81>

E LE C T R O N I C SOU N D

772398 139013
9
THE ELECTRONIC MUSIC MAGA ZINE ISSUE 81 £6.99

FAUST
FRE A K TRONIC A 19 71−74

DEVO’S GERALD V CASALE / HAIKU SALUT / JANET BEAT / CHVRCHES / SARAH DAVACHI / NIK KERSHAW HAND OVER FIST
81 WELCOME TO

HELLO
ELECTRONIC SOUND

EDITOR Thanks to a Virgin Records marketing ruse, ownership of Faust’s 1973 album ‘The Faust Tapes’
Push was all but obligatory for any self-respecting head in the early 70s. ‘Dark Side Of The Moon’?
@pushtweeting Check. ’Tubular Bells’? Check. ‘The Faust Tapes’? Check.
The reason for the album’s popularity was simple. It cost just 49p, which was the same
DEPUTY EDITOR price as a single at that time. As a result, Virgin shifted 60,000 copies of the record, propelling
Mark Roland this mighty fine but mighty strange slice of prime German freaktronica to a lofty position in
@markroland101 the UK album charts. Well, it would have done, had the powers-that-be not decided the cheap
price rendered it ineligible for inclusion.
ART EDITOR Buried in that tale somewhere is a metaphor for Faust’s career. The most idiosyncratic of
Mark Hall the krautrock outfits, everything they did was filtered through their art smarts, with one-time
@hellomarkhall film journalist manager Uwe Nettelbeck anticipating the Paul Morley school of journo/band
blur, where creative statement, myth and controversy trumps any of the normal routes to
COMMISSIONING EDITOR commercial success.
Neil Mason As Bureau B prepare to release a chunky boxset of Faust’s early 70s output, this month’s
@neil_mason cover feature details the group’s chaotic reign of sonic terror, created partly in their house/
commune in rural Germany and partly in swanky studios alongside the likes of Mike Oldfield
EDITORIAL ASSISTANT and Donna Summer. It’s a story of counterculture abandon, disregard for music industry
Isaak Lewis-Smith standards, inter-band personality clashes on an epic scale, and the pursuit of bold and brazen
@isaakeles new sounds. It’s one heck of a read.
Once you’ve drawn breath after that, we think you’ll find lots of other enjoyable pieces in
SUB EDITORS this issue. Haiku Salut explain how they’ve made a hauntology album by accident and Canadian
Gill Mullins multi-instrumentalist Sarah Davachi reveals the impetus for her unique ambient compositions.
Susie Dawes Devo’s Jerry Casale discusses his controversial ’Jihad Jerry’ project and Sink Ya Teeth bass
player Gemma Cullingford talks about her debut solo album. We also have a terrific interview
with Janet Beat, a contemporary of Daphne Oram and Delia Derbyshire who is finally being
recognised for her pioneering electronic work, and an extract from ‘Renegade Snares’, a new
book tracing the development of drum ’n’ bass.
We’re pretty sure that lot will keep you going for a little while. We’d better leave you to
make a start on it.

Electronically yours
Push and Mark

EDITORIAL
editorial@electronicsound.co.uk
ADVERTISING
Chris Dawes
chris@electronicsound.co.uk
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electronicsound.co.uk/subscribe
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Heigham Street, Norwich, NR2 4TE
CONTRIBUTORS
Jeremy Allen, Joe Banks, Joel Benjamin, Ian Berriman, Bethan Cole, Stephen Dalton, Flore Diamant, Bob Fischer,
Claire Francis, Carl Griffin, Velimir Ilic, Jo Kendall, Andy Linehan, Finlay Milligan, Ben Murphy, Kris Needs,
Sharon O’Connell, Jo Hutton, Matt Parker, David Pollock, Fat Roland, Chris Roberts, Joe Silva, Dave Simpson,
Mat Smith, William Stokes, David Stubbs, James Thornhill, Neil Thomson, Spenser Tomson, Ben Willmott
© Electronic Sound 2021. No part of this magazine may be used or reproduced in any way without the prior
written consent of the publisher. We may occasionally use material we believe has been placed in the public
domain. Sometimes it is not possible to identify and contact the copyright holder. If you claim ownership of
something published by us, we will be happy to make the correct acknowledgement. All information is believed
to be correct at the time of publication and we cannot accept responsibility for any errors or inaccuracies there
may be in that information.

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A QUARTER-INCH MAGNETIC
TAPE, VIOLIN AND SHEET MUSIC
Orkney Islands
2 6 M AY 2 0 2 1

In June 2021, Erland Cooper signed a deal with the Mercury KX

label, putting him on a par with some very fine contemporary
composers including Ólafur Arnalds, Nainita Desai and Isobel
Waller-Bridge. Interesting news, but hardly hold the front page…
until you discover he’s been sitting on a big secret for over year.
He has just announced that his first classical piece, ‘Carve
The Runes Then Be Content With Silence’, is finished. Written
for solo violin and string ensemble over three movements
it celebrates George Mackay Brown, marking 100 years
since the Orcadian poet’s birth. It was recorded at the Royal
Conservatoire of Scotland with acclaimed violin soloist
Daniel Pioro and RCS string consort, Studio Collective. Sounds
great. It’s out in 2024. Whoah! Hold your horses. It’s out when?
“Each year for three years I’ve written and released an album
every spring and autumn,” says Erland. “To break that cycle,
I’ve planted one in the earth for three years.”
Yup, the master tape has been buried (“planted – buried
was a little… final”) somewhere on his beloved Orkney Islands
and he doesn’t intend on digging it up for a bit. You know, see
what happens…
The album was mastered onto quarter-inch tape, the digital
files were then destroyed and the recording “planted”, along
with an actual violin and the printed score, in a little ceremony
on 26 May 2021. The work, Erland says, has been left to be
“recomposed” by the earth and will be dug up and released in
two years, nine months, nine days, 18 hours, four minutes and
15 seconds, according to the countdown on his website at the
time of writing. Which begs the question, what on earth (ha!)
will it sound like after its time under the soil?
“The material on the tape might erode naturally, disintegrate
and create drops of silence, or the peaty soil might preserve it
perfectly well,” he muses. “It may or may not get better with
age. Alterations to the sound and music will be reincorporated
into the pages of a new score and live performance.”
Erland has also added a little jeopardy by leaving a trail
for anyone who fancies a treasure hunt. “This year, instead
of music, I will release a map,” he writes online. The map
contains clues to the tape’s location and will be available
via contentwithsilence.com. If the recording is found, the
successful hunter will be invited to Erland’s studio for the first
listen of the freshly unearthed (done it again!) work. The piece
will then be released exactly as it sounds straight from the soil.
What’s more, he’ll attempt to re-perform it live.
Worried you won’t remember all this? Fret not, pre-orders
are open already (see Rough Trade, Drift, Resident, Monorail).
If you’re anything like us you’ll probably bag one, forget all about
it and get a lovely surprise in a couple of years’ time. Meanwhile,
not one to twiddle his thumbs, Erland is heading out on a short
UK tour in October. Buckets and spades optional. For dates, see
erlandcooper.com
 OPENING SHOT

PHOTO: SAMUEL DAVIES

5
READER OFFER
Exclusive reader-only limited editions

HOW DO I GET THE ELECTRONIC SOUND READER OFFER?

A. Buy the latest issue and the Reader Offer directly from electronicsound.co.uk
as a Magazine & Music Bundle for £11.99

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every month for just £10.99. See electronicsound.co.uk/subscribe for details

C. Visit electronicsound.co.uk/faust to buy this release on its own for £7.99,

but be quick because stocks are strictly limited
Faust ‘J’ai Mal Aux Dents’ / ‘Ricochets’

READER OFFER
clear vinyl seven-inch

Faust men Jean-Hervé Péron and Hans-Joachim Irmler

talk through the two tracks from ‘The Faust Tapes’
featured on this month’s exclusive seven-inch

‘J’AI MAL AUX DENTS’ ‘RICOCHETS’

Jean-Hervé: “‘J’ai Mal Aux Dents’ [‘I Have Toothache’] was recorded in
Wümme. Since we did this song, it has been covered many times. I especially
love the version by Ectogram, who were this great band from Wales. And I
really dig that sax! I love the way Gunther Wüsthoff used to play sax. The end
riff on ‘It’s A Rainy Day, Sunshine Girl’ is fantastic! The solo on ‘Giggy Smile’
is brilliant too!”
Hans-Joachim: “I don’t think we had dental problems at that time, but we
wanted to describe a situation that you could find yourself in – something
very hard.”
Jean-Hervé: “I used these lyrics more as onomatopoeia to help me keep
the bass riff going throughout the song. Funnily enough, after a few decades,
this Dadaist nonsense phrase was misunderstood and became ‘Shempal
Buddha / Ship on a better sea’, a spiritual meaning neither apparent to the
senses nor obvious to the intelligence at the time. Which I find absolutely
fascinating, far more interesting than ‘J’ai mal aux dents / J’ai mal aux pieds
aussi’ [‘I have toothache / I have sore feet as well’]. Songs seem to take on
lives of their own sometimes.”
Hans-Joachim: “This track started with one of my machines and we then
added some of the soft mixes to it.”
Jean-Hervé: “‘Ricochets’ was the result of one of hundreds of experimental
moments we had in Wümme. I can definitely identify Rudolf Sosna again on
this, that’s for sure. Did he do this alone, overdubbing his own playing? I know
Rudolf invested a tremendous amount of work and was the largest contributor
to ‘The Faust Tapes’. The whole of the first side of the album is possibly him
alone. Rudolf has passed now, but if he was here he would have given you
a perfect, poetic and very long explanation of this track. There’s definitely
one of the black boxes created by our engineer Kurt Graupner doing magical
tricks here. We were able to easily pan any sound using one of the five pedals.
Thanks Kurt!”
Hans-Joachim: “I didn’t know the name of this song. I just know it is part of
‘The Faust Tapes’ [the tracks weren’t titled on the original 1973 album]. I think
Mr Péron wanted to name it for some personal reason. I think he had to name
it in order to give it to someone.”

Hans-Joachim: “The back-and-forth of the English and the French lyrics

might have been a sort of challenge. But I also wonder if it might have come
from a conversation we heard?”

Jean-Hervé: “That’s what happens when you travel a lot [laughs]. There
is no special reason for the two languages and I sometimes even sing it in
German. The English lyrics were sung by Rudolf Sosna, our guitarist and
pianist. I sang the French part because French is my mother tongue, so it
obviously comes naturally to me.” 7
THE FRONT

3 Welcome
4 Opening Shot
6 Reader Offer
11 Delay Grounds
12 Chvrches
16 Save Our Sounds
17 Cahill/Costello
20 Von Südenfed
23 Faithful Johannes
24 Nik Kershaw
27 The Ümlauts
28 Jack Dangers

FEATURES

30 Faust
44 Haiku Salut
50 Devo’s Gerald V Casale
56 Gemma Cullingford
60 Renegade Snares
64 Janet Beat
68 Sarah Davachi
 CONTENTS
THE BACK

72 Saint Etienne
74 Suuns, Blak Saagan, Gaspar Claus, Steve Cobby
75 Park Hye Jin, Son Of Chi & Radboud Mens, Body Corp, EmT
76 Devendra Banhart & Noah Georgeson, Soccer96,
Dereck Higgins, Pharagonesia
77 Bruno Bavota, Jane And Barton, Muslimgauze,
Benjamin Lew / Steven Brown
78 Equations Collective, RP Boo, Robert Curgenven, R.Seiliog
79 Machinefabriek, VARIÁT, Shuttle358, Trifecta
80 Pearl & The Oysters, From Nursery To Misery, Yann Tiersen,
Love-Songs & U Schütte
81 Field Works, Heliochrysum, Scanner, Paul Fishman
82 Glenn Fallows & Mark Treffel, aAirial, Harmonious Thelonious,
CM Von Hausswolff & Chandra Shukla
83 Maston, Greg Nieuwsma, Candlesnuffer, Heron & Crane
84 Nicolas Bernier + Simon Trottier, Best Available Technology,
Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan
85 ‘Spaciousness 2’, The Bug, Space Afrika
86 Shire T, Van Der Graaf Generator, Max Richter
87 Immersion
88 Space Raiders, Blancmange
89 Lee Gamble, Richard Pike, Super Furry Animals
90 Nite Jewel, ‘Caves’, Stephen Prince
91 Anna Meredith, A Year In The Country
92 Alice Hubble
93 Zyklus, The Limiñanas / Laurent Garnier,
Chora(s)san Time-Court Mirage
94 Spiritualized, FS Blumm & Nils Frahm, John Vanderslice
95 Public Service Broadcasting, Justice
96 Stockists
98 Fat Roland 9
CONTROL FREAK
Customisable controllers
from Ontario

If you work in a creative virtual

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The tiles can be easily assembled
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or quantity, and support easy
integration and intuitive touch
control navigation with your chosen
software. Modules are available to
purchase individually or in ready-
made sets, though we’re particularly
intrigued by the Orbiter module:
a pressure-sensitive disc and
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for precise control in X/Y. Console
packages range from $399 to $799,
while individual modules start at $99.
monogramcc.com
 THE FRONT
PULSE

DELAY GROUNDS
Fast-rising Bristol-based studio tinkerer

WHO THEY?
Having previously played in various psych bands, Bristolian
Patrick Tipler (aka Delay Grounds) came to prominence
with a debut pair of EPs – 2020’s ‘Onomatopoeia’ and this
year’s ‘Upcycling’. Reflecting his synth obsession and love
of tinkering in the studio, both announced him as a cutting-
edge producer and sound designer, and a major new talent
to boot.

WHY DELAY GROUNDS?

Released on Barcelona’s Lapsus label, Tipler’s latest
five-tracker, ‘Genus’, sees him build on the momentum of
those earlier releases. Channelling the anxiety, vulnerability
and grief he felt during lockdown, the EP goes large
on thrilling atmospherics and glitchy, playful hues, its
“astral” electronica veering off into avant-techno and IDM
territory. “The process of making music was the only place
I felt comfortable ‘talking’ about how I was feeling,” says
Tipler. “Listening back to ‘Genus’ now, I’m like, ‘Wow, it all
came out on this record’.” He cites arch-experimentalists
Can, the oscillating atmospherics of Broadcast (“It’s that
grit-in-the-pearl beauty of undulating feedback, tape hiss
and reverb”) and the euphoric psych of Animal Collective as
major inspirations. And you can hear their influence seeping
into the sonic minutiae of ‘Genus’, on tracks such as ‘Origin’
and ‘Soft Detach’.

TELL US MORE…
Electronic music has already come to define him in
unforeseen ways. “It’s taught me so much about myself
just because I find making it so difficult,” he says. “I’ve had
to totally rethink everything I thought I knew about music,
but through the struggle of the process, I’ve really found
myself.” With live dates and more releases in the works –
he’s currently using his Instagram feed as a sound source,
intriguingly – it’s going to be exciting seeing how he evolves
from here.

VELIMIR ILIC

‘Genus’ is released by Lapsus on 17 September

11
MIC CHECK
Dynamic pro audio for podcasters
If you’re on the lookout for an affordable podcasting mic that
doesn’t compromise on quality, start counting your change.
Whether you’re a beginner or upgrading, Audio-Technica’s
new AT2040 microphone – priced at £89 – comes as close to
professional broadcast standard as you’re going to get for less
than £100, without the need for a flashy studio. Set-up is quick
and easy, and as a dynamic mic, it’ll help reduce external noise
in an untreated recording room. With an internal filter that
helps to minimise annoying pops, it delivers a warm, smooth
and natural sound, and its hypercardioid polar pattern promises
tight, directional pick-up. Also included is an integrated shock
mount, which blocks any vibrations and unwanted noise that
could be transmitted through the mic itself, and there’s a
pivoting stand mount, too. Very handy. Whatever your content
creation, this comes highly recommended. audio-technica.com
FACTORY OF FICTION
The life of Tony Wilson finally goes to print
If you had to select one person to pen the biography of Factory
founder Tony Wilson, Paul Morley would likely top the list. He
was after all in the front seat for the wild ride, and puts it all to
work in ‘From Manchester With Love: The Life And Opinions of
Tony Wilson’, which arrives this October on Faber.
“This book has, on paper, taken me ten years to write,” he
begins. You soon realise why. It’s far from your run-of-the-mill
bio, and takes Morley’s house style of pulling anything and
everything into the mix. Written in three parts and with
a whopping 51 chapters, Morley’s story rattles through ‘Salford,
Marple And Busy Being Born’ to ‘Debating, Grammar School
And The Beatles’, and within the blink of an eye you’re already
on Chapter 13 – ‘An Aside, Arguments, Acid, Richard And Judy,
Making Friends And Getting Married’.
Part Two covers The Sex Pistols and ‘The Greatest Gig Of
All Time’, while Part Three – the longest at 300 pages – covers
everything from the moment they met to Tony’s death in 2007.
“After he died, within hours, it seemed like minutes,” writes
Morley, “I was inevitably called onto live television – his
element, the media man being honoured by the media – hoping
I could do him, and all the insides and outsides of his being, the
good things and bad things that made him such a compelling
figure, some kind of justice. I ended up in this position because
whatever else I did or wrote or became, it was my job to write
and talk about Tony Wilson; he had made sure of that.” You can
pick one up for £20 from any self-respecting retailer. faber.co.uk
UNDER
THE
INFLUENCE
Her early inspirations include Annie, Whitney
and… Louis. And if you’ve ever done something
unspeakable in a Glasgow urinal, then Chvrches’
Lauren Mayberry has a few things to say to you
INTERVIEW: BOB FISCHER
”AND I-I-I-I-I-I-I…”
“My mum always played Whitney in the house when we were kids and I was
deeply obsessed with the film ‘The Bodyguard’, which I don’t think is that
appropriate for a child. To me, she was just the most beautiful person. Full
stop. She had the voice, but I was also amazed by her skin, and when she
sang vibrato I’d think, ‘Even Whitney’s tongue is beautiful!’. To the child in me,
she was just perfect.
“Time has shown that she was one in a million. More than that. In primary
school, we had to write ‘What I Want To Do When I Grow Up’, and I said that
I either wanted to work at John Menzies, or be the person who got Whitney
Houston’s food shopping for her. Now I’ve experienced a tiny percentage of
that level of attention, it makes me sad that my childhood self clearly wanted
Whitney to be taken care of. And my adult self is sad that no one really did
take care of her.”
ANNIE LENNOX
“Something else my mum played a lot when I was young was Annie Lennox’s
album ‘Diva’. We listened to it on the way to school, on the way home, on
evenings and weekends. My older sister and I became so obsessed with it,
we tried to recreate the cover – which is such an amazing, striking image.
We were at home, and I remember having a red scarf wrapped around my
head and lipstick all over my face, thinking, ‘Yes! We’ve nailed it’. As an adult,
I know that Annie Lennox is really fucking cool. As a kid I didn’t pick up on
that, but I guess it’s an early example of art making you feel something and
want to do something. The seed was sown.
“And then we worked with Dave Stewart around the time of the last
Chvrches album. We were having dinner and Dave said, ‘By the way, Annie’s
coming down’. I almost fell off my chair. She was incredibly lovely, thoughtful,
intelligent and kind, but I didn’t tell her that I’d once dressed up as the cover of
‘Diva’. I tried not to be weird. I didn’t want to make her feel weird. I just stared
at her, then looked away when she looked over… [Laughs]”

