time I wanted to go back to making party tracks without any grand concepts or clever directions involved. I didn’t have to push anything or steer anything, so I could focus on having fun.”

Despite this and despite the breadth of ideas on display, ‘Cola Party’ seems to hang together much better than Houle’s previous albums.

Maybe that’s down to him taking a more relaxed approach to his music.

Maybe it’s because he’s got more adept at pulling together the disparate elements of his sound. Or maybe it’s simply that he’s developed a clearer understanding of what works and what doesn’t, something that’s undoubtedly been helped by the large number of live shows he plays. Interestingly, most of Houle’s shows are at clubs not gig venues and it’s not unusual for clubbers to think he’s DJing rather than playing live. But whatever the setting, the opportunity to test tracks on audiences is very important to him.

“When I play out, around half the set is stuff I’m still working on, still deciding what needs doing. I tend to spend the weeks in the studio and the weekends trying tracks out in clubs. When I’m playing I’m always saying to myself, ‘This part is too long’ or ‘This part should be louder’ or ‘OK, there’s a mistake there’. Then I go back to the studio and change things, refine things, fix things. I do that all the time.”

Does a lot of material end up in the bin? You do have a reputation for being one of the most prolific artists around.

“When I first started, I used to make two or three tracks a day, but I’ve slowed down and it’s more like two or three tracks a week now, mainly because I’m just so busy. But when I talk to other musicians, they’re making two or three tracks a month. So, yeah, I am prolific, but it’s not like I’m working hard. I’m just having fun. It’s like playing video games or something. It’s a total pleasure for me.”

MARC HOULE

L

et’s flip back to that opening question. Is Marc Houle a techno artist?

“I love melodies. That’s what’s so great about new wave music. You often only have one melody with techno, but with new wave you can go nuts and have 10 layers of synths. But I also love the actual sounds

“Ummm… What do they call it when you don’t know who or what

of my synthesisers. I love playing a chord on my Juno 60 and going

you are?”

‘Waaahh!! Wooohh!!’. Even though I’ve had a Juno 60 for 20 years, I still get excited about the sounds it makes because it’s so good, it’s

An identity crisis?

so beautiful. I don’t buy many new synths, I tend to stick with the ones

‘That’s it. I mean, it used to be pretty easy, right? It used to be, OK,

crazy synth that does something you’ve never heard before. Then

there’s techno and there’s house, so which one are you? But over the years, everything’s got very blurred. I used to get called a minimal techno artist, but I’m not minimal now. When I hear minimal techno, that’s not me, that’s not what I do. But has what I do changed that much? I don’t think so. I really don’t. I think what’s happened is all the genres and styles have been shifting and swirling together.”

You were in your mid-teens when Juan Atkins and Derrick May and Kevin Saunderson were rolling out all those seminal early Detroit techno tracks. Were you listening to those records at the time?

I’ve already got, they’re like my arsenal, but there’s always some old when you hear it, you wish you’d had it and used it 10 years ago.”

There are lots of dark and moody synth lines on ‘Cola Party’. There are some very sinister sounding vocals too. They work especially well on ’S-T-E-A-K’ and on the album title track, both of which remind me of how Stephen Mallinder’s voice was heavily treated on the early Cabaret Voltaire records.

“Cabaret Voltaire were too scary for me, but I loved John Foxx and Gary Numan,” says Houle. “John Foxx’s synthesiser lines are incredible. He does moody better than anyone. Better than I ever could. But, yeah, it’s about emotions, right? It’s the emotions in

“For sure,” says Houle. “Actually, before that, my sister brought

sounds. Sometimes you pick a synth because it sticks out, like a DX7,

me back a mixtape from Chicago, with Chicago house tracks like

because you want it to cut through the mix and you want it to throw

‘Jack Your Body’ on it, and I was so blown away because those

the melody, and when you do that it changes the way you feel. I love

tracks had the sounds I loved, like the Atari Commodore sounds,

doing that. For me, that’s the fun of playing a synthesiser. It’s about

they had great synthesisers and drum beats, and everything was

creating moods and creating feelings.

so simple and repetitive, and I was like, ‘Wow, what is this stuff?’.

From there, I discovered the techno parties that were starting up in Detroit, so my friends and I would drive over there every Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday… I spent the next 10 years of my life going to those parties and just dancing all night. At the same time, I was making techno music at home, but I was never part of the Detroit movement, I wasn’t making Detroit techno. I mean, I love it, it’s my favourite kind of music…”

He trails off and sighs.

“Except, well, there are times when I believe I kind of do make Detroit techno. There are elements in there, but mixed in with some Chicago stuff and some new wave stuff and some video games stuff too. I’m somewhere in the middle of all that.”

“With the vocals, I like to try different ideas. So with ‘I Don’t Want To Know About You’, that’s my voice without any effects. With ‘S-T-EA-K’, I changed the shape of my mouth to get that main vocal sound instead of just using effects [pulls his mouth into a large oval shape].

