El Ef Oh!

 

Oddly, never made the connection between the electro roots of Mark 'n' Gaz (who met as members of rival teams in a breakdance contest) and the fact that Tommy Boy put out Frequencies in the USA. 

Tommy Boy also put out 808 State's Ninety, in a remixed form. 

LFO

Sheath

(Warp)

Observer Music Monthly, 2003

It’s a tough time for dance music believers. Mainstream house culture has imploded, with superclubs closing, dance magazines folding, and average sales for 12 inch singles on a steady downward arc. The more cerebral end of home-listening electronica suffers from stylistic fragmentation, overproduction (there’s just too many "pretty good" records being made), and the absence of a truly startling new sound (even a Next Medium-Sized Thing would be a blessing at this point). Trendy young hipsters think dance culture’s passe and really rather naff: these days they’re into bands with riffs, hooky choruses, foxy singers, and good hair, from neo-garage groups like The White Stripes to post-punk revivalists like The Rapture. 

Little wonder, then, that the leading lights of leftfield electronica have been looking back to the early Nineties, when their scene was at the peak of its creativity, cultural preeminence, and popularity. There’s been a spate of retro-rave flavoured releases from the aging Anglo vanguard--a reinvocation (conscious or unconscious, it’s hard to say) of the era when this music was simultaneously the cutting edge and in the pop charts. 

LFO’s Mark Bell is a case in point. Today he’s better known for his production work with Bjork and Depeche Mode, but back in 1990, he was one half of a duo who reached #12 in the UK singles charts with their self-titled debut "LFO". This Leeds group pioneered a style called "bleep", the first truly British mutation of the house and techno streaming over from Chicago and Detroit. In 1991 they released Frequencies, the first really great techno album released anywhere *(unless you count ancestors Kraftwerk, alongside whose godlike genius LFO’s best work ranks, if you ask me). Just about the only bad thing about Sheath, LFO’s third album and first release for seven years, is its title, which I fear is being used in its antideluvian meaning of "condom" (only "rubber johnny" could have been worse). Really, this record should be called Frequencies: the Return. 

Deliberately lo-fi opener "Blown" instantly transports you back to the era of landmark records like Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works 1985-91. All muddy heart-tremor bass, creaky hissing beats and tinkling, tingling rivulets of synth, it has the enchanted, misty-eyed quality of those childhood mornings when you wake to look through frost-embroidered bedroom windows. "Mokeylips" teems with fluorescent pulses and those classic LFO textures that seem to stick to your skin like Velcro. As bracing as snorting a line of Ajax, "Mum-Man" is industrial-strength hardcore of the kind that mashed-up the more mental ravefloors in ’92. With its robot-voice dancemaster commands and videogame zaps, "Freak" harks back further still to LFO’s Eighties roots as teenage electro fans body-popping and spinning on their heads in deserted shopping centres. "Moistly" shimmers and surges with that odd mixture of nervousness and serenity that infused the classic Detroit techno of Derrick May and Carl Craig. And the beat-less tone-poem "Premacy" pierces your heart with its plangent poignancy. 

Electronic music may be suffering from the cruel cycles of cool at the moment, but Sheath (ugh, I really don’t like that title) shows that music of quality and distinction is still coming from that quarter. Yet more proof (if any were still needed) that all-instrumental machine-music can be as emotionally evocative, as sensuously exquisite, as heart-tenderising and soul-nourishing as any rock group you care to mention. (Like for instance Radiohead, whose Thom Yorke, as it happens, was a huge fan of the Northern "bleep" tracks released by Warp in the early Nineties). One can only hope this album finds the audience it deserves.

And some bits from my 2008 FACT celebration of Bleep

LFO

"LFO"

(Warp, 1990)

Kraftwerk reincarnated as a pair of teenage ex-breakdancers from Leeds, LFO's Mark Bell and Gez Varley took bleep into the Top 20 with this immortal classic. Portentous and momentous like "Trans-Europe Express", the opening synth-chords make you feel like you're being ushered you into the presence of greatness. Then that dark probe of a bassline bores its way into the depths of your brain, via your anus. LFO would go on to record the immaculately inventive Frequencies, one of electronic dance music's All Time Top 5 Albums.

LFO

What Is House EP

(Warp, 1992)

Where better to end than with LFO voicing the question originally raised by bleep itself--just how far can house music be stretched and still be house? With its gnarly synth and electronically-distorted spoken-not-sung vocal, the title track sounds like the Fall if Mark E. Smith was reborn as a 20 year old South Yorks pillhead. The concise lyric pays homage to "the pioneers of the hypnotic groove"--from Phuture, Fingers Inc and Adonis to Eno, Tangerine Dream, YMO, Kraftwerk and Depeche--but like all tributes implies: we're more-than-worthy inheritors.

* the first really great techno album

Is this unfair to 808 State, who did Ninety  a year earlier? Maybe, but not really, as I don't really think of that album as techno - it's more like a dreamy, ambient-tinged house record.  Great album, and one that has lasted for me whereas Ex:Cel (which is slightly more techno, even has some hardcore-aspiring tunes on it, and came out in '91) hasn't endured. 

