RIP Ken Downie a.k.a. The Black Dog

Big shout to Matthew Ingram the Mighty Woebot whose tape of the early Black Dog EPs introduced me to their most magickal musik phase.

Here is Matt's lovely tribute to the Black Dog from a few years ago

Here's my own writing about the group:

THE BLACK DOG, The Book of Dogma

emusic, 2007


A legend in techno circles, The Black Dog’s music is like the missing link between Coil’s eldritch electronica and Carl Craig’s exquisitely-textured elegance. Although the British group--originally the trio of Ken Downie, Ed Handley, and Andy Turner--became widely heard as part of Warp Records’ “electronic listening music” initiative of the early 90s, the bedrock of their cult is their hard-to-find first three EPs, 

Did I say hard? Damn near impossible actually, when it comes to The Virtual EP, Age of Slack EP, and The Black Dog EP, vinyl-only 1989-90 releases long out-of-print and each worth a small fortune. Now at long overdue last they are available in their entirety as the first disc of this double-CD retrospective. 

Tracks like “Virtual,” “The Weight” and “Tactile” distil the essence of Detroit techno into an etherealized machine-funk so translucent and refined it feels like you should store it in crystal vials rather than a lowly CD case or hard drive. "Age of Slack” and “Ambience with Teeth” use hip hop breakbeats in ways that parallel early jungle, but there’s a balletic poise and delicacy to the way Black Dog deploy their crisp and rattling drum loops. 

This is rave sublimated into a mind-dance, the shimmying-and-sashaying thought-shapes of some advanced alien species who get together and party via telepathy. 

This set’s second disc, consisting of tracks from three EPS recorded for the GPR label in the early 90s, is also excellent, looking ahead to the Warp-era albums Bytes and Spanners. 

But it’s disc one that captures The Black Dog at their magickal and mysterious best.

[from the liner notes to Artificial Intelligence]

The Black Dog's contribution, done as an alter-ego, for AI

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The Black Dog (and Balil and Plaid)  from Energy Flash

The Black Dog – the trio of Ed Handley, Andy Turner and Ken Downie – were almost as hermetic as Autechre, but more committed to traditional art notions of ‘expression’. They once defined their 

project as the quest for ‘a computer soul’, while Ken Downie told Eternity that The Black Dog started in order to fill ‘a hole in music. Acid house had been “squashed” by the police and rinky-dinky 

Italian house music was getting played everywhere. Emotion had left via the window.’ 

The musical emotions in The Black Dog (and alter egos Plaid and Balil) aren’t the straightforward, run-of-the-mill, everyday sort, but rather more elusive: subtle, indefinable shades of mood, 

ambiguous and evanescent feelings for which even an oxymoron like ‘bittersweet’ seems rather crude. Eschewing live appearances and seldom doing interviews, The Black Dog nonetheless created a 

cult aura around their often hard-to-find discography. One of their chosen mediums was cyberspace: long before the current craze for  techno websites, The Black Dog established a computer bulletin 

board called Black Dog Towers. Visitors could gawp at artwork and learn more about the Dog’s interest in arcane knowledges, such as paganism, out-of-body experiences, UFOs, Kabbalah and ‘aeonics’ 

(mass shifts in consciousness). Ken Downie – the principal esoterrorist in the band – has described himself as a magician. One of The Black Dog’s earliest tracks, ‘Virtual (Gods in Space)’, features 

a sample – ‘make the events occur that you want to occur’ – which gives a magickal spin to the punk DIY ethos. 

Although far from the euphoric fervour of rave, The Black Dog’s early 1990–2 material is remarkably similar to the breakbeat hardcore of the day. Like Hyper-On Experience, DJ Trax, et al., the 

mode of construction is basically the Mantronix collage aesthetic updated for the rave era: incongruous samples + looped breakbeats + oscillator riffs. But the mood of ‘Seers + Sages’, ‘Apt’, ‘Chiba’ and 

‘Age of Slack’ is quirky Dada absurdism rather than Loony Toons zany. The crisp, echoed breakbeat and keyboard vamp on ‘Seers + Sale’ recalls 2 Bad Mice classics like ‘Waremouse’, except that the 

riff sounds like it’s played on a church organ, so the effect is eldritch rather than E-lated. On 1991’s ‘Chiba’, the Morse-code riff has a glancing lightness of inflection that anticipates the Detroit break

beat of Innerzone Orchestra’s ‘Bug in the Bassbin’. 

Carl Craig, the producer behind Innerzone Orchestra, clearly recognized The Black Dog as kindred spirits in sonic watercolours; in  1992, his Planet E label released their classic Balil track ‘Nort Route’. 

Strangely redolent of the early eighties – the Sinophile phunk of Sylvian and Sakomoto’s ‘Bamboo Music’, the phuturistic panache of Thomas Leer – ‘Nort Route’ daubs synth-goo into an exquisite 

calligraphic melody-shape over an off-kilter breakbeat. The track trembles and brims with a peculiar emotion, a euphoric melancholy that David Toop came closest to capturing with the phrase ‘nostalgia for the future’. 

What The Black Dog/Balil/Plaid tracks most resembled was a sort of digital update of fifties exotica. But instead of imitating remote alien cultures, as the original exotica did, it was like The Black Dog were somehow giving us advance glimpses of the hybrid musics of the next millennium: the Hispanic-Polynesian dance crazes of the Pacific Rim, or music for discotheques and wine bars in Chiba City and The Sprawl (the megalopolises in William Gibson’s Neuromancer and Count Zero). 

While some of the Dog’s later work – on albums like Bytes, Parallel, The Temple of Transparent Balls and Spanners – crosses the thin line between mood-music and muzak, it’s still marked by a rhythmic inventiveness that’s unusual in the electronic listening field. With its percussive density and discombobulated time signatures, The Black Dog’s music often feels like it’s designed for the asymmetrical dancing of creatures with an odd number of limbs – not bipeds, but quintupeds or nonopeds. 

The Black Dog's mix of bleep n bass for FACT

Stuff on The Black Dog in this Redbull story about London Techno