The much-missed Mirrors were sometimes accused of being too derivative of early OMD. As if that was a bad thing. Here they are, live in Barcelona, saving electronic music.
Belgians had the benefit of this performance, back in 1983, and it has thoughtfully been added to Youtube from an old tape of the Veronica’s Countdown programme. As is the way. Typically shambolic New Order, but with that human touch that means the machines never get in the way.
Kari Berg is not just a singer, actress and model. The Swedish vocalist (Ashbury Heights, Chaos All Stars) is also an anti-bullying activist. As a project leader for Sweden’s “Rätten till sin identitet” (EN: “The Right to Their Identity”), Berg is highly visible in work with youth in subcultures who face oppression and violence for liking their own music and fashion. RTSI is similar to the UK’s Sophie Lancaster Foundation, a charity set up following the unprovoked murder of Lancaster and her partner in Lancashire.
To support RTSI’s work, Berg has collaborated with Yves Schelpe from the Belgian band, Psy’Aviah, to create this song and video. The title, “It’s Just Words,” refers to the gossip and slander that is used to marginalise people who simply wish to be themselves. The story in the video was inspired by “Promenaden” [EN: “The Promenade”] by Emelie Engwall, taken from the RTSI-published book, “Våra Berättelser” [EN: “Our Stories”].
“It’s Just Words” is a great groove for the weekend, but it’s got a serious message, too.
LINKS
Rätten till sin identitet
Kari Berg Web Site
Psy’Aviah Web Site
Sophie Lancaster Foundation
Eric Random‘s role in alternative music is sometimes lost in the liner notes: here he is playing tablas on Cabaret Voltaire’s Micro-Phonies; there he is adding adding texture on the Cabs’ 2×45. He pops up as a percussionist on Psychic TV’s “Love, War, Riot,” producing and playing on the feted Some Bizarre compilation, and standing next to Nico on her tour of Eastern Europe.
That’s a resume of distinction, but the limelight hasn’t shone directly on Random very often. After some dabbling in a band and being a roadie for local heroes, Buzzcocks, he started his recording career in The Tiller Boys, a post-punk incubator that played on the same bill as Joy Division and also counted Peter Shelley as a member. Needless to say, it was Shelley, on his way from being a Buzzcock to a Homosapien, who got most of the attention.
Random’s first solo release, an EP called That’s What I Like About Me (reversing a line from a hit by The Knack that was then in the charts), was named Single of the Week by the NME in 1980. It was a promising start, but critical acclaim and commercial achievement took divergent paths. Random’s style was deeply underground, and what success he enjoyed was entirely subterranean. Subsequent releases included albums on New Hormones, Cabaret Voltaire’s Doublevision imprint and FON, as well as a smattering of tracks for Plurex and Touch. The people he connected with were more ACR than A&R, and after travels abroad his interest veered from the industrial to the Indian; the trail of recordings never leading towards the charts aimed for by label-mates like Chakk or Krush.
That isn’t to say that Random didn’t have an eye on the dancefloor. The proto-acid 12″ single, “Mad as Mankind,” recorded with Richard H. Kirk and Stephen Mallinder in 1984, was as funky as it was ahead of its time. A synthetic bass sequence and basic drum pattern provided a pulsing framework around which Random erected layers of keyboards, bass guitar, tabla and processed vocals. It was never designed to sit next to Heaven 17’s “Let Me Go,” but it was no less sophisticated.
Fast forward to 2016, skipping over tales of compilations and live work only for brevity, and Random has again set his sights on the alternative dancefloor. Words Made Flesh provides a dozen slices of exceptional dance material. The real reason Avicii retired might be that he decided he couldn’t do anything as groovy as “Phobic,” and William Orbit would probably find affinity with “Arc Light.”
The year isn’t half over, but Words Made Flesh is a serious contender for the album of the year. The acid bites of “Let It Go” are a reminder of the power of the accent in an 8-step sequence, while there is real magic in the more sinister “Go Figure” – the latter a collaboration with Stephen Mallinder. There are Eastern influences in “Conspiracy Complete” that represent a complete update of the experimental sound that came from the Cabs camp back in the 80s. Will this break Random’s pattern of excellent material being given more recognition from peers than the public? Only if there is any justice left.
Twice a Man have revealed their new single: “Here Comes the Rain,” lifted from the Presence album, appears in both an edited form and as a remix from Denmark’s esteemed Leaether Strip.
A brooding, moody and dramatic minor-key masterpiece, “Here Comes the Rain” is one of the stand-out tracks that appeared on our chosen Album of the Year for 2015. Leaether Strip’s version digs into the bassline and plays with the groove, yielding a more austere yet decidedly funky interpretation.
Wire‘s residency in Islington last year, as headliners for the DRILL:Lexington festival, showed off the songs sculpted into their eponymous, fourteenth studio album. Hewn from sonic granite, Wire was a unique out-take from the art-rock outfit’s forty-year career; but then, each of the preceding releases has followed a different course. Change Becomes Us, said the title of the thirteenth studio album, and change is the only constant in the band’s trajectory. Even if there is a distinctive Wire sound and they inhabit the same planet as the rest of us, they follow a less predictable orbit and make better use of space.