So, yeah, I don’t want to do the same thing all the time. I like to mix it up and play around with my voice. Pitched up, pitched down, changing my mouth shape, making noises, singing harmonies…”

By mainly using vocals as a sound, as a sonic texture, I guess that means you’re not so interested in lyrical narratives?

“I don’t sit around writing poetry and coming up with great lines,” he says. “Sometimes I want to just play another synth, but if a track needs something else, a different element, I’ll put in a vocal and see how it works. A lot of times, it’s just a voice acting as a placeholder, though. Sometimes I’m just singing ‘Blah-blah-blah-blah’, but then I

Would you say you were into sounds more than songs?

find that ends up being pretty much the song.”

I love melodies.

That’s what’s so great about new wave music

MARC HOULE

I grew up loving Kraftwerk, but Kraftwerk grew up loving The Beach Boys

I

want to try this one last time. Just for the hell of it. Is Marc Houle a techno artist?

“Maybe there’s some genre out there that I don’t know about and maybe that’s what I am, that’s where I fit. I do sometimes wonder if that’s the case.”

That would actually make a lot of sense. And here’s one of the many things I find intriguing about Houle. He learnt his trade in Detroit, in the crucible of techno, and he was a key member of Richie Hawtin’s Minus family for a good number of years. So in many ways, Houle has the credentials of a techno insider. But it doesn’t take more than half a listen to ‘Cola Party’ to realise that he’s actually very much a techno outsider, a techno maverick. Perhaps it’s all that analogue gear he uses, perhaps it’s his love of Foxx and Numan and the like, but Houle’s sound seems to be rooted more in mechanisation than in technology. You can hear it on several tracks on ‘Cola Party’ and most particularly on ‘Hot Sauce’, where the rattling snares sound like a military band going at it hammer and tongs.

“It’s interesting that you say that,” grins Houle. “Something I’ve often thought about is what it would be like for a big military drum corps to play ‘Spastik’, the Plastikman track [makes lots of drum noises]. That’s one of the things I want to see before I die. That would make me the happiest person in the world. I did tell Richie Hawtin he should do that, but I think it’s probably more of a Marc idea than a Rich idea.”

That’s almost certainly true. When it comes to playful concepts, Houle has form. A few years ago, he released ‘Techno Vocals’, a track that took a humorous swipe at the pitched down vocals popular with some techno artists, including himself sometimes. He’s also not averse to recording with other artists. He’s never worked with a marching band – not yet anyway – but he has collaborated with Veronica Vasicka from Minimal Wave and with French electrohead Miss Kittin. And then there’s La Folie, Houle’s synthpop band with his old friend Joaquim dos Santos.

“La Folie is almost like a surreal joke,” he laughs. “We’ve been recording an album for 13 years now. It’s all ready to go, we mixed it down in an incredible studio and it’s been mastered, but it hasn’t been released. I don’t know what will happen with it. On top of that, we’ve played just one show in 13 years. I’m still writing songs for the project, though. There’s about 120 in the queue for Joaquim to sing on. I love sitting there coming up with keyboard lines for the sort of songs I could never play to the club crowds. You know, 2,000 people who want to dance hard don’t want to hear pop songs or romantic songs. So, yeah, it’s great because it’s another avenue for me to express myself.”

And there are plenty more avenues for Houle to still explore. Have I mentioned his fondness for Black Sabbath yet? Or Prince? Or Kraftwerk? Mind you, Kraftwerk should be a given.

“I grew up loving Kraftwerk,” he says. “But Kraftwerk grew up loving The Beach Boys. Listen to ‘Autobahn’ – ‘Wir fahren fahren fahren auf de autobahn’ – and it’s a Beach Boys song. I mean, yeah, holy crap, but it is. That’s what’s so exciting about music. You keep chasing it, but you can’t really analyse a single moment because all music has been built on layers and layers and layers of stuff that’s come before.

“I’m fascinated by anything and everything to do with music. I watch so many documentaries about it – the origins of music and how it has evolved, classical music, music from the 1920s and the 1930s – and it’s all tied in, everything relates to everything else, and you don’t realise that if you focus on one type of music or one aspect of music.

You have to look at the whole picture to fully understand the giant formation of where we are now.”

Which, of course, goes some way to explaining Marc Houle’s musical identity crisis. May it continue for many years to come.

‘Cola Party’ is out now on Items & Things

Pic: Yves Borgwardt

ITEMS & THINGS

Pic: Tamara Deike

Marc Houle, Magda and Troy Pierce are the joint owners of the Items & Things label.

They started I&T in 2006, when they were all signed to Richie Hawtin’s Minus imprint, but released just four or five records in as many years. They trio left Minus to focus on I&T in 2011.

What’s the dynamic like between the three of you?

