A celebration of music I've loved for a long time: electronic, synthesizer, new wave, post-punk, prog, soundtrack, avant-garde, industrial, ebm, and a lot more. Much of this material is long out of print. None of the links are stored on this blog; downloads are not my responsibility. If you like something then support the artist - if it's available, buy it.
The third tragic death early in 2011 is a difficult one to consider. Commenting on the passing of artists who have meant so much to me at a distance is hard enough, but to do so about someone I've known personally is far harder. Trish Keenan, singer with experimental electronic band Broadcast, died in Warwick hospital on January 14th from pneumonia after contracting swine flu on tour in Australia. She was just 42.
Since their first singles appeared in the mid-90s on Stereolab's Duophonic label, Broadcast steadily built a small but devoted cult following across the world. Their first album The Noise Made By People was released on Warp Records in 2000, followed by Haha Sound in 2003 and Tender Buttons in 2005. The rarities compilation The Future Crayon was released in 2006, and their last outing was the mini album Broadcast and The Focus Group Investigate Witch Cults of the Radio Age in 2009.
Their sound is hard to categorize, chock-full of competing currents - Stereolab to psychedelia, loose avant-garde abstractions to tightly disciplined krautrock, cut-down minimalism to lush soundtrack sweeps - all held together by Trish's beautiful voice. The band attracted attention from fans across all musical genres and some celebrity endorsements; among them Blur's Graham Coxon, singer/actress Zooey Deschanel and Simpsons creator Matt Groening, who included them among his choices when curating summer 2010's All Tomorrow's Parties festival in Somerset.
I knew Trish through non-musical circumstances, having taught her at Birmingham university on the Creative Writing BA. It's to my eternal regret that when she told me she was a singer I assumed - based on my own careless stereotype of her personality formed through assumptions about her writing style, mode of dress etc. - that she was in a folk band and gave it little further thought. Only after she had left the university and I saw her on the cover of The Wire magazine in 2009 did I realise she was in Broadcast; indeed, from 2004 she was one-half of the band with her partner James Cargill.
She was fiercely proud of her Midlands working-class roots, had strong opinions and could be forthright in presenting them, but she was so unaffected and egoless that it's no surprise she didn't mention Broadcast in our discussions. I wish she had; we had a far greater musical appreciation in common than I'd suspected. Although I wasn't a Broadcast fan at that time I'd heard a couple of tracks and would certainly have delved into their back catalogue to discover earlier just how good they were. It only registered after looking through their youtube videos that I'd actually caught the band's appearance on Jools Holland's TV show back in 2000, but of course I'd forgotten all about it when I met Trish several years later. After reading the Wire piece I did get their albums and became a fan belatedly.
One always assumes there will be time and opportunity to catch up again and rectify old mistakes but alas, in this instance there is none; a further example, should it be needed, of our precarious and fragile grip on this existence.
THIS is a link to download a single 66 minute mp3 file of Broadcast's penultimate concert, at the Hi-Fi club in Melbourne on December 9 2010. Sincere thanks to youtuber insleepsound for providing.
You can download the tremendous Haha Sound album HERE.
BROADCAST - HAHA SOUND 01. Colour Me In 02. Pendulum 03. Before We Begin 04. Valerie 05. Man Is Not A Bird 06. Minim 07. Lunch Hour Pops 08. Black Umbrellas 09. Ominous Cloud 10. Distorsion 11. Oh How I miss You 12. The Little Bell 13. Winter Now 14. Hawk
The following videos are: Pendulum, from Haha Sound; The Black Cat - directed by Trish herself - and America's Boy live at KCRW, both from Tender Buttons.
Another untimely death in early 2011 was that of virtuoso guitarist Gary Moore, who passed away from a heart attack in a Costa Brava hotel room on February 6th aged 58. Not only an ex-member of Thin Lizzy and Skid Row before a successful solo career, but also - and far more importantly for me - one quarter of jazz rock fusion supergroup Colosseum II. Not that you'd know it from many of the media obituaries, obsessed only with the mainstream - if they mention Colosseum II at all they usually do so in a single dismissive sentence, as a mere passing footnote in Moore's oeuvre. Despite CII's lack of commercial success, nothing could be further from the truth.
