Lushus Daim & The Pretty Vein – The One You Love (Disconet) Elevation – Traitor (Razormaid) The Weather Girls – No One Can You Love More Than Me (Disconet) Risque – Starlight (Disconet) Natasha – AM-FM (Disconet) Colonel Abrams – Over And Over (Disconet) Swing Out Sister – Surrender (Disconet) Eighth Wonder – I’m Not Scared (Razormaid) Propaganda – P Machinery/Frozen Faces (Razormaid) Propaganda – Dr. Mabuse (Razormaid) Do Piano – Alone (Razormaid) Cabaret Voltaire – Sensoria (Razormaid) Skipworth & Turner – Thinking About Your Love (Disconet) Alphonse Mouzon – I’m Glad That You’re Here (Disconet) Miquel Brown – Close To Perfection (Lightspeed) Bucks Fizz – I Hear Talk (Disconet) Cabaret Voltaire – Don’t Argue (Razormaid) Pet Shop Boys – West End Girls (Razormaid) Miami Sound Machine – Falling In Love (Uh-Oh) (Disconet) Grace Jones – Pull Up to The Bumper (Disconet) Was (Not Was) – Robot Girl (Razormaid) Kid Creole – Endicott (Razormaid) Pet Shop Boys – Domino Dancing (Hot Tracks) Risco Connection – Ain’t No Stopping Us Now (C.S.) Sparks – With All My Might (Disconet)
Cabaret Voltaire – Baader Meinhof Heiner Goebbels / Alfred Harth – Berlin, Kudamm 12.4.81 Throbbing Gristle – Beachy Head Howard Shore – Welcome To Videodrome Clock DVA – The Connection Machine Ennio Morricone – The Thing: Humanity (Part 2) F. C. Judd – Automation Bruce Gilbert – The Shivering Man Gentle Ihor – Psalm 151 General Strike – Next Day The Flying Lizards – Cirrus The Wirtschaftswunder – EDV-Step Suzanne Ciani – Second Breath Holger Hiller/Thomas Fehlmann – Gibst Du mir Steine, geb ich Dir Sand Combo Satori – Enlightment The Human League – Morale/You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling Patrick Cowley & Jorge Socarras – You Laugh At My Face Slap – Eden Now 400 Blows – The Morality Of Altitude The Bach Revolution – Urban Illusion Koji Ueno – Adagietto (Remix Version) Peter Schickele – Saturn John Lurie – The Lampposts Are Mine Tuxedomoon – The Waltz Jerry Goldsmith – Love Theme From Chinatown (End Title) This Mortal Coil – Another Day Psychic TV – Only Love Can Break Your Heart The United States Of America – Love Song For The Dead Ché The White Noise – The Visitation The Walker Brothers – My Ship Is Coming In
Nobody would probably expect anything else than deep emotional music on a label run by Robert Owens, but what Mark Rogers of Hollywood Beyond fame comes up with on the sublime “Twilight For Some”, is even more. Despite the gentle tone of the music and the understated vocal delivery, not too many vocal house tracks are as touching this. The lyrics are very melancholic, offering little relief to the troubled people they address, and the music is a companion that stresses rather than distracts. Everytime I listen to this, and the track fades out to a loop of the words “identity, identity, identity…”, I can’t help wishing this experience would last much longer, and more often than not, I put the needle right back to beginning.
Cabaret Voltaire “Searchin” [Parlophone]
A track lifted from the album “Groovy, Laidback and Nasty” from 1990, that most of the fans and critics of the UK electronic pioneers dismissed as mere attempt to cash in on the increasingly fertile house sound. Worse than that, nobody was really willing to accept Cabaret Voltaire venturing into musical terrain that was nothing else than pure pop, with one of post punk’s most recognizable voices crooning blissful melodies with uplifting messages, and one of post punk’s most adventurous experimentalists gladly supplying the according tunes and harmonies. But Cabaret Voltaire enlisted Marshall Jefferson at the time of full creative swing for the production, and he made this song his very own, even bringing in Paris Brightledge, on of Chicago‘s most wonderful voices, for the background vocals. So this might be not the most original Cabaret Voltaire record, but they had proven their merits enough before and after, and I am really thankful that they took the chance of doing this album. Maybe imagine this track not being sung by Stephen Mallinder, but Brightledge all alone for instance, and not being by Cabaret Voltaire, but by Marshall Jefferson, and house’s history books would treat it like a bona fide classic. I at least do, no matter what constellation.
