Grebo fondly dismembered

Close to the Noise Floor: Formative UK Electronica 1975-1984

Various

Close To the Noise Floor: Formative UK Electronica 1975-1984

Cherry Red

Pitchfork, 2016

by Simon Reynolds

The evolutionary arc of the synthesizer has a completely different shape to the trajectory of the electric guitar. With a few exceptions, the guitar started out as a crude generator of exciting noise and dance energy: a fundamentally teenage sound. Then it gradually became an ever more subtle expressive implement, with a huge textural range.  Synths, in contrast, started out prog: they cost a fortune and were challenging to operate, and this made them the preserve of established performers generally of  virtuosic and artistically ambitious bent. Either that or synthesisers belonged to institutions like universities and were accessible only to composers with equally lofty purposes in mind.

The primitivist phase of the synthesizer came after the sophisticated start. In the late Seventies, cheaper machines like the Wasp became available; they were also compact, portable, and relatively user-friendly compared with their bulky predecessors. This democratization of electronics happened to coincide with rock’s own self-conscious return to juvenile basics in the form of punk. All of a sudden the synth was competing with the guitar to be the true instrument of do-it-yourself.  For many the synth won that contest handily: you didn’t even need to learn two chords, you could riff out abstract blurts of nasty noise or play one-finger melodies.  Furthermore synths and the rudimentary drum machines that were also newly available encouraged a “non-musical” (at least in rock terms) approach. Rather than jam your way to a song through the intuitive logic of groove and feel, tracks could be built up through addition and subtraction, using a hypnotic but uninflected machine-beat as a grid for the assembly process.  

Compiled by Richard Anderson, Close To the Noise Floor is a four-disc survey of the excitingly messy birth of British electronica during the late Seventies and early Eighties. One of the maps Anderson used is “Wild Planet”, a celebrated three-part feature written by Dave Henderson  for the music weekly Sounds. The 1983 article spawned a regular Sounds column dedicated to the cassette underground of tiny labels like Flowmotion and Third Mind.  Henderson contributes a short but vivid memoir-style introduction to this box set and also features in his musical guise as a member of Worldbackwards, a group whose ambition was to sound like “Throbbing Gristle on Tamla Motown”.

“Minimal synth” works as a shorthand tag for Close To the Noise Floor’s remit, although the scope of the trawl is actually wider and more disparate than what that term tends to signify, taking in electro-punk, industrial, synthpop, dark ambient, and more.  Rather than use generic focus as an organizing principle, the anthology achieves coherence through sticking with a single country – Britain – when it could have easily have swept across the equally active European scene or harvested the scattered but significant American exponents like John Bender and Nervous Gender.

The national focus makes sense historically, in so far as the UK scene was catalysed by half-a-dozen native outfits who released debut singles within a few months of each other in mid-1978: The Normal, Human League, Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire, Thomas Leer, and Robert Rental.  The combined impact of these singles – respectively “T.V.O.D.”, “Being Boiled”, “United”, Extended Play EP, “Private Plane” and “Paralysis” -  was as galvanizing as Buzzcocks’s “Spiral Scratch” had been for scrappy DIY guitar-groups a year earlier.

Noise Floor’s first disc concentrates on the children of Throbbing Gristle and “Warm Leatherette” (the more influential B-side to The Normal’s “T.V.O.D.”).  No spacey ripples or groovy Moogy sensuality here: the synth is used aggressively and obnoxiously. One gem in this vein is Storm Bugs’s “Little Bob Minor”, with its ear-itching drones whose texture resembles a comb-and-paper kazoo.   Vocals, when they appear, are usually screams or creepy spoken-word soundbites, as with the cut-up voices from a radio interview with prostitutes that appear on We Be Echo’s “Sexuality”.