In 1977 and 1978 they were among my most indispensable listening experiences, introducing me to jazz rock and taking it to phenomenal levels of dynamic interplay; in their own way every bit as accomplished/important as King Crimson, ELP, Return To Forever, National Health, Focus, UK etc. When I heard a couple of tracks on Alan Freeman's Saturday afternoon Radio 1 show in 1977, I had to get the album immediately. At that time there were two; 1976's Strange New Flesh and that year's Electric Savage. While it has its moments, I think Flesh is the junior partner among their recordings, where they were finding their feet and developing a style, while Savage is the pinnacle of their achievements; white-hot, electric and savage.
The line-up was Jon Hiseman on drums & percussion, John Mole on bass, Don Airey on keyboards and Moore on guitars. A child prodigy, Airey began his rock career in Cozy Powell's band Hammer, and has also played with a host of heavy-rock giants like Black Sabbath, Rainbow and Deep Purple. Hiseman, considered by many 70s critics the premier jazz rock drummer in the world (I'd still go for Christian Vander of Magma), had been in the highly influential jazz fusion band Colosseum almost a decade earlier, but CII was a far harder proposition; faster, dirtier, more eclectic, driven by Airey and Moore's constant frenetic leadline duelling. Moore had to reinvent his guitar playing style to keep up with Airey's flying fingers, and the first tracks I heard, Intergalactic Strut and Desperado, are perhaps the greatest examples of this - the musical equivalent of today's 'bullet-time' superfast motion film sequences. I found it utterly thrilling that they could pull off such complex music with such dazzling speed and sheer dexterity and I can still remember the buzz quite clearly.
COLOSSEUM II - ELECTRIC SAVAGE 01. Put It This Way 02. All Skin and Bone 03. Rivers 04. The Scorch 05. Lament 06. Desperado 07. Am I 08. Intergalactic Strut
Colosseum II's third and last album, War Dance (1978) is more of the same but with, for me, a distinct lessening of the inspired genius of Electric Savage, although I accept that I may hold a minority view on this. Perhaps it's that Savage was recorded mainly live and captures a furious vitality that War Dance's extended studio time and layering diluted. Perhaps it's simply that Savage was the first CII album I heard and loved, and they tend to be the ones that really stay with you. Who knows? Whatever the reasons, it is among my key formative musical experiences. It provided another much-needed alternative/antidote to mainstream rock and pop, and introduced me to a genre I grew to love as I gradually discovered its best practitioners.
The live videos below, The Scorch (from Electric Savage) and The Inquisition (from War Dance), are from BBC radio/TV's Sight & Sound In Concert simultaneous broadcast on January 14th 1978. If you don't find them inspirational I think you may just be comatose.
Thin Lizzy and blues guitar legacy notwithstanding, Gary Moore will always be a fundamental part of CII & jazz rock fusion, and I'll take my opportunity to say thanks and goodbye on behalf of that genre and my 16 year-old self's sense of wonder. I read a description of him as a combination of Jeff Beck and John McLaughlin. Hell, I'd even add Al Di Meola and Carlos Santana, and that's as fitting an epitaph as I can think of.
I had to put the blog on hold for a long time because of insane work commitments but here it is again after a sad start to 2011 with the unfortunate, untimely deaths of three music luminaries. First, MICK KARN:
On January 4th, multi-instrumentalist Mick Karn died from cancer, aged 52. Born Andonis Michaelides on July 24 1958 in Cyprus, Karn will probably be remembered as Japan's bass guitarist but he also made a number of memorable solo and group project albums following Japan's acrimonious split in 1982 after a falling out with singer/frontman David Sylvian. His life and career have been eulogised widely, and rightly, but to me his passing is wistfully symbolic of the gradual severing of connections to a great and misunderstood era. Japan were widely dismissed as style-over-substance 'New Romantics' by commentators who couldn't see past the extravagant clothes and make-up, or listen past the first few notes, but there was much more substance to them than almost any other band of their type.