Unfair to anyone else? Not sure what month it came out in '91, but Ultramarine might have pipped LFO to the post - but then again, Every Man and Woman Is A Star isn't really techno, is it? It's more acid meets chillout meets pastoral fusion. 

Also that year was Orbital's debut - but Frequencies wipes the floor with that. 

LFO labelmates Nightmares on Wax also debuted at album length in 1991 but Word of Science is already trying to expand beyond bleep and touching on the downtempo smoker's muzik of their later discography.

Unique 3's Jus' Unique came out in 1990. There's great stuff on it: deep-bleep like "Phase 3" and "Digicality", tuff little unit of a toon "Code 0274", plus the classic singles up to that point. Overall, though, it's not quite on a par with Frequencies - bit too much of an eclectic sprawl, with some Rebel MC-ish rap tracks that are fun but a bit dated.  

DHS did The Difference Between Noise and Music in '91 - I'll have to give that a relisten. Possibly a real contender against LFO.  (I did give it a relisten and it's pretty interesting stuff but not as consummate as Frequencies)

Oh, blimey, how could I forget - there's A Guy Called Gerald's Automanikk, from 1990. I don't  recall it quite being on a par with Frequencies, or even with Ninety (the apposite comparison). The great, all-time Gerald album is Black Secret Technology, with '92 's 28 Gun Bad Boy also a strong statement. 

A couple of contenders - 4 Hero's In Rough Territory (but it's before they've really found their path, and I don't remember it being a great album - a bit rough, in fact, and not ruff-rough). And then Nexus 21's The Rhythm of Life (from as early as '89), which I think is pre-bleep and when they are still very much Detroit-emulative and specifically Kevin Saunderson fanboys.  

Where else could we look for pipping-Frequencies-to-the-post possibles? Detroit? I don't think any of the major artists had done an album-album by that point.  Germany? 

Even more consistent and long-running LFO / Warp / bleep + bass celebration (for the benefit of  certain folks who should know better, and in fact, I wager, actually do know better)

Warp Influences / Classics / Remixes

VARIOUS ARTISTS

Warp 10+1 Influences

Warp 10+2 Classics

Warp 10+3 Remixes

(Warp/Matador)

Spin, 1999

by Simon Reynolds

UK rave started out as that strange thing--a subculture based almost entirely around import records. In 1988-89, British DJs had several years backlog of  feverish house classics to spin,  plus fresh imports from  Chicago, Detroit and New York every week. Homegrown tracks, mostly inferior imitations, couldn't compete. All this changed by early 1990 with a UK explosion of  indie dance labels and the emergence of a distinctively British rave sound  that merged house with elements of hip hop and reggae. Based in the Northern English industrial city Sheffield, Warp was the greatest of these dance independents, and one of the few to survive the era. Released to commemorate the label's tenth anniversary, these three double-CDs showcase the sharp ears and canny self-reinvention skills that have ensured Warp's longevity and continued relevance.

Warp's first phase of cool came as the prime purveyor of  "bleep-and-bass"--a style that owed as much to electro's pocket-calculator melodies and dub reggae's floorquaking sub-bass as it did to acid house's trip-notic compulsion. Much of Classics sound like a direction Kraftwerk could have followed after 1981's Computer World. Sweet Exorcist's "Clonk," for instance, is like Ralf und Florian lost in the K-hole, an inner-spatial  maelstrom of  weird geometry and precise derangement. Ranging from Tricky Disco's cartoon-quirky almost-pop, through the cold urgency of  LFO and Forgemasters, to Nightmares On Wax's proto-darkside disorientation, Classics is a fabulous document of a forgotten era of UK dance culture. Fortuitously, bleep-and-bass sounds fresher than ever today, chiming not just with the electro renaissance within techno (i/F, Ectomorph) but with the dry, drum machine beats, geometric stab-riffs, and chilly-the-most synth-tones audible in recent rap/R&B--Cash Money bounce boys like Juvenile, Ja Rule's "Holla Holla", Timbaland/Missy/Ginuwine.

Influences mostly consists of  sinister acid house from the import-dominated era of Brit-rave. But two inclusions locate the blueprint for early Warp more precisely in that late Eighties phase when twilight electro merged with the harder, tracks-not-songs side of  house. New York outfit Nitro Deluxe's  1987 "Let's Get Brutal" is a vast drumscape underpinned with tectonic shock-waves of sub-bass and topped by a shrill, staccato keyboard vamp made out of a vocal sample played several octaves too high. Kickstarted by the hilarious vocoderized mission statement "we are the original acid house creators/we hate all commercial house masturbators," and motored by a miasmic bassline that recedes into the  mix then swarms back to subsume your consciousness like malevolent fog,  Unique 3's "The Theme"  was actually the first bleep tune; as their old skool name suggests, the group was a North of England B-boy crew turned ravers.