The stand-out track on the first disc, though, is a bit of an anomaly: Thomas Leer’s “Tight as A Drum,” from his fabulous EP 4 Movements. By 1981 Leer had left behind the gratingly foreboding ambiences of The Bridge, his collaborative album with Robert Rental, and absorbed the mutant disco influence of New York’s ZE label.  4 Movements also sounds like he’s letting back in some of the banished musicality of pre-punk rock, figures like Island Records folk-blues minstrel John Martyn. “Tight As Drum” swings because although the percussion is electronic, Leer played it by hand on pads; the intricate weave of synth-melodies over the top sounds vaguely Middle Eastern in its ornamented filigree. The song seems to reach your ears through the heat-haze coming off a sun-baked road. A snapshot of a moment of tension so exquisitely taut it’s a kind of ecstasy, “Tight As A Drum” features the briefest of spoken-not-sung lyrics: a depiction of a young man stretching himself, silhouetted against the morning light streaming through a window.  

Embracing mainstream ideas of melody and musicality doesn’t work so well on the second disc, which mostly features groups who reach towards pop but don’t get even as close as The Human League did on “Being Boiled” (included here). Performance art duo Schlelmer K’s “Broken Vein” suggests Soft Cell sans the soaring voice and heart-swelling tunes; Native Europe’s “The Distance from Köln” is a lo-fi cousin to Berlin’s Eighties radio staple “The Metro”; lyrically if not so much sonically, Cultural Amnesia’s 1981 anti-Thatcherism ditty “Materialistic Man” comes over like  a dry run for Depeche Mode’s  “Everything Counts”.  The better tunes come from those who actually managed to make it as pop stars.  “A New Kind of Man”, an unreleased solo single by ex-Ultravox singer John Foxx, features a vocal that – typical for the emerging synthpop genre – sounds glacial and torrid at the same time, plus lyrics like scraps from an abandoned and torn-up screenplay: “an underwater kind of silence/humming of electric pylons/”don’t forget me” fits of static/another scene began.”  Heard in its superior 1980 album version rather than original incarnation as B-side to their debut single “Electricity,” Orchestral Manoeuvres In the Dark’s “Almost” sounds like a spindly North-of-England Kraftwerk: graph-paper rhythm, sobbing synth. Possibly the best thing OMD ever did, the song seems to express obliquely the hidden hot tears of a cold fish technocrat who’s outwardly all impassive Dr Spock logic:  “always making statements and moving step by step/always acting theories/I will regret.”

Livening up the second disc – otherwise a bit of slog – are specimens from the post-punk mini-genre of parody.  The late Seventies erupted with cover  versions that swapped reverent reinterpretation for willfully goofy travesty – think Flying Lizards’s deadpan take on “Money”, or The Dickies’s punked-up “Nights in White Satin”. The idea, I think, was to show just how much distance there was now between Old Wave and New Wave – or, if the cover was of a contemporary hit, how far from chartpop convention you could push the song.   That’s the nature of the game with British Standard Unit’s deconstructive molesting of Rod Stewart’s “D’Ya Think I’m Sexy,” which became a John Peel radio show fave in 1979 with its grotesquely sped-up voices and anti-disco jerkiness.  B.S.U. was just one of numerous guises worn by ex-Mott the Hoople keyboard player Morgan Fisher for a covers album project called Hybrid Kids. “Gerry and the Holograms” by the group of the same name isn’t a cover but a lampoon of the emergent synthpop genre itself, wreaked by two members of the cult band Alberto Y Lost Trios Paranoias (whose output consisted almost entirely of parodies such as their punk-mocking Snuff Rock EP). “Gerry and the Holograms” has been identified as the melodic source for New Order’s “Blue Monday,” but to these ears sounds more like The Stooges’s “I Wanna Be Your Dog” covered by BBC Radiophonic Workshop. In a word, awesome.

That pair of whimsies could equally have been squeezed onto the last disc of Close To the Noise Floor, which corrals an array of unclassifiable oddities. Although electronic in feel, more often than not the sounds here are achieved via conventional instruments subjected to heavy treatments. Here the forebears, if any exist, are The Residents and Cabaret Voltaire (who in their early days used effects-processed flute and guitar more than synths).  Renaldo and the Loaf’s “Dying Inside” sounds ripe for sampling by Kanye West on Pablo II. Unable to afford synths, the duo used effects pedals to render their instruments and voices as inorganic and alien-sounding as possible.  Alien Brains’s “Menial Disorders” has a great back story (the project started in the physics lab at the group’s high school and mainly deployed a “Loopotron,” a self-cobbled tape-echo machine that used the erase head to alter the sound) which is matched by the sound itself : a cloud of mechanical gnats circling around your head, fizzing zig-zags of hi-hat, corrugated crumples of  texture, rhythm like bed springs pinging inside a giant reverberant cistern.  

