First Law: A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
To get to the ten songs on Sci-Fi Revisited, you need to solve a puzzle on a computer screen. Jumping through this hoop is a throw-back to the primitive games that people used to make with Macromedia Flash. As well as adding a nostalgic touch, it is a reminder of how mich artists thought about the overall experience when creating albums in days gone past. With streaming, music is just part of a giant data pool, and even cover art has been replaced by a thumbnail.
Jean-Marc Lederman isn’t happy just throwing his creations into the pond with all of the other data. Whether making lenticular images or books, he takes care to link his music with other objects. He is also keen to involve many of his collaborators and contacts – to share the vision and broaden the scope of his projects. As The Jean-Marc Lederman Experience, an ever-shifting band of artists add their parts to the Belgian composer’s instrumentation with something close to a free hand.
Second Law: A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
On this outing, we find readings of science fiction literature, voiced by Emileigh Rohn (Chiasm), Tom Shear (Assemblage 23), Christina Z, Mari Kattman, Mira Shear, Ken Magerman (Amaranth), Julianne Regan, Daz Sharp, Jim Marcus (Die Wurzau), Sapphira Vee (Die Wurzau), and Lederman (Kid Montana, The Weathermen) himself.
It’s a Who’s Who (which always should have been Who’s Whom, surely?) of one corner of alternative music. The material comes from various sources, but it is unified by its retro take on the future. The result is a public radio show for goths and cybers.
Third Law: A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
Buyers on Bandcamp can get their hands on an exclusive comic book made to accompany the album. Together with the video game and high-resolution downloads, it represents three eras of science fiction.
<The real joy of Sci-Fi Revisited lies in the musical fragments distributed by Lederman to his cohort. He has made techno and EBM, but Our Man in Brussels also has a good line in cinematic, expressive ambience. Hans Zimmer hasn’t snatched him up yet, but there is still time.
More than anyone else, perhaps, Brian Griffin created the image of Depeche Mode over their first five albums. At a time when they were capable of issuing an album a year, developing their style with each release, Griffin’s images were the best-known and most-distinctive features of their branding. From a plastic-wrapped lawn ornament to a monumental banner-draped building, Depeche Mode were defined by his eye and the lens of his camera.
In 1989, Robert Görl was nearly killed in a car crash. The founder of Deutsch Amerikanische Freundschaft survived but was left in hospital with a shattered body. It could have been the end of Görl’s career in music; but, instead, it marked a kind of rebirth.
The truth is that Stevo Pearce, the founder of Some Bizarre and legendary Soft Cell manager, has more personality than his body can handle. It bursts out in moments of wildness that surprise and scare record company executives. With a love of the surreal and MDMA, Stevo (no one uses his last name other than his bank manager) took a duo from Leeds to global stardom while creating a label that gave obscure industrial acts access to major label resources.
The intersection of three lives – Cosey Fanni Tutti, Delia Derbyshire, and Margery Kempe – is explored with references to music, feminism, and marginalisation. Tutti, once denounced in Parliament as a “wrecker of civilisation,” is making a film version of her book, Art, Sex, Music, while contributing to another about Derbyshire’s complex life. At the same time, she is reading the story of the 15th century local mystic, Kempe. Similarities emerge about places, situations, and struggles.
The history of electronic body music really began with DAF. Gabi Delgado sang, while Robert Görl played drums. They used sequencers to play the bass lines and pulses that completed their sound, and the feeling was harder than their disco precedents. The approach was functional but also stylistic. In Elektronische Körpermusik, Hampejs and Schulze explore these origins but also celebrate the movement that grew from it.
Written by our Editor, Walking in Their Shoes traces the path of Depeche Mode as they played and recorded in London. It locates the venues and studios where the band developed their sound and built their audience. It also includes key locations in Mute Records’ history, such as the Decoy Avenue house where the label was founded. Pictures and public transport details help orient fans visiting the sites. It is the best way to experience London in the footsteps of the band.
If you believe the conventional history, Factory was a group of men making things. There was Tony Wilson, the hero of every story. Rob Gretton, the drug-hoovering manager. Peter Saville, the graphic designer with no sense of time. Barney and Hooky from New Order sulking or scheming like schoolboys. Mike Pickering in the booth at the Haçienda. Everywhere and always, if there was a face to the label and its spin-offs, it belonged to a man.
The use of a Yello track in the teen comedy, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, gave the obscure Swiss act a hit. By that point the duo of Dieter Meier and Boris Blank, Yello had grown up on the same label as The Residents and were a stable in the record collections of underground DJs. The inclusion of “Oh Yeah,” with Meier’s processed intonation suggesting male lust, opened the money tap and took the band into the mainstream.