Where Influences works as a superb primer in early house, Remixes intentionally fails to document the post-bleep Warp that most people know-- revered home of Aphex Twin, Black Dog, Autechre and Squarepusher, those godfathers of IDM  (Intelligent Dance Music, or dance music you can't really dance to). Instead, the double-CD  aims to capture the shape-shifting spirit of  the post-rave network (with its one-off collaborations, multiple aliases, and omnivorous eclecticism) by subjecting some of  Warp's finest to remixes from a host of  suspects usual and unusual.  UK post-rockers Four Tet, for instance, take a track from Aphex's Selected Ambient Works Vol II and turn what was originally as lustrous and near-motionless as crystals forming in a solution into a frisky work-out reminiscent of an over-caffeinated Tortoise. 

Highly listenable, the double-CD nonetheless suffers from the cardinal drawback of modern remixology--rather than enhancing the beloved original or locating some latent potential within it, the remixers almost invariably replace it with an all new track containing only a token trace of the ancestor. In that sense, Warp 10+3 Remixes  effectively evokes the present moment in electronica, where too many producers have got so infatuated with technique, they've lost contact with the dancefloor. Whereas Classics captures a lost moment of perfect coexistence between auteurism and popular desire, when experimentalists (like Sweet Exorcist's Richard H. Kirk, formerly of Cabaret Voltaire) briefly got on the good foot.  

RIP RHK - Cabaret Voltaire + Sweet Exorcist + Xon writings

Cabaret Voltaire (and Factrix)

Village Voice, July 29, 2003

by Simon Reynolds

Thesis: Industrial music, in its original late-’70s incarnation, was the second flowering of an authentic psychedelia. (“Authentic” meaning non-revivalist, untainted by nostalgia). There was the same impulse to blow minds through multimedia sensory overload (the inevitable back-projected, cut-up movies behind every industrial performance—attempts at “total art” only too redolent of 1960s happenings and acid-tests). And industrial, like psychedelia, believed “no sound shalt go untreated”; both adulterated rock’s “naturalistic” recording conventions with FX, tape splices, and dirty electronic noise.

There were even direct links between the blissed freaks of the late ’60s and the autopsy aesthetes of the late ’70s: The precursors of pioneering London industrialists Throbbing Gristle were COUM Transmissions, who began in 1969 as an absurdist-primitivist cosmic rock group, evolved into a taboo-busting, tabloid-scandalizing performance art ensemble, then mutated into TG. There’s also something quite Grateful Dead-like about TG, from the cultishness they cultivated to their habit of excessive self-documentation. Earlier this year, the gargantuan box set 24 Hours made available again Throbbing Gristle’s 1979 cassette-only chest, which contained lo-fi live recordings of every single performance—all two dozen of ’em—TG had played up to that point.

Cabaret Voltaire, Sheffield Roxy Music fans who liked to dress sharp, probably despised straggly-haired, afghan-clad hippies. Still, the early Cabs lineup featured clarinet (shades of Jethro Tull!), while local fanzine Gunrubber compared their live sound to Hawkwind. The Cabs were huge fans of German kosmische rock (particularly Can) and loved Nuggets to the point of covering the Seeds’ punkadelic garage classic “No Escape.” The band’s Richard H. Kirk used to describe their shows as “like a bad trip,” and indeed “Possibility of a Bum Trip” is one of the unreleased goodies on Methodology ’74/’78.

The Cabs’ box is part of a mini-boom in archival industrial: Alongside the strictly-for-nutters 24 Hours and a double CD by San Francisco’s Factrix, long out-of-print records by 23 Skidoo and Biting Tongues have recently been reissued. Last year also saw a bonanza of vintage Cabs material: the classic albums Mix-Up, Voice of America, and Red Mecca; a terrific brand-new compilation, The Original Sound of Sheffield ’78/’82. Best Of; plus the reissue of an older, even better comp of the early Cabs singles, The Living Legends. And in May of next year, Throbbing Gristle will reunite to headline and host “Re-TG,” a two-day industrial-music festival taking place at an English vacation resort.

The earliest material on Methodology is almost 30 years old. And what’s initially surprising about all this bygone futurism is how great it sounds as guitar music, given industrial’s general rock-is-dead stance. Kirk started out contributing clarinet (harshly processed and highly effective, actually—the multitracked woodwinds on “Fuse Mountain” create a psychotic-bucolic vibe, like Popol Vuh jamming on a steel mill’s slag heap). As punk kicked in, the Cabs went rockier and Kirk swiftly joined post-punk’s pantheon of guitar innovators. You can hear Can’s Michael Karoli and reggae’s scratchy afterbeat in Kirk’s choppy rhythm playing, but what’s really distinctive is his trademark timbre: a sensuously brittle distortion like blistered metal, needling its way deep into your ear canal. Often fed through delay units, Kirk’s sustain-heavy lead lines arc and recede through soundscapes that are soused in reverb yet feel curiously dry, evoking the dead echoing chambers of nuclear bunkers and underground silos.