The proof is in the pressing: Nocturnal Koreans, the fifteenth studio album, is a breezy set, floating on gentle whispers and propelled by more insistent gusts. There are folk-psychedelic airs blowing through the vents of “Dead Weight,” on which vocal tasks are shared by Colin Newman and Graham Lewis, and the material is far from the post-industrial urgency of their Send-era tracks. There might be echoes of Newman’s Wiltshire upbringing in the studio work, as even the fuzz of “Still” opens up into plains as wide as a cloudless English sky.
The songs on Nocturnal Koreans started life as songs left over from the Wire sessions, but they were subjected to revision in the studio until they emerged from their hard-drive chrysalis. Newman explains:
The WIRE album was quite respectful of the band, and Nocturnal Koreans is less respectful of the band—or, more accurately, it’s the band being less respectful to itself—in that it’s more created in the studio, rather than recorded basically as the band played it, which was mostly the case with WIRE. A general rule for this record was: any trickery is fair game, if it makes it sound better.
As heard in songs like “Pilgrim Trade,” the studio wizardry that Newman has mastered in his years as a producer is spell-binding. There are dreampop artists who can only imagine the spectral conjuring that Wire are capable of. At 25:57, Nocturnal Koreans is the briefest of trips, but it bears repeated listening to appreciate the subtle shades of psychedelia embedded in “Fishes Bones” alone.
LUST FOR YOUTH
FIRST HATE
Moth Club, London
22 April 2016
The front of the stage at Hackney’s Moth Club is the flame drawing in London’s bright young things. There are Hungarian, Polish and Italian fans pressed together, absorbing the dark wave throbs of a Danish band led by a Swede — if the UK is going to leave the European Union, then surely shows like this will be a casualty of the new politics. Then who would be left in the capital to mutter into the darkness over pulsing electronics? Answer us that, Boris Johnson.
The act holding Europe together on this evening is Lust for Youth. A project started by Hannes Norrvide in Gothenburg, way back in in 2009, the L4Y template took form with doom-laden electronic sounds and growled vocals (“Another Night”). Within a short time, Norrvide had relocated to Denmark and absorbed pop sensibilities, even if his Psyche-influenced roots are still evident. The current L4Y release, Compassion, shows a wider range of influences that most of the audience would regard as distant history: “Sudden Ambition” sits somewhere between Depeche Mode’s “But Not Tonight” and “Hold Me Now” by Thompson Twins, while “Better Looking Brother” arguably owes something to New Order’s “Thieves Like Us.” These are just reference points, however, as Norrvide’s style is imbued with greater tension and angst than these precedents.
On stage, L4Y includes a hooded producer, Malte Fisher, on guitar and Loke Rahbek on keyboards. Through a cloud of Euro-sweat, rising from a sell-out crowd of jumping 20-somethings, they deliver a set that includes the sinister electro of “Chasing the Light,” “Illume” from the formidable International release, and most of the Compassion album. The new material really comes to life in performance, and the magnificent “Stardom” has a large section of the crowd singing back to Norrvide in their own accents.
A great surprise was the appearance of First Hate, another Danish-based electronic outfit, in the support slot. Influences from the godfathers of dark wave, Psyche, can be found in their songs, too, but their energetic performance was far from being derivative. “Trojan Horse,” the stand-out track from their first EP, “The Mind of a Gemini,” was a great lead-in for the headliners:
The UK might want to leave the EU, but access to music of this quality needs to be a key point in negotiations.
When Gary Numan first toured Canada in 1980, he stumbled across an eccentric and remarkable performer called Nash the Slash. Numan promptly ditched the support act booked for his tour and took Nash in their place. In short order, Nash was in England, signed to the Dindisc label alongside Martha and the Muffins. His output was produced by Steve Hillage and Bill Nelson, and he appeared on a Smash Hits flexi with label-mates OMD. Nash performed live with Numan at his “farewell” concert and played violin on his single, “She’s Got Claws.”
Artoffact, the Canadian industrial and electronic label, have now re-issued several Nash the Slash releases. The series starts with the first solo Nash the Slash release, Bedside Companion. A four track EP, Bedside Companion reveals Nash’s prog rock roots. The outstanding track on this release, “Blind Windows,” marks the birth of the ambient trance style that is the missing link between Steve Hillage’s solo material and the sound that he later developed for The Orb and System 7. The four songs are presented at the intended speed and 1/3 slower, reflecting the happy accident that occurred when Toronto DJ, Dave Marsden, mistook the 45 rpm 12″ for a 33 1/3 album: Nash realised that the instrumentals could be played at different speeds with equally interesting results.