‘10 THINGS I HATE ABOUT YOU’
“When you talk about feminism, people always want you to have an intense
academic discovery story. But my 12-year-old entry level was the film
‘10 Things I Hate About You’. I remember leaving the cinema thinking, ‘Kat
Stratford is the coolest person I’ve ever seen in my life’. She reads ‘The
Bell Jar’. And Heath Ledger’s character is talking about a band, and he says,
‘They’re no Raincoats or Bikini Kill, but they’re OK’. They’re all Hollywood
versions of the discussion, but at that age I’d never heard about any of
these things.
“The script is based on ‘The Taming Of The Shrew’, and it has a knowing
intelligence. I think I might be the reason Borders bookshop in Glasgow went
bust, because I’d go there and read all their feminist books in the seating
area, then put them back. And now, I love the idea that 12-year-old girls going
to Taylor Swift shows might pick up the same message. I’ve grown up to be
a cantankerous and rage-filled woman, and I found that from a teen movie.
[Laughs] You get there how you get there.”
SHE BANGS THE DRUMS
“I learned to play the drums when I was 14 because I was into bands like
Jimmy Eat World and Foo Fighters. But also because I was doing Higher music
at High School in Scotland…
“We needed to be able to perform with two instruments, and I didn’t want
my two to be piano and voice. I thought singing was deeply embarrassing
and I wasn’t very good at it. I didn’t want to spend a year singing in front of
roomfuls of people and a board of examiners. So I thought if I learned drums
over the course of the summer, then I would never have to sing in front of
people again.
“That plan did not work out. But it’s interesting to look back. It was
about insecurity and lack of confidence, and I’ve had to work on that a lot –
the idea of standing in front of people, wanting to be the centre of attention.
With Chvrches, I’ve had to figure out how to do that.”
THE FRONT
PHOTO: SEBAS TIAN MLYNARSKI & KE VIN J THOMSON
LOUIS THEROUX
“I studied journalism at university because I was obsessed with Louis
Theroux. My entry essay was about Louis, Nick Broomfield and Jon Snow
from ‘Channel 4 News’. But Louis was my favourite, because he approaches
his interviews with both curiosity and empathy, and the subjects he covers
are so broad. For any creative person, trying to understand people is a big
part of what we do. Chvrches’ music has nothing to do with Louis Theroux’s
documentaries, but I feel it’s all motivated by the same stuff – why are we
the way we are? Why am I like this to you, and why are you like this to me?
“When I was trying to get into television, I never wanted to be a presenter.
I wanted to be involved with researching. Just as with the band I was in
before Chvrches, I was never the frontperson, I was playing drums and
keyboards. I guess you don’t know what’s good for you, really…”
BAR STOOLS
“I think you can immediately tell the difference between a musician who’s
worked a minimum wage job in a bar, and one who hasn’t. Even to this day,
when we have the longest Chvrches work days of our lives, I am not as dog-
fucking-tired as I was at the end of that. If you’re doing a job to pay for your
rent, there’s a different mentality to your music. It’s forged in a fire. You can’t
fuck around. And I think it informs how grateful you are, and how much you
want to work for it.
“Every time anyone says something about the band, I think, ‘You know
what? I cleaned a lot of fucking urinals to get to where I am, so I don’t feel
bad about it’. Maybe things look very shiny now, but I tell you… there needs
to be an academic study on why drunk men in Glasgow like to shit in urinals.
When we’re playing big shows I think, ‘Never forget where you come from’.
I have cleaned several turds out of urinals, and I feel like that’s the making
of the person.”
Chvrches’ new album ‘Screen Violence’ is out now on Virgin EMI 13
PEACE OFFERING
Good-looking garm,
direct from Moog HQ

The previous issue of Electronic

Sound saw Ryan Gosling gracing the
cover in a still from ‘Drive’, wearing
that cool silk bomber jacket. Now,
hands up who’s already rattled
through eBay for a cheap knock-off?
To save us all the bother, Moog have
come to the rescue with an equally
stylish alternative. Featuring a white
dove holding a patch cable in its
beak – representing “peace, love
and musical inspiration” – this black
lightweight Peace Dove bomber
jacket goes above and beyond a lot
of merch, in that it actually looks
pretty damn good. Just $65, too.
While you’re there, why not bag one
of Moog’s rather fetching reusable
water bottles ($25), or even a Cozy
bandana ($20). Bank account, go brrr.
moogmusic.com

GREEN REVOLUTION
Eco cans from Denmark put to the test
Copenhagen’s AIAIAI are on a mission to bring quality audio and sustainability
into the same conversation, as anyone who saw their recent collaboration
with Ninja Tune will know. The headphones in their flagship TMA-2 range are
totally modular, meaning that not only are they customisable, but you won’t
need to shell out on a whole new pair if you break any individual parts.
Unboxing the TMA-2 Studio and Studio XE models, the stylish and clever
packaging is impressive. Each component (the cable, speaker units and so on)
comes sealed in its own little tear-to-open pouch – made of recycled plastic,
of course – with just three steps for easy assembly. While featuring different
headband and earpad designs, both the Studio and Studio XE are driven by
a S05 speaker, whose 40mm diaphragm consists of bacterial cellulose – an
organic, biodegradable and acoustically rich compound that’s not made, but
grown. Wow. Comfortable, durable and light, both models are capable of crisp
highs, pronounced enough in the mid-range and nicely balanced on the bass.
It’s quite a feat to bring such a system to fruition without making it
impossibly fiddly, promising high performance while making it look cool. With
both the Studio and Studio XE, AIAIAI are making a strong argument for
professional and amateur listeners alike to opt into their vision of the future.
At £200 and £160 respectively, they’re hard to resist. aiaiai.audio
A KEY CHANGE
Precision typing that looks the part
Few things are more satisfying than the feel and sound of a good old reliable
mechanical keyboard, but things have moved on since the 90s. Enter WASD
Keyboards, a company specialising in blending retro style with some very
modern features.
For a start, their flagship V3 keyboard comes with German-engineered
gold-standard Cherry MX mechanical switches, giving them a 50 million
operation lifecycle (your standard affair only has 5 to 10 million, don’t you
know). On top of that it has nine different switch options for you to choose
from, such as the level of tactile feedback or whether there’s a click on
keypress. But you can also customise your key layout pretty much any way
you want, with a head-spinning array of colours to choose from for individual
keys and legends.
WASD also have some pre-made layouts for the less daring among us,
but another really nice touch is that there’s no glaring company logo printed
on each model. Prices start at $165 and you can add a hardwood wrist rest
for $65. wasdkeyboards.com
THE FRONT
UNNATURAL HISTORY
Access all areas in new Coil photo book
Often a group remembered for its tragedies, a new photography
book will certainly overturn a few assumptions about Coil.
‘Camera Light Oblivion’ features images taken by photographer
Ruth Bayer, a friend of Coil co-founder John Balance who
was granted behind-the-scenes access to three of Coil’s live
performances in London between 2000 and 2002. The group
– then consisting of Balance, Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson,
Ossian Brown and Thighpaulsandra – appear on stage in fluffy
angel costumes or blood-smeared skeleton outfits. Standard.
But the most striking images are captured offstage,
before and after each show. The four men appear in deep
concentration during soundcheck, fooling around in the green
room or painting each other’s toenails, their flamboyant suits
relaxed down around their waists. “Ruth’s photographs show
us that Coil was not simply a band,” writes Mark Pilkington from
publisher Strange Attractor, in his intro to the 160-page book.
“It was a family, one blessed, and cursed, with all the joys and
sorrows that bond carries with it.” Priced at £45 and limited to
500 copies, you know the drill. strangeattractor.co.uk
WORLD MUSIC
Global field recording project turns 21
Radio Aporee Maps is an online project dedicated to field
recording, phonography and “the art of listening”, as its German
creator Udo Noll puts it. After first appearing at the turn of the
millennium in the form of a primitive sound database, Aporee’s
current “soundmap” view was added in 2006, giving visitors
the ability to interactively scour the globe for recorded sounds,
which also come with detailed information on how they were
gathered. As long as you follow Aporee’s detailed guidelines,
anyone can share audio while exploring the thousands of
sounds available. One minute you could be listening to the
day-to-day activities going on in your local area, the next
you might hear trickling sounds of spring water in Niaqornat,
Greenland. It’s beguiling stuff. Follow Aporee’s Twitter account
(@unosonic) for updates of each new recording, and for more
information on how to upload your own contributions, head to
their website. aporee.org 15
SOS
The British Library’s Save Our Sounds project aims
to save UK recordings from extinction. Andy Linehan,
Curator of Popular Music, looks through some of
the archive’s priceless audio treasures. This month:
Digital Releases
LED THERE BE LIGHT
19th century lantern gets 21st century twist
New York’s Museum of Modern Art has quite a rigorous
two-stage vetting process when choosing items to sell via its
online Design Store. That said, it’s no surprise this LED Lantern
Speaker passed those tests with flying colours. Created by
Taiwanese designer Keen Hsu, its combination of “pleasing
nostalgia with cutting-edge innovation” sees the speaker
deliver omnidirectional sound via Bluetooth, while doubling
up as a retro-looking, hurricane lamp-inspired light source.
And thanks to its rechargeable battery and energy-efficient
LED, it promises five hours of audio playback plus seven hours
of ambient light. A micro USB cord for charging is also included.
With a splash-proof outer shell, this is an essential bit of
outdoor kit – an absolute steal at £100.99. Get one sorted for
that autumn staycation you’re planning. store.moma.org

The Save Our Sounds project has been running since 2017, resulting in
hundreds of thousands of recordings being digitised through the Unlocking
Our Sound Heritage programme. However, Save Our Sounds is not just about
preserving recordings on old formats, crucial as that work is. The project also
seeks to ensure that current releases are collected by the British Library’s
Sound Archive and become part of the nation’s audio heritage.
For many years, record labels have been sending their releases to
the archive as a matter of course, and this continues to happen, but the
move away from physical products in recent years led to many digital-only
recordings not being filed. One of the goals of the Save Our Sounds project,
therefore, was to establish a way of collecting, cataloguing and storing
digital releases.
The Sound Archive had already been in discussion with Beggars Group
(which includes labels such as 4AD, Rough Trade and XL Recordings) about
archiving their output. They agreed to assist in sending their releases digitally
using the DDEX system.
This system ensures that the data describing the recordings – such as
artist, title and label – is contained in an XML file as part of the delivery,
and that the presentation is consistent across all releases. This allows the
Sound Archive to automatically extract the relevant information to generate
a catalogue entry for the recording and link it to the sound file in our digital
store, without the need for any human intervention.
This arrangement has now been operating for a number of years, securing
many thousands of releases from various labels along the way. Additionally,
it is recognised that not all digital recordings – particularly those from the
smaller independents and self-releasing artists – use the DDEX system.
So Save Our Sounds has also developed a Manual Submission Portal, to allow
approved labels and individuals to upload their digital tracks and relevant
information directly. So, the archive is saving sounds from the present as well
as the past, for the benefit of future generations.

For more about Save Our Sounds visit bl.uk/save-our-sounds

 THE FRONT
Richard Norris

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PULSE

CAHILL/COSTELLO
Glasgow’s ambient improv unit

WHO THEY?
Cahill/Costello is the eponymous pairing of classical and
contemporary guitarist Kevin Daniel Cahill and drummer
Graham Costello. The Glasgow-based pair met back in 2012
at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and had collaborated
on various projects, but it wasn’t until late 2019 that they
came together and began making lush, free-form ambient
music as an alliteratively-named duo.

WHY CAHILL/COSTELLO?
Their first single, the seven-minute long ‘Io II’, came out
last year and is an excellent introduction to Cahill/Costello’s
unique musical blueprint. The track is named after one
of Jupiter’s moons and was the result of an improvised
recording session. Within its gentle, hushed soundscape
there are elements of experimental jazz, post-rock
instrumentation, and handmade tape loop effects,
creating an ethereal and emotive terrain that does seem
out of this world.

TELL US MORE…
The pair’s debut album ‘Offworld’ certainly delivers on the
promise we first glimpsed on ‘Io II’. A remarkably self-
assured long-player full of dreamy electro-ambient textures,
it was recorded at a studio in Sanna, Scotland, the most
westerly point of mainland Britain. They spent a week in
this remote location “living together, rehearsing, recording,
and fishing” – a relaxing scene that filters into the minimal
and calming nature of the album’s nine compositions. The
title track creates deep sonic space through alluring drum
flutters, barely-there tape crackles, and spidery guitar lines.
The brief burst of drum rolls on ‘And It Was Not Meant That
We Should Voyage Far’ is the duo at their most rousing,
while the tender echo and yearning, mesmeric guitar of
‘Pavan II’ is the perfect incantation of Scotland’s windswept,
secluded coastal vistas by two artists making a mark on the
country’s contemporary music scene.

CLAIRE FRANCIS

‘Offworld’ is out now on Gearbox

17
IN THE FRAME
Bluetooth makes a spectacle of itself

The majority of people in the UK wear glasses, so it’s surprising that very little has changed
in how we use them. There is Google Glass of course, the wearable computer which has
pivoted away from the consumer market as a workforce-oriented productivity tool, while
Bose have recently made strides by releasing frames with open-ear audio, though sadly the
temples are a bit bulgy and weird-looking.
Enter Aether, whose new range of audio specs look the part and promise “immaculate
call clarity”. Unboxing a pair (the S1 model), there’s a lot to be taken with. They look
very similar to regular frames, and the compact open-ear Bluetooth speakers are well
concealed. Technology-wise, there’s not much different going on here than what you’d
get with any pair of earbuds, but not having to fill your ears with ill-fitting plugs is a boon.
They’re definitely at their best when playing spoken word through them, so phone calls,
video conferencing and podcasts are great. Music sounds a bit thin, which is disappointing,
but being able to use the Couch to 5K app on a run – without earbuds falling out every five
minutes – more than makes up for it. You also get a chunky aluminium case that doubles
as a charger, giving the specs three hours of battery life with capacity for up to four
recharges. At €360, this is undoubtedly some of the best eye tech that we have seen.
aether-eyewear.com