The box’s subtitle, Attic Tapes, refers to an actual claustrophobic space, the equipment-crammed upstairs loft where the trio—Kirk, Stephen Mallinder, and Chris Watson—would meet several times a week and “jam” with the tape recorder running. Methodology‘s three discs draw from hundreds of hours of raw music generated in the years before the Cabs’ first EP for Rough Trade. A few tracks are throwaway juvenilia, but it’s amazing how listenable even the sketchy stuff is. Creaky and homespun, early musique concrète stabs like “Dream Sequence Number Two Ethel’s Voice” have an alien-yet-quaint quality reminiscent of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop (most famous for their work on the cult sci-fi series Dr. Who), while the rattling synthetic percussion and soiled sheets of abstract sound on “Henderson Reversed Piece Two” could give electronic composer Morton Subotnick a run for his money. By disc three, we’ve reached 1977/78 and the archetypal Cabs sound is taking shape: hissy rhythm-generator percussion, dank synth-slime, viscous coils of reverbed bass, a stalking hypno-groove midway between death disco and Eastern Bloc skank.

If there’s an element that dates poorly, it’s the occasional recitative, typically Burroughs-blighted or imaginatively overpowered by Atrocity Exhibition-era J.G. Ballard. Just check the fetid imagery of “Bed Time Stories”: “with dogs that are trained to sniff out corpses/eat my remains but leave my feet/I’ll hold a séance with Moroccan rapists/masturbating end over end.” (Mind you, it actually sounds quite effective in a flat, dry Yorkshire accent). There’s a similar liability effect with the prose-poetry daubed over Factrix tracks like “Empire of Passion”: “I want your sex for my display case . . . my swarms of sticky flies/gnaw away her ivory limbs.”

The Art(aud)-damaged Factrix hailed from San Francisco—the major outpost, outside Britain, for industrial music. (Which sort of nails the industrial-as-psychedelia-redux theory.) TG and the Cabs played to big crowds there. Collaborating with local kindred spirits Mark Pauline (of Survival Research Laboratories) and Monte Cazazza (the guy who inadvertently christened the genre with his “industrial music for industrial people” wisecrack), Factrix provided the soundtrack for several multimedia shockfests. The most infamous involved dead animals grotesquely roboticized by Pauline—like his patented “rabot” made out of metal, electrical wire, and rotting bunny. This sort of audience-confronting art/anti-art malarky can be traced through ’60s outfits like the Vienna Aktionists (pig’s blood, self-mutilation, pagan ritual), all the way back to Dada. Factrix’s Cole Palme echoed the famous flinch-inducing image in Un Chien Andalou when he talked of the group’s desire “to take a razor to the mind’s eye,” while Cabaret Voltaire nicked their name from the original Dadaist nightclub in WW I Zurich.

Like the Cabs, Factrix were big on the mistreatment of sound, deploying an arsenal of Eno-like reinventions such as amputated bass, “radioguitar,” and “glaxobass,” along with tape-loops, exotic percussion, and Multimoog. But as with Methodology, the surprise stand-out aspect of Factrix’s Artifact reissue is the most traditional element—Bond Bergland’s trippy guitar work, whose keening lead lines are definitely in the West Coast acid-rock tradition, tinged with the angularity of Roxy’s Phil Manzanera. On tracks like “Snuff Box (Alternate)” and “Obsession,” the guitar billows up in gaseous columns and harrowed arabesques that recall Ashra’s Manuel Göttsching—stripped of their New Age serenity. There are non-psych guitar thrills, too: the stumbling lunge-riff on “Theme From NOW!,” a distortion-pocked cover of the VU’s “Beginning to See the Light.” Elsewhere, Factrix’s more anti-/un-rock side produces creepy delights like “Phantom Pain,” with its pitter-pulse rhythms and poltergeist-like leakage from the etherworld, while the group’s merger of metal-bashing and ethnic instrumentation (migh-wiz, doumbek, saz . . . ) sometimes suggests an unlikely merger of SPK and the Third Ear Band.

Factrix started out influenced by TG and CV, but as they evolved they anticipated industrial’s next stage, when Psychic TV, Coil, and their ilk embarked on a full-blown magickal-mystery trip. Partial to the occasional mushroom, Factrix talked of wanting to jettison language and escape time—a nakedly psychedelic agenda that Artifact was originally going to honor by containing a sheet of acid-blotter, undipped but perforated using a vintage machine once owned by one of Haight-Ashbury’s “acid barons.” After Factrix disintegrated, Bergland formed Saqqara Dogs, an overtly transcendental trio centered around his skykissing solos. Cabaret Voltaire, meanwhile, got deeper into dance music (a journey you can follow on 2001’s box Conform to Deform ’82/’90. Archive;), embracing sequencers and ultimately making a sort of bleak house music—just in time for rave, that other authentic, non-retro reflowering of psychedelia.

