by Vinyl301 -

Hypnotone: Dream Beam

R-180889-1257689853

Creation 1990.  CRESCD 082

Discogs

Creation’s brief dalliance with dance music wasn’t entirely successful, but this single, their first dance release is an exception I think.  I suppose Alan McGee’s self belief must have had a boost when his jangly indiepop signing Primal Scream created the whole indie/dance crossover thing, but it was obvious his ear was attuned to guitar bands and not much else.

Hypnotone were Tony Martin (who did production work for Primal Scream and The Lilac Time) and Martin Mittler (of Intestella) .   This was retro even in 1990 with its minimalist synth sounds, but otherwise very much of its time, and apparently, a Balearic classic.

They did a handful of singles and, surprisingly a couple of albums, none of which are now available.  They did do a rather fine remix of Primal Scream’s Come Together though which is on the double version of the Dirty Hits compilation.

by Vinyl301 -

A Guy Called Gerald: Black Secret Technology

front

Juice Box 1995; JBOX 025CD

Discogs

Gerald has been a pretty constant feature in my listening since Voodoo Ray, and this is probably his definitive statement, although it’s Voodoo Ray which really does it for me.

I’m not great with the labels people attach to this sort of music – I guess I’m just not cool enough, but I suppose you’d call this Drum N Bass.  It’s drum n bass with a difference though – it’s playing while I type and while it uses old technology (of course) it doesn’t sound dated in the way that the contemporaneous and much better known Timeless by Goldie does.  It’s full of manipulated vocal samples and complex rhythms, but it always avoids that sense of being beaten around the head that much similar music from the period has.  It has a subtlety which is a rare commodity in this genre.  It also has clear links to another favourite of mine, Photek who clearly spent far too much time in his bedroom listening to Gerald.

This is the original CD issue of the album and it does have a few quirks.  It’s mastered very quietly, so you’ll need to turn the volume up, but more seriously it doesn’t have much bass and the sound overall is rather muddy.  There was some debate at the time whether this was intentional, but a recent remaster sounds more conventional, so I guess it was a mistake.  I rather like the muddy sound, but if it bothers you, seek out the remaster.

by Vinyl301 -

Sandoz: Intensely Radioactive

int

Touch, TO:23  1994

Discogs

More Sheffield electronic goodness today, this time from Richard H Kirk’s most significant alias, Sandoz.  Kirk is best known as a founder member of the mostly excellent Cabaret Voltaire (See this post for an early Cabs track), so his importance in electronic music is beyond question.

This album doesn’t have the hard edged industrial feel of much of Cabaret Voltaire’s best output; it has elements of dub which have been developed further in subsequent releases but it keeps the otherwordly quality which drew me to the Cabs in the first place.

More music?  Well his new dub album on Soul Jazz is a storming realisation of ideas he’s been playing with for a while.

by Vinyl301 -

LFO: LFO

lfo

WAP5CD 1990 Warp Records

Discogs

I was rather perplexed by this when it came out. From the first it wormed its way into my brain and has been there ever since, but there’s really not much going on (on the record, not just my brain), and the whole things revolves around the simplest two note bassline imaginable. So besotted did I become with the track that the impact of its simplicity started to remind me of when I first became aware of 12-bar blues (The Kinks version of Louis Louis to be precise). It’s as though it had revealed some kind of fundamental truth in music. It also reminds me of the Moody Blues album Searching For The Lost Chord, not for the musical content of course, but for the idea that some important element of music had been lost, and this track represented its rediscovery.   I realise all of this is pretentious twaddle, but the strange impact this track has had on me must have come from somewhere, and it’s the only explanation I could think of.

At the time, one of Radio 1’s terminally dull and musically illiterate DJs (Steve Wright) refused to play it because he thought it was rubbish.  Perhaps he tapped into the same thing as me and was offended by it.  It’s certainly an unusual thing for a daytime DJ to do, particularly given the endless stream of garbage those guys have to play.

Aside from my obsession with this particular track, it’s an important part of the history UK electronic music, being perhaps the definitive release for Sheffield’s Warp label and the whole bleep thing they started.  Unfortunately I won’t be able to post much of that here because Warp have re-issued most of it.