SOMA LOVIN’
Touchy-feely sound art machine
Polish-Russian company Soma are unusual in that they have an extensive
manifesto committed to creating not just sound machines, but sound art.
It’s a philosophy that has given us a wonderful range of weird instruments,
the latest being the Enner. Featuring touch panels and a fun interface
designed by Danish sound artist SiSTOR, the synth’s eye-catching USP is
that its signals pass through – and are managed by – your body. Touching the
different spaces affects the output, as you become the matrix through which
the mixing, volume, timbre, feedback and other parameters of synthesis
occur. “Human skin has much more complex electric properties than we
think,” say Soma, and hearing the Enner, you’ll believe them – the possibilities
are endless. €440 plus shipping and fees? Yes please. somasynths.com
NINJA TUNER
Portable next-gen guitar tuning
Say what you will about U2, but securing The Edge’s endorsement for a novel
guitar gadget is surely no mean feat. “I use this Roadie 3 tuner every day,”
he says. And why wouldn’t he? With a gold medal at the London Design
Awards already under their belt, American-Lebanese developers Band
Industries know their stuff. The Roadie 3 is an automated handheld tuning
device that latches onto the geared pegs of any headstock – guitar, uke, banjo
et al – and tunes it at an efficient 110 rpm. With a full colour LCD display, 150+
built-in tunings and the capacity to create custom tunings, the Roadie 3 joins
the guitar-specific Roadie 2 and the Roadie Bass. You and your audience will
appreciate the £142 investment. roadiemusic.com
THE FRONT
PATCH PERFECT
Erica’s game-changing mixer
For modular synth purists, the difficulty of recreating a patch
is a big part of the medium’s charm and finesse. But in plain
sight of such tinkering, stalwart Latvian developers Erica
Synths have released the Desktop Matrix Mixer: a 16-input,
16-output patch matrix that opens up new worlds of flexibility
and recall in modular synthesis. Each of the mixer’s inputs can
be assigned to any of its outputs in seconds (that’s 256 possible
connections), so not only can patches be edited without
touching a cable, they can also be saved and returned to later
via a 254-pattern memory. “The development of the Mixer was
a logical consequent project after the SYNTRX, in which
we used the same technology,” explains Erica Synths’ Eliza
Aboltina. “A major drawback of performing with large modular
set-ups is the limited possibilities to quickly and effectively
diversify the sound. Matrix Mixer allows you to radically change
the patch with a single push of a button.“ With a random pattern
mode as well as the capability of receiving program changes via
MIDI, the €490 price tag is well worth swallowing. ericasynths.lv
BEYOND THE FOURTH WORLD
Posthumous diary entries from Jon Hassell
The legendary American trumpeter and composer Jon Hassell
passed away in June at the age of 84, leaving behind a notable
experimental discography of over 20 albums. But music wasn’t
the only form he experimented with. ‘Atmospherics’ is a 68-
page paperback collecting Hassell’s own writings about his
music, featuring essays and diary entry notes on some of his
most famous works, including 1978’s ‘Vernal Equinox’, 1981’s
‘Dream Theory In Malaya’, and 1999’s ‘Fascinoma’.
The pieces run like diary entries, with Hassell giving us
some true nuggets along the way. “Look no further than the
cover painting for the perfect reminder of flowers as sexual
strategies,” he muses on the sleeve of Miles Davis’ ‘Bitches
Brew’. Also included are some archive articles and photographs
put together by LA graphic designer Collin Fletcher, who calls
the book “an incredible insight into the mind of ‘Fourth World’
music, for both longtime followers and those who are just
now discovering Jon’s music”. The first edition is available
exclusively from Bleep and you can preorder your copy now
for £14.99. bleep.com 19
ELECTRIC AVENUE
Pressing play on gazillions of gadgets
“As soon as I plugged in my microphone and started wandering
around, I was drawn to the LEDs,” explains Brighton-based field
recordist and artist, Simon James. He’s telling us about ‘Electro
Smog’, his new mixed media project which explores the sounds
of the world’s biggest electronics market in Shenzhen, China.
It all began while James was visiting the country for another
project, but after catching wind of the market – described as
“geek heaven” – he went along with his LOM electromagnetic
microphone in tow. The recordings are nothing short of…
well, terrifying. The music warps and shrieks, like a dying robot.
“As each LED lights up in a pattern it’s a bit like a sequence
from an audio perspective,” he explains. “You’re picking up the
rhythm as electromagnetic sound rather than light.”
In addition to the recordings themselves – which arrive on
an upcycled USB stick in order to reduce the project’s energy
consumption – there’s also an English/Chinese language
booklet, featuring an interview with James and Angus Carlyle,
UAL’s Professor of Sound and Landscape, who contributes
a delightful Ballardian short story. Pick up the limited edition
USB/booklet for £25 – only 150 available, be quick – or buy it
digitally for £10. thesimonsound.bandcamp.com
STAND BY ME
A fine and upstanding turntable
After more than two years in the works, LA start up Fuse Audio
have duly answered the calls for an upright turntable that
almost no one was making, yet many will be tempted by. Yep,
their Vert model will play your vinyl standing up rather than
lying down. It does so via an auto balanced and weighted tone-
arm, and can play at three speeds (78 being the less common
one there) with a belt-driven motor and a premium ceramic
needle. This being an all-in-one system, not unlike those boxy
Crosley suitcase turntables you get, don’t expect the sound
to compete with your hi-fi. This is more a design statement,
though does come with a few in-built features that prove useful,
like Bluetooth, FM radio, USB and RCA cable inputs, plus an
alarm clock. It’s a beautiful piece of kit, with The Vert’s shell
made from ashtree wood, and though it’ll feel strange at first,
their standard edition costs $209 and is a total eye-catcher.
fuseaudio.net
TIME
MACHINE
What to make of the musical mind-melt that saw
The Fall’s Mark E Smith hook up with Düsseldorf
experimentalists Mouse On Mars? Jan St Werner
takes us behind the scenes with Von Südenfed
WORDS: JEREMY ALLEN
Eurovision and all its pageantry is not something you’d ordinarily associate
with Mark E Smith. But if the stars had aligned, Von Südenfed might have
represented the UK in Serbia in 2008, wowing the continent with the
surrealist wonder of ‘The Rhinohead’. While the “if” in that sentence is doing
some heavy lifting, the thought of the leader of The Fall standing onstage at
the Belgrade Arena, his foghorn vocalese coming out of every television set
across Europe, is just too delicious a spectacle not to consider for a moment.
Like Benny and Björn, Serge Gainsbourg and Mr Lordi before him, Smith
harboured secret ambitions to conquer the continent’s premier musical
tournament. That’s according to Jan St Werner of feted German electronic
outfit Mouse On Mars.
Werner and his bandmate Andi Toma memorably formed the short-lived
but jaw-droppingly brilliant Von Südenfed with Smith in the mid-2000s.
Was it a side-project? Was it a supergroup? Was it a collective? Whatever
it was, the dirty electronica left an indelible imprint on the careers of both
parties. It wasn’t The Fall mixed by Mouse On Mars, and it wasn’t Mouse
On Mars featuring Mark E Smith. It was Von Südenfed, a singular
collaboration that went for the jugular.
And somehow, Smith saw this Anglo-German alliance as a means of
conquering Europe.
“Mark’s dream was always to do Eurovision and we thought maybe we
could join the Eurovision Song Contest,” says Werner, cheerfully, on the
phone from Berlin.
As frontman of The Fall, the subversive and ever-changing Manchester
ragtag, Smith was always an outlier – contradictory by today’s standards
and driven by gut instinct and an absurdist world view. The idea of entering
Eurovision as Mark E Smith was perverse enough; entering it with Germans
was even more wonderfully unorthodox.
“For me, the whole thing was very Dadaesque,” says Werner. “He was
an enigma you couldn’t solve. I think that was what we really liked about
the project.”

Von Südenfed didn’t make it to Serbia, but they did go to Norway. Let’s
park the Time Machine on the lawn of the Bergen Kunsthall in early 2008,
and head in for one of the most bizarre gigs ever performed by humankind.
It’s a pristine, functionalist building they’re in, next to an idyllic fjord. The
Kunsthall is mainly used for contemporary art exhibitions, installations and
the odd music show. And speaking of odd, Smith is about to perform one of
his most off-the-wall sets ever. This, remember, is the man who in 1998 fought
his entire band onstage in New York.
“Mark wouldn’t come to the stage,” says Werner. “He stayed backstage,
but backstage was situated so you could look down onto the stage. He
opened a sliding door and was visible to the audience.” A microphone lead
was found that was long enough to stretch from the stage to the backstage
booth. “And his entourage kept a close eye to ensure that he wouldn’t
stumble or fall into the audience.”
Smith needed lyrics, and when somebody dutifully printed them out for
him, he then realised he didn’t have his reading glasses. What ensued was
the stuff of high art or utter madness, or both. Mouse On Mars’ manager was
drafted in to read Smith’s lyrics into his ear, which he would then disseminate
to the audience, slurring the words as the music galloped ahead without him.
“He’d be singing ‘The Rhinohead’ on delay,” laughs Werner, who says
that specific song was inspired by a visit Mark and his wife Elena paid to
the zoo, where Smith claimed he spotted a rhinoceros wearing a necklace.
“Everything was completely behind and not at all in sync with the music, but
it was so cool!”
For added visual entertainment, Von Südenfed invented an associated
band to travel with them – a troupe of three drag artists who mirrored the
three in the group. You can see Jonny Woo, Jeanette and Batty Lashes
in the video of ‘Fledermaus Can’t Get It’, and they’re also pictured on the
back sleeve of the ‘Tromatic Reflexxions’ LP. Dancing onstage, they would
keep the crowd moving and engaged, especially when Smith did one of his
disappearing acts.
THE FRONT
“Mark often went off,” says Werner. Each time Mark came back, people
would be cheering. They were happy when he was away, they were ecstatic
when he came back! I dunno, it was some weird magic.”
I tell Werner that the first time I saw the album cover, I’d assumed Mouse
On Mars had somehow convinced Smith to dress up in drag.
“Yeah, it was funny because that was Mark’s only concern,” he says.
“When we had the idea to put the drag artists on the cover he said, ‘What if
people think that’s us?’. He didn’t want that. He was happy to be affiliated
with them, and enjoyed having them there. He thought anything that helped
us get into Eurovision would be good.”
Despite being unable to control Smith, he looks back on the Bergen show
with great fondness.
“That performance was so intense and so weird. It was more like an art
performance or something, and the people really loved it. Everyone knew it
was a one-of-a-kind thing, so they completely accepted what happened. And
we were fine with it too because we had no expectations.”
Back at their studio in Cologne, how did Werner and Toma manage to
handle an artist who once sacked a sound engineer for eating a salad?
Werner says their secret weapon was Elena Poulou, Smith’s wife at the time,
who’d introduced them when they’d lived in the same complex in Düsseldorf
in the mid-90s. She knew when to call up and say, “Mark isn’t coming into the
studio today”. Smith was also perplexed by the pair, which he liked.
“I think that’s what he trusted,” says Werner, a truth appearing to hit him
as he says it. “He trusted us! That was it.”
While Von Südenfed had assumed they were “invincible” at the time,
according to Jan St Werner, Domino Records had to pull the plug due to
budgetary restraints. The band lost its impetus and ‘Tromatic Reflexxions’
remains their only album, though it’s quite a statement. The Eurovision dream
was never realised – Russia’s Dima Bilan won with ‘Believe’ in 2008 instead.
Eurovision winners are a “Dima” dozen, but there was only ever one
Mark E Smith. 21
HAVING YOUR COLLAR FELT
Sony’s neck speakers

When bone conductor headphones

first appeared, we eyed them
with mild suspicion. Headphones
that don’t go in your ears? Witchy
witchness. Try them, though, and it’s
hard to imagine heading out for a
run or ride without them.
At first sight, the new Sony
SRS-NB10 Wireless Neckband
seems similarly weirdy-woo. More
wearable speakers than headphones,
the obvious question is can’t
everyone hear them? Not quite,
as the audio is localised, with a
full-range speaker unit firing straight
up and into your ears, a trick that’s
pretty effective at low volumes.
There’s also passive radiators
embedded at the back of the unit to
offer up some bass richness.
Sold as “light and comfortable”,
they seem to be aimed at the WFH
market and, with the promise of
crystal-clear voice quality via two
top-notch mics, we can see how
they’d be good for those on wall-
to-wall calls all day long. They’re
Bluetooth, of course, splash-proof,
have a 20-hour battery life and they
only come in at £135. Worth a punt at
that price. sony.co.uk
 THE FRONT
PULSE

FAITHFUL JOHANNES
Knockabout Durham electropop, don’t stop

WHO THEY?
The Alan Bennett of hip hop, as nobody has ever called him.
But more fool them, it’s the perfect description. “I’ve read
a lot of his work out loud to my partner at bedtime,” admits
this softly-spoken Durham idler, also citing Victoria Wood,
US humourist David Sedaris and whimsical rapper Serengeti
as influences. He shares their collective obsession with the
intriguing minutiae of life. “I want to find a way to convey
how complex and beautiful the world is,” he ponders.
“And focusing on the little things seems the best way to
achieve that.”

WHY FAITHFUL JOHANNES?

There’s no shortage of “little things” on his new collection

cue records
cue records
‘Ken & Jean’, a bittersweet concept album about an on-off
middle-aged couple. “In 1991 they had a holiday on the
Med where Ken pretended to be a Hollywood actor and got
sceneshifting
scene shifting special treatment,” explains Johannes. “This became
machinemusic
machine music a hobby, and he began concocting schemes to blag
frametotoframe
frame frame anything from extra time at the bowling alley to a premature
centenarian’s telegram from the Queen.”
www.cuedotrecords.com
www.cuedotrecords.com
@cuedotrecords
cue @cuedotrecords TELL US MORE…
cue
The album, set a few years after Jean left Ken (“She did
a late-night runner from a holiday in North Yorkshire”),
is a beautiful confection of gentle breakbeats, farty synths,
1960s pop flourishes and Johannes’ “barely rap”: an
adorable mumble that reeks of tearooms, listless Tuesdays
and a very British brand of drizzle-soaked desperation.
“An actual couple called Ken and Jean drink in my local pub,”
he confesses. “But I only realised this afterwards.” Onstage,
Johannes is frequently accompanied by a frilly standard
lamp, an ironing board and a selection of hand-scrawled
placards. “Faithful Johannes” is, of course, a character
from a Brothers Grimm fairy tale. His real name is Tim.

BOB FISCHER

‘Ken & Jean’ is out now on Win Big

23
LANDMARKS
Synthpop legend Nik Kershaw talks us through his 1984 smash
hit ‘I Won’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me’
INTERVIEW: MAT SMITH
“‘I Won’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me’ went through various evolutions.
First of all, it was acoustic. Then I bought a Portastudio and I did a version in
1982 that was much more like a pop song, with most of the main elements of
the finished track. It was one of six songs I wrote and demoed to hawk around
record companies to try to get a deal – something which failed miserably.
“Eventually, I got picked up by MCA, and we went looking for a producer.
The first name out of the hat was Rupert Hine, who was working with Howard
Jones at the time. I remember going to Farmyard Studios and doing a version
of ‘I Won’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me’ with him. I loved it, and I thought
he was going to produce what became ‘Human Racing’, my debut album.
However, Charlie Eyre, my A&R at MCA absolutely hated Rupert’s mix.
After that, we hooked up with Peter Collins. We went into Sarm East Studios
in 1983 and started recording the album. With ‘I Won’t Let The Sun Go Down
On Me’, we basically just re-recorded the demo, part by part, but obviously
it sounded a lot better than it did on my Portastudio.
“We mixed that track so many times because Charlie was never happy
with it. He didn’t think that the chorus exploded in your face enough or that
the vocals were as loud as they should be. It wasn’t quite as much of a pop
anthem as it ended up. I hated the mix that Charlie liked, but we went with it
anyway. MCA released the song as a single in 1983, and it didn’t do well at
all. No one knew who I was and we didn’t seem to be able to get any interest
from anywhere. It was only when ‘Wouldn’t It Be Good’ came out that people
noticed me, so we released it for a second time in the July of 1984, and that’s
when it became a hit.
“Back then, I found it very difficult to write and sing pop lyrics, which are
mostly about shagging, or your girlfriend leaving you. I didn‘t feel connected
to that. ‘I Won’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me’ is actually a protest song. If
you can cast your mind back that far, CND was a big thing. We were all set
to get obliterated, and mutually assured destruction was uppermost in our
minds. That was the subject of the song. Originally, it was just me whingeing
in a Dylan-esque way. We all wanted to change the world back in the 1980s,
hence Live Aid and everything else, but now the song sounds a bit naive and
up itself to me.
“I chose to make a lot of my lyrics at the time as ambiguous and cryptic as
possible so that nobody found out that I was a fraud. I had terrible imposter
syndrome, so all of my lyrics are veiled in words to point the listener in the
opposite direction. Consequently, no one ever knew what ‘I Won’t Let The
Sun Go Down On Me’ was about. I didn’t go on Radio 1 and say, ‘Hey, this is
about the end of the world!’. I was so swept away with being famous and the
centre of attention that I forgot what it was supposed to be saying.
“Like a lot of artists, I have a love-hate relationship with my early hits.
You’re defined by these songs, but they’re only three minutes of music that
you did nearly 40 years ago. You want to be valued for what you’re doing
or who you are now. I think every artist goes through a stage of resenting
having to play them live, which is definitely where I was at the beginning of
this century. Whenever I played ‘I Won’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me’ live,
I would completely change it. It became a totally different beast, and the
audience would stand there going, ‘Huh?’.
 THE FRONT
MEAT YOUR MATCH
New card game based on notorious feuds

If you’ve graduated from ‘Go Fish!’, but ‘Cards Against Humanity’

leaves you with PTSD, we’ve got just the thing. ‘BEEF!’ is a new
card game from Rough Trade Books that has you trying to match
up society’s most notorious feuding couples. Designed for two
or more people, players essentially go through the cards and
try to amass as many correct couples as possible. And these
aren’t fictional nobodies, no sirree. East London-based designer
and illustrator Wilfrid Wood has gone straight to the nerve
ends of society, with couples like Rebekah Vardy and Coleen
“Wagatha Christie” Rooney, Princes Harry and William, Sartre
and Heidegger, plus “famous tease” Clive Anderson versus
The Bee Gees. There is supposedly a point to all this, as Wood
says it should provide catharsis for “popular culture’s endless
beefs”. Whatever, it’s rollicking good fun, and only £16.99.
roughtradebooks.com

“And then there was a point where I suddenly got it. I started doing
a couple of the 1980s tours, which I initially kicked and screamed against,
but eventually did them because I saw my mates from back in the day
having all the fun. Once I started doing those concerts, I figured out that all
of us performing on them and those who come to watch are really sharing
something together.
“Those people come to hear these songs. They’re probably reliving the
time when they were 15 or 16 years old. They’re fed up with having
a mortgage and three kids screaming at them, and they just want to escape GOING UNDERGROUND
back to their past for a couple of hours. So I thought to myself, ‘If they want
to hear that song, they almost certainly want to hear how it sounded when Illuminating new Nico biography
they first bought the record’. After that, I went back to doing it as close to the
original as possible and giving them that moment. There’s a moment in Jennifer Otter Bickerdike’s ‘You Are
“I’ve realised that ‘I Won’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me’ and all my old Beautiful And You Are Alone: The Biography Of Nico’ when
songs have become like little stepping stones that get put in during a set. a young Dylan mansplains German history to the singer, who,
Even when you’re playing to your own audience, who’ve probably bought your don’t you know, actually lived through it. Nico said her only
more recent records, you’ve still got those safe areas you can go to if their regret was being born a woman and not a man, and what comes
eyes start glazing over when you say, ‘Here’s one from my new album’. Not over strongly in this portrait is how women had to be dependent
to mention the fact that they’re responsible for my lifestyle and for putting on the male gatekeepers of the day if they were to achieve
my kids through university. I don’t have a problem at all playing any of those success. The book starts by finally establishing Nico’s birth
songs live now. My early hits have been really good to me, and I’ve found that date with brilliant first-hand research, before hurtling into the
respect for them.” details of her often traumatic transitions, from Christa Päfggen
to successful European model, and Velvets singer to post-punk
Nik Kershaw’s ‘Oxymoron’ album is out now on Audio Network icon. Published by Faber, get it on hardback for £20. faber.co.uk 25
TABLE MANNERS
Anniversary deck is a keeper

Last year saw Pro-Ject release their Debut Carbon EVO,

a turntable that had us purring. Its high-quality sound, swish
design and affordable price tag of £449 made it one of the buys
of the year. Now they have a newer model to show off. Released
to celebrate the Austrian company’s 30th birthday, the Debut
PRO is a slightly more expensive option, retailing at £699, but
it’s equally as covetable, with a chic black shell and sleek,
minimalist design.
This isn’t just an old turntable in new clothes. The Debut PRO
sounds clear and crisp, thanks to an anti-magnetic, precision-
balanced platter that helps to damp all resonances, a rigid
hybrid tonearm – ensuring perfect tracking – and a high-end
Pick It PRO cartridge, specially designed by Ortofon. With its
three-speed option, you can even dig out and play your old
shellac 78s. If you’re searching for an outstanding turntable at
a fraction of the cost of other audiophile brands, this should be
high on your list. project-audio.com
 THE FRONT
PULSE

THE ÜMLAUTS
Sehr gut art rock krautrock satirists

WHO THEY?
All hail the art school band. The art school in question
is Wimbledon, and the four art scamps responsible are
songwriters Alfred Leer and Oliver Offord, and co-
conspirators Annabelle Mödlinger and Maria Vittoria Faldini
who met while studying, cementing a pan-European identity
for a band inspired by the music of the northern European
electronic/experimental corridor of the 1970s. They clearly
share the same fascination with the era’s non-rock ’n’ roll,
non-US/UK experimentation that attracted Eno and Bowie
back in 1976, but mediated through nearly four decades of
mutation and celebration.