Cabaret Voltaire

The Original Sound of Sheffield--The Best of the Virgin/EMI Years

Conform to Deform--The Virgin/EMI Years

Uncut, 2001

by Simon Reynolds

 It's hard to believe today, but back in the early Eighties the "New Pop" ideal of  mainstream entryism was so dominant, and the alternative (staying indie) so discredited, that even the leading lights of industrial music had a bash.  Clock DVA, SPK, and Throbbing Gristle (renamed Psychic TV) all formed alliances with major labels, glossing up their music  seemingly in hopes of getting on Top of the Pops.  What's most surprising in retrospect is not the group's eagerness to "sell out"  (hell, everybody needs to make some bread), but the major labels'  belief they could sell the stuff to Joe Punter.

 Invariably, the post-industrial popsters stiffed in the marketplace and, tails (or pierced dicks) between legs, they rejoined erstwhile comrades like Nurse With Wound and Coil in the margins.  Still, flouting received wisdom, it's not always true that compromise ruins a band's sound. Sometimes it an improvement: the radio-friendly Nirvana of Nevermind is just plain better than the Subpop stuff.  Even a failed attempt at mainstreaming can serve as a  timely escape for a band that's hit an aesthetic dead end. So while I'd still rate Cabaret Voltaire's first phase from "Nag Nag Nag" through Red Mecca to "Your Agent Man" as their definitive legacy, it's undeniable that by 1982 they'd taken that approach as far as they could. It was time for a change: a new arena, bigger horizons, a shifted sound.

 On their first two post-Rough Trade albums, The Crackdown and  Microphonies, the Cabs are basically trying to do a New Order: marry postpunk's angst with the party sounds of electro and Latin Freestyle that ruled Manhattan clubs like the Funhouse and Danceteria. If they never pulled off a "Blue Monday" or "Confusion", they  got close with "Crackdown", "Just Fascination," and especially "Sensoria", which gave an ultramodern sheen--all chattering sequencers, pert chugging basslines, and robotic handclaps--to the classic Voltaire vibe of twitchy, under-surveillance tension. The result---Shannon for J.G. Ballard fans---was  only a few leftward steps from  Depeche Mode in their "political", Neubauten-infatuated mode. But  Stephen Mallinder's sultry vocals were always too subdued and moody for full pop impact. And melody was never the Cabs's strong suit.

By the time a dance culture based around largely instrumental music arrived,  in the form of acid house, Cabaret Voltaire was running out of steam (understandably, after thirteen years and umpteen releases).   Remixes of  post-1988 Cabs tunes by dancefloor luminaries like A Guy Called Gerald and Rob Gordon show both how much the Cabs had in common with acid and bleep, but also how they needed assistance to really infiltrate that arena. Hooking up with Sheffield deejay Parrot as Sweet Exorcist, though, Richard Kirk did enjoy  the ravefloor impact that eluded the Cabs,  with early Warp releases like "Testone".  Avant-funk  finally had its day, as 'ardkore.

 The three-CD  Conform to Deform is flawed:  there's hardly anything from 1985's under-rated  The Covenant, The Sword, and the Arm of the Lord, and an entire disc dedicated to live versions seems an odd decision (although the Cabs could be a formidable and forbidding live experience). Some tracks haven't dated well:  "C.O.m.a" is all stop-start edits, Fairlight gimmicks, and other modish mid-Eighties techniques, but, unlike equally of-their-time efforts by Art of Noise and Mantronix, the effect is "period charmless."   The single-disc  The Original Sound of Sheffield, though, makes a strong case for the  Cabs's crossover era.  An essential companion/sequel to the first-phase Cabs singles compilation The Living Legends, this "greatest near-misses" tells the story of how one pioneering postpunk  outfit tried to adapt to the challenging climate of the 1980s.

Melody Maker, June 30 1990

Kirk-related blurbs from my guide to "The 20 Best Bleep Records Ever Made", FACT magazine, 2008

SWEET EXORCIST

"Testone"

(Warp, 1989)

 

Sweet Exorcist were Richard H. Kirk from Cabaret Voltaire and Sheffield's DJ Parrot, and "Testone" is a classic example of bleep's sensual austerity: the barest components (growling sub-bass, a rhythmic web of Roland  909 klang and tuss, and a nagging sequence of five bleep-tones) are woven into something almost voluptuous. The title comes from the test tones built into synths and samplers, while the opening soundbite--"if everything's ready here on the dark side of the moon, play the five tones"--is sampled from Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

XON

The Mood Set EP

(Network, 1991)

 Sweet Exorcist's Richard H. Kirk and Forgemaster Rob Gordon team up for this coldly compelling one-off. All whiplash percussion and spectral synths, "Dissonance" is the prize here. Its "ooh, ooh, techno city" hook, sampled from Cybotron (Juan Atkins' first group)  might be homage to Detroit. But it could equally be serving notice to the Belleville Three: watch out, Sheffield is the world capital of electronic music. Again. Because, actually, that Cybotron vocal sounds suspiciously like early Human League…

 

SWEET EXORCIST

"Clonk's Coming" (off C.C.C.D)

(Warp, 1991)

Bleep at its most sophisticated, the final tune on this seven track maxi-EP (or is it mini-LP?) starts with a dizzy-making roundelay of dub-delayed bleeps, falls into a strange loping sashay of a groove, and blossoms into a fiesta of textured percussion, clanking bass, and densely clustered electronic tonalities.