Most of Noise Floor’s contents are shaped by twin prohibitions. First and foremost, the goal was to sound as un-rock’n’roll and un-American as possible (which is why the vocals, when they appear, are usually absurdly English – stiff-backed, groomed-sounding, somehow short-haired).  But there was a secondary impulse at work too: to break with the conventions of synth-based music established in the first half of the Seventies by groups like Tangerine Dream and Klaus Schulze, who favored long-form compositions (often taking up an entire album side) and an atmosphere of celestial serenity. 

Now you might have noticed that I jumped right past this box’s third disc. That’s because in some ways it’s the most intriguing of the four, precisely because it’s full of postpunk DIY that still took its bearings from the pre-punk electronic cosmonauts.  Maximal Synth, you could call this stuff:  operators like Sea of Wires, MFH, and Mark Shreeve, who, rather than ape “Warm Leatherette” or Cabaret Voltaire’s “Silent Command”, parallel the billowing pulse-scapes being made at that same time by Manuel Gottsching on albums like 1978’s Blackouts. This sound – late period kosmische drifting towards New Age or proto-techno – has in recent years enjoyed a measure of renewed currency thanks to Emeralds and their ilk, but generally it’s been written right out of history.

One of the groups included on Disc 3 are actually a totally pre-punk proposition.  Zorch took their battery of EMS Synthi As and lightshow to free festivals all across England, including the very first Stonehenge Festival in 1974. Hearing their “Adrenalin” made me wish for a time machine so I could experiences its spaceship-landing whooshes panning around the megalithic columns and frazzling the minds of the gathered long-hairs.  In a similar amorphous vein, Ron Berry’s “Sea of Tranquility” is an elegaic homage to the Moon Landing. But “Triptych” by EG Oblique Graph (Bryn Jones, later better known as Muslimgauze) is less beatific, recalling the sensory-deprivation aesthetic of Conrad Schnitzler: insidiously hissing percussion and color-leached tones, like a wintry after-dark walk through a Berlin pedestrian underpass. 

Despite the omission of obvious classics like “Warm Leatherette” or Fad Gadget’s “Ricky’s Hand” (presumably because the Mute label archive was off-limits to the compiler) Close To the Noise Floor provides a fascinating overview of the formative years of British home-studio electronica: groups who were precursors in spirit, if not direct lineage, to the techno and IDM artists of the Nineties.  Still, with the cult for “minimal wave” now a decade old, it almost feels like another task has become urgent: the rediscovery of the groups that did the groundwork for the outfits on Disc 3 of Noise Floor. Time, perhaps, for a box set that does justice to major label synth-rock of the Seventies: figures like Tomita, pre-Chariots of Fire Vangelis, Michael Hoenig, Ralph Lundsten, even Jean Michel-Jarre.  Rather than the underground, which enjoys a healthy complement of dedicated curators and salvage operators, it’s the mainstream of that era that is truly lost, that in a stragne way seems even more exotic and remote in time.  

Kate Bush (2014)

KATE BUSH and her Never Never Pop
The Guardian, August 21 2014

by Simon Reynolds

In 2014, there is something unbelievable about the idea of Kate Bush as a pop star.  Did it really actually happen, that run of singles so strange and yet so strong they rose to the higher reaches of the hit parade, rubbing shoulders with Showaddywaddy and The Nolans on Top of the Pops?  How did such an unearthly voice and unleashed imagination ever infiltrate the mundane mainstream, get play-listed on daytime Radio One, profiled on Nationwide, parodied on Not the Nine O’Clock News?

The string of hits from “Wuthering Heights”  to “Cloudbusting” is almost unrivaled  for sustained brilliance and escalating oddness  - only The Beatles, from start to finish, and Bowie, from “Space Oddity” to “Fashion,” surpass it.

Some high points, year by year...

1978:  “Wuthering Heights” .  Gothic romance distilled into four-and-a-half minutes of gaseous rhapsody, this was released as her first single at Bush’s insistence in the face of opposition from seasoned and cautious EMI executives;  wilfulness vindicated by the month “Wuthering” spent at Number one. 