WHY THE ÜMLAUTS?

When the standout track of your debut EP is a sprightly
six minutes of motorik electronics, cheesy 70s organ and
moaned Nico-esque vocals called ‘Boiler Suits & Combat
Boots’, you’re certainly making quite a statement. It’s clearly
a reference to the very magnificent La Düsseldorf, the band
Klaus Dinger formed when Neu! dissolved. You can also
discern scraps of Faust, Kraftwerk, Kleenex, Delta Five and
The Raincoats in their make up, while they ’fess up to The
Fall, X-Ray Spex, Björk and The Knife.

TELL US MORE…
‘Um Politik’ and ‘Energy Plan’ share the post-punk,
Neue Deutsche Welle spirit, the latter exploding under
microwaved pressure. ‘Der Fuchs’ is a severe dark
dancefloor banger in the tradition of early acid house and
Deutsch Amerikanische Freundschaft, mostly instrumental
but slashed with savage spoken word. They’re at their most
exciting when Mödlinger and Faldini are intoning with their
magnificent indifference. The pair cite Joesph Beuys as
a hero, in case you needed any further context. You can hear
all this on their ‘Ü’ EP over on their Bandcamp, which you
should explore immediately.

MARK ROLAND

‘Ü’ is out now on PRAH Recordings

27
SCHOOL OF ELECTRONIC MUSIC
Resident archivist Jack Dangers talks to the animals
with Jim Nollman, whose 1982 album sees him playing
heavy metal guitar underwater to a pod of orcas
‘Playing Music With Animals: The Interspecies Communication Of Jim
Nollman With 300 Turkeys, 12 Wolves, 20 Orca Whales’ is the best field
recording album I have. The title says it all, really. This is Jim Nollman
singing and playing to, and with, various animals.
It starts off with him performing ‘Froggy Went A-Courting’ to 300 turkeys
who all start gobbling along with him. In the booklet that comes with the
album, he says he was once attacked by turkeys “for getting too frenetic”.
Then he plays a vihuela, a large 12-string mandolin-like instrument with
a bottleneck, to wolves who all howl along. He and cellist Sybl Glebow spent
five days in a wolf preserve trying to play with and record the wolves. They
really go for it when they hear a cello.
He plays a waterphone underwater to orcas. At one point, he plays
guitar through an underwater speaker and poses the question, are the
orcas teaching him their language? The proposition that orcas are capable
of language raised quite a controversy, when presented at a session of the
International Whaling Commission.
The track ‘Heavy Metal (Guitar/Orca)’ is part of a “dialogue” between
guitar and orcas which, he says, lasted for several hours. They seem buzzed
by the energy, though it’s not very heavy metal, really. ‘Orca Reggae’ isn’t
particularly reggae either. Nollman concludes that the orcas could learn the
rudiments of jazz improvisation given enough time.
‘Playing Music With Animals’ ends with ‘Music To Eat Thanksgiving Dinner
By’, a three-flute improvisation with the 300 turkeys edited from a two-hour
piece, which makes his position about animals and the interdependence of
species pretty clear.
The album is rare and sells for between £80 and £100. Like many releases
on the Folkways label, you used to be able to pick them up for a few dollars.
Even in the early days of eBay you could get them for five dollars. I knew
a guy once who worked in record distribution, and he would bring boxes of
sealed Folkways LPs and sell them to me for a dollar. So I collected all of their
electronic music albums and all the releases under their Science series.
Jim Nollman is still working on interspecies communication, and you can
catch up with his latest activities on his website interspecies.com
HANG TIME
Give your ‘phones the respect they deserve
Are you guilty of reaching for a pair of headphones you thought
had been left somewhere on your desk, only to find they’re
nowhere to be seen? Instead, they’re probably down the side
of the sofa, piled beneath a heap of magazines, or tangled up in
a mess of wires on the floor. It’s terrible etiquette, but thanks
to Grovemade, a Portland, Oregon-based office furniture and
accessories company, rehab is here. Their new headphone
stand not only corrects the issue of randomly discarding your
cans, but it also looks rather stylish on its own, too. At $150,
it’s not cheap, but it’s made from solid hardwood, full-grain
tanned leather and stainless steel, making it a statement piece
as well as a premium bit of kit. You have the option for either
walnut or maple woods, and as with all good-quality leather, its
natural imperfections will develop a “distinguished character”
with use, moulding around the shape of your headphones if used
consistently. At nine inches tall and reassuringly sturdy, it’s
suitable for most models, too. grovemade.com
JUNGLE BOOK
Underground 1990s novella resurfaces
Hot on the heels of reissued rave novel ‘Trip City’ comes another
fictional nightlife story, getting fresh treatment some 20 years
down the line. Set during a hectic weekend in the fast-rising
jungle scene of 1994, ‘Junglist’ is the coming of age tale of four
young black men – Meth, Q, Biggie and Craig – in the thick of
London’s musical inner-city life. The fruit of writer/director
Andrew “Two Fingas” Green and photojournalist Eddie “James
T Kirk” Otchere, it originally formed part of a series of pulp-
inspired contemporary novellas for publishing imprint Allen
& Unwin, though much of the first run was pulped (the irony,
right?) thanks to some legal action over an uncleared photo,
so it barely registered first time round. There’s a great new intro
by Sukhdev Sandhu, author, critic and professor at NYU, who
puts the whole thing into context, calling it “Vauxhall kosmische,
tower-block psychedelia”. If you were there, this will ring bells.
If you weren’t, it’s a fascinating snapshot into a truly wild world.
Out now on paperback for £10.99. repeaterbooks.com
 THE FRONT
GENTLEMAN TAKES POLAROIDS
New book of photography from Japan man

If you’re aware of David Sylvian’s 1984 book and exhibition

‘Perspectives – Polaroids 82-84’, which was made up of
Hockney-esque collages and acted as a curated diary of
Sylvian’s shift from pop pin-up to lone left-field artist, then his
latest project won’t come as a surprise.
‘ERR’ is a hefty 216-page photo book featuring pictures
captured using his iPhone between October 2019 and April 2020,
taken while on a meandering American road trip in search of
a new home after a stint living in Berlin. Sylvian chose to edit
them at the end of each day in whatever motel he was staying
in, and the images lean into the phone’s technical glitches,
enjoying the imperfections as much as the intentional shots.
The pandemic hit the USA during his mini-odyssey, giving the
distorted and beautiful imagery the sense of an arthouse road
movie, with Sylvian its detached and romantic narrator. Also
featuring text by Shinya Fujiwara and an original poem by
Hastings poet Daisy Lafarge, you can pre-order a copy now for
€109 via Berlin-based label, Grönland. davidsylvian.com

Three new all-analogue

Eurorack modules
expert-sleepers.co.uk

TAKING MINUTES
Clever voice recorder from China

A fact that any writer will attest to, patchy dictaphone

recordings and time-intensive interview transcripts will keep
you up at night. Luckily, Chinese company Mobvoi are in the
business of making clever voice-recognition tech capable of
turning audio into words. Their most recent product is the AI
Recorder, a nifty device that not only records high-quality
audio with automatic gain control and a noise-cancelling dual
mic system, but also automatically transcribes speech with an
alleged 94 per cent accuracy rate. The AI Recorder transfers
recordings over Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, holds 16GB of onboard
storage, and can record for 10 hours straight on a single battery
charge. Is the future here? Find out for £79.99. mobvoi.com 29
FREAK
POWER
 FAUST

Faust produced four albums of head-spinning

brilliance between 1971 and 1974. It might
have been five if half the band hadn’t been
carted off to jail. With a new boxset on the way,
we unravel the story of the German legends’
momentous reign of sonic terror. Forget
krautrock, this is freaktronica with bells on

WORDS: JEREMY ALLEN 31

 n 1974, five of the original six members of Faust assembled at Giorgio
Moroder’s Musicland Studios in Munich to work on their fifth album,

I which had the working title ‘Faust 5½’. It would prove to be their final
hurrah. Having lost a bandmate after their debut release and traversed
a tempestuous half a decade together, these 10 days would mark the
end of Faust in their first remarkable iteration.
With their long-serving engineer taking care of the technicalities, Musicland would
witness the seminal freaktronic outfit breaking new ground, concocting a heady brew of
white noise, experimental rock, quixotic jazz, and thunderous backbeats. It was a bold and
intoxicating cacophony that sounded like nothing else on earth at that point. Their closest
relatives might have been Can and Neu!, but Faust had been on their own path for a good
while now and they were largely free of whatever outside influences they’d once had.
‘Faust 5½’ was way ahead of its time. And as fate would have it, it wouldn’t be released
in its time either.

aust had ridden their luck since forming in Hamburg at the tail end of
the 1960s, jumping from one major record label to another, with two

F albums for Polydor in Germany and two for Richard Branson’s recently
launched Virgin imprint in the UK. But the making of ‘Faust IV’ had
seen them dissolve in acrimony as they somehow managed to fall out
with both Virgin and each other. Organist Hans-Joachim Irmler left
the UK in a fit of pique and returned home to Germany, with guitarist Rudolf Sosna doing
the same soon after. The band’s manager, Uwe Nettelbeck, decided to depart around this
time too.
Led by Jean-Hervé Péron, the group’s bassist and de facto frontman, the remaining
members picked up a couple of replacement musicians and went gallivanting across
Europe on a madcap tour. Once those shows were over, however, Faust were wrung out
and rudderless. They were as good as over.
A short time later, Jean-Hervé Péron found himself in the south of Germany, subsisting
on dog food and schnapps. Despite his frustration with the recording of ‘Faust IV’, he still
hoped to be able to return to the studio some day. Hans-Joachim Irmler, who wasn’t far
away from his erstwhile bandmate geographically, had similar yearnings. It was Hans-
Joachim who finally decided to put his feelings of antipathy aside and get the group back
together for one more record.
“I just thought, ‘OK, they’re all arseholes, but…’,” he says, laughing heartily down
the line from his studio in Scheer, a small town not far from the German-Swiss border.
“So I called them up.”
The band managed to secure some time at Musicland, the studio Giorgio Moroder had
opened in Munich a couple of years earlier, on the understanding that they would record
at night. They had to make way for Moroder’s latest protege, an Amercian singer called
Donna Summer, in the daytime.
“We started off by renting a farmyard here in the south,” continues Hans-Joachim.
“We stayed there and tried to figure out some parts. And then we were off to Munich.”
Faust’s time in the Bavarian capital has passed into legend. Musicland was housed
in the basement of the newly built Arabella-Hochhaus hotel, so the band thought it made
sense to book themselves some rooms. No matter that it was one of the city’s most
expensive places. No matter that they had no money. They were still signed to Virgin,
so the UK label would be picking up the bill. Or so they thought.
By day, they streaked around the corridors and made full use of the hotel’s facilities,
including ordering fillet steaks for their dogs on room service. By night, they headed down
to Musicland in the basement, using up miles and miles of magnetic tape as they worked
until dawn with their engineer Kurt Graupner at the controls. They continued in this vein
for more than a week.
“I suppose we did quite a chaotic thing,” admits Jean-Hervé Péron, speaking from his
farm near Hamburg. “We abused the hotel and the studio. And we were broke. We had no
money at all. Kurt was there the whole time, so we recorded every night. It was 10 days of
recording, with lots and lots of tapes. At some point, the hotel eventually said to us, ‘There
is a huge bill for this, who is going to pay?’. They were getting nervous. But we just said,
‘It’s OK, Virgin Records will pay’.”
But when the hotel got in touch with the label, they were told something different.
“I was thinking Richard Branson owed us a third record on Virgin,” says Hans-Joachim.
“But Branson refused to pay up. He said it was out of the question.”
“We could hear the hotel on the phone to Virgin” adds Jean-Hervé. “While they were
talking, we put all of our gear into my BRS truck. Kurt Graupner had already left by now, so
we asked our roadie, a young guy called Rudy, who was only about 17 or 18 at the time, to
 FAUST
take the tapes. So Rudy got into the truck and drove away. He smashed through the barrier FAUST AMONG EQUAL S
of the hotel and disappeared.”
Extracts of the record that should have been ‘Faust 5½’ have appeared on various Faust JEAN-HERVÉ
compilations over the decades, including ‘Munic & Elsewhere’ and ‘71 Minutes Of…’, with PÉRON
a few pieces also surfacing via the internet. But now, for the very first time, the tapes have
been restored and the album is about to be released in its entirety, approved by the band Jean-Hervé Péron was born in
and close to how Hans-Joachim Irmler mixed it in Munich, with both his hands and his feet Morocco, though its significance to
on the faders of the desk. his story is slight according to the
“The tapes were lying in cardboard boxes in some damp shed or garage in Lower Saxony man himself. “Yes, it’s true, I was
or Schleswig-Holstein,” says synth and sax man Gunther Wüsthoff. born in Casablanca, because you
The band have changed the title of the album from ‘Faust 5½’ to ‘Punkt’, and it’s being can’t really choose the place you are
released as part of ‘Faust 1971-1974’, a mammoth boxset from Bureau B Records. As well born. My mama was there for some
as ‘Punkt’, the collection includes Faust’s first four albums and two further long-players, reason, my papa was there for some
‘Momentaufnahme I’ and ‘Momentaufnahme II’ (‘Snapshot I’ and Snapshot II’), which reason. It was 1949, so the war was
are full of electrifying songs and elongated sketches, many of them previously unheard. over.” In the early 1950s, the family
The vinyl version also includes two seven-inch singles, ‘Lieber Herr Deutschland’ and moved to Cherbourg in Normandy,
‘So Far’. where Jean-Hervé grew up. After
After almost half a century, ‘Faust 1971-1974’ is as close to a complete picture of those a period studying in America, he
early years as we’re ever likely to get. So why did it take so long? returned to Europe and spent a year
“Because Uwe Nettelbeck was no longer there,” says Gunther. “Who else should have drifting and busking until he found
initiated this?” his way to Hamburg. Faust’s bass
“But then at some point, Bureau B said to us, ‘Come on, let’s digitise all this material player and de facto frontman has
and make something out of it’,” says Jean-Hervé. “I had to sit in a studio in Hamburg and been there ever since. As well as
work out what was on those tapes. I think it was four or five days, listening to them 10 maintaining the most durable version
hours a day. It was highly emotional for me.” of Faust with Gunther Wüsthoff
Talking of high emotions, what happened at the Arabella-Hochhaus hotel after Rudy and Werner “Zappi” Diermaier, he
the roadie broke through the barrier in the truck? also played in the 1990s krautrock
“Hans-Joachim and Rudolf and myself were still there,” grins Jean-Hervé. “We said, supergroup Space Explosion with
‘OK, take us to jail, put us up against a wall, we are guilty’.” Zappi, Cluster’s Dieter Moebius,
Amon Düül II’s Chris Karrer and
Guru Guru’s Mani Neumeier. Jean-
Hervé is a gloriously loquacious
interviewee. He speaks three
languages fluently and he is very
fond of dogs (as are Zappi and
Hans-Joachim Irmler).