“We’ve been friends since we all first started making music,” says Marc Houle. “We’re just normal people – we hang out, we make stupid jokes, we have fun. We yell at each other sometimes, but one minute later we’re cracking jokes again. It’s very relaxed. It feels like we’re all going down the same road, but we’re each taking a different vehicle.”

What three words would you use to describe Magda?

“Hmm. That’s tough. I don’t want to say something too good, but I don’t want to be too mean. Special… little… squirrel [laughs].

She’s good at looking for nuts that nobody else has found and putting them together in a neat pile [laughs again].”

What if it was a plus one for a Black Sabbath gig? Magda or…?

And three words to describe Troy?

Who would win an arm wrestling competition between the three of you?

“Cool… motorcycle… They can be random words, right? Cool motorcycle… tattoo. He’s definitely the cool one, you know. He wears the best clothes.”

You have a plus one on the guest list for a Depeche Mode gig. Would you take Magda or Troy?

“Errrrr... [long pause]. Probably Troy because Magda would be way too busy.

Magda is always way too busy. Troy would know all the tracks too.”

“Troy. For sure. We talk about Black Sabbath all the time. We both love Sabbath.

I mean, how can you not?”

“Troy. This isn’t fair, Troy’s getting all the answers.”

What three words would Magda and Troy use to describe you?

“Retarded… clown… nerd. Yeah, retarded clown nerd, that’s pretty much me. That’s not good, is it? I’d rather be the cool motorcycle tattoo guy, but I’m just not [sighs]. But I’m always happy, I’m always laughing, so that’s OK, right?”

UNDER THE INFLUENCE

With the release of ’N.O.W. Is The Time’, an album featuring the finest moments of NIGHTMARES ON WAX’s 25-year career, NOW big chief GEORGE EVELYN talks us through some of the people, places and sounds that have inspired him and his tuneage

UNDER THE INFLUENCE

I

t all started around 1977, when I was about seven years old, hearing the reggae sound systems in my neighbourhood. There were two rival sound systems, Concrete Lion and Messiah. The Messiah sound system was from Hyde Park in Leeds, which was where I grew up.

S

tanding outside the youth club listening to what was going on inside created a lot of curiosity in me. I could hear them practising and testing out the sound systems, but it wasn’t the same. You’d only get to experience the full effect when they were at Carnival, once a year on the August bank holiday, when all the sound systems would be up on the streets. That would be the closest I would get to enjoy the sound systems properly.

Because of all that curiosity, I came to really like the music that was being played. My first memory of becoming a fan of a particular artist was Scientist, who released these amazing dub albums on Greensleeves Records. His album

The main guy behind Messiah was called Clifford Smith, who was the older brother of my best friend at school, Dennis.

Dennis and I would hang out with them, watching them build the speaker boxes, setting up the sound for the weekend, or getting ready to play at the Belle View Youth Centre, our local youth club.

sleeves featured some amazing cartoon artwork. My mates and I would sit there and listen to these albums and talk about which character we wanted to be on the record sleeve, fantasising about being that certain person on the cover.

Because I was really intrigued by it all, that led towards DJing and collecting records. I remember applying to get a DJ job at a hospital radio station because I wanted to be a radio DJ too. I think the radio DJs were much bigger celebrities back then, in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Listening to the Top 40 on a Sunday was a regular thing in our house.

We would listen to – dare I say it – Jimmy Saville doing the chart rundown while we were having Sunday dinner.

Sometimes a sound system would visit from another area to compete against them. We were too young to go into the dances, but we used to hang around outside, listening to them throwing down on the microphone and dropping reggae tunes.

W

e spent a lot of time on the streets when we were kids, particularly when the breakdancing thing came along. That scene totally shook my world. There was suddenly all this amazing new music, all these brilliant hip hop and electro records, and it was like a whole new world just opened up to me. It was a mad

T

his is where my influences really started to grow. Coming out of the reggae sound system scene and then going into the street culture of hip hop, I was experimenting with sounds and that led me to start collecting what were called “cuts” back then. I got into finding out what certain scratch sounds were on records, which then led me to James Brown and to finding out what breakbeats were. Collecting breaks took me in a whole new world of music and it was a real voyage of discovery with

trip right the way through from 1982 until around about 1985 or 1986.

That period really laid the foundations for me wanting to make music of my own, especially getting into scratching and discovering how to manipulate records.

We only had one turntable, so I had to learn how to use a cassette machine

people like Earth, Wind & Fire, Curtis Mayfield and Ike Turner. I was unearthing all this incredible music through these familiar cuts I’d heard on hip hop records.

I will always be grateful to hip hop for giving me that broad horizon. If it wasn’t for hip hop, I wouldn’t have the record collection I have now, although it’s not just all hip hop records. My collection covers a very wide spectrum of music of different styles and from different decades.

to tape segments of different records and then put them together to create megamixes. I’d invite people round to my house to take me on at scratching on a crappy Fidelity turntable. It was all about bravado, about battling with people and having a reputation through breakdancing or DJing or rapping. It was all great fun.