JAPAN: Steve Jansen, Richard Barbieri, David Sylvian, Mick Karn
Japan were a little too cerebral to match the success of their more commercial electro (Gary Numan, OMD), or New Romantic (Duran Duran, Adam & the Ants) peers, and a little too 'artistic', i.e. complicated, for the pure dance crowd; that said, they had a large and devoted following, and were of course huge in Japan. They moved away from their initial glam-tinged post-punk spikiness, reducing guitars in favour of atmospheric electronics, but their sound was always centred around Karn's inspired, mesmerizing, fluid fretless basslines.
Mick Karn's first solo album, Titles, was released on Virgin in 1982. He retained the services of two ex-Japan colleagues - percussionist Steve Jansen and keyboardist Richard Barbieri - with whom he would continue to collaborate regularly. More esoteric than Japan, Titles pivots upon Karn's unique bass playing, often situating it as a lead instrument, and features his virtuosity on woodwinds and keys.
MICK KARN - TITLES 01. Tribal Dawn 02. Lost Affections In A Room 03. Passion In Moisture 04. Weather the Windmill 05. Saviour Are You With Me? 06. Trust Me 07. Sensitive 08. Piper Blue 09. The Sound Of Waves
The magnificent single Sensitive is below:
After guest slots with the likes of Gary Numan (Dance) and Bill Nelson (Chimera), Karn's next album The Waking Hour was the fruit of a 1984 project called Dalis Car with ex-Bauhaus frontman Peter Murphy. It's strange, quirky, sparsely minimal, hypnotic, with tinges of Karn's solo arrangements behind Murphy's trademark vox, and it's a grower.
Karn produced his second solo album Dreams Of Reason Produce Monsters in 1987; certainly up to the quality of Titles and well worth seeking out. In 1991 the members of Japan reunited briefly for a one-off album as Rain Tree Crow - Sylvian did not want the old name used, and the music was very different from their previous incarnation - before, under Mick's name, Jansen, Barbieri and Karn released the stunning jazz fusion album Bestial Cluster in 1993. This video of the title track is from Dutch TV in 1997 and showcases three immensely talented musicians, augmented by Steven Wilson on guitar. Barbieri later became a member of Porcupine Tree, Wilson's art-prog rock band.
Karn continued to make music for as long as he could, both solo and a string of eclectic side projects. His final album The Concrete Twin was released in 2010.
Lastly, a dose of the mighty Japan in their heyday, with one of my favourite tracks of the era, Gentlemen Take Polaroids live on the Oil On Canvas dvd:
Karn was a tremendous musician/composer/arranger and I can think of no-one remotely like him, both in his overall stylings and the diverse musical paths he trod. Although he was a true virtuoso he couldn't read music and said he didn't really know what notes he was playing; it was just instinctive. I was lucky enough to catch Japan a few times and they remain among the greatest live experiences. One of my most spine-tingling memories from that period is of Karn, fretless held upright in front of his face, in jumpsuit and karate slippers, moving gracefully across the stage in a heel-toe-heel-toe motion. When the strobes shone on him it looked like he was floating from one side of the stage to the other.
That his latter years should have been lived out in relative poverty - so much so that a campaign was raised to bring him back from Cyprus and pay for cancer treatment in London - is a tragedy. In a just world he would have been at the very least comfortable through his musical talent and legacy. The guy could make a bass guitar sit up and talk like very few others and deserved much more recognition for it. The world is just too slow to tune into such innovators.
R.I.P. Mick. Your music enriched many lives, including mine. Thank you.
To find out more about Mick's music, and his sculpture, visit his site at http://www.mickkarn.net/ His autobiography, Japan and Self Existence, is recommended and available to buy from lulu.com here.
Riding the crest of the minimal wave... One of the most exciting electro labels in the world right now is New York's Wierd Records. Although it has only a small handful of acts on its roster, polymath artist/DJ Pieter Schoolwerth's brainchild is at the forefront of the new analogue bubblebath, promoting artists who use 'antique' synth sounds instead of digital, and in live performances eschew laptops in favour of spaghetti-wired mixing consoles & outboard FX. The label's mainstay is Sean McBride, otherwise known as Martial Canterel and one half (with his partner Liz Wendelbo) of Xeno & Oakland er. The overall Martial Canterel tone is sombre and the mood darkly melancholic; the minimal arrangements and live-in-the-studio recording techniques add to the DIY feel, but make no mistake - this material is considered, arranged and polished. McBride's approach is deceptively simple and very effective: catchy sequencing & arpeggiation; busy white noise generators and old-school drum machine percussion, memorable minor key riffs/breaks and echoing half-spoken, half-sung vox. The whole thing exudes a delightful 1979 throwback DIY ethos, and genuinely sounds like it could have been recorded back in the day by the likes of John Foxx, Chris Carter, Cabaret Voltaire or Vice Versa. It reminds one of ex-DNA member Robin Crutchfield's early 80s Dark Day albums Exterminating Angel and Window, and especially Tommi Stumpff's composition and production on German songstress Silvia's eponymous 1982 album.