1971 JE AN-HERVÉ PÉRON

PHOTO: GÜNTER ZINT 33
FAUST AMONG EQUAL S
HANS-JOACHIM
IRMLER
Born and raised near Lake
Constance on the German border
with Switzerland, the multi-
instrumentalist Hans-Joachim Irmler
brought a mixture of musical flair
and technical savoir-faire to Faust.
He moved to Hamburg to work as a
runner on the music TV show ‘Beat-
Club’ in the late 1960s after meeting
the producer Michael Leckebusch
through his mother, but soon found
himself drawn to an improvisatory
music and film collective at the
Toulouse Lautrec Institut in the city,
which was where Faust met and
formed. When the original line-up of
the band split in 1975, Hans-Joachim
started his own keyboard workshop
and later recorded two Faust albums
with constituent members in the
1990s. After a well-documented
schism with Jean-Hervé Péron, he
then made ‘Faust Is Last’ in 2010
with just Werner Diermaier on
board. As well as collaborating
with many legendary German
artists over the years, including
the late Jaki Liebezeit (Can), FM
Einheit (Einstürzende Neubauten)
and Gudrun Gut (Malaria!), Hans-
Joachim is the curator of the
Klangbad Festival, which takes
place every year in his home town
of Scheer. He founded the festival
in 2004.
1971 HANS- JOACHIM IRML ER
PHOTO: JÜRGEN D. ENS THAL ER
aust released their self-titled debut album 50 years ago this month.
Amazingly, it still sounds like the future. It looked different to
F everything else in the record shops at the time too. It was pressed on
clear vinyl – long before that was even a thing – and it came in a
transparent sleeve with an X-ray of a fist raised in defiance printed
on the front.
The formation of Faust – like most things about the band – is shrouded in myth. The story
goes that they were actually put together, Monkees-style, by film critic and silver-tongued
man-about-town Uwe Nettelbeck after he’d cased the local scene in Hamburg. They were
said to have been intended as a replacement for The Beatles.
“Polydor had screwed up their contract with The Beatles and wanted to try something
more daring now,” says Gunther Wüsthoff. “But the story that we were a manufactured
band is largely a falsehood and the ‘Hamburg Beatles’ idea is an oversimplification.”
The opening track of ‘Faust’, ‘Why Don’t You Eat Carrots?’, is a montage of musique
concrète and musical digression. It’s not exactly ‘Love Me Do’, although there is a tiny
snippet of ‘All You Need Is Love’ near the beginning, included as if to signal a break from
the past and from hegemonic pop stimuli.
“Uwe told everyone that he sought us out,” says Hans-Joachim Irmler. “It’s total bullshit.
It wasn’t at all like that. We sought him out. We needed someone who was able to make
contact with a label.”
What was Nettelbeck like?
“A long-haired and full-bodied man with round nickel glasses, broken jeans and a
colourful hippy T-shirt,” says Gunther descriptively. “I had heard about him when he’d
written film reviews for Die Zeit, the German newspaper.”
Nettelbeck reportedly hand-picked the original members of Faust from two groups –
three from Nukleus and three from Campylognatus Citelli – but the six musicians had
already started cross-pollinating before he showed up and neither of the outfits was
particularly developed.
“I can’t tell you anything about Campylognatus Citelli,” says percussionist Arnulf
Meifert, who was sacked from Faust soon after their first album. “I don’t remember any
band names. Jochen Irmler invited me to join, but I wasn’t interested in the names of
the bands.”
“Campylognatus Citelli didn’t have songs,” notes drummer Werner “Zappi” Diermaier.
“We just improvised when we came together.”
 FAUST
The trio used to meet in a cold and wet bunker that was such an oddly proportioned FAUST AMONG EQUAL S
space that they had to practice one in front of the other in a line. But they had more going
for them than Nukleus, who may or may not have even been called that. WERNER “ZAPPI”
“Gunther, Rudolf and I were the central point of a music collective, but we weren’t really DIERMAIER
a band,” says Jean-Hervé Péron.
Whatever they were and whatever they were called, they rehearsed at Gunther’s flat Werner Diermaier, or Zappi to his
until the situation became untenable. By this point, Jean-Hervé had fortuitously found friends and fans, is the rock upon
himself somewhere to live at the Toulouse Lautrec Institut, an arts centre where the which Faust depends. The Austrian-
earliest version of Faust began creating music for filmmakers. born drummer is the only member
“That place was important in Faust’s history,” declares Jean-Hervé. “There was a bar who has played on every Faust
attached to it and it was run by Andy Hertel, a man who was also important in Faust’s record, taking sole responsibility for
history. Hertel played a big role in the artwork of our first album. It’s his fist on the X-ray.” the drums following the departure
Frenchman Jean-Hervé was actually a relative newcomer to Hamburg. It’s often said of Arnulf Meifert in 1971. Zappi
that he was driven by the events of May 1968 in Paris, but he was in Upstate New York also provided the simplistic but
on a year-long language exchange programme when the student uprising erupted in the wrist-challenging repetitive beat
Latin Quarter of the French capital. By the time he returned to his home in Normandy, on droney New York avant-garde
his anarchic ways were deemed old hat by his milieu, who were all now Maoists and composer Tony Conrad’s ‘Outside
Trotskyists. He ended up taking to the road with his girlfriend and enjoying a period of The Dream Syndicate’ album, which
what he calls “vagabondage” before ending up in Hamburg. was recorded at Wümme in 1973
“Please note that the six musicians in Faust were ever so different from one another,” with half of Faust. “We had to
says Jean-Hervé. “There was a north and south divide in the band. There were cultural repeat it several times as Tony made
differences and language differences. It was a strange and powerful cocktail. Uwe mistakes while playing,” says Zappi.
Nettelbeck was the person who bundled these energies together and Kurt Graupner “It took some days.” It’s a story that
was the perfect man to technically make it all possible.” is testament to his steadfastness,
The group that came together was certainly a diverse one, something that made Faust especially in service to Faust. When
interesting but probably ultimately contributed to tearing them apart. Jean-Hervé was asked what he regrets most about
French, Zappi had been born in Austria, Hans-Joachim and Arnulf came from southern his 50 years in the band, he says it’s
Germany, and Gunther hailed from the remote northern region of Friesland – “a peculiar that Jean-Hervé and Hans-Joachim
place where the people could never be tamed or subdued,” according to Jean-Hervé, both assumed the role of chief. “At
who has frequently also talked about Gunther’s keen interest in guns. the start, we never had a chief in
“I carried a gun after I had completed my military service as a naval radio operator,” the band,” he says. “Later down the
confirms Gunther. “That was mainly a Heckler & Koch G3 and a Walther P38. Or sometimes road, they developed the attitude
an MG 42 [a machine gun]. But I think everyone has been taken in by Jean-Hervé. He says where they both had to play the
I carry a gun all the time. This is untrue. The same goes for his claim that I am the heir of chief.” Zappi continues to play in a
the Flensburg steel manufacturing company. That guy’s name is Wüsthof with one ‘F’.” version of Faust with Jean-Hervé
The member of Faust we’ve only really mentioned in passing so far is guitarist Rudolf Péron and Gunther Wüsthoff.
Sosna. He was half-Russian and a Frank Zappa fanatic. Rudolf, who Jean-Hervé has often
called “the conscience of Faust,” drank himself to death in 1996.
“He had a brilliant mind,” says Jean-Hervé. “He played the piano like a young god, he
could paint, he could recite poems, and he wrote songs that were far-out and puzzling and
really inspiring. For me, he was a genius. There is no question about it. He died very sadly
because of delirium tremens, though I think this is a common trait of all geniuses. They have
so much flowing into them that it’s too much for the brain. It goes in one way or another –
insanity… delirium… and that’s how it ended with Rudolf.”

olydor Records signed Faust on the strength of a demo of ‘Lieber

Herr Deutschland’, an unruly mash-up of squalling guitars, feedback,

P chanting and double-tracked talking in German, its seemingly

disparate sections spliced together with postmodern elan. It’s often
said that Polydor didn’t know what they were doing, but there are
enough hints in its Dadaist five minutes to suggest they couldn’t have
been totally surprised when they heard the group’s first album – a fastidiously constructed
patchwork on side one and an acid-fuelled jam on side two. The latter was recorded in
a hurry in a single night when the label, tired of waiting for the record to be finished,
threatened to call in their investment.
The ‘Lieber Herr Deutschland’ demo is certainly one of the highlights of the ‘Faust
1971-1974’ boxset. It’s not the most commercial sounding of songs, though. Can you even
call it a song?
“No, not really,” says Hans-Joachim with a laugh. “At first, the label refused to use it.
It was in German and they wanted something in English. But that changed soon after this,
when Udo Lindenberg made a success of singing in German.”
Theatrical prog rock bands like Checkpoint Charlie and Floh De Cologne had also been
singing in German for the last two or three years, partly to make a political statement
about reclaiming their language and partly to disassociate themselves from mainstream
pop artists. 35
FAUST AMONG EQUAL S
RUDOLF SOSNA
“Let’s talk about Rudolf,” says Jean-
Hervé Péron. “He was very well
educated. He was a very intelligent
young man. I spoke to one of his
girlfriends, Marita, who I looked up
recently because of the booklet we
are publishing with the boxset, and
she said, ‘I once looked at one of
Rudolf’s school reports and it was
full of A++s’.” Born in 1946, Rudolf
Sosna has often been referred
to as the conscience of Faust. A
technically brilliant guitarist and
also a fine pianist, he wrote many
of the band’s best-loved songs
and was possessed of a gift for
uncomplicated musical lines that cut
through the sonic tomfoolery. It’s his
melodies on the likes of ‘Flashback
Caruso’ and ‘Jennifer’ that hold
everything together. A prolific poet
and painter as well as a musician,
Rudolf unfortunately suffered from
alcoholism. He reunited with Faust
briefly in the mid-1990s, but the band
became exhausted by his behaviour
and were forced to continue without
him after four or five destructive
days. Rudolf Sosna died on 10
November 1996, aged just 50.
1971 IN W ÜMME JE AN-HERV É PÉRON,
RUDOL F SOSNA ,
HANS- JOACHIM IRML ER,
K UR T GR AUPNER
PHOTO: BURE AU B
“Uwe Nettelbeck’s basic idea was to give some experimental, non-conventional
musicians the same possibilities to express themselves as the established artists in the
Top 10,” explains Jean-Hervé. “He was a very clever man and he convinced Polydor by
saying, ‘Listen, here is this demo of ‘Lieber Herr Deutschland’, it’s totally new, it’s great,
and we must help this band to make more songs’.”
It wasn’t just a ruse, however. The dominant music in the German charts at the time
was Schlager – throwaway and conservative pop that projected the confidence of the
Wirtschaftswunder (the “economic miracle”). It was rooted in Volksmusik, which was at
best uncool and at worst unable to shake off its associations with the Nazis.
By referencing the chaos of the Cabaret Voltaire, the absurdist spectacle of existentialist
theatre, and the electronic serialism of Stockhausen, Faust were channelling a post-war
alienation that acted as a kind of severance from their forebears while also rejecting
Anglo-American influences. This newness and edginess must have seemed worthy of a
punt for a label looking for something completely different. It was German but without
being that German. Faust, for the record, would go on to also sing in English and sometimes
French (or indeed both on ‘J’ai Mal Aux Dents’).
“We had no format or framework and we didn’t play a style in the sense of blues or
progressive rock or modal jazz, so we always stumbled into whatever our six temperaments
gave us at that hour,” says Arnulf.
Jean-Hervé mentions AMM, an improvisational jazz outfit from London who predated
Faust by several years and were thinking along similar lines, although the German band
knew nothing of these British musical frontiersmen. He also talks about the international
creative community Fluxus, with whom they enjoyed many levels of synchronicity, but both
of these groups were also unaware of the other.
“In retrospect, we were a kind of social sculpture as propagated by Joseph Beuys,”
adds Arnulf. “We were altogether a strange creature in the music scene of that time –
a raised fist against the commerce of the record industry, unpredictable, not malleable,
not fitting into any pigeonhole.”
There were the other krautrock bands of the day too, of course, but again Faust were
largely oblivious of them. One of the main reasons for this was their geographical isolation.
“Uwe managed to get a deal for us that meant we had a studio for a whole year and we
had a sound engineer at our disposal as much as possible,” says Jean-Hervé. “This was
his plan. And it worked. And so we went to Wümme.”
 FAUST
Faust settled themselves into a converted schoolhouse in the woods in Wümme, FAUST AMONG EQUAL S
Lower Saxony, and hired engineer Kurt Graupner to install a mixing desk. At the commune
they established there, the musicians smoked weed, walked their dogs in the raw, recorded GUNTHER
solos from their beds (with extremely long cables snaking into the control room), got drunk WÜSTHOFF
with the local farmers at the nearby village bar, and caused lots of general mischief.
“The time in Wümme was existential for the band,” says Zappi. “Being away from any Originally from Friesland in Lower
external influences made us concentrate on ourselves, which was important.” Saxony, Gunther Wüsthoff finished
“We lived a very modest, rather monastic life in Wümme,” adds Arnulf. “The refrigerator his national service as a naval radio
was empty most of the time. Apart from breakfast, there was very often nothing. Uwe operator and then studied fine art
occasionally drove up in a Volvo, bringing us a bag of rolls and a DM 50 bill. I should really in Hamburg, where he hooked up
have guarded that each time. If we didn’t use it right away, the guys would take it into the with Jean-Hervé Péron. “Gunther
village and turn it into beer and dog food.” had a flat – and if you had a flat at
Gunther’s memory of a regular day at Wümme is perhaps somewhat prosaic, but it’s that time you were a king!” says
also weirdly revealing. Jean-Hervé. “Everyone would crash
“Morning toilet, fetching milk and eggs, breakfast, setting up the studio, making music, there. This is how it all began.” As
recording music, cooking and eating lunch, walking, shopping, house cleaning, making well as bringing synthesisers to the
music, recording music, taking care of instruments, meditating and doing the things that Faust party (including an ARP 2600),
people do.” Gunther plays a mean saxophone,
the talismanic sound of the band on
he release of ‘Faust’ in 1971 was met with little fanfare. At Polydor’s songs like ‘It’s A Rainy Day, Sunshine
insistence, the band played a one-off show at the Musikhalle in Girl’, which happens to be Julian