1979: “Them Heavy People” (the radio cut from the On Stage EP). Namedropping the Russian mystic Gurdjieff and Sufi  whirling dervishes,  a celebration of  being intellectually-emotionally expanded: “it’s nearly killing me ... what a lovely feeling”.

1980: “Breathing,”   a chillingly claustrophobic sound-picture of  slow death through radiation sickness after the Bomb drops:  “chips of plutonium/ are twinkling in every lung.”  Swiftly followed by “Army Dreamers”: perhaps the best,  certainly the most subtle of anti-war songs, inventing and rendering obsolete  Let England Shake a couple of decades ahead of schedule.

1981: “Sat In Your Lap”. Avant-pop stampede of pounding percussion and deranged shrieks, a sister-song to Public Image Ltd’s “Flowers of Romance”, but lyrically about the quest for Knowledge:  “I want to be a scholar!”.

1982: “The Dreaming”, Bush’s first real flop, but artistically a triumph: inspired by Australian aboriginal culture and music, it’s a Fairlight fairy-tale that used smashed-marble for percussion sounds and prophesized a completely alternate future for sampling-based pop than what would actually transpire.  

1985: “Running Up That Hill,” an ecstastic protest against the limits of identity and empathy, preempting Prince’s similarly inspired “If I Was Your Girlfriend” by a couple of years.  Swiftly followed by “Cloudbusting”, a song/video about the psychologist-turned-mystic Wilhelm Reich’s attempts to build a rain-making machine, as seen through the faithful eyes of small son Peter.

As words and as music, not one of these screams “hit single”.  But all but one of them were. 

Bush’s preeminence as the Goddess of  Artpop makes perfect sense, then.  It’s hardly surprising that her name gets reeled out, with varying degrees of appropriateness, as the ancestor for any new female artist trying to merge  glamour, conceptualism,  innovation, and autonomy. Sometimes there is a direct influence, or an undeniable resemblance:    Grimes, Julia Holter, FKA Twigs.

Strange as it may seem, though, Kate Bush was not always impregnably cool. In fact, despite her massive record sales and mainstream fame, she was not taken seriously or afforded much respect by critics or hip listeners in the late Seventies. 

This was partly a matter of timing. After a year of being developed by EMI (who funded her while she “grew up”, expanding her horizons and honing her craft) Bush emerged into a British music scene transformed by punk.  Both her sound and her look seemed conventionally feminine when juxtaposed with ferociously confrontational performers like Siouxsie Sioux and Poly Styrene, who shredded expectations of  how the female voice  should sound and who shatttered taboos with their lyrical content and appearance.   Bushs’  fantastical lyrics, influenced by children’s literature, esoteric mystical knowledge, daydreams, and the lore and legends of old Albion, seemed irrelevant and deficient in street-cred at a time of tower-block social realism and agit-prop.   Her odd combo of artiness and artlessness, and the way she came across in interviews—at once guileless and guarded—made her a target for music press mockery, for  crude and cruel dismissals of her music as a middlebrow soft option, easy listening with literary affectations.

Despite being as young or younger than, say, The Slits, Bush seemed Old Wave: she belonged with the generation of musicians who’d emerged during the Sixties (“boring old farts” as the punk press called them). Some of B.O.F’s were indeed her mentors, friends, and collaborators: David Gilmour, Peter Gabriel, Roy Harper.   Growing up, her sensibility was shaped  by her older brothers, in particular the musical tastes and spiritual interests of Jay, 13 years her senior and a true Sixties cat.

Punk often sneered at “art” as airy-fairy, bourgeois self-indulgence, but its ranks were full of art-school graduates and this artiness blossomed with the sound, design and stage presentation of bands like Wire and Talking Heads. But Bush’s seemed the wrong kind of “arty”: ornate rather than angular, overly decorative and decorous.  It was the sort of musically accomplished, well-arranged, album-oriented art-pop that EMI had been comfortable with since The Beatles and had pursued with Pink Floyd, Cockney Rebel, Queen. They signed Bush expressly as the first major British female exponent of this genteel genre.