 

(Read this interview with DJ Parrot aka Richard Barratt, which has stuff on the primitive set-up they struggled with to make "Testone")

And the very first thing I wrote about Cabaret Voltaire, from Melody Maker, July 26 1986

stray bloggage

Blissblog May 12, 2004

Richard h. kirk earlier/later (mute)

lives up to nick gutterbreaks praise, esp. the second disc of early days stuff. and worth the price just for the front cover --photo booth pic of kirk as a teenager looking like this sort of glam kid gone feral/reverted to hippie -- bowie meets peter the wild boy

Blissblog May 07, 2004

Very nice piece by Nick Gutterbreakz on the Richard H. Kirk Earlier/Later Unreleased Projects Anthology 74/89 (Grey Area Of Mute) CD which is out any day and which I'm panting to hear. I'm not quite as obsessive about Cabs-related output as Nick but not that far behind him. And weirdly it's quite a recent development. I really liked the Cabs at the time, had a fair few things by them, some vinyl, others taped off friends. And there were certain tracks like "Black Mask" and "Sluggin"/"Secret Agent Man" and swathes of Covenant that really stood out for me. But I wasn't like an obsessive fan by any means. But now, I dunno, through doing the book or something, in these last three years, I just really fell in love with the Cabs--as Sound and as Spirit-- to the point where I want all of it, the juvenilia and solo side project marginalia.... last year, if Methodology: Attic Tapes had been a new release it might have beaten out even Dizzee as my year's favorite listen (was amazed how little love that record got in the critpolls and blog roundups, praps most people didn't actually hear it?) ... yeah I really feel Nick's Kirkmania.... cos there's just something that imbues even the scraps and half-finished stuff... Something heroic about Cabaret Voltaire. Culture warrior bizniz innit.

For a cultural and material topography of postpunk Sheffield, check out this extensive interview I did with the late Andy Gill, the NME's Sheffield correspondent during this legendary time and friends with the Cabs and most of the other significant musicians in the town. 

Here's what Andy had to say about the Cabs and Richard H. Kirk:

“... Before the Cabs had a record out, they used to come into Virgin, where I worked.  I had hair down to my waist in those days. They came up to the counter and asked 'Have you got any records by Cabaret Voltaire?'. I’d heard of the name, and what I’d heard about them sounded really intriguing to me. So, I said ‘As far as I know they haven’t got anything out yet, but I’d really be interested in hearing them, cos it’s my kind of thing.’ I remember them being quite shocked that this guy who looked like a Ted Nugent fan was heavily into that kind of that stuff. Ever since then we’ve been mates....

"Mal and Rich and Chris  and their gang were heavily into the sonics of Roxy. Although Mal was heavily into clothes too.  He had two rooms in his flat, and one room was where he lived and the other was his wardrobe – and he had an ironing board in the middle of it. It was just completely full of clothes. Mal was the most stylish person I’d ever met; he always had a consummate sense of style.

“The early Cabs gigs were trying to get a reaction – it was a racket, just squealing noise. And there’d be films behind them of god knows what: biological warfare experiments, people in chemical warfare suits. They’d collect old Super-8 footage of things like that.

"Around 1975 or 1976, we became friends. They had been going since ‘73 or ’74. So, it was a bit after that I got to meet them. They had this studio in this old industrial building. The whole building was called Western Works – and they recorded in it and called the studio Western Works.”

What were they like as people, Cabaret Voltaire?

“Richard’s always been a bit stroppy –in that very Yorkshire way. He can be hellishly stubborn. That’s a typically Yorkshire thing:  ‘if you say don’t do this, I’ll do it’.  He’s got that thing in his voice.

"In Sheffield, it wasn’t like the London Musicians Collective, where everyone’s got wire-rim glasses and that sort of avantgarde middle class attitude. In Sheffield, it was working class Dada. They were heavily into Dada and liked to get a reaction. Wake people up. Richard, then, mainly played guitar and clarinet. Mal did rudimentary bass and vocals, treated beyond legibility.

Warp Influences / Classics / Remixes

VARIOUS ARTISTS

Warp 10+1 Influences

Warp 10+2 Classics

Warp 10+3 Remixes

(Warp/Matador)
Spin, 1999

by Simon Reynolds

UK rave started out as that strange thing--a subculture based almost entirely around import records. In 1988-89, British DJs had several years backlog of  feverish house classics to spin,  plus fresh imports from  Chicago, Detroit and New York every week. Homegrown tracks, mostly inferior imitations, couldn't compete. All this changed by early 1990 with a UK explosion of  indie dance labels and the emergence of a distinctively British rave sound  that merged house with elements of hip hop and reggae. Based in the Northern English industrial city Sheffield, Warp was the greatest of these dance independents, and one of the few to survive the era. Released to commemorate the label's tenth anniversary, these three double-CDs showcase the sharp ears and canny self-reinvention skills that have ensured Warp's longevity and continued relevance.