T Hamburg, but it was a ramshackle affair to say the least. Faust treated
the stage like they were still in their front room back in Wümme.
“The stage manager looked at his wristwatch and said, ‘No concert
Cope’s all-time favourite sax break.
And he’s not the only one. There’s
a story that Gunther refused to play
has ever lasted this long here!’,” recalls Gunther. “He was glad that he the sax part when Faust visited
could finally get home to his family at one in the morning. Those who were there at the time Paris, mortally offending a French
still have fond memories of that unforgettable evening.” journalist with the power to make or
Their record label were significantly less impressed, but Faust weren’t overly bothered break the band, according to Jean-
about that. Most of them had other things on their minds, not least the fact that they had Hervé in David Stubbs’ ‘Future Days’.
decided to get Arnulf Meifer out of the group. “This is the first time I’ve heard
“Arnulf was not quite on our wavelength,” explains Jean-Hervé. “He was very academic, about this – I had no idea!” says
very theoretical, a bit older and a bit straight. The rest of us were not. I think maybe the Gunther. Bureau B recently released
person in the band I felt the closest to was Zappi. We both liked dogs and we both liked to an excellent collection of his sound
do crazy things.” experiments, ‘[to|digi]tal’, which
Arnulf believes his sacking from Faust was instigated by Uwe Nettelbeck. He says spans the years 1979 to 2007.
Nettelbeck threatened the other members with pulling the plug if he wasn’t expelled from
the group. In the aftermath of the Musikhalle gig, he was abused by a drunken Rudolf
Sosna, who intimated to him that he would soon be on his way out. There was no mistaking
the bad atmosphere in the schoolhouse at Wümme.
“I was somehow not surprised when I found out that Uwe wanted me to leave,” says
Arnulf. “This was about two days later. I said I wouldn’t go, at least not until each of my
comrades said the words, ‘I want you to quit’. So they all did, they all said it, and that same
day I was gone.”
The five remaining members continued their work at Wümme and Faust’s second album,
‘So Far’, came out in 1972, by which point Polydor’s patience was really wearing thin. While
maintaining the band’s proclivity for musical detour, the record is packed with great tunes
and has a strong sense of sonic cohesion. The opening track, ‘It’s A Rainy Day, Sunshine
Girl’, has stealthily become one of Faust’s better known songs. It’s catchy, yet deceptively
oddball, with a steady repetitive beat from Zappi throughout the entire piece. The droning,
proto-industrial ‘Mamie Is Blue’ meanwhile appears to be a dark manifestation of what
krautrock superfan Julian Cope describes as “a whole youth nation working out their blues”
in his 1995 book ‘Krautrocksampler’.
“I think there’s a phenomenon happening here, where the artist isn’t really consciously
aware of what he’s saying,” notes Jean-Hervé. “Maybe I’m being ridiculous, but my belief
is that artists are people who have the privilege of being able to receive cosmic waves from
above. So yes, ‘Mamie Is Blue’, when you make me think about it, sounds like some kind of
denial. Why repeat ‘Mamie is blue’ and ‘Daddy is blue’? But at the time, I can assure you we
were not aware of what we were expressing.”
The title track is another highlight of ‘So Far’. Built on a funky loop that Hans-Joachim
compares to what Miles Davis was doing at the time, it features some Pierre Schaeffer-
style ingenuity from Kurt Graupner. It was certainly useful having someone with a penchant
for building outlandish sonic devices as their engineer.
“We used one line fed through an unbelievable looping set-up for the track ’So Far’,”
says Hans-Joachim. “Looping machines didn’t exist at the time, so we had to create a loop
that ran out of the control room and beyond the studio before coming back again.” 37
FAUST AMONG EQUAL S
ARNULF MEIFERT
Arnulf Meifert was a founder
member of Faust, playing drums
and percussion on the band’s debut
album. He was first invited to join
their early doors jam sessions by
Hans-Joachim Irmler and his style
complemented Werner Diermaier’s
from the outset. “We didn’t have any
problems with each other and didn’t
feel like competitors,” says Arnulf.
“Zappi had an earthy style, which
came into full use from the second LP
onwards. My Ludwig drums worked
in all directions.” Arnulf didn’t
quite fit, though. He was the oldest
member of the band by around a year
and he was often away from Wümme,
working in theatre productions and
also on the film ‘Ein Fest Für Boris’.
He left Faust in the autumn of 1971
and immediately began a 25-year
collaboration with the Austrian
painter and performance artist
Günter Brus, before later retraining
as a scientific librarian. Arnulf is
currently working with his wife
Franziska on an illustrated history of
the satirical underground, up to and
including the Marseille publishing
house Le Dernier Cri.
“Kurt was instrumental in creating the musique concrète collage on side one of the first
album,” says Zappi. “He was a classical sound engineer, which we appreciated. He was
also the architect of the famous Faust black boxes.”
The black boxes were conceived by Kurt and Hans-Joachim and were taken out on tour
with the band in 1973. They were innovative, metre-long effects units that enabled Faust
to create sounds that weren’t available on the market at the time and allowed the members
to mix each other in real time.
“Nowadays, you can get much better units that are about a 10th of the size,” notes
Jean-Hervé. “But there was none of that at this time.”
There were five boxes in all. Jean-Hervé still has one and Hans-Joachim has another.
Kurt apparently owns two.
“Basically, it’s an effects box with three different channels,” explains Jean-Hervé.
“Just by pressing buttons and turning knobs, we could add effects and send what we were
doing to one of our friends. I would play bass and send my sound to Rudolf, then he would
start working on it. So there were always extremely intense interactions between us.”
“In a way, we were a socialist band, because one of the knobs allowed us to balance
each other,” chuckles Hans-Joachim. “So if Jean-Hervé was doing something that was
bullshit, I could fade him out. And he could do the same to me.”
“The black boxes were great,” says Arnulf. “But if you want to define one sound that
was specific to Faust, one sound that was spectacular, then it has to be Jochen’s organ.
He constructed this electronic instrument himself and this big wooden thing… it was a
real wonderbox.”
As well as his musical talent, Hans-Joachim brought a technological aspect to Faust.
He was the band’s youngest member and he had a way of manipulating sound to ensure
it was incredibly loud, describing it as “music you could touch”. He’d always wanted
a Hammond organ, but since they cost in the region of DM 30,000 he’d decided to take
matters into his own hands.
“So I started to build an organ,” he says. “I had no idea how to solder at the time and
I thought I’d get killed in the first 10 minutes. I still have that organ, actually.”
he money ran out in Wümme and the goodwill ran out with Polydor,
but Uwe Nettelbeck managed to wangle a new deal for Faust with
T Virgin Records in the UK. Richard Branson’s label had recently picked
up fellow sonic travellers Tangerine Dream, Gong and Henry Cow, and
was fast becoming a trusted independent voice in the music industry.
It wasn’t quite on the cusp of propelling Branson into the big time, but
that moment wasn’t far off.
Faust landed in the UK to begin the next part of their adventure in early 1973. They were
met at Southampton and driven to The Manor, a swishy residential recording studio in
Oxfordshire. The plan was for them to record during the day, while Mike Oldfield used the
studio downtime to put the finishing touches to ‘Tubular Bells’.
“There was another guy there, Simon Draper, who was Branson’s cousin I think,” says
Jean-Hervé. “He was definitely into art rather than business and the combination of the
two of them was ideal. It was Simon who signed us. He came to Hamburg and asked us to
play something. About 10 minutes later, he said, ‘Cool, we’ll buy that’. He was turned on
by our music, but he soon discovered that we weren’t very pleasant people.”
In what way?
“Ah, you know… the German way of speaking, the German way of being,” replies Jean-
Hervé. “In Europe, we say ‘Yes’ when we mean ‘Yes’. When we mean ‘No’, we say ‘No’.
In England, you never say ‘Yes’ or ‘No’, you say, ‘Maybe’, or ‘That might be OK’, or ‘Oh, well,
I’m not sure’. So that was a bit of a clash.”
How did The Manor compare to the old schoolhouse?
“There was lots of nature around, like in Wümme,” says Gunther. “A fast road, like in
Wümme. Food like in England.”
“In Wümme, it was more personal,” says Zappi. “We felt at home. At The Manor,
we were guests.”
Faust didn’t arrive in the UK empty-handed. They brought lots of tracks they had been
working on in Wümme with them and it was from this material that their first album for
Virgin, ’The Faust Tapes’, was compiled. The front cover of the record was made up of
columns of dense text about the band taken from the music press, while the back featured
Bridget Riley’s iconic 1964 painting ‘Crest’. The album was sold at the gimmicky price of
49p, resulting in it shifting a lot more units than Faust might otherwise have expected.
Among the standouts of ‘The Faust Tapes’ are ’J’ai Mal Aux Dents’, starring Gunther’s
sax in mad mode, and ‘Flashback Caruso’, a four-minute psychedelic masterpiece by Rudolf.
All around the longer tracks are snippets from the band’s archive, often culled from jams
 FAUST
that may well have gone on for hours. ‘Don’t’, for example, is a 20-second breakbeat that FAUST AMONG EQUAL S
is crying out to be looped into a hip hop groove.
“Yeah, of course, if we had gone deeper we could have turned that into hip hop and KURT GRAUPNER
made a political statement out of it,” agrees Jean-Hervé. “But we didn't. When we were
living in Wümme, we produced so many sketches. We threw so many ideas out. Ideas, Faust were at the vanguard of
ideas, ideas…” expanding the possibilities of what
Interestingly, there are other tracks among the ‘Faust 1971-1974’ boxset extras that could be done in the recording studio
have a jazzy hip hop flavour, albeit often with added white noise. ‘Vorsatz’ and ‘Rückwärts and the man mainly responsible
Durch Die Drehtür’, both on ‘Momentaufnahme I’, are fine examples. Zappi’s drumming on for making them sound like a band
these tracks is great and it’s a surprise to learn that he didn’t grow up in a jazz household. from the future was engineer Kurt
“No, my background is actually in marching music,” he reveals. “My father was a Graupner. “Usually when you talk
marching musician.” about a band, you talk about the
If the collage aspect of ‘The Faust Tapes’ echoes ‘Faust’, then their second album for musicians,” says Jean-Hervé Péron.
Virgin, ‘Faust IV’, aligns itself with ‘So Far’ as a more cohesive listen. ‘Krautrock’, the epic “With Faust, I would like to make an
opener of ‘Faust IV’, was another track they’d brought over from Wümme, but it was given exception. We were the musicians
a radical overhaul, the larger mixing desk at The Manor giving them more multitracking – we were making and creating the
options. Other songs were more spontaneous, including ‘The Sad Skinhead’, spiky and music – but there were other people
full of pathos, and ‘Jennifer’, which Rudolf wrote about a teenage girl he observed lurking behind it, recording it and offering
around the studio. us technical possibilities.” Kurt
The recording of ‘Faust IV’ was not without trouble, however, much of it of the band’s initiated building effects that had
own making. Faust were neither punctilious nor polite. Alternating sessions with Mike not yet hit the market, including the
Oldfield meant that the studio had to be rearranged when they showed up, something infamous Faust black boxes created
Richard Branson had assured them would not be a problem. They took their revenge on with Hans-Joachim Irmler (who also
Branson by eating at expensive French restaurants and charging it back to the record brought a certain technical nous).
label. But despite the difficulties, Zappi thought well of the Virgin boss. The boxes featured tone generators
“He was courageous,” says the drummer. “I was impressed by his attitude.” and ring modulators, enabling the
That feeling isn’t necessarily shared by everyone in the group, though. musicians to craft surround stereo
“There was a culture clash, let’s put it that way,” says Jean-Hervé. “OK, Richard was effects and control the raw noise
definitely a great man. He was nice and he was clever and he was generous – he offered generated by other band members
us hospitality and he bought me a guitar – but he definitely wasn’t into art. He was more with foot switches. “Kurt was God’s
like, ‘How can art create money?’.” gift,” Hans-Joachim told Sound On
Hans-Joachim is more scathing. Sound in 2010. “To us, all these other
“Branson was a businessman and he was always more interested in flying into space engineers seemed really stupid,
or buying islands,” he says. “I became so angry about him and also about Nettelbeck. open to nothing. Kurt was quite
I was close to beating them up. But I decided to leave England instead. Rudolf left too.” young and he was really open. He
didn’t know what to expect.”

1974 MUSICL AND S TUDIO

K UR T GR AUPER ON A RP 2 6 0 0
AND HIS BL ACK BOX EFFEC T BOARD
PHOTO: K UR T GR AUPNER 39
FAUST AMONG EQUAL S
UWE NETTELBECK
Faust’s debonair manager is often
portrayed as a svengali figure in the
mould of Andrew Loog Oldham or
Malcolm McLaren, though members
of the band insist that meeting Uwe
Nettelbeck was as propitious for
him as it was for them. He’s credited
as the producer of Faust’s first four
albums and he also worked with
Anglo-German avant-popsters Slapp
Happy. Uwe was a mover and shaker
in the publishing world too. As the
editor of the underground magazine
Konkret, he rubbed shoulders with
and subsequently fell out with Ulrike
Meinhof, the left-wing journalist
who would go on to infamy as a
founder member of the Red Army
Faction terrorist group. Before
meeting Faust and manipulating
record companies, Uwe was known
throughout Germany as a film critic
with Die Zeit, the national weekly
newspaper. He returned to editing
and writing once his music business
adventure was over, mainly working
for Die Republik, a magazine he
founded in 1976 and ran for 30 years.
Uwe Nettelbeck died of cancer in
2007 at the age of 66.
1971 IN SCH W INDEBECK
U W E NE T TELBECK TAL KING
TO THE BAND
PHOTO: GÜNTER ZINT
What was Hans-Joachim’s problem with Nettelbeck?
“In the beginning, Uwe helped us, but in the end it cost us a lot of money. He was really…”
– he pauses for a moment – “…not the person we thought he was. And he always wanted to
be a producer, although he wasn’t that at all. We let him put that he was on the records, but
he wasn’t. He had no idea about music.”
According to Faust folklore, Nettelbeck pulled together the tracks from the
‘Faust IV’ sessions and handed them over to Branson without the band’s permission.
The consequences of this action were both a triumph and a catastrophe.
“Uwe had to canonise our efforts and our energies,” says Jean-Hervé. “That’s why
Hans-Joachim and Rudolf – two extreme people – decided to leave the band. But if Uwe
hadn’t been there, there wouldn’t have been a ‘Krautrock’, or a ‘Jennifer’, or a ‘Sad
Skinhead’. There wouldn’t have been a ‘Faust IV’ at all.”
Hans-Joachim vehemently disagrees.
“That arsehole did nothing!” he splutters. “He only collected money.”
t’s sad that Rudolf Sosna is the only one of the original six who isn’t
here to witness the release of ‘Faust 5 ½’, or ‘Punkt’ as the album is
I now known. Pronounced “poonked”, it means “full stop” in German,
although it works as a bilingual pun too. All of the surviving members
of Faust are delighted that this long-lost freaktronic gem can finally
be heard pretty much as they intended it to be.
“For sure!” says Hans-Joachim. “I've been listening to these recordings for years.
I was happy with how crazy I thought they sounded at the time.”
“I'm so pleased this record is coming out,” adds Jean-Hervé.
Which leaves one final question. What happened after Jean-Hervé, Hans-Joachim and
Rudolf were arrested by the police at the Arabella-Hochhaus in Munich?
“The mother of Hans-Joachim and the mother of Rudolf bailed us out and got us free,”
laughs Jean-Hervé. “I could try to make it sound very adventurous and splendid, but we
were saved by our mamas.”
If the youth really were working out their blues, as Julian Cope suggests, then perhaps
Faust at least have some kind of closure.
“I’m afraid the mother of Hans-Joachim isn’t alive anymore and I’m pretty sure that the
mother of Rudolf has passed too now, but I wish I could present the boxset to them. Thank
you mamas, you saved this music.”
‘Faust 1971-1974’ is released by Bureau B on 8 October
 FAUST

PHOTO: JÜRGEN D. ENS THAL ER

41
‘FAUST’
TO
‘PUNKT’
A hop and a skip through the first
four Faust albums, plus the one
that got away… until now

‘FAUST’
Polydor, 1971

Whether Polydor Records were aware of what Faust were up to or not, they presided
over one of the truly avant-garde releases of the day. ‘Faust’ is an abstract tapestry of
awe-inspiring detours, where ghostly radio static meets marching bands and industrial
oompah sidles up to Morton Feldman-like piano digressions. It’s a superb way to herald
the arrival of the undisputed mavericks of kosmische. What’s difficult to believe in today’s
climate is that a major label were willing to bankroll a group of unknowns and allow them to
indulge their whims with next to no supervision. It took Polydor a year to come a-knocking
on the door of their commune at Wümme and ask for the fruits of their investment. Side one
of ‘Faust’ was fastidiously stitched together during this period by in-house engineering
maestro Kurt Graupner and sounds like a great act of chutzpah. Side two was jammed in
a single night after the band had all dropped some acid and is more like a textbook case
of self-sabotage.

‘SO FAR’
Polydor, 1972

Faust’s second album is very different to its predecessor, as signified by the diametric
change in the cover art, the transparent packaging of their debut release eschewed for a
Malevichian square of total blackness more than a decade before the idea was repeated
in the side-splitting mockumentary ‘This Is Spinal Tap’. Musically, ‘So Far’ is a much more
coherent and accessible record, featuring some of Faust’s best songs. Some of their best
grooves too. That’s not to say it’s not a miscellany of musical madness – this is Faust after
all. Jean-Hervé Péron’s meticulous classical guitar on ‘On The Way To Abamäe’ sits next
to the summery, staccato chug of ‘It’s A Rainy Day, Sunshine Girl’ on one side and the epic,
quixotic, galloping ‘No Harm’ on the other. It doesn’t always get the plaudits it deserves,
but as second albums go, ‘So Far’ is up there with ‘For Your Pleasure’ and ‘It Takes A Nation
Of Millions To Hold Us Back’.
 FAUST
‘THE FAUST TAPES’
Virgin, 1973

The cover of ‘The Faust Tapes’ features a disclaimer, right at the top and in capital letters –
“THE MUSIC ON THIS ALBUM, DRAWN FROM FAUST’S OWN LIBRARY OF PRIVATE TAPES,
WAS RECORDED INFORMALLY AND NOT ORIGINALLY INTENDED FOR RELEASE”. It goes
on to say that the record is to meet the high demand for the band’s material in the UK. Faust
also make it clear that this shouldn’t be regarded as their third studio album but, somewhat
contrarily, go on to call the follow-up release ‘Faust IV’. The third album by Faust, then,
their first on the Virgin label, is mostly made up of snippets of dilettante-ish exploration
recorded at Wümme and woven together in a Dadaist collage to audacious effect. The
disorder and merriment it evokes came at a fun-sized price too. Virgin issued the album as
a loss-leader, a snip at just 49p, the price of a seven-inch single in the UK at that time. Such
gimmickry might have devalued Faust’s brand overall, but the music has more than stood
the test of time.

‘FAUST IV’
Virgin, 1973

Leading with ‘Krautrock’, the title chosen in response to the phrase being used by
the British music press to describe the new wave of German artists in the early 1970s,
‘Faust IV’ is a magnificent fulfilment of one band’s eclectic vision (even if the camp was
somewhat divided by the final tracklist). The capabilities of The Manor, one of the UK’s
foremost studios, enabled them to augment their sound and the rich panoply of styles is
demonstrative of the push-me-pull-you nature of Faust – a band that could surely never
stay together, despite the magic they conjured up. Driving hippy rock makes way for
squelching synths and musique concrète on ‘Just A Second’, country rock is terrorised by
interjections of noise on ‘It’s A Bit Of A Pain’, and the singsongy shanty ‘Picnic On A Frozen
River, Deuxième Tableau’ is hijacked by thundering rhythms and sax mayhem. The modus
operandi here seems to be disruption, especially from zones of comfort, fuelling a kind of
punk sensibility that turned out to be far more punk than punk itself.

‘PUNKT’
Bureau B, 2021

Recorded at Musicland Studios in Munich in 1974, Faust’s fabled fifth album was supposed
to have been called ‘Faust 5½’, on account of it being a consolidation of the sound of
their other four albums. “We had album one and three, which were a bit phasey,” says
Hans-Joachim Irmler. “And then albums two and four went together as well. The fifth was
a mixture. That’s why I called it ‘5½’.” Whatever the logic of that, the final record that the
five original members made together is a hymn to full-bodied extemporisation, taking their
sonic excesses to their natural endgame. These are not necessarily songs, but “Stücke”
(pieces) as Hans-Joachim calls them. ‘Morning Land’ is an uncompromising start, shuttling
along on a monstrous drumbeat with feedback rushing across the aural flatlands like
napalm. ‘Schön Rund’, on the other hand, brings some of the sweeter, piano-led Faust to
the fore, with requisite embellishments of synth and sound effects while Werner “Zappi”
Diermaier holds everything up, right through to the explosive conclusion, as he does
throughout the record. ‘Punkt’, the new title of the album, means full stop in German.