Xeno & Oaklander has much the same sonic foundations as MC but the sound is fuller and more mellow with the addition of Wendelbo's lush string and pad chords and silky vocals. How they manage to get so much mileage and variety from essentially the same formula - and to sound so damn FRESH with it - is a thing of wonder, and beauty.
Although McBride & Wendelbo are clearly enamoured of a wide range of late 70s/early 80s EM artists and their sound references a 'Golden age' of electronics, it never appears derivative or plagiaristic. There is a joy in the purity of analogue timbres, both cold and warm, that seeps into the listener and transports them to a delirious hybrid of 'now' and 'then'. For me it recaptures the essence of those first minimal synth discoveries over 30 years ago that so few artists today can get close to, and if that's shameful nostalgia or wilful fancy on my part, I'm flat-out grateful for it.
There is a new Martial Canterel album due this year which is welcome as releases have been minimal: the rare self-issued cassettes Sister Age (2004) and Drilling Backwards (2006); limited issue LPs Confusing Outsides (2005) on Genetic and Austerton (2007) on Xanten; Refuge Underneath LP/CD (2007) on Wierd; Cruelty Frames Our Age CD-R (2008) on Xanten and the 2007 Tarantulla CD Views Beyond the City Wall, shared between MC and Silent Signals.
X & O live are a study in just getting on with things. Liz swings, sways and bops, losing herself in her vox and then adding crucial keyboard lines. Sean is an intriguing performer: a tall, gangly frame topped by an angular head. Oddly unhip smart casual attire, a touch rumpled at the edges. A one-man hive of activity, fiddling constantly with his synth & mixer settings and controlling most live sound elements. Instead of using a stand he just tucks the mic into a back pocket or under his arm. A cigarette is often clenched between his fingers. He seems happy to play in the tiny, cramped Wierd space with the audience only inches away. They are both is focused and sincere, and refreshingly free from pretension. No electronic act has had a more immediate impact on me for a long time and I hope to get to New York sometime to attend Schoolwerth's regular DJ/live Wednesday club nights at Wierd HQ, and of course catch MC and/or X & O...
Xeno & Oaklander have released two albums to date: Vigils (2006) on Xanten, and 2009's Sentinelle on Wierd. The sound is more mellow and less minimal, but will be instantly recognisable to anyone familiar with Martial Canterel. All of these albums are required listening and are out there in the blogosphere but no download links from me - please help the artists and the label by ordering direct from Wierd Records. This kind of music has long been marginalised by a mainstream industry and audience seemingly allergic to cerebral electronica outside a very narrow bandwidth, and needs all the support it can get to stay alive. Right, to the tracks/videos then. All are live recordings from performances at Wierd. The first two are from Martial Canterel: Windscreen, November 12 2008, and Occupy These Terms, August 19 2009 (uploaded in 1080p HD resolution). The last two are by Xeno & Oaklander: Blue Flower, October 28 2008, and Saracen, March 18 2009. These are among the most precious things I've heard for many a long day; Blue Flower especially is a soaring joy. This is live electronica as it should be delivered: with heart, skill, passion and intelligence.
Stop press: Xeno and Oaklander are playing a few British dates in April so I'll get to catch them sooner than I thought and I can't bloody wait: Brighton Cowley Club on April 14th, Nottingham Spanky Van Dykes on the 19th and hopefully Brixton Windmill on the 20th.
Severed Heads live Beck's Festival Bar, Hyde Park Barracks Sydney, 14 January 2010. Pic by Zoltan Blazer.