UNDER THE INFLUENCE

D

isco and funk records became a big part of my collection and from there I got connected into the early house scene. I’d be buying Chicago house tracks, but without really even knowing that’s what they were. I was just buying them because they were great tracks. I got into Trax Records and

M

e and Boy Wonder [Kevin Harper, half of Nightmares On Wax for the first album only] started running our own club night in Leeds called Downbeat in 1986. We did it for three years, through until 1989.

Being in that environment, playing tunes, collecting hip hop records, getting the rare tracks that nobody else had, getting into the whole rare groove thing, that’s

T

hroughout this journey, I’ve always had music in my life, even back when I was seven. My influences really do come from the bare necessities, from being attracted to the music that was around me in my neighbourhood, the music of my environment.

Something I remember very clearly was being 13 years old and getting my first Walkman. The first album I listened to on it was Aswad’s ‘New Chapter’.

was buying stuff by Marshall Jefferson, Adonis, Steve “Silk” Hurley, Darryl Pandy and other Chicago house artists. That was just incredible.

House music swept the dancefloor for us. I remember in 1985, we would go to clubs or to all-dayers as dance crews,

what me and Kevin were about.

And in the middle of all that, we had this desire to make a record. Kevin was great at beatboxing and I rapped and scratched a bit, so we had that b-boy element. Once we got some equipment, we started making tunes together and the obvious thing was to drop them at our club night. So that’s what we did.

We were taking demos down there and

and we’d make circles at these events and be getting down to what are now considered classic house tracks. There were no raves back then. The music was just the music. We didn’t know anything about the amazing clubs like The Warehouse in Chicago, which is where this music was derived from.

playing them off a cassette. Playing cassettes in a nightclub – imagine doing that now!

We released our first EP in 1989 on Poverty Records. It was called ‘Let It Roll’.

It led to us meeting Steve Beckett and then getting a deal with Warp Records.

Nightmares On Wax were Warp’s second ever signing.

It was actually my brother who had ‘New Chapter’ and I had ‘A New Chapter of Dub’. I remember walking around Hyde Park for hours and hours on my own just listening to this one album, enjoying the experience of having headphones on and walking round the streets listening to this great music with Aswad’s great production. Walking round my streetlamp-lit neighbourhood listening to that album is such a strong memory for me.

Nightmares On Wax’s ‘N.O.W. Is The Time’ album is out now on Warp

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ALBUM REVIEWS

Some Bizarre transition also gave electronics more of a prominent focus in the Cabs’ music, though it was still blended with sludgy basslines, splintered guitar riffs and found sounds.

CABARET VOLTAIRE #7885 (Electropunk To Technopop 1978-1985) Mute

A bumper Cabs compilation drawing on both their Rough Trade days and their Some Bizarre catalogue One of the most mystifying things about Cabaret Voltaire was the progression in their output from the dirty, industrial primitivism of their earliest work – work that put them on a natural par with fellow art-punks Throbbing Gristle and Robert Rental – to the relatively glossy almost-pop of the three albums they recorded for Some Bizarre/ Virgin in the mid-1980s. A poster for ‘MicroPhonies’, the most fully realised of their Some Bizarre releases, even graced the walls of one Ferris Bueller’s bedroom.

Much changed within the band between their late 70s material for Rough Trade and the MTVfriendly output for Stevo’s seminal imprint. First, there was the departure of Chris Watson, who went on to enjoy parallel careers as a stalwart of Touch Records and an eminent sound recordist for the BBC. As a trio, Watson played a pivotal role in the development of the Cabs’ ethos alongside Richard H Kirk and Stephen Mallinder, and his exit naturally led to a change in approach.

Second, technology was evolving at a rapid pace. As Kirk recalls in his liner notes to ‘#7885 (Electropunk To Technopop 1978-1985)’, the band moved from garagey self-sufficiency at their Western Works studio in Sheffield to recording sessions in swishy suites with producers, engineers and sundry other hired hands. The

What’s highlighted by this new Mute compilation – the first Cabaret Voltaire album to draw from both the Rough Trade and Some Bizarre periods – is that, despite all the apparent differences, a series of common threads run throughout the best part of a decade. One of these is Stephen Mallinder’s vocals. On the Rough Trade tracks, these are primarily spoken, usually filtered through an ugly distortion box which renders any sort of coherence intentionally difficult. The later vocals are clearer, less punk, more obviously sung instead of spoken, but the cut-up approach of the group’s first recordings is just as evident on the Some Bizarre pieces, betraying the ongoing influence of William Burroughs, who remained something of a shadowy presence for a lot of the artists that emerged from the industrial scene.