Marsden’s oversight helped to inspire the release in 1981 of Decomposing, the first album designed to be played at any speed on a conventional record player. Essential for any Nash fan’s collection, and including the magnificent “Womble,” Decomposing is not part of the current Artoffact series. Instead, we have Dreams and Nightmares, the second Nash the Slash release, which collected recordings as diverse as a soundtrack to Un chien andolou and music for late night television. Essentially a compilation of tracks recorded to four-track, this is the kind of material that eccentric electronic artists recorded in their bedrooms in the 1970s and circulated on cassette tape through the Contact List for Electronic Music, but Nash was already a step ahead in releasing vinyl through his own label, Cut-Throat Records.
A surprise is the inclusion in this series of Hammersmith Holocaust, a reproduction of one of Nash’s rarer recordings. Lifted from the sound board at a support show for Numan in 1980, it begins with “Wolf,” in which Nash uses a motif from Prokofiev, stretched and distorted over simple bass patterns. A cover of “Smoke on the Water,” rewritten as “Dopes on the Water,” plays with Deep Purple’s classic tale of jazz venue immolation. “Children of the Night,” the title track for the Hillage-produced album that would follow the show, starts with an ambient intro that signposts the template that The Orb later lift for “Blue Room.” Nash is in full stride during a cover of The Who’s “Baba O’Riley” that also strays into ambient trance territory, before a nitro-fuelled version of “Danger Zone” wraps proceedings.
Things really get interesting with the reissue of Children of the Night, Nash’s sole album for Dindisc. Recorded at Britannia Row, the London studio owned by Pink Floyd where New Order created “Blue Monday,” the album has cover artwork by Martyn Atkins, who also worked with Joy Division and Depeche Mode. In the studio, Hillage, who was getting ready to produce Simple Minds’ legendary Sons and Fascination, was supported by engineer Michael Johnson, who also worked on some of Joy Division and New Order’s best-known recordings. The result was an alternative classic, packed with essential tracks like “In a Glass Eye” and “Reactor No. 2;” but, even with the inclusion of a jukebox-friendly remake of Jan and Dean’s “Dead Man’s Curve,” the commercial success of those other artists eluded Nash, who returned to Canada and revived his Cut-Throat imprint. Always ahead of his time, his next album would feature input from the Martha and the Muffins producer, Daniel Lanois.
When Nash died in 2014 from a heart attack, the tributes were led by Gary Numan. Numan has contributed liner notes to Hammersmith Holocaust that re-tell the story of how he met Nash, as well as his feelings about working with Jeff Plewman, the man beneath the bandages. Even if Nash’s absence leaves a hole in the heart of alternative music, the material assembled in these recordings lives on.
Urban planning is a tricky business. The development of places for people to live is much more complicated than arranging roads to channel traffic and locating schools near residential areas. There are no options in Sim City for dealing with the interactions between hippies and the working poor, for example. On a computer, you can raze a neighbourhood and start again, but in meatspace the reality is that decay starts before the paint is dry and never really ends.
The unplugged version is also full of memories – some happy, some banal, some tragic – that present a psychological challenge to the cartographer’s reductionist sense of space. Maps don’t mark out where young kids gathered to race bicycles or discuss David Bowie; where first glances were exchanged or bullies waited for their prey. These experiences are sometimes highly personal, but the memories of them are closely connected to the spaces arranged by planners. The collective memory of them has a lot to do with identity.
Britain’s new towns – the cities built in the period of renewal that followed the Second World War – were designed with a certain optimism. Basildon, East Kilbride and Milton Keynes were conceived as open, rational spaces, in which the inhabitants could develop in greater harmony with their surroundings. That promise brought to one of these towns, Skelmersdale, an influx of followers of the Transcendental Meditation movement.
The arrival of a large group of TM practitioners in a town with no history was an event outside the urban planners’ contemplation. It shaped, not only its identity, but also the psychogeography of its inhabitants.
The Magnetic North’s first album was inspired by Orkney, where Erland Cooper had been raised. Legend has it that Cooper was visited by the spirit of Betty Corrigal, an 18th century Orcadian, and awoke from a dream with a list of track titles derived from places on the island. Band-mates Hannah Peel and Simon Tong joined in, creating music that grew from Orkney’s rocks and the small community that clings to them.
The second album from The Magnetic North shifts location to Skelmersdale, or Skem, where Tong grew up. Tong’s parents had been TM practitioners, and parts of The Prospect of Skelmersdale directly reference the influence of rhe Maharishi. “Jai Guru Dev,” named for a uniquely Skem greeting, features found sound from the dedication of the Golden Dome meeting place created by the town’s TM community in the 1980s. Other songs touch upon TM themes less self-consciously, interweaving them with expressions of optimism and departure.
The desire to leave a place is one of the strongest feelings one can have about it. The planners of Skelmersdale didn’t provide an easy exit, which helped to shape Tong’s relationship with the town. It’s been a while since he moved, but on this evidence he hasn’t entirely left it behind.
If a third album, describing Peel’s version of Barnsley, is on its way, we’re keen to hear it.
The Magnetic North play in London on 14 April 2016 and in Salford on 1 May 2016.