Of all the electro-geniuses (genii?) out there twiddling their knobs in basements and attics, Australian Tom Ellard stands (like many, largely unrecognised outside a hardcore of appreciators) at the top of the tree. He has ploughed a singular furrow welding together experimental and melodic electronics and quirky visuals since the late 70s in Sydney when he joined an anti-commercial 'band' called Mr & Mrs No-Smoking Sign. When original members Richard Fielding & Andrew Wright left, Ellard continued as Severed Heads. The early music was almost beyond labelling, incorporating elements of 'industrial' noise-generation, tape cutting & looping, early sampling of found sounds and electronic sound synthesis. As the project developed it became more 'conventional', employing song-structures and vocals in a more-or-less recognisable mutant electro pop style. Over the years he has been assisted by several fellow electro-travellers including Garry Bradbury, Paul Deering, Stephen R. Jones, inventor of one of the first video-synthesizers, and the late Simon (Insect-O-Cutor) Knuckey and Robert Racic.
For a long time Ellard has had a notoriously spiky, up and down relationship with his musical alter-ego, the music business and a fair few of his fans. The Heads supposedly signed off with a spectacular Sydney show in January but on the website www.sevcom.com Ellard pronounces the project as '...born 1979, died 2008.' In truth, he's viewed the Heads as an albatross and railed against the dying of the light for quite a while. He has accused certain post-punk new wave bands like New Order and Depeche Mode of continuing well past what he sees as their their sell-by date while at the same time bemoaning the critical establishment's failure to notice Severed Heads' activities since 1985. He frustratedly refers to fans and critics who prefer early Heads material as 'Cliffords' (the 79-85 compilation album was called Clifford Darling, Please Don't Live In the Past) whom he sees as burying their, er, heads in the sand and refusing to open up to the later, less abstract stuff. Seems like a case of having cake and eating it, but that is one of the most refreshing things about Tom Ellard: he speaks his mind whatever is on it and wears his heart on his sleeve. He now lectures at the University of New South Wales and, reading his blog, even this seems to have as many cons as pros. Perhaps he's just a frustrated rock star ;) or more likely, one of those people (like me, for sure) who never really found out what they wanted to do after they left school.
A major reason I and many Heads fans love the band so much is that for the best part of 30 years they forged a unique identity with heart, spleen and ideology, produced some of the most amazing electronic music ever heard (for me Ellard is THE master electro melodician; his trademark off-kilter basslines are the nuts and his minor-key harmonies are almost overwhelmingly beautiful) and continued through the wasteland of the late 80s/entire 90s into the noughties when doing so must have felt like banging their, er, heads against a bigger, harder wall each year. So I can certainly forgive his spikiness, I just wish he'd try to see it from a wider point of view. People's likes and dislikes are usually hardwired into them for very complex reasons and if anyone out there loves even one part of your oeuvre so much, it's a job well done in my book. Would that many of us had the talent and perseverance to produce something half as good...
From the very early days of the shared (with Rhythmyx Chymx) Ear Bitten album in 1980, through Terse Tapes cassette releases like Clean (1981), Blubberknife (1982) and Since the Accident (1983), Severed Heads did their own experimental thing like no-one else, with a determinedly DIY aesthetic. One track that Ellard created to fill space on Since the Accident became a double-edged sword: Dead Eyes Opened, featuring simple but killer interweaving sequences cradling Edgar Lustgarten's macabre spoken vocal from a cassette audiobook, has been the band's most consistently-loved cut ever since. This fuelled Ellard's frustration with the fandom and marketing side of making music - but quality is quality is quality. I'm guessing he's not a subscriber to the death of the author principle...