The other constant was a focus on a strain of nervous, almost unintentional funk. The oldest piece here, ‘Do The Mussolini (Headkick)’, carries its alien groove on a barely-there beat and a tentative bassline, containing more of a human quality in its construction than anything Kraftwerk produced at that time. By the closing tracks, the likes of ‘The Dream Ticket’, the funk dimension had taken on a more pronounced edge, more brazen perhaps, some might say more garish.

It’s no surprise that the Cabs covered Isaac Hayes’ ‘Theme From Shaft’, filtering the classic horn groove through the same dubby spatial

awareness that can be heard throughout this collection. There’s no avoiding the fact that the Cabs’ early music was dark, and it’s tempting – but incorrect – to view their later material as having greater levity. Listen to tracks such as ‘Kino’ and ‘I Want You’ and you’ll hear the same bleak streak, in spite of the cleaner sound.

Elsewhere in the liner notes, Kirk tries to make a case for Cabaret Voltaire not necessarily embracing the bold style and imagery of the dayglo era that their Some Bizarre work occupied.

He consciously makes reference to avoiding Flock Of Seagulls haircuts (though check out some of the period pictures of the duo and you might disagree) and claims his eyeliner usage was a throwback to the punk days rather than a way of blending into their new environs. Perhaps Ferris Bueller, as a proxy for the record-buying public, understood it better than they did – that poster for ‘Micro-Phonies’ hangs next to adverts for releases

by Simple Minds and Blancmange.

By Kirk’s own admission, ‘#7885’ offers a slightly one-sided view of the Cabs’ output across two distinct periods; seven-inch edits and shorter single tracks are employed specifically to avoid presenting their work as impenetrable or inaccessible. Kirk even says he didn’t want to scare listeners away by presenting something too dense. But whatever the motivation, this compilation serves as a succinct reminder of what made Cabaret Voltaire such a compelling proposition at the time.

MAT SMITH

ALBUM REVIEWS

tones and the creation of unintended rhythmical elements than from the original loop itself.

LUKE ABBOTT Wysing Forest Border Community

Rural art project involving modular synthesis awash with strange and beautiful sounds and melodies A slow wave of sound emerges; clear tones overlapping to create a wash of soothing melodious electronics, like Eno might have done once upon a time, back when the sharpest of the cutting edge of musical tech was modular analogue synthesis, long before he went digital (or started using that hand wavy thing he’s been spotted manipulating in the company of Karl Hyde). And then an insistent thumping starts up.

It’s warm, but it’s urgent and there’s a tension in it.

As the tones continue, they start to become swamped by white noise. It sounds like the huffing and puffing of a stationary steam train.

Other noises spring out of this; slightly detuned notes ring out in some kind of damaged trumpet voluntary, woozy yet victorious. Then that rabbit’s heartbeat of a pulse comes back in, slows, takes up a tempo and a feel reminiscent of Pink Floyd’s ‘Time’ from ‘Dark Side Of The Moon’, and the swaying melodic theme swirls back into focus.

Then you realise that two tracks have come and gone (‘Two Degrees’ and ‘Amphis’) and 15 minutes have passed as the third piece, ‘Unfurling’, kicks off. ‘Unfurling’ sounds more like the kind of experimentation Steve Reich liked to play around with, where he’d set off a couple of tape loops and record the results as they slipped out of synch and then back in again, drawing more meaning from the accidental coinciding of

Luke Abbott’s own modus operandi here certainly owes more to the academic minimalists and electronic music pioneers than it does to the commercially successful creators of electronic pop music or dance music. With the blessing of the Arts Council (and, you have to assume, some cash), Abbott hauled himself off for a week or so to Wysing Art Centre in Cambridgeshire, where he installed himself and his modular sound-making kit in a white room. This album is the result. Interesting, this intersection of art and electronic music. So should we expect some kind of rural concept album from this exercise, you know, like a ‘Campfire Tapes’ of the Nintendo generation? That would be literal to the point of stupidity. What we have with ‘Wysing Forest’ is a recording of what happens when several ideas and circumstances collide; a musician who thinks like an artist, a place that isn’t his usual recording studio, and the absence of commercial considerations (like shifting units, remixes for the dubstep crowd, etc).

Despite the lofty art concepts at work here, Abbott’s not above pulling the Jean Michel Jarre laser guns out of his arsenal (‘Free Migration’) and nor do they preclude the use of very pretty melodies, something which he keeps being drawn to, whether he wants to or not. In the end, this is why Luke Abbott’s work is so appealing; unexpected tunes taking flight from a canvas of sound created through a number of fascinating creative decisions. Not least of these is his decision to use modular equipment that is, with a time travelling irony that may yet see Eno get into it again, once more at the cutting edge of electronic music making.