And that’s where Kate Bush was situated on The Kick Inside and Lionheart, her first two albums: somewhere  at the cross-roads of singer-songwriter pop, the lighter side of prog, and the  highbrow end of glam. Like Bowie, she studied mime with Lindsay Kemp, took classes in dance, and made a series of striking, inventive  videos.  EMI’s Bob Mercer hailed Bush as “a completely audio visual artist” and spoke of the company’s intention to break her in America through television rather than radio (this, several years before MTV even existed).  Her one and only tour was a theatrical mega-production in the rigidly choreographed tradition of Diamond Dogs, all dancers and costume changes and no-expense-spared staging. Reviewing one of the 1979 concerts for NME, Charles Shaar Murray typified the general rock-press attitude towards Bush at that point, scornfully describing the show as a throw-back to “all the unpleasant aspects of David Bowie in the Mainman era....  [Bowie manager/Mainman boss] Tony DeFries would've loved you seven years ago, Kate, and seven years ago maybe I would've too. But these days I'm past the stage of admiring people desperate to dazzle and bemuse, and I wish you were past the stage of trying those tricks yourself.” Spectacle, in the immediate years after punk, was considered a narcissistic star trip, fundamentally non-egalitarian.

Abandoning the live arena altogether, Bush plunged deeper into the studio, exploring its capacities for illusion-spinning: a theatricality of the mind’s eye, conjured through sound.  Her music got more challenging, harder to ignore or deny, as she gradually assumed total control.  On 1980’s Never For Ever, Bush co-produces but is clearly calling the shots: the result is like the missing link between Laura Ashley and Laurie Anderson.  Two years later, the production and arrangement entirely in Bush’s hands, came her  wholly unfettered mistress-piece: The Dreaming.

Bush reveled in the empowerment, declaring that “the freedom you feel when you’re actually in control of your own music is fantastic” but giving the emotion a distinctly female inflection:  “as soon as you get your hands on the production, it becomes your baby. That’s really exciting for me, because you do everything for your own child” ”

Integral to her seizing  of the means of musical production was Bush’s ardent embrace of the Fairlight Sampler,  at that time a very expensive play-thing reserved for an elite of art-rock superstars such as  herself and Peter Gabriel. Years ahead of The Art of Noise or Mantronix, she became a sampling pioneer, at a time when very few women outside the realm of academic electronic composers  were involved with cutting-edge music-making technology.

Armed with the Fairlight and other state-of-the-art machines, Bush took her existing maximalist tendencies and pushed them further still, to the brink of overload.  It’s this too-muchness – the intricate excess of layers, details, twists, treatments – that makes The Dreaming such a delirious, head-spinning experience. Paradoxically, the effect of unruly profusion and rampant frenzy was born not through spontaneity and randomness but conscientiously focused assembly and obsessive-compulsive meticulousness.  It took a control freak to create such a freak-out.

Particularly arresting were the new uses Bush was making of her voice: tracks like “Pull Out The Pin” and “Suspended In Gaffa”  teemed with a panoply of exaggerated accents and jarring phrasings, as Bush applied demented thespian emphasis on particular words or syllables, and developed a whole new vocabulary of harsh shrieks and throat-scorched yelps. Emotions clashed or merged into hybrids  impossible to parse. And all this was before she let rip with the studio effects and the stereophonic trickery, as on “Leave It Open”, with its birds-on-helium twitters and  its main  vocal phased and plaited into infolded shapes.  Pretentious in the best sense of the word, Kate Bush in the early Eighties became one of those artists, like The Associates or Japan, that caused Radio One day-time deejays to titter nervously, or be openly derisive.

As the postpunk era gave way to the glossy, over-produced Eighties, suddenly Bush’s sumptuous soundscapes made more sense than they had during the era of 2-Tone and Joy Division.  Hounds of Love was both a commercial and critical smash.  For the first time, really, Bush was hip, raved about by music journalists without any hint of apologia or reservation. With bands like the Banshees and the Bunnymen opting for lavish orchestrations, Bush seemed less like a throwback to pre-punk times and more like a sort of posh auntie to the Goths.  Indeed she had spawned from the very same southern-edge-of-London suburbia as Siouxsie.