Warp's first phase of cool came as the prime purveyor of  "bleep-and-bass"--a style that owed as much to electro's pocket-calculator melodies and dub reggae's floorquaking sub-bass as it did to acid house's trip-notic compulsion. Much of Classics sound like a direction Kraftwerk could have followed after 1981's Computer World. Sweet Exorcist's "Clonk," for instance, is like Ralf und Florian lost in the K-hole, an inner-spatial  maelstrom of  weird geometry and precise derangement. Ranging from Tricky Disco's cartoon-quirky almost-pop, through the cold urgency of  LFO and Forgemasters, to Nightmares On Wax's proto-darkside disorientation, Classics is a fabulous document of a forgotten era of UK dance culture. Fortuitously, bleep-and-bass sounds fresher than ever today, chiming not just with the electro renaissance within techno (i/F, Ectomorph) but with the dry, drum machine beats, geometric stab-riffs, and chilly-the-most synth-tones audible in recent rap/R&B--Cash Money bounce boys like Juvenile, Ja Rule's "Holla Holla", Timbaland/Missy/Ginuwine.

Influences mostly consists of  sinister acid house from the import-dominated era of Brit-rave. But two inclusions locate the blueprint for early Warp more precisely in that late Eighties phase when twilight electro merged with the harder, tracks-not-songs side of  house. New York outfit Nitro Deluxe's  1987 "Let's Get Brutal" is a vast drumscape underpinned with tectonic shock-waves of sub-bass and topped by a shrill, staccato keyboard vamp made out of a vocal sample played several octaves too high. Kickstarted by the hilarious vocoderized mission statement "we are the original acid house creators/we hate all commercial house masturbators," and motored by a miasmic bassline that recedes into the  mix then swarms back to subsume your consciousness like malevolent fog,  Unique 3's "The Theme"  was actually the first bleep tune; as their old skool name suggests, the group was a North of England B-boy crew turned ravers.

Where Influences works as a superb primer in early house, Remixes intentionally fails to document the post-bleep Warp that most people know-- revered home of Aphex Twin, Black Dog, Autechre and Squarepusher, those godfathers of IDM  (Intelligent Dance Music, or dance music you can't really dance to). Instead, the double-CD  aims to capture the shape-shifting spirit of  the post-rave network (with its one-off collaborations, multiple aliases, and omnivorous eclecticism) by subjecting some of  Warp's finest to remixes from a host of  suspects usual and unusual.  UK post-rockers Four Tet, for instance, take a track from Aphex's Selected Ambient Works Vol II and turn what was originally as lustrous and near-motionless as crystals forming in a solution into a frisky work-out reminiscent of an over-caffeinated Tortoise. 

Highly listenable, the double-CD nonetheless suffers from the cardinal drawback of modern remixology--rather than enhancing the beloved original or locating some latent potential within it, the remixers almost invariably replace it with an all new track containing only a token trace of the ancestor. In that sense, Warp 10+3 Remixes  effectively evokes the present moment in electronica, where too many producers have got so infatuated with technique, they've lost contact with the dancefloor. Whereas Classics captures a lost moment of perfect coexistence between auteurism and popular desire, when experimentalists (like Sweet Exorcist's Richard H. Kirk, formerly of Cabaret Voltaire) briefly got on the good foot.  

Bits on Bass for The Wire's Low End Theories issue (July 2012)

by Simon Reynolds

John Entwistle / The Who, “My Generation” (Brunswick single, 1965)

Rock ‘n’ roll had triggered violence before, but up until The Who it had never really represented violence musically or enacted it onstage.  Think of words like “mayhem” and “destruction” in connection with that band and the first things that spring to mind are Keith Moon’s free-flailing drums and Pete Townshend’s scything powerchords.  (Not forgetting those climactic orgies of instrument-smashing).  But on “My Generation” John Entwistle supplies more than his fair share of the savagery. Often described as lead bassist to Townshend’s  rhythm guitarist, on this late 1965 single, his is the loudest instrument (with the possible exception of Moon’s cymbals). 

For the first minute “Thunderfingers”, as his bandmates nicknamed him,  churns and grinds as relentlessly and remorselessly as a gigantic tunnel-boring drill. Then, outrageously, he takes the solo and slashes a rent in the song’s fabric with a down-diving flurry of notes at once fluidly elegant and brutishly in-your-face.  This is generally regarded as the first bass solo in recorded rock, and as such, it’s a mixed portent.  Entwistle would immediately attempt to reprise the shock effect on the Who’s debut album with the bass-dominated instrumental “The Ox” and over the years he became an increasingly ostentatious player, peaking with the verging-on-Pastorius floridity of Quadrophenia’s “The Real Me” (much admired in the technical guitar magazines). 