43
GHOST
HUNTERS
The latest Haiku Salut album is based around found
sounds the group have gathered from across the globe
over the last five years – often in very strange and
spooky places. Is your spine ready for some tingling?
WORDS: STEPHEN DALTON
nder the sultry swelter of an unusually intense July
heatwave, Darley Abbey Park is a blaze of neon blooms,
U lush greenery and insect buzz. In a typical summer, this
riverside idyll on the northern edge of Derby city centre
hosts music festivals, rowing regattas and firework
displays. But for the last 18 months, public gatherings
here have inevitably been more limited.
Today, however, Haiku Salut have brought along their own miniature music
machines for our alfresco picnic. Two-year-old Frankie is all chatty mischief
as he pinballs around the park before trying to cram my digital recorder into
his mouth. Mabel, 18 months old, gurgles and giggles with a permanent look
of bewilderment on her face. And six-month-old Rosa just coos serenely.
Three Delias from Derbyshire, Haiku Salut have been making exquisite,
richly layered, gently experimental electroacoustic instrumentals together
for the past decade. Even before their children arrived, they were always
a family affair. Married couple Sophie and Gemma Barkerwood are mothers
to Mabel, while Louise Croft is blessed with both Frankie and Rosa.
HAIKU SALUT
With all three children born during the making of their latest album,
‘The Hill, The Light, The Ghost’, the Haikus have been on a steep learning
curve, slotting rehearsals and studio sessions around sleeps and nappy
changes, as well as part-time jobs outside of the band. Even after Louise
took parental leave in 2019, the other two carried on touring as a duo while
Gemma herself was heavily pregnant.
“Gemma was technically full-term when we played the Leicester gig,”
Sophie grins. “We were joking about what would happen if her waters broke
onstage. We even had a code word…”
When the pandemic shut down most of the music industry last year,
Haiku Salut were better prepared than most. Their new album was nearing
completion as Sophie and Gemma went into pre-planned domestic seclusion
at home in the rolling hills of the Derbyshire Dales.
“We had Mabel a few months before the pandemic struck, so we already
expected our lives to get quite small,” Gemma explains.
“The record was coming together before Mabel arrived,” Sophie adds.
“We just finalised a few things, realised a few ideas.” 45
 n some level, ‘The Hill, The Light, The Ghost’ is Haiku
Salut’s fourth baby – a lovingly crafted distillation of
O personal memories, emotionally resonant echoes,
sparkles and shimmers and electro-squelch noises.
Its gestation began five years ago, when the trio first took
an old Tascam field recorder with them on their travels,
using it to collect found sounds, ambient textures and phantom echoes.
Sophie describes this exploratory creative process as seeking out “ghosts
in the fabric of things”, which brings to mind ectoplasm and slime guns.
When there’s something strange in your neighbourhood, who you gonna
call? Haiku Salut, obviously.
“It started when we went to Japan,” Gemma explains. “I don’t know if
you’ve been, but everything there makes a noise. We kept saying, ‘How are
we going to remember all this?’, so we began making lots of recordings. Even
the washing machine had its own little song and it was something I didn’t
want to forget.”
Richard McGuire’s acclaimed graphic novel ‘Here’ – composed entirely
of multiple views of a single room across thousands of years – was a key
inspiration for the album.
“It’s partly an exploration of time,” Sophie nods. “How we experience
it, how we can capture something, how we can conserve it in some way.
You can preserve something in a recording, but the experience has gone,
so it’s kind of a paradox. We wanted to bring these memories into a new lens,
to rescue them from just kicking about on an old Tascam field recorder.”
One sampling location that proved almost literally ghostly was a semi-
derelict flat above an abandoned urology clinic in central Germany. The door
was open, so Sophie and Gemma walked right in. There was a ruined piano
inside and they wanted to sample it. But the clinic interior was more horror
movie than ghost story.
“Someone had written ‘I have AIDS’ in blood on the wall,” Gemma says
with a shudder. “I was pregnant, so that’s when I freaked out. We don’t really
know what happened to the people who had lived and worked there, although
there are lots of different rumours on the internet. All their belongings and
equipment were still there, payslips left on the side…”
Returning to the UK, the Haikus used the vast library of recordings they
had amassed to collate textured sound collages. Sophie describes the
process as harnessing “constellations” of ideas that gradually coalesced
into the finished pieces on ‘The Hill, The Light, The Ghost’.
“A lot of the tracks have memories from different times,” she says.
“For ‘We Need These Beams’, we used the sound of crickets from a visit to
Lake Biwa in Japan and recordings of my dad sifting through some wood.
The two complement each other, even though they’re years and years apart
and from different spaces. Together they create this wonderful atmosphere,
which we then added instrumentation to.”
One track on the new album, ‘All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving
Grace’, takes its title from the 1967 Richard Brautigan poem. It grew out of a
piece of metal machine music Haiku Salut were commissioned to compose in
2018 for the self-playing instruments of a robot orchestra at the Life Science
Centre in Newcastle.
“The robots were more functional, rather than algorithms or AI,” Sophie
explains. “We were writing the music and they were doing our bidding.”
Another track, ‘Trespass’, came about when Jarvis Cocker invited Haiku
Salut to participate in Be Kinder, a National Trust-backed art trail through
the Peak District co-curated by artist Jeremy Deller to commemorate the
famous mass trespass on Kinder Scout in 1932. The band spent their day
composing a work-in-progress piece in a chapel in the picturesque Edale
Valley. They didn’t meet Jarvis until later, when he manned the wheels of
steel at the afterparty buffet.
“His car broke down when he was on his way back from London, so he
didn’t get to see us in the chapel,” Louise recalls. “But we were invited to
the party afterwards, which was in a working men’s club around the back
of a cement factory. There were people clocking on and clocking off for
work. We were like, ‘Are we in the right place?’. Then we saw Jarvis making
an announcement onstage about somebody leaving their lights on in the
car park. Ha!”
With its hinterland of eerie ruins, half-forgotten memories and vintage
technology, ‘The Hill, The Light, The Ghost’ arguably strays into the esoteric
conceptual realm of hauntology. The term, first coined by French philosopher
Jacques Derrida, was later applied more forensically to electronic music by
feted cultural theorists like Mark Fisher and is concerned with the spectres
of long-lost pasts and cancelled futures.
“We didn’t set out to write a hauntology album, but some people have
brought it to our attention,” Sophie nods. “We enjoy processing stuff
so it sounds like a broken VHS tape and that sort of thing. I don’t think
we necessarily knew that we were into it, but it kind of worked. We are
accidentally hauntological!”
 HAIKU SALUT

47
 he three members of Haiku Salut first met at Derby
University around 2008. Gemma and Louise had both
T been involved in music projects as teenagers (“I was
in lots of terrible bands,” Louise laughs). Sophie
started dating Gemma through a mutual connection
they both seem guarded about recalling.
“Erm... do we really want to go there?” Sophie says. “I used to be friends
with your ex-girlfriend, then she wasn’t your girlfriend anymore, and then
you were my girlfriend.”
Haiku Salut formed in 2010, soon after the three had left college, and
initially leaned towards a rather more organic sound – accordion, ukulele,
glockenspiel and trumpet all feature on their initial EP releases. Yann
Tiersen’s wistful, swooning score to Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s classic 2001
film ‘Amélie’ was a key influence, although Sophie’s fondness for glitchy
Japanese electronica soon became a prominent feature in their sparkly
electro-folk tapestries.
By the time Haiku Salut released their debut album ‘Tricolore’ in 2013,
Sophie and Gemma were married, amalgamating their surnames into the
portmanteau Barkerwood.
“We looked at doing an anagram,” Sophie recalls. “But the best word you
can make out of our names is ‘wardrobe’… I could be Sophie Wardrobe!”
Early in their career, Haiku Salut hit on the inspired notion of alternating
more conventional gigs with magical “lamp shows” featuring a stage full
of lamps from charity shops, all wired to switch on and off in time with the
music. The trio also prompted comments because they didn’t say a word
onstage as they swapped instruments, nervous smiles and knowing looks.
Louise insists their policy of silence was never a deliberate art statement –
it simply grew naturally out of the fact that none of them wanted to take on
the role of frontwoman.
“Talking didn’t really help what we were doing either,” Sophie shrugs.
“It didn’t add anything to the experience. In a way, it actually took something
away from it, so we stopped.”
When Haiku Salut toured with the rootsy acoustic band Lau in 2013,
some audience members reacted to their silence with confusion and hostility.
One woman even took them aside and offered them public speaking lessons.
“It was a folk tour and folk artists tend to talk a lot because they like to
explain their songs,” Louise says. “But we’ve never been folk, so that’s not
what we do.”
In response to this bruising experience, the Haikus resolved never to
speak onstage again.
“So then it became an art statement,” Sophie grins.
ven in 2021, it feels a little bit unusual, perhaps quietly
revolutionary, to have an all-female electronic band with
E a same-sex married couple at its core. But the wry,
understated, genial Haiku Salut are hardly flag-waving,
queer-punk militants. Indeed, Sophie and Gemma insist
they haven’t encountered any overt homophobia during
their career, although a constant daily diet of heteronormative assumptions
sometimes grates on them. Their shared name, for example, led many early
reviewers (this one included) to presume they were sisters, not spouses.
“We should have done a White Stripes,” Sophie laughs. “It is kind of a pain
having to come out all the time. I had it in the library the other day. This man
said, ‘Oh, you’re not with your sister this week?’. I thought, ‘I don’t want to
have to come out to a man in the library!’. He’s a lovely man. He might even
read this…”
The Haikus similarly feel they have only suffered mildly from casual sexism,
as opposed to full-blooded misogyny.

“When Louise’s partner has come on tour with us, people have always
assumed he’s in the band,” Gemma says.
“There have been a few sound engineers we’ve had to put in their place,”
Sophie adds. “I suppose we’ve experienced sexism in hidden ways. Because
there isn’t a man in the group, people are like, ‘Well, somebody’s got to know
what they’re doing!’. I think if we did have a male bandmate, we would have
noticed that stuff more.”
All the same, in their own modest way, Haiku Salut are quietly pushing
back sexist norms in music.
“The last tour we did, it was just a load of women at the front,” Gemma
grins. “As the guy who does the lamps for us pointed out, you never see
that anywhere. So we feel proud to have been able to create a space where
women can do that.”
As for how the internal politics of Haiku Salut work, Sophie has clearly
assumed the role of bossy band leader. With just a hint of nervous laughter,
Gemma and Louise gladly confirm this, but Sophie insists she is more of a
compulsive worrier and studio matriarch than an actual tyrant. She certainly
seems to be more soft-spoken introvert than attention-seeking diva. In an
ideal world, she says, they’d never have to do photo sessions or make videos
again. Even playing live makes her anxious, though she admittedly enjoys
being on stage more than the tense run-up.
“I’d just like to sit and write,” she sighs.
HAIKU SALUT
s well as releasing ‘The Hill, The Light, The Ghost’, Haiku
Salut have multiple projects on the horizon, including a
A full-length soundtrack for the 1930 German documentary
‘People On Sunday’. This follows on from their highly
acclaimed score for Buster Keaton’s 1926 silent classic
‘The General’.
With the virus restrictions in the UK finally being relaxed, hopefully not
to return, these “accidental hauntologists” are also planning their live
comeback, taking their ghosts on the road with another lamp show tour in
October and November. On balance, admits Sophie, Haiku Salut have
survived the global pandemic pretty well.
“It’s obviously had a massive impact on musicians in general,” she says.
“But we came to the conclusion that we’ve still got our health, we’ve not been
particularly affected in terms of our families, and we’ve all got our other
part-time jobs, so we feel lucky. Yes, we haven’t been able to perform and
we’ve lost a bit of money, but we’ve produced something that we’re really
proud of. We’re in a good place.”
‘The Hill, The Light, The Ghost’ is out now on CD on Secret Name.
The vinyl version follows on 26 November
49
RAGE
AGAINST THE
MACHINE
When Devo’s Gerald V Casale came up with a new
solo vehicle in the early 2000s, America was not ready
for Jihad Jerry And The Evildoers. With a snazzy new
re-release and a brand new track, perhaps the time is
now. After all, his is not a holy war…
WORDS: MARK ROLAND
hat happened to the American counterculture of the
1970s? The self-obsession of the cocaine high ousted
W the mind-expansion and oneness of the LSD trip. John
Lennon was baking bread in the Dakota Apartments
and Yippie leader Jerry “Chicago 7” Rubin was on his
way to becoming a millionaire stockbroker. But Gerald
Vincent “Jerry” Casale and Mark Mothersbaugh, two former long-haired
1960s radicals from America’s post-industrial wasteland, donned yellow
boilersuits, deconstructed rock ’n’ roll with synthesisers and angular
weirdness, and posed the baffling yet loaded question, “Are we not men?”,
immediately answering it themselves by declaring, “We are Devo!”.
Following on from their post-punk triumphs, Devo continued to fly the flag
for anti-authoritarianism throughout a grimly conformist and violent 1980s,
all the time still knocking out pop hits. By the end of that decade, however,
the band were wrung out. They never actually split, but they restricted their
activities to sporadic and ecstatically received jags of touring, accompanied
by releases of recordings from the Devo vaults. Mothersbaugh’s burgeoning
success as a film and television composer meanwhile meant that cranking
up the Devo machine was not his highest priority – much to Jerry Casale’s
ongoing frustration.
nd so in 2006, with time on his hands, Casale was at
it again – but now he was striking out alone and with
A a message weighted by post-9/11 buzzwords of fear and
loathing. He dubbed himself Jihad Jerry, his band were
The Evildoers, and the album was called ‘Mine Is Not
A Holy War’. Given that the US and its allies were in over
their heads fighting wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq, it was not the best
moment to spring this level of satire on the American record-buying public.
“Yeah, Jihad Jerry did not get the love,” Casale sighs.
He’s talking as the album gets a 15th anniversary reissue. He’s billing
himself as DEVO’s Gerald V Casale now and the record has been retitled
‘AKA Jihad Jerry & The Evildoers’. It features some previously unreleased
tracks and a new one, ‘I’m Gonna Pay U Back’, which is also available as
a single.
“I was completely misunderstood,” he continues. “I got death threats.
Some people found my email address. The music industry turned its back,
of course. I did get some interviews early on, just because I was Gerald
Casale from Devo. One was at a radio station in New York, where the guy
really liked two cuts on the record. He loved ‘The Time Is Now’. He said,
‘You know, if this was a Devo record, I’d be playing the hell out of it, but I
can’t play Jihad Jerry. I can’t say, “This is Jihad Jerry & The Evildoers”,
and then spin this cut’. He told me that in person.”
DEVO’S GERALD V CASALE
Casale should really have seen it coming. After all, he created the venal
character Rod Rooter and his malevolent employers Big Entertainment,
who shaft Devo at every opportunity in skits between the songs on their
1984 home video release ‘We’re All Devo!’. Given that this was an act of
creative revenge on the music industry gatekeepers who despised the group,
his surprise at Jihad Jerry getting the bum’s rush seems kind of hilarious.
“I was stupidly open-mouthed and slack-jawed,” he laughs ruefully.
“I was kind of like [puts on dopey voice], ‘Huh? How come?’. I mean, OK,
so now it all makes sense…“
erhaps enough time has passed to take the sting out of
‘Mine Is Not A Holy War’. That’s undoubtedly what the
P small US label Real Gone thought when they decided they
wanted to reactivate Jihad Jerry.
“Somebody there really liked the album,” Casale
concurs. “They thought it was a lost gem. They thought
it came out too close to 9/11. Sensibilities weren’t running towards satire at
that point. But with plenty of age, I think Jihad Jerry as a ridiculous character
is acceptable. A Caucasian man, a senior citizen, wearing a stupid Sam The
Sham-type turban wasn’t meant to be taken seriously. I tried to make that
clear from the beginning. I did say, ‘Mine is not a holy war’, right? In the press,
I would say my war is a war on stupidity – and that’s as thankless and futile
as the war on drugs.”
Real Gone asked Casale if he had any unreleased tracks they could include
to jazz up the 2021 reboot. They were thrilled when he suggested ‘I’m Gonna
Pay U Back’, which comes with a video every bit as bizarre as you would
hope from an architect of the Devo art project. With a dazzling comic-book
aesthetic that gives its human protagonists a garish, plasticised look, it pits
Devo Jerry in a Marvel-esque standoff against supervillain Jihad Jerry.
In a spaceship, naturally.
“It’s me fighting my alter ego, even though it’s not really about either of
these personas I adopt,” he explains. “It’s about being a victim of gaslighting.
The whole of America was a victim of it for four years under Donald Trump,
but there are many toxic narcissists like him that people know personally in
their daily lives. Maybe it’s someone in their family. Maybe it’s their boss.
“The point is, when you’re the victim of gaslighting, ultimately you’re left
with a big decision. Do you accept the position you’re being put into by this
person who’s turning things around on you and making you feel nuts and
wrong, or do you rebel and try to take the control back? The way I tried to
dramatise that, so it wouldn’t be just Jihad Jerry bitching about someone in
the real world, was to make it about aspects of myself. I wanted to free myself
up from being a victim. It’s pretty abstract. But you can still enjoy the video
without knowing any of that stuff.” 51
 s any Devo aficionado knows, the band’s world is heavily
populated with characters, uniforms and masks, enabling
A them to share their message of “de-evolution” with
a variety of amusing and unsettling looks. Once they got
signed, the costumes came thick and fast. Each album
coined a new image – the bright yellow boilersuits, the
skateboarding helmets and pads, the short-sleeved Tyvek leisure attire,
the tidy ‘New Traditionalists’ chinos, patent leather shoes and corporate
employee tops, the Chinese/American friendship suits. But dressing up and
taking on eccentric personas had been part of Casale’s schtick long before
he cooked up the theory of de-evolution. Back in the late 1960s, his first
character was called Skunk Man Fly.
“He was just a white guy that probably had black blues envy,” Casale
explains. “He was a dirty bluesman. He later sang songs like ‘Beehive’
and ‘I Need A Chick’ and ‘I Been Refused’.”
So these three old Devo deep cuts, fresh versions of which are on the
‘Jihad Jerry’ album, were originally sung by Skunk Man Fly?
“Exactly. It was imitating those blues names, but making it absurd. Which
it obviously was. It’s what crazy Caucasian conceptual artists tend to do.”
Casale’s next character was Protar, another creation from his days at
Kent State University, which he attended alongside Mark Mothersbaugh.
The campus remains notorious as the place where four students were shot
dead by National Guardsmen during anti-Vietnam War protests in 1970 –
killings that Casale witnessed up-close. The experience changed him from
a peace-loving 60s dude into an angry 70s militant who would later channel
his rage through Devo.
“After the killings at Kent State, all the right-wing state governors colluded
and conspired to start punishing activists and anybody who had belonged to
what they called ‘radical organisations’. I was a member of SDS [Students
For A Democratic Society], so there went my scholarship to Ann Arbor, where
I was planning to go to graduate school. The only way I was in college at all
was because of a scholarship. I didn’t have any money – I was blue-collar –
so I had to do graduate school in Kent State. During the admissions process,
before the first quarter of fall 1970 started, I became Protar. I tried to change
my name and get my student ID photographed as Protar, but I failed.”
So what was the idea behind Protar?
“He was like an avenging angel. Imagine if Spock had a disintegrator ray
and got pissed off. So he was no longer a dispassionate and logical alien,
he was an alien who’d had enough of human hideousness.”
Rayguns are a regular trope in Devo videos. The kids in the ‘Through
Being Cool’ clip use them to evaporate Reaganite ninnies and twits.
“Well, you know, we always embraced technology. And what a clean
and unmessy way of eliminating horrible people.”
Oh, for a wobbly Devo gun in real life…
“Well, yeah! Imagine just getting rid of Trump like that. It would have done
the world a favour. When I wrote the original songs for ‘Mine Is Not A Holy
War’, I was railing against Dubya – George W Bush, yeah? I thought he was
bad. With his ginned-up reasons for starting wars and his embrace of the
right-wing evangelicals, empowering them to influence the Supreme Court
and try to get rid of women’s reproductive rights… I mean, he was such
a moron and a fake hillbilly, right? Well, forget it, because Trump makes
him look like a nice guy.”
It was worse than Devo ever warned it might be. Not even Gerald V Casale
could have imagined how low it would actually go.
“No, I didn’t,” he says. “We talked about de-evolution, but we weren’t
ready for it. Think about what we have been living through – four years of
Trump and then Covid. This is beyond our worst nightmare of things devolving.
Trump took us to the brink. What happened on 6 January came close to going
all the way. And Trump’s not going away. There’ll be people embracing him.
He’s coming back, just like the Delta variant of Covid.”
asale’s rage – first aimed at George W Bush and the wars
in Afghanistan and Iraq (with the outrageous ‘Army Girls
C Gone Wild’ prompted by the shameful Abu Ghraib war
crimes) and more recently at the grim forces unleashed
by Donald Trump – is sublimated through Jihad Jerry. His
characters, it seems, are a way of creatively discharging
the pent-up energy of his ire. In the earliest days of Devo, before they had
secured a record deal, before anyone cared anything about them, Casale and
Mothersbaugh would invent characters and stay in them for long periods.
This was not, let’s face it, normal. But did it work as a psychological shield?
“Yes. Going back to Greek plays, that’s the function of adopting alter egos
and wearing costumes and masks, although you don’t realise that is what
you’re doing at first. I wasn’t cognisant of what I was doing on a premeditated
level. I couldn’t have articulated some academic argument about it. That only
came later. I think you hide behind a mask to get out something you want to
get out, but feel too naked to do so as yourself. The other reason is to be able
to project. You’re a performer. You’re performing.
 DEVO’S GERALD V CASALE