HEIDEGGER SMITH

IRMLER & LIEBEZEIT Flut

Klangbad

A brilliant collection of improvisations from two of krautrock’s heaviest hitters What do you get when you put two giants of the krautrock scene in a studio for three long days?

Well, in this instance, you get a monster of an album; a collection of improvised music which, at times, sounds more like an orchestra of noise merchants in the midst of a 24-hour freak-out than a couple of old guys jamming with an organ and some drums in a former factory in Germany.

The two old guys are Hans-Joachim Irmler and Jaki Liebezeit. Liebezeit is best known for his work with Can, of course. His tight rhythms were probably the most crucial lynchpin of Can’s sound and are the reason most often cited for their long-lived appeal. You can’t stumble across ‘Halleluhwah’ from the masterful ‘Tago Mago’ album and not be mesmerised by Liebezeit’s contribution. Jochen Irmler, meanwhile, was creating clear vinyl artefacts for the fledgling Virgin label in the early 1970s with his groundbreaking band Faust. Faust were often a more challenging affair than Can, though no less impressive. Songs like ‘Why Don’t You Eat Carrots?’ from their 1971 debut would shift from gentle neo-classical minimalism to manipulated tape horror-noise and lyrics delivered in mass chants against a fractured jazz racket, or they could crank out proto-new wave guitar anxiety like the incredible ‘J’ai Mal Aux Dents’. They were a kind of jazz/musique concrete/krautrock mindfuck. And still are.

elements of Neil Arthur, Mark Hollis and I Start Counting’s David Baker with a natural soulfulness that provides a warm, hypnotic counterweight to Allan-Smith’s music. The theme may well be about love and attraction, but it’s subtle rather than overt or throwaway.

So the idea of these two getting together is an extremely enticing one – and the results do not disappoint.

Jaki Liebezeit’s rhythms! The man is 76 years old yet his drumming is as funky and as pulselike as it ever was, while Irmler’s restless spirit continues the Faust ethic of sonic exploration as if the 20 years between the end of 1970s and the beginning of century 21 never happened. The fierce concentration and lack of fuss in Liebezeit’s playing is the perfect foil for his partner’s more explosive tendencies. Irmler really lets loose, conjuring sounds from his organ, presumably with a box of tricks to shape and process them into entirely new and spectral forms, confident that the beat, which responds oh-so subtly to his every jerk and flourish, will keep everything anchored.

The six pieces have titles like ‘Amalgam’, ‘Golden Skin’ and ‘Ein Perfektes Paar’ (although the review copy I received, thrillingly from “Faust Studio”, had them as ‘Stück 1’, ‘Stück 2’, etc), but in reality those are just labels to be dispensed with. This thing rolls along outside of mundane nomenclature. As Liebezeit puts it himself: “We play without notes. In places where notation systems do not exist, the rhythm holds a much more dominant role in music, for example as is the case in Africa. Here people make music differently than those who think in terms of notes and bars. Musical bars are like prison bars.

Playing without notes means that you must play repetitively – and repetition is rhythm. At the same time, repetition does not really exist here, because you never (quite) play the same thing (twice).”

That these guys are still making music, with or without notes, and still hurtling off in chaotic new directions like the kosmische travellers they are, is something for which we should be hugely grateful.

MARK ROLAND

SPACEBUOY Intoxicated Juggernaut

Synthpop plus techno plus trance adds up to a strong debut for these Midlands guys Spacebuoy are a Midlands-based duo of vocalist Howard “H” Moth and all-round synth wizard Jez Allan-Smith. Okay, it’s a duo making electronic sounds, so it must be an homage to classic synthpop, right?

Well, in places that may be true, but ‘Intoxicated’ draws as much from 90s dance music as it does the vocalist/synth player formula that still has evident appeal in any number of modern upstarts.

Beats either thud with urgent dancefloor appeal or judder with skeletal electro insistence, while the synths echo acid house complexity as often as monophonic simplicity, or flutter around like some of the poppier releases of the Perfecto Fluoro back catalogue. Allan-Smith cites influences from the likes of Depeche Mode, Yazoo and Fad Gadget, while also admitting a love of the likes of John “00” Fleming and Paul Oakenfold, all of which goes a long way to explaining the array of electronic styles offered up here.

‘So Easy’ and the euphoric ‘Radiate’ are probably the slickest examples of the synthpop end of the album, featuring lots of bleeping loveliness, wobbly synth arpeggios and not-quitemelodies that a latter-day Vince Clarke might approve of, while H delivers soulful, wistful vocals with all the delicate ups and downs and powerful choruses that good pop music demands. H’s voice is something of an enigma in itself, blending

Elsewhere, ‘Deliverance’ and ‘13’ are laced with harder elements appropriated from techno and trance. ‘Deliverance’ even finds H providing a rapturous yet malevolent vocal not a million miles away from John Lydon’s collaboration with Leftfield on ‘Open Up’, while the impassioned ‘13’ buzzes with angry synth interjections subjected to harsh filtering. The pairing of ‘Heaven Sent’ and ‘December’ are the highlights of what is overall a strong album, both employing slick, classic retro synthpop hooks mixed seamlessly with the emotive twists and turns that have been the staple of both electronic pop and more dancefloorangled concerns.