Of the ethereal-girl artists emerging in the mid-Eighties, Elizabeth Fraser was the most clearly indebted – indeed the frou-frou side of Cocteau Twins could be traced to a single song on Never For Ever, “Delius (Song of Summer)”.  Bjork’s starburst of vocal euphoria likewise owed much to Kate. Enya, formerly of Clannad, followed in Bush’s footsteps in her explorations of synths and sampling, as well as taking vocal multi-tracking to the dizzy limit.

The Nineties saw the arrival of Tori Amos, whose piano-driven confessionals blatantly drew on Bush’s  ornate early sound. But there were less obvious inheritors, too.  Touring their first album, Suede liked to air “Wuthering Heights” immediately before going onstage: Brett Anderson placed Bush in his personal trinity of utterly-English ancestors, alongside Bowie and Morrissey.  Esoteric-industrial duo Coil hailed Kate as “a very powerful witch”, possibly knowing about – or simply sensing – the Bush family’s shared enchantment with the ideas of Gurdjieff, who amongst other things explored the magical effects of  particular musical chords. Closeted fans started to emerge from the unlikeliest places: Johnny Rotten, for instance, gushed about the “beauty beyond belief” of Bush’s music.

But even as her deity status in the alternative-music pantheon gained lustre, Bush’s creative ouput dimmed:  album releases became sporadic, the gaps between grew longer and the impression made on public consciousness with each record fainter.  Just about everybody knows “Wuthering” and “Running,”  but how many common-or-garden pop punters could sing, or even name, a single off The Sensual World or The Red Shoes?  In the 2000s, Aerial and 50 Words For Snow, quiet records both,  received admiring notices, the kind of “glad you’re back” reviews that Iconic Artists receive as a  reward for a lifetime of achievement and the cumulative gratitude and affection  inspired thereby.

Meanwhile, as any kind of public figure, Bush virtually disappeared. 

It is striking how little we know about Kate Bush, how completely she’s preserved her privacy.

During the critical phase of their rise to fame and often for a long time after it was strictly necessary,  figures like Bowie, Eno or Morrissey made an art form out of the music paper interview, using it as a forum to expound ideas, to hone or extend the public persona, to engage in mischief or mystique.  But Bush never shone in that context. Interviews are a chore, a distraction from her real work, a waste of her time.  Faced by a journalist’s microphone,  Bush is reserved, dry, ungenerous – the exact opposite of how she is faced by a microphone in a recording studio.

I interviewed  Bush around The Red Shoes and found it a frustrating experience. It’s not that she was terse or tetchy; she answered every question, mostly at decent-enough length, and got evasive only       once or twice. But there was a glazed quality to the conversation,  in the sense of trance-like and mechanical, but also “glazed” like a ceramic film forming an invisible barrier.  There was a sense of non-encounter. I would attribute it to my own failings as an interviewer, except that my wife, far more adept at getting people to open up, had the exact same experience a month later. Fred Vermorel, the author of not one but two brilliantly unorthodox biographies of Bush, has written about the way “she will neutralise you by dissolving her presence in a polite fog." And if you look through the archive of her interviews, it’s clear she’s been doing that for years: it is striking how little of the vividness and exuberance of her music is allowed into the interviews.

In a 1993 TV doc, Bush spoke bluntly and almost disdainfully of her discomfort with interviews, her feeling that everything she has to say is in the work and that there it is said more eloquently than she could ever be in speech.  But the real issue, I suspect, is that to consent to an interview is to allow oneself to be framed and interpreted, to have your utterances snipped up and shunted around the page.  The obvious analogy would be a singer-songwriter who laid down the vocal melody but handed over the arrangement and production to someone else.  There’s a loss of control there. 

Still, it’s hard to think of an artist with such an amazing body of work who has produced such a small collection of quotable remarks. (Her only rival in this regard might be Prince). Here, to close, is one she gave me that’s not bad as a encapsulation of the spirit of Kate Bush and her Never Never Pop. 

"That's what all art's about - a sense of moving away from boundaries that you can't -  in real-life. Like a dancer is always trying to fly, really - to do something that's just not possible. But you try to do as much as you can within those physical boundaries. All art is like that: a form of exploration, of making up stories. Writing, film, sculpture, music: it's all make believe, really."