But in the immediate aftermath of “My Generation”, young bands like The Eyes, The Creation and John’s Children picked up not on the sophistication (beyond their capabilities, anyway) but the loudness, distortion, and menace.  Amping up the jagged, edge-of-chaos frenzy, they recorded a series of 1966-67 singles that fans and collectors today know as “freakbeat”.  Mod, as a musical form as opposed to a subcultural style, represented a uniquely English contribution to rock: the sound of frustration and neurosis, tension and explosive release.  In their own way, for a moment there in the mid-Sixties the Who were as radical as the Velvet Underground. Certainly, as far as Britain is concerned, punk starts here. Entwistle can even be seen as a forefather of postpunk’s  “lead bassists”, or at least the  aggressive hard-rocking sort, such as Jean-Jacques Burnel and Peter Hook. Indeed Hooky actually bought some of the Ox’s bass guitars in the estate sale after his 2002 death.

Tina Weymouth / Talking Heads’s “Found a Job” (from More Songs About Buildings and Food, 1978)

So dominant was David Byrne as the front-and-center figure in Talking Heads – voice, wordsmith,  mesmerizingly awkward physical presence—that it’s  always been too easy to underplay the vital contributions of the instrumentalists. (Including Byrne’s own instrumental role as marvelously inventive guitarist).  Props due to drummer Chris Frantz and to Jerry Harrison for his keyboard colorations, but DB’s only serious rival as charismatic focus was always Tina Weymouth.  Her bass is often the primary melodic voice in the songs, while the unfettered joy of her playing provides a vital counter to the singer’s neurotic unease. 

Talking Heads’s classic first four albums hold an embarrassment of four-string riches.  The nimble pretzel-funk of “Cities”. The rubbery ache of “Heaven”.  The languid lope of “Warning Sign”. The lurching anti-groove “Drugs”. The virtually iconic unchanging bassline of “Once In A Lifetime” (whose composition Weymouth generously credits to her husband Frantz but which has her fingerprints all over it in terms of the use of space and silence). The quirky quiver of “Mind”. The uncharacteristic hypno-drone of “The Overload.”

In sheer desperation, I plump here for the first B-line of Weymouth’s, and possibly of anybody’s, that caught my young (16 years old) ear: the corkscrewing earworm that is “Found A Job,” a bass-riff that sings in your head like pure pop and pummels you in the gut like the toughest funk or hardest rock.   During postpunk, I never played air guitar (too phallic, too masculinist and metal). But I did play air bass.  And Tina Weymouth got as much mime time out of me as that other great bass hero of the era, Jah Wobble.   

Unique 3, "Weight For the Bass (Original Soundyard Dubplate Mix)" (Ten Records, 1990)

In the beginning, U.K. rave was fueled by imports from Chicago, Detroit, and New York. Homegrown efforts paled next to the real thing. But towards the end of 1989, a distinctively British sound  emerged.  Associated with artists like LFO, Rhythmatic, Nightmares on Wax, and Original Clique, and with fledgling labels like Chill, Network, and Warp, this phase has gone down to history as bleep. But at the time synonyms like bleep-and-bass or Northern bass got bandied around too. And that’s because the tracks mostly came out of Yorkshire and the West Midlands and what they brought to the house template was something that hadn’t been particularly prominent before: low end. Most of the bleep-makers were former B-boys who’d come up through the UK’s mid-Eighties “street beats” culture—breakdancing to Man Parrish and Mantronix, daubing graffiti on railway bridges and after-dark shopping center walls. Then their heads got flipped out by acid house in 1988. But instead of mimicking Chicago’s Roland 303 acid-bass, they stuck with electro’s 808-bassed boom. They were also influenced heavily by the imported-from-Jamaica sound system culture that was thoroughly established in mixed-race Northern cities like Leeds by the late Eighties. 

That three-way collision of hip hop, reggae, and house is all across the bleep sound of 1989-1991, but nowhere more thrillingly than in the output of Bradford’s Unique 3.  “The Theme” b/w “7-AM’, their debut, is officially regarded as the Birth of Bleep. But “Weight for the Bass”, their third single, packs more sub-lo heft.  The tectonic-plate-shaking  bass and eerily cavernous space are offset and lightened by  skippy electro-descended beats and an Italo-house piano vamp that chatters with the bright-eyed inanity of an E’d up raver. Spelling out the Jamaican connection, the “Original Soundyard Dubplate Mix” also nods to the Soundyard, the Bradford club founded by  Unique 3's Edzy. The group’s L Double would go on to be a valuable player in jungle, a scene organized around dubplates and bass-drops. And the title “Weight for the Bass” pre-echoes the dubstep fetish-term  “bass weight”. Indeed the way that the track stretches out a tremor into a trauma-scape of ecstatic dread anticipates such classics of the last decade as Pinch’s “Qawwali” and Loefah’s “Bombay Squad.”

                                                       [NB below is not the right mix but gives you a flavour at least]