The upshot of all of this stylistic interplay is a clever album that’s as reverential as it is original, putting to shame some recent efforts by other synth duos that have felt like directionless watertreading in comparison.

MAT SMITH

ALBUM REVIEWS

keeping a steady rhythm is good for this sort of sexual expression (tee-hee-hee).

GUSGUS Mexico Kompakt

Iceland’s favourite electronic groovers turn up the heat for an album brimming with confidence Trace the story of GusGus over the last 20 years or so with each member represented as a line and it wouldn’t look dissimilar to what you’d find behind a modern TV – lots of tangled cables looping in and out, some disappearing and reappearing later, others only just visible. For ‘Mexico’, however, GusGus have settled into a four-piece consisting of Stephan Stephensen, Birgir Thorarinsson, Daníel Ágúst and Högni Egilsson, the first two of these having been in every line-up of GusGus since 1995.

It seems that with less members comes a greater sense of focus for the group. Some of GusGus’ previous releases have featured songs that meander a bit too much, like on ’24/7’, where only one song was shorter than seven minutes and it felt like a bit of a slog at times. But with ‘Mexico’, GusGus are practically sprightly.

The first track, ‘Obnoxiously Sexual’, is the perfect example of this. It’s brimming with little flourishes of bubbling synths and the lyrics tell a tale of love that gets a little hot under the collar. ‘Crossfade’ follows in a similar vein, although the lusty nature is slightly more concealed than on the opener.

GusGus keep a steady rhythm through these fairly sensual adventures, sticking to a top-tapping beat that serves as a canvas for the intimate melodies. Which isn’t to say the beats are boring.

They’re exactly what’s needed and I’ve heard that

History often comes into play on ‘Mexico’, not through lyrics, but through sound and feeling.

There’s a lot of reverence for the 90s these days and while you might believe that some artists are capitalising on it, there’s no way in hell you could say that about GusGus. They’re not making slow-burning housey tracks like ‘Airwaves’ and ‘Sustain’ out of nostalgia. They don’t throw those Lighthouse Family-esque wails into the background of ‘God-Application’ because they’ve heard the Lighthouse Family are getting big again (they’re not, but they bloody well should be).

GusGus sound authentic with all this because that’s exactly what they are. There’s nothing gaudy or clichéd about what they’re doing – and it’s pretty much gorgeous.

There’s more room to breathe as ‘Mexico’ draws to a close. It’s not like they ran out of steam after the emotionally draining ‘God-Application’, which could easily turn out to be one of my personal favourites of the year (what can I say, I really like the Lighthouse Family), but things are definitely increasingly relaxed. The title track gets a little repetitive after a while, at points sounding like they programmed one melody, let someone loose with three filter knobs, said “Have at it”, and didn’t return for six minutes. ‘This Is Not The First Time’ almost slips into trance, if just for a second, but the acidic synths and straining strings keep the track above water.

GusGus get their groove back for the final song, ‘This Is What You Get When You Mess With Love’. It’s a subdued but swaggering depiction of a failing relationship, crashing on the rocks like a lost ship. Though the point of view seems to be from the captain, there’s a cocksure recklessness in the delivery. It’s damn confident and, as ‘Mexico’ proves, GusGus are always nothing if not that.

SAM SMITH

XENO & OAKLANDER Par Avion

Ghostly International

Romantic, urgent, modular synthpop with a seductively warm and dark underbelly ‘Par Avion’. The title summons up strong images of a bygone era, when impossibly lightweight blue envelopes edged with red stripes flew around the world, laden with exotic stamps in strange currencies, containing closely written love notes and children’s pen pal letters. If you’re old enough to remember the pre-digital age, when mail didn’t announce itself with a ping from your phone but with a swing of the letterbox flap, you’ll also remember the warmth of the sound of machines, before the DX7. This album, as modern as it is, recalls both.

Xeno & Oaklander are a New York-based duo (she’s called Liz Wendelbo and is French/ Norwegian, he is Sean McBride from Maryland) who live with their modular synths and vintage machinery in a small apartment in Brooklyn. The relationship is domestic and intimate and, like a black and white French nouveau vague movie, the album is romantic, yet maintains a cool distance.

There’s a yearning masked by the seductive power of the electronics and the mechanical beats; you can’t escape that girl/boy narrative.

They both sing. His voice is edged with the howl of late 70s and early 80s British futurists like Andy McCluskey. She sings (in French sometimes) drenched in reverb, her breathy, pure tones floating above the music, disembodied, distant, unknowable. It’s especially effective on the hectic

‘Nuage D’Ivoire’, one of the many standouts on the album.