Shades Of Rhythm “Exorcist” [ZTT]
Shades Of Rhythm were better known for their rave anthems, filled to the brim with crowd noises, joyful diva vocals and plenty of pianos. And while there is nothing really wrong with that (but admitted, on many occasions it IS really wrong), they were also capable of doing something completely different. “Exorcist” is a pitch dark beast that establishes a really intense mood on nothing more than the basis of a break beat in moderate tempo and a plethora of sinister sequences that seem to spiral into the ether. This still makes any room go boom.
I-F “Energy Vampire” [Disko B]
Now that the UK bass elite is embracing an electro tinge to their latest dubplate, it is maybe a good time to drop a reminder for the Dutchman who already seemingly could look well into the future when he released a series of relentless and uncompromising classics in the past. The moody stop-and-go groove of “Energy Vampire” would not look out of place on a post-dubstep production of 2010, yet it already appeared on I-F’s album “Fucking Consumer” in 1998. Things go in circles, as they say, and the robots shall have the last laugh. And if sometime the italo disco groundwork will seep through the bassbins of the younger bass generation as well (there are already hints that this is not as improbable as it sounds), there is a good chance that I-F will be involved in something else entirely, and equally influential.
At a time when they had no interest in minimalism, conceptualism or fine wines, Daniel Bell, John Acquaviva and Richie Hawtin released “Technarchy” in 1990, the year their imprint Plus 8 came into being, and properly illustrated that techno could embrace the sound heritage of the pioneering industrial artists, acid house, and the emerging Detroit sound at the same time. The devastating result hinted at the hoovers, cornfields, and love parades to come but back then nobody would have predicted all that. What this record confirmed, however, was that there was a potential for all that. From the introducing metal beats, building a harsh yet funky groove, to the 303 squelches, and then, of course, to one of the most bone-crushing bass breakdowns in the history of club music. Most DJs playing the record at the time when it came out even emphasized the experience by turning up the bass even louder when the kick drum came to a halt and just the bassline was rummaging around in the intestines of the floor, but then again it was already doing its work untouched by any mixing antics. In any case whoever heard the track unprepared and for the first time in a club, would possibly never ever forget it. I certainly did not.
In discussion with Philip Sherburne about “The Flat Earth” by Thomas Dolby (1984).
Why did you choose this album, and how did you come across Thomas Dolby in the first place?
Until I was 12 or 13, I got most of my pop music from Top 40 radio. There weren’t a lot of other options for kid living in suburban Portland, Oregon in the late ’70s and early ’80s, and I loved a lot of things that I’d probably cringe at now, simply because they were all that was available. This is not one of them, though. Thomas Dolby’s “The Flat Earth” has remained a personal favorite for a quarter century now, and within it I can find many of the seeds of my eventual love for electronic music. I don’t remember any first encounter with Thomas Dolby’s 1982 single “She Blinded Me With Science,” which was all over the radio that year. I’m sure it was the synths and samples that grabbed me. I had discovered synthesizers through the music shop where I bought piano sheet music – Bach, Czerny, Phil Collins – and was nuts about anything with synths in it (In 1983, I’d get one of my own, a Korg Poly-800). Curiously, I didn’t dig any further into Dolby’s music at the time, but then, the song was ubiquitous, and in retrospect, it was such an odd single it probably didn’t gesture towards a form bigger than itself, like an album. It was what it was, and that was plenty. In 1984 or 1985, I went through a brief period of checking out LPs from the Multnomah County Library. That’s where I came across „The Flat Earth“. It was the cover that got me. Around that time, I would latch onto anything that had the faintest hint of “new wave” to it, and the cover’s pseudoscientific markings and cryptic photo-montage seemed like the most modern thing I’d ever seen. In retrospect, the sleeve is hardly so dazzling — a slightly watered down