Subsequent releases opened the band up to international critical attention. City Slab Horror was released by UK label Ink Records in 1985 and live UK appearances followed, at London's ICA and Everyman Cinema. They went on a fraught tour in Canada and at home, but some good did emerge: Volition Records signed a deal for domestic releases and Nettwerk took on North American distribution. Clifford, Darling... and The Big Bigot soon appeared, followed in 1987 by Bad Mood Guy and 1989's Rotund For Success. The 90s proved traumatic, with record company indifference and financial difficulties to the fore. 1991's Cuisine included an experimental suite entitled Piscatorial, outlining schizophrenic tensions of trying to align & market the band's diverse musical styles. Nothing else appeared until 1994's (96 in the US) Gigapus album, which was a commercial disappointment. Ellard had long been interested in video technology and the album was reissued as Metapus, a limited 2 disc package with one disc a CD-ROM of video work. This ushered in a new era of embracing developments in internet and digital technology. Sick of trying to forge new deals, Ellard released 1998's Haul Ass album as a self-issued CD-R, ordered direct from the sevcom website. In the early 2000s a series of cd releases entitled Op (v1.0, v2.0 etc.) became available and he also issued DVD-Rs of new video material like Robot Peepshow. A film soundtrack (Illustrated Family Doctor) in 2004 was followed by a deal with James Nice at LTM to reissue Rotund For Success with remixes and extra tracks. The soundtrack even earned a record industry award - the first recognition of its kind.
In December 2005 I was fortunate enough to see Severed Heads live for the first (and, I guess, last) time at the BIMFest (Belgian Independent Music Festival) at Hof Ter Lo in Antwerp. I went over with a good friend who was lucky enough to have been at the Everyman Cinema gig in 85, the bastard - I couldn't go. Ellard was on great dry form that day and he and Alison Cole played a terrific set augmented by his surreal and blackly humorous video animations. Ellard's first words on stage were "And now, the comic relief"- he even got in a spike to start with. He followed this with "We're called 'Frank Sinatra.'" Severed Heads live Antwerp BIMFest 2005. Pics by Man On Wire.
I have a good quality audio file of the gig which I found on the sickness-abounds blog a few months ago. I notice the blog has been removed and a smaller version has replaced it - see my blog list - but the file is no longer there. If it is not forthcoming I'll upload it to a server myself for a future post. Some of the live tracks did appear on LTM's Viva Heads! cd in 2006. The same year, Sevcom released Under Gail Succubus packaged with Over Barbara Island, a round-up of new material. The 2cd remix compilation ComMerz appeared from LTM in 2007, and in 2008 Ellard released the mammoth 5-album vinyl early/rarities retrospective Adenoids, which has just appeared as a cd set available from sevcom.
This list is not exhaustive, and doesn't include side projects like Co Kla Coma, nor does it cover Ellard's occasional production roles for bands like Skinny Puppy and Single Gun Theory. It's been a 30 year career of pioneering music and video work so please do it justice by researching it further at http://sevcom.com and http://tomellard.com - also go to LTM's Severed Heads catalogue page HERE and bio page written by Bernie Krause HERE.
Tom Ellard has his own YouTube channel (of course), where you'll find some of his superb, unique home-made video gems. If he were Czech or similar his animations would have been enough to forge a cult career in their own right. The latest video additions are in HD - 720p max at the moment - paving the way for a mooted Blu-ray disc. This track, Sevs In Space, from the phenomenal Haul Ass album, is a glorious fusion of music & visuals. Velvet Numanesque chorus melodies and a crazy narrative concept based on a monumental flying head (yep, a homage to John Boorman's 1974 sf curio Zardoz) will do it for me every time.
Lastly, here are a couple of archival must-watches thanks to YouTuber 'QRhuggies': Severed Heads live in the studio on ABC's Rock Arena TV show from October 1986. The first video is 13 minutes and features the tracks Petrol, A Million Angels and Bless The House. The second clocks in at 15 minutes and features Big Blue Is Back, Harold & Cindy Hospital, Propellor and Halo. I defy any true fan of electronic music to watch these videos and listen to a Sevs album without getting hooked and diving head first into the whole shebang.
I've loved the Heads since Since the Accident and especially City Slab Horror, duly conforming to the Clifford stereotype by loving that album perhaps the most of all the band's output. I've lost count of the people I've introduced to Severed Heads down the years who wondered how come they'd never heard them before and bought their product. I hope the blogosphere serves to increase profiles and sales of artists like Szajner, Ellard and others featured on eclectic music blogs - even I'm not cynical enough to think that everyone who comes across the material is only destined to download it for free wherever they can find it. As Ellard himself put it a long time ago on an album sleevenote: 'Remember - no-one lost their job buying Severed Heads.'