What really comes across here are two things: Xeno & Oaklander’s unerring way with tunefulness and a spectacular control of the textures of the machines. Modular gear is so hard to work with, but it rewards patience and commitment – something ‘Par Avion’ appears to have in spades. The album opener, ‘Interface’, relies on a pure-toned blipping melody, which messes with its internal logic to create tension, and a simple, thudding bassline, which similarly takes enough of a detour from where you’d expect to keep it fresh. Add the vocal interplay, a jerking rhythm and some subtle soundscaping, and you’re left with a five-minute track that you wish would carry on forever.

They’re not afraid to sometimes force this apparently stately sound into speedy, punkish bpms. ‘Lastly’ clocks in at around 150bpm and the aforementioned and toweringly excellent ‘Nuage D’Ivoire’ is equally mosh pit friendly. As a result, the album retains a feeling of urgency and anxiety that suits its New York lineage. You can’t talk about NYC electronic music duos without contemplating Suicide, the original scuzzball synthpunks, who got their kit from small ads in local papers, and the connection isn’t lost on Xeno & Oaklander. They recently teamed with Martin Rev to make a new version of ‘Frankie Teardrop’ from Suicide’s 1977 debut, a bluecollar tale so beautifully put together and intense that it was an influence on Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Nebraska’ album.

It’s good to know that America has music like this coming out of it, bearing in mind how the electronic scene there has been swamped by the crunching meaninglessness of brostep. ‘Par Avion’ deserves our full attention.

MARK ROLAND

melodies of ‘Minimum Wage’, good enough for Duran Duran, are played out alongside a barked lyrical refrain (“Drink and drugs are the minimum wage”). ‘Mechanical Love’ (“That you know I’m afraid of”) is familiar Bis and ‘(That Love Ain’t) Justified’ totally lifts the hook of Spandau Ballet’s ‘Chant No 1’. It was never about fusion, always about being cheeky.

BIS

Data Panik Etcetera Do Yourself In

Glaswegian riot grrrl electro-popsters are back with their first studio album since 2001 Bis were originally linked to the 90s explosion that was riot grrrl, the bold, brash, shout-sing indie sound that was hailed as punk all over again, this time with a feminist manifesto. It was about intention, freedom, gender politics... and it was fabulous. Contrary to popular perception, riot grrrl wasn’t just about women-only bands, though. Many, like Bis, featured male as well as female members. Moreover, the music that came out of the scene owed much more to experimentation with pop and electronica than with punk.

Bis were the first unsigned band to ever appear on ‘Top Of The Pops’ and they were a multiheaded, snapping beast – even back then – with a stubborn, stand together, don’t-dance-for-theman streak. They were mavericks, similar to bands like the Cardiacs in terms of their attitude, but with an electronic edge that softened the spiky lyrics. In short, Bis were a DIY pop group with strong opinions and a strong drive. (Reaches for Bis’ ‘Atom Powered Action’, CD version, released on the cool Wiiija label, 1996. Sighs nostalgically.)

They haven’t released a studio album since 2001, but normal Bis service is resumed with ‘Data Panik Etcetera’, a mix of previously unreleased old favourites and newbies. The racy and perky

Most of these songs are a far cry from the ones that most folk might remember (as opposed to hardcore fans like Mogwai or Joanna Gruesome), because Bis are best known for the ‘Powerpuff Girls’ theme tune and the bubblegum sound of ‘Teen-C’. ‘Control The Radical’, the opening track here, and ‘Too Much Not Enough’ hint at that same kind of urgency, but somehow don’t quite have the youthful thrill. The overall effect lacks edge, lacks that pow factor. That said, there are definite benefits to a mature Bis, especially with ‘Rulers And The States’, when they transform into Talking Heads.

They still do cool stuff too. ‘Data Panik Etcetera’ was initially released in the spring on limited edition white vinyl, with download details for the digital version inside the sleeve. Bis certainly have a place in 2014. Check out ‘Flesh Removers’, which is like Kraftwerk goes feminist indie, or ‘Young Mothers’, on which social comment is counteracted by Manda Rin’s breathy vocals and the dreamy, layered melodies, or the lighter nudisco bounce of ’Sense Not Sense’. In this house, the star of the album if there has to be one, is ‘Cubis (I Love You)’, a moment when the vocals and the electronics ride the same train.

Awkward conversations against a background of cheesy electro-pop, no respect for the rules, too many words, lots of questions… We may not exactly need them, but it’s good to have Bis back.

NGAIRE RUTH

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20 years of Trip Hop Birth of the Minimoog

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MARC HOULE NIGHTMARES ON WAX LUKE HAINES MARK MOORE LUKE ABBOTT XENO & OAKLANDER BIS GAZELLE TWIN RICHARD BARBIERI JACK DANGERS

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