It’s also slightly cheeky because the title track is available on the re-issued (and essential) Frequencies LP, albeit a shorter version.  I’ve posted it because it contains two tracks, Probe and Track 4 which are not available elsewhere, and because it’s a surprising omission from Warp’s generally excellent re-issue programme.  Frequencies is available from Warp here.  Of particular note is the lush vinyl version, which unusually is nicer than the original copy I have.   Warp have also re-issued most of their back catalogue, all of which is worth having.   My only gripe is that there’s no new material – surely there was something lurking in the vaults for sad obsessives like me.

by Vinyl301 -

Various Artists: Sonic Boom, The Art Of Sound

boom

Discogs

I spend a lot of time in art galleries, and of course am a bit obsessed by experimental music, so the Hayward Gallery’s 2000 “sound art” exhibition, curated by the always interesting David Toop was a must for me.  This post is the double CD compilation which came with the exhibition catalogue, and while it suffers a bit from the lack of accompanying visuals (and for you the lack of the catalogues extensive notes on all the artists), there’s enough here to maintain interest.

I’ll talk a bit about some of my favourites.

Firstly, Philip Jeck whose work revolves around having loads of old Dansette record players playing “distressed” records.  For Sonic Boom, the record players were all stuck on a single groove, and were switched on and off with timers, which produced a suprisingly effective audio collage.

Jeck

Christian Marclay’s piece, Guitar Drag, needs a bit of explanation.  What he did was fix a guitar amp to the back of a flatbed truck, plug a guitar in and drag it behind the truck until the guitar was destroyed.  At Sonic Boom, this was a film, but here it’s only an except of the film’s soundtrack.  It’s surprisingly listenable, that is if you’re into experimental guitar music, and taps into the destruction of guitars by endless rock gods, but also the popular pastime of murdering black men in the American south (where this was filmed) by dragging them behind trucks not too many decades ago.

dragGuitarDragSmashedGuitar

I’d like to post some Ryoji Ikeda here – I’ve been fond of his minimalist electronice for a long time, but everything I have is still available, so the extract here from his zero degrees album will have to do.

Lee Renaldo and Brian Eno need no introduction, I’ve talked about John Oswald before, and will post some Thomas Köner stuff at some point in the future.

This compilation is of course flawed, as was the exhibition it documents.  It’s incomplete because it’s audio only, and some of the tracks weren’t at the exhibition at all because what was wouldn’t have worked here.  Nevertheless there’s lots here which is worth a listen if you have a liking for the experimental, and a few rare gems from better known artists.

Here’s a tracklisting, lifted as usual from Discogs:

CD1.1 Scanner – The Collector
Composed By – Robin Rimbaud 4:00
CD1.2 Ken Ikeda & Mariko Mori – Miko No Inori
Composed By – Ken Ikeda 4:00
CD1.3 Pan Sonic – Alku 2:27
CD1.4 Project Dark – Step 1, Step 2, Step 3 2:40
CD1.5 Max Eastley & Thomas Köner – In Concert 6:14
CD1.6 Christina Kubisch – Oase 2000 7:36
CD1.7 Bow Gamelan* & Paul Burwell – Never Mind The Rowlocks
Composed By – P.D. Burwell* 4:00
CD1.8 Christian Marclay – Guitar Drag 4:00
CD1.09 Stephan Von Huene – Extended Schwitters 6:57
CD1.10 Angela Bulloch – Theremin 7:17
CD1.11 Chico Macmurtrie – Yoyo Berimbau 1:11
CD1.12 Greyworld – Studio 5 2:30
CD2.1 Ian Walton & Russell Mills – Mantle 7:01
CD2.2 Lee Ranaldo – El Oido (The Ear) 6:07
CD2.3 Philip Jeck – Off The Record 5:22
CD2.4 Brian Eno – Kites III (Extract) 7:19
CD2.5 Ryoji Ikeda – 0* :: Zero Degrees (1) 3:31
CD2.6 John Oswald – Mad Mod 2:12
CD2.7 Paul Schütze – The Head, The Soles Of The Feet, An Arm (Extract) 6:33
CD2.8 João Paulo Feliciano & Rafael Toral – Rlo I 6:58
CD2.9 Disinformation – National Grid 6:43
CD2.10 Max Eastley – Domain Of Presences
Mastered By – Peter Cusack 7:21
CD2.11 Heri Dono – Watching The Marginal People 2:00

by Vinyl301 -

The Caretaker: A Stairway To The Stars

Folder

I bought this on a whim for a couple of quid in the Notting Hill Music Exchange.  Rarely has such a small amount of money given me so much pleasure.  It’s The Caretaker’s second album and it came out in 2001

The Caretaker project was inspired by the ballroom scene in The Shining.  It uses samples from forgotten ballroom music of the 30s and 40s to create a really powerful sense of place.  The samples are very prominent in the mix and are gently manipulated to make them sound as though they’re leaking through from another dimension.  The sense of wandering around an abandoned and decaying ballroom is very real and very spooky.