version of Peter Saville. (In fact, it looks a little like a cross between the Durutti Column’s “Circuses & Bread” and Section 25’s “From the Hip”, but it lacks the elegance of either.) Still, it was good enough for a 14-year-old jonesing for the New. I remember sitting on the floor of my parents’ living room, hunched over the sleeve, trying to make sense of the whole package. Not to repeat myself, but “cryptic” is the only word that fits. Everything about the music seemed to hint at hidden meanings, from the sleeve to the lyrics: “Keith talked in alphanumerals,” after all. Who the hell was the guy panning for gold on the cover? Who were these mysterious Mulu, people of the rainforest? What was a drug cathedral, and why an octohedron? (I had so much to learn.) Etc., etc. I’ve long since stopped caring much about lyrics, much less concept albums, but I was young and impressionable then, and every flip of the record seemed to offer another clue as to some strange, grownup world I couldn’t begin to decipher. The same went for the music, of course. For starters, there was the stylistic range: “Dissidents” and “White City” were recognizable as pop music, after a fashion, but what was “Screen Kiss”? It presented a kind of liquidity I don’t remember having recognized in music before that – first in the fretless bass, the synthesizers and the stacked harmonies, and even the chord changes, but mainly it was the way it trailed off into the scratchy patter of L.A. traffic reports, multi-tracked and run through delay. I’d never heard the “real world” breaking into pop music before, and certainly not spun into such a purely “ambient” sound. “Mulu the Rain Forest” was another weird one – again, an approximation of ambient, long before I’d discover it. And “I Scare Myself” totally threw me for a loop. What was a Latin lounge jazz song doing here, especially sandwiched between the humid “Mulu” and the jagged, chromed funk of “Hyperactive”? There was no doubting the continuity of the album, but the pieces felt at odds, as fractured as the cut-up sleeve imagery; the sequencing seemed erratic and the two sides of the LP felt out of balance with each other, and yet you couldn’t have put it together any other way. Just like venturing to the edge of the (flat) earth, flipping the record had a weirdly vertiginous quality to it. (I was, you may note, an unusually impressionable adolescent, at least where music was concerned.)
At the time I got this it took some time to grow on me. Was it the same with you or was it love at first sight?
A little of both. There was definitely something off-putting about the record at first, but I devoured it anyway. I’d go so far as to say that the parts that alienated me were precisely what sent me back into it. I wanted to figure it out. All this might sound a little silly now. Today, I can recognize that a lot of it is pretty overblown, beginning with the lyrics: “My writing/ is an iron fist/ in a glove full of Vaseline”? That’s… pretty awful. (Also, it may go some way towards explaining the purplish quality of my own youthful stabs at poesy.) But for all its excesses, it kept drawing me in. I still listen to the fade out from “Dissidents” into “The Flat Earth” and feel a thrill all over again, all those gangly licks and hard-edged FM tones giving way to hushed percussion and a yielding soundfield… It’s funny, too, to listen today to the title track and even hear the tiniest hint of disco and proto-house in the rolling conga rhythms, things I had absolutely no idea about then. Whatever its failures, this was the album that, more than any other up until that time, convinced me that records offered more than just a hook and a chorus, that they deserved to be puzzled through, analyzed, unpacked. That they offered up their own little worlds, worlds I would aspire to inhabit. Read the rest of this entry »