Rich though this seam of ideas is, The Caretaker eventually  moved on to other territory – there’s only so much you can do with ballrooms!

Have a look at VVM’s bandcamp site for more, and the odd free download.

by Vinyl301 -

Mille Plateaux: In Memorium Gilles Deleuze

Various Artists - In Memoriam Gilles Deleuze

Mille Plateaux 1996. MP CD 22

Discogs

This is the best of three of compilation albums I have which were issued in tribute to the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze after his suicide in 1995. All of them are dark electronica, this one being issued by the Mille Plateaux label. I’m not entirely convinced that the link between Deleuze’s work and the music here really works for the listener, but since the label was named after one of Deleuze’s books, whether I can see the connection or not, it’s certainly there. The artists represented are very much from the intellectual end of electronica (and elsewhere). Scanner, aka Robin Rimbaud for example writes regularly for The Wire in which most of the artists figured prominently throughout the 1990s. To what extent they’re directly influenced by Deleuze isn’t clear,

That this was an important project for Mille Plateux is obvious.  There are no out-takes, poor quality remixes or tracks lifted out of context from albums.  Everything here is exclusive and hangs together remarkably well, despite the contrast between the full on aural assault of, say, Steel and the more ambient character of much of the rest.   Looking down the tracklist it’s a veritable who’s who of everyone who was worth listening to in the world of electronica in the 1990s.  If you’re into this kind of stuff, it’s essential listening.

This is a double CD, but the break between the discs is of no significance, so I’ve ripped it as though it was a single, very long disc.

1. Gilles Deleuze – Gilles Deleuze
2. Happy Deterritorializations – Wehowsky/Wollscheid
3. On the Edge of a Grain of Sand- :Zoviet*France:
4. Bon Voyage – Alec Empire
5. Gigantic Tautological Machinery – Cristian Vogel
6. Indirection/Comtinuum – Christophe Charles
7. Abstract Miniatures in Memoriam Gilles Deleuze – Atom Heart
8. Heller – Gas
9. Intro-Spektiv – Chris & Cosey
10. Wunschmaschinenpark- J.Burger
11. Death Is the Begining – Steel
12. Can’t Be Still- Blue Byte
13. Starjammer – Trans Am
14. Intermodal – Rome
15. As In – Jim O’Rourke
16. You Are Here 0.9 B – Oval
17. 1001 – Mouse on Mars
18. Vital One – Ian Pooley
19 Patent – Bleed
20. Qeria for Gilles Deleuze – Tobias Hazan
21. Without End – Scanner
22. Invisual Ocean – DJ Spooky
23. Gradation d’Humor-Fetisch Park
24. Traobeik – Gilles Deleuze
25. And Line – Kerosene
26. Garator – El Turco Loco
27. Layered Layers- Beequeen

by Vinyl301 -

Coil: Colour Sound Oblivion 4 (Moscow)

coil-moscow

Still not able to do vinyl rips, so here’s something a little different.  This is the soundtrack from DVD 4 of the huge (and insanely expensive) Coil boxed set Colour, Sound, Oblivion recorded live in Moscow in 2001.

The boxed set was put together by the late Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson in the period after the death of John Balance, almost as if he knew his own end was not so far away.  It compiles on 16 DVDs all their live performances for which reasonable quality audio and video exist.

I’m rarely at a loss for words to describe music, but I’ve always struggled to explain why I like Coil so much.  Others have no such problem, but what they write is usually enough to put anyone off.  I guess it comes down to the emotional engagement which is at the heart of all great music, and while their recorded output is at times unlistenable, there’s always a rawness to it which is compelling.  Here though is a blog which deals with the problem of writing about Coil unusually well.

In life, Coil were never very good at making their music available, and in death it’s got a lot worse.  Their web operation, Threshold House still exists but these days there’s very little to buy.  Of note is The Remote Viewer which seems to be the only CD now available, and the download of Worship The Glitch.