1988, im Blütejahr von Acid House, war die Sachlage eigentlich klar. In den USA war Acid roh und funky und entschieden billig-analog, die Chicago Originators allerdings schon auf dem Sprung zum nächsten Ding (Hip House vorerst, da lässt sich die Geschichte nicht klittern), und Detroits Brüder im Geiste machten etwas ganz Anderes aus der Vorlage. In England hingegen griffen die traditionellen Mechanismen der Hype-Presse und Acid wurde zur Bewegung. Und diese war in Klang und Mode überwiegend Pop. Im Gegensatz zu den amerikanischen Ur-Tracks, die voll in ihrer Funktionalität aufgingen, kam man auf der Insel nicht ohne den stilistischen Mehrwert aus. Also wurde alles day-glo, Smileys, Acid Ted und Space Cadet, und man hielt Radlerhosen und Bandanas für ein unbedenkliches Outfit. Man brauchte erneut Gesichter, und im Rückenwind von Yazz, Baby Ford, D-Mob quietschten und blubberten Varianten in die Charts und Clubs, die mit der experimentellen Ausprägung des Ausgangsmaterials nicht mehr viel zu tun hatten. Und dann kamen 808 State aus Manchester mit ihrem Debütalbum ”Newbuild“, einer komplett anderen Interpretation all der Zufallsklänge, die sich mit einer 303 erzielen ließen. Graham Massey, vormalig Mitglied der Post Punk-Veteranen Biting Tongues, Martin Price, Besitzer des legendären Plattenladens Eastern Bloc und Gerald Simpson, das Voodoo Ray-Wunderkind, hatten offensichtlich weder Interesse daran, den Sound aus Chicago zu kopieren, noch ihn mit käsigen Samples zu Top of the Pops-Material umzubiegen. Ihr Entwurf war kalt und irre, ein einziges manisches Flirren, das bereits von den komplexen Rhythmen vorangehetzt wurde, die Markenzeichen der Band blieben. Wo die Boulevardpresse sich mit Drogenvorwürfen gegen die vergleichsweise charmanten aber eher harmlosen Hits der Szene warm schoss, war eigentlich hier der wahre Feind. Musik, die gleichermaßen klang wie ein weitäugiger Rausch im Strobonebel der Clubs, sowie eben auch ein weitäugiger Rausch inmitten der grauen Fiesheit mancher Gegenden nordenglischer Städte, dessen Stumpfheit die Kids im Strobonebel der Clubs bekämpfen wollten. Der komplexe Irrsinn von ”Flow Coma“ oder ”Sync/Swim“ hat nichts von seinem Schockpotential eingebüßt, und ebnete den Weg derer, für die die Clubmusik der folgenden Jahre nicht mit Behaglichkeit einherzugehen hatte, also in etwa das Bindeglied der Hinterhältigkeit und Radikalität von Cabaret Voltaire und Konsorten und Aphex Twin und Konsorten, und dann wieder zurück nach Chicago zu Traxx und Jamal Moss. Wie so oft ließ sich der Intensitätslevel des Erstlings nicht halten, wie so oft probierte man sich danach mit anderen Ideen aus, man überwarf sich, man ging getrennte Wege, und man produzierte das nächste Meisterwerk, in anders aber mindestens ebenso bedeutend, ”Automanikk“ hier, und ”Ninety“ da. Der Stoff, aus dem die Träume sind.
I was deeply involved in the local subcultures in my small coastal hometown in the 80s. I did not know what I wanted to be, of course, but I know I did not want to be as boring as so many other people my age I met. So local subcultures seemed like an easy way out to be or at least act different. I always listened to a lot of different music at the same time but I opted to be part of the Two Tone/Mod scene. I liked the style and the hierarchical challenge. And well, the fashion was so much better than in other scenes. Of course the town was so small that you kind of were stuck with all the other scenes though, because the majority of other youths hated other youths who thought they were something else, and looked different (and better), and thus you were constantly beaten up. Given the many rules of conduct of “my” subculture many records I loved had to stay guilty pleasures, though I gained a lot of pleasure from them nonetheless (and still do). Now in the process of assimilation in Berlin I also realized how lots of 80s styles were already recycled for a while, like Post Punk, Synthpop, Electro or Italo Disco. I always was interested in context, so mixes like these were probably an effort to set things straight for myself. Never forget where you are coming from and so on. But probably they also reminded me that I was getting older too, and whether I should leave my years of being relatively irresponsible and unreasonable behind. The photo is a take on the Larry Levan story of him cleaning the mirror ball himself before the party, taken before a party at my flat.
Cabaret Voltaire – Just Fascination Shriekback – Working On The Ground John Foxx – Underpass The Weathermen – Punishment Park Impedance – Tainted Love Dominatrix – Dominatrix Sleep Tonight Yazoo – State Farm The Fun Boy Three – Faith, Hope And Charity Yellow Magic Orchestra – Behind The Mask A Certain Ratio – Knife Slits Water A.R. Kane – A Love From Outer Space Yellow Magic Orchestra – Nice Age Nitzer Ebb – Join In The Chant Soft Cell – Torch Liaisons Dangereuses – Etre Assis Ou Danser Visage – Visa-Age Suicide – Shadazz Rheingold – Fluss Godley & Creme – Under Your Thumb
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