53

“Think about what it takes. Why does anyone get up on a stage with an
instrument? Why do they have the nerve to think they should put something
out there in front of people? You said, ‘It’s not normal’. Well, there’s something
about ‘not normal’ and you need that to complete yourself. You’re compelled
to tell people what you know and you have to find ways to do it. The masks
also hide anger. Devo had anger, I had anger, but the masks abstract that and
make it palatable to the audience.”
And to yourselves? Is it a way of releasing your feelings without going
out and doing awful things yourselves?
“Well, you definitely feel better after you’ve done this thing and then take
the mask off,” he laughs.
David Bowie, another artist who created new personas throughout
his career, sometimes from song to song, was an early champion of Devo.
He proclaimed them to be “the band of the future” when he saw them playing
in New York in 1977. While filming ‘Just A Gigolo’, he spent his weekends off
helping Brian Eno produce their first album the following year. Does Casale
think their universe of characters played a role in piquing Bowie’s interest
in them?
“Yes,” he says, becoming noticeably affected at the mention of Bowie’s
name. “He was my hero. I looked up to that guy. I was totally in awe of him.
And it was easy to talk to him. It was like you’d had these conversations with
him in your brain years before meeting him. When you were actually with
him, the challenge was to not become like you were in ‘Bill & Ted’s Excellent
Adventure’ and get tongue-tied. After about five minutes, I wasn’t, and that
felt really good.
“Bowie was such a presence. So refined and so articulate. Mesmerising.
When he’s looking at you and talking, you’re just, ‘OK, I’m hip to talk, I’m
ready…’. What a deep respect I have for him. You have six to nine months left
to live, you know that, and you work on putting out a new record. You start
writing about the end of life and you shoot two or three videos about death.
That’s an artist.”
DEVO’S GERALD V CASALE
he Jihad Jerry project closes a loop for Gerald V Casale.
Through its blues and 1960s R&B influences and its use
T of old Devo tunes, not to mention the fact that fellow
Devo members Mark and Bob Mothersbaugh and his
own sadly departed brother Bob are all over it, the
album feels like a conscious revisiting of his lost youth,
a reboot of a long-gone era.
“It was pretty conscious,” Casale affirms. “Devo were doing nothing at
that point and Mark had no interest in doing anything. I was tired of sitting
on my hands and having no means of self-expression, so I thought, ‘I’m going
to go back and have fun with some of the things that were my influences’.
I was listening to records like Bob Dylan’s ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’
and The Rolling Stones’ ‘Aftermath’, records that excited me when I was 16
or 17 years old, so I just let myself go back there.”
And was it bittersweet?
“You got that right,” he sighs.
In the sense that we mourn our youth?
“Absolutely.”
There’s always the future to talk about, though. Against all expectations,
Devo are playing four US shows in September. They are also booked to
appear at the already sold-out Cruel World festival in Pasadena, California,
next May. Will there be more dates?
“You know, given the randomness of Devo reality, I wouldn’t ever posit
that,” Casale says. “But I would like to think so. I have always been Devo and
I have never dropped the torch. What I have tried to do with this song ‘I’m
Gonna Pay U Back’ is to keep the spirit of the band alive with something edgy
and controversial, with a video that has a new look and is something Devo
would use if they were doing anything, right?”
Right. Are we not men? We are still Devo.
‘AKA Jihad Jerry & The Evildoers’ is out now on Real Gone 55
VOX
HUMANA
Sink Ya Teeth bassist Gemma Cullingford has found her voice and
is stepping into the spotlight with a solo album of electronic songs
about love, death and getting the boiler mended

WORDS: MARK ROLAND


emma Cullingford, bass player and shrinking violet
of Britain’s foremost post-punky indie-electro-disco
G two-piece Sink Ya Teeth, has released a solo album
called ‘Let Me Speak’ on the fine and upstanding Outré
label. Constructed from synths, bass guitar, thumping
great stripped-down beats and, most importantly,
Cullingford’s semi-detached vocals, it’s the document of a woman literally
finding her voice and taking a big step outside of the Sink Ya Teeth comfort
zone she has built with Maria Uzor.
It came together, like many projects emerging into this contagion culture
we now inhabit, because time stopped. When Sink Ya Teeth released their
second album, ‘Two’, the duo headed out on tour. They were planning to drop
into the Electronic Sound HQ at some point to sign a handful of records and
have a chat. All seemed well with them. This was, however, February 2020.
“We did three dates,” says Cullingford. “We were going by train, doing
these sweaty little venues. Going up to Leeds on the morning of the first
date, I was like, ‘Maria, I’m not too sure about this…’, because the pandemic
was really starting to ramp up. By the time the tour was halted three days
later, everyone at our publishers was already working from home. Some of
them didn’t come to our gig in London because they were self-isolating.
I’m surprised we didn’t get it.”
Perhaps they did get Covid and were asymptomatic. Or maybe, given that
a track on ‘Two’ is called ‘The Vaccine’, they saw it coming and knew what
the drill would be. It’s worth mentioning at this point that it’s a very warm and
sunny day, and Gemma Cullingford has come to meet me for the first face-to-
face interview either of us has done in 18 months. It’s a huge deal.
“Being on trains, every time I saw someone cough I was horrified,” she
recounts, looking suitably horrified. “You realise how many people rub their
nose and then touch things. I was like, ‘God, this is just awful!’. On the TV,
I saw people stuck on cruise ships, and I was petrified of being quarantined
in a hotel because ours weren’t the nicest. I couldn’t imagine two weeks in
one of those rooms. I went a bit crazy on the last night, so as soon as I got
home I was like, ‘Right, we are locking ourselves down!’.”
n the earliest days of Sink Ya Teeth, it felt a little like
a low-key experiment. Two musicians, both veterans of
I the underground scene, getting together to see what
happened. They put out a couple of seven-inch singles
and much fun was had at sporadic gigs around their home
city of Norwich. It soon spiralled, with the patronage of
GEMMA CULLINGFORD
Manchester stalwarts A Certain Ratio and rapidly rising media excitement
leading to mounting expectations for the group’s eponymous debut album.
Cullingford and Uzor signed a publishing deal with Mute in 2019, but they don’t
have a manager and they run their own record label. They both have day jobs
too. It’s quite the juggling act.
You might think the steel door banging shut on Sink Ya Teeth just as ‘Two’
was being released would be hard to take, especially with the tour also
evaporating before their eyes. But because of their already paranoid and
frazzled state of mind, they hit the fuggedaboutit button with a combination
of speed and relief.
“We were actually a bit overwhelmed with things,” confesses Cullingford.
“When we played in Norwich, I found it really difficult. Everyone wanted to
talk to me, but I just wanted to hide, to be invisible. But when you stay in the
dressing room, you feel you should be out there, in the middle of it, or you feel
rude, or like you’re not getting in the zone. I couldn’t handle it.”
Was it because of Covid?
“It was because I didn’t want to be seen,” she says. “It was the pressure.
Playing Norwich is scary for me because I want people in Norwich to love us,
but I don’t enjoy playing in front of my friends. I prefer going to places where I
don’t know anyone. A month or two before, I remember saying to Maria, ‘I just
want to go to a desert island for a year’. Then the pandemic happened and I
was like, ‘Did I bring it on?!’. It was as if someone had answered my prayers.”
Here’s the paradox that is Gemma Cullingford. She loves a job that involves
doing a great many things she finds almost impossible to do. She wants to
be in a band and play music for people, but she doesn’t want to be seen. She
hates having her picture taken. She hates doing videos. She enjoys playing
gigs, but she was pleased when society shut down and she could retreat to
her Norfolk bolthole. And all of this is somehow captured on ‘Let Me Speak’.
“I’m not comfortable in the limelight,” she continues. “I like creating music
and I want people to hear it, but in order for people to hear it you have to put
yourself out there. Even touring with previous bands… I didn’t enjoy it much.”
She knows what she’s talking about. Her first band was KaitO, a four-piece
rock outfit fronted by Nik Colk, now of Factory Floor. KaitO slogged around
America several times, plying their Sonic Youth shouty guitar wares.
“When KaitO toured America, which was when I was in my early 20s,
everyone would be going out at 11pm, while I’d be going to bed. I’ve always
been the same. I have to drink quite a lot to feel sociable, which then makes
me feel a bit ill and tired… and I’m not good when I’m tired. I need space,
which you don’t get on tour. Luckily for me, Maria also likes her own space
these days. We’re pretty good at giving each other loads of it, so it works.” 57

nd so ensued 15 months of semi-rural isolation. Sink Ya
Teeth’s touring was cancelled. Everyone’s touring was
A cancelled. Everyone’s everything was cancelled. As 2020
trudged on, the news of daily death rates and footage of
mass graves and reports of health systems collapsing
around the world made you feel as if you’d woken up in
a dystopian movie scripted by Stephen King. Yet for more people than would
probably care to confess, society closing down came as a blessed relief.
The enforced break certainly gave Cullingford some much-needed respite.
“Lockdown was heaven for me,” she admits. “I know that it was terrible
because of what was happening, but in my house, in my little world, I felt
I could do anything I wanted without any outside judgement. It was just me
and my boyfriend and my dog. And I was able to come out with lyrics! I’ve
never done that before!”
The knotty issue of lyrics cropped up the last time I spoke to her. In Sink
Ya Teeth, she hides behind her bass guitar (“my armour”), leaving vocalist
Uzor to write all the words. But lockdown unlocked Cullingford. And that’s
what this record of hers is all about.
“What with the good weather and the garden, I’d often sit there in silence –
because I love silence – and ideas began to bubble up,” she says. “I was able
to write a couple of things… nothing very deep, but something. I guess you
put it in the Petri dish and you look at it later and ask, ‘What was that about?’,
and then you sort of examine it. I felt really brave.”
When the tracks started to come together, she quickly realised she had
quite a lot of material.
“I contacted Graeme at Outré,” she says. “I was like, ‘I think I’ve got this
album…’. I felt invisible – I reckoned I could put it out because no one’s there
and no one’s going to hear it – and yet I wanted it to be heard. So I just went
for it. Maybe another year or at a different time in life I wouldn’t have dared
but, well, I’d recently celebrated a big birthday, I don’t have any kids, I know
music is me, and I know this is me. It’s sort of like that thing of finding yourself
when you get a bit older.”
Musically, ‘Let Me Speak’ gnaws on a similar bone to Sink Ya Teeth, but
the record is most notable for Cullingford’s vocals – breathy and whispered,
sometimes spoken – and the flashes of lyrical strangeness, which burst out
like unexpected fireworks in the night sky.
Take ‘Queen Bee’. On the face of it, the stabbed chords and driving disco
beat evoke a nightclub of naked electro minimalism with a dash of Gary
Numan’s ‘I Die: You Die’ thrown in. But the words take it into an altogether
different realm: “He came round, straight from prison / Didn’t care how cold it
was, Davie Dixon / He screwed me in the bathroom / And left me on the floor /
What’s wrong with you David? / What’d you do that for?”. It’s pretty shocking.
“They were the first lyrics I ever wrote!” says Cullingford gleefully.
‘Queen Bee’ appears to be a deadpan description of a tale of abuse and
exploitation. And it is exactly that, but not quite how you might imagine.
“It was just before Christmas,” she says. “My boiler had broken down
and I called a company who sent this guy to my house. They were rip-off
merchants, really. He did a lot of that tut-tutting tradespeople do, leaning
on my washing machine, phoning people up, wasting my time.”
GEMMA CULLINGFORD
Screwed over in the bathroom, then. Where the boiler was.
“I know he wouldn’t have pissed around as much if my boyfriend had been
there. I felt violated by the time he left and I wished I’d stuck up for myself
more. So ‘Queen Bee’ is me, telling the story of how it might have been if I’d
been my own superhero. Gemma sticking up for herself. But I hate conflict,
so I would never do that.”
Still, inspired by her boyfriend’s suggestion she use something that had
made her angry as a way of getting underway, the track unleashed the lyric
writing for ‘Let Me Speak’.
“There wasn’t much thought behind it, to be honest,” she says. “It came
together so quickly, I don’t really remember doing it. A lot of what I do, I just
bash out.”
Another standout moment is the cover version of Bobbie Gentry’s ‘Ode
To Billie Joe’. Cullingford has excised Gentry’s mysterious narrative from its
beautiful country music setting and replanted it in Suicide-esque electronic
minimalism, her detached English delivery giving the song a fresh incongruity
that only emphasises its obscure emotional undertow.
“I didn’t know ‘Ode To Billie Joe’ until recently,” she says. “When I heard it,
I fell in love with the tune first. Then I read the words… and they’re amazing.
I didn’t stop thinking about them for weeks and every time I sang it I thought,
‘What were they throwing off the Tallahatchie Bridge?’. She sings it very jolly,
doesn’t she? It’s really a pop song, but I thought it deserved something quite
dark. I remember thinking the beat behind it was a little like a heartbeat. But
that was just tinkering, so I read it in my normal voice and left it.”
emma Cullingford seems surprised when I tell her there
will be a demand for her to play live and ask how she will
G deal with that side of a solo career. She won’t, she says.
She’s not going to play live, she says. And what about
Sink Ya Teeth? What’s happening there?
“We’ve got some gigs booked in the autumn,” she
replies. “I don’t feel great about them, to be honest. We’re headlining loads
that are way past my bedtime!”
As you’ll probably have guessed, her enthusiasm for a return to the life
of a gigging musician is notable by its absence.
“I feel like I want to stay in my nice safe house… and yet I love it when
I’m actually playing and after I’ve done it. I contradict myself so much. I love
silence, but if I listen to music it has to be loud and through headphones –
I have to be really absorbed in it. And not wanting to be seen, but wanting
to be seen at the same time. One of the reasons I chose black and white for
my album artwork is because a lot of people say I see things in black and
white, but also because of these contrasts in my personality – being shy
but having to perform.”
It’s an illogicality and an expression of anxieties that a lot of people will
understand as we enter into a post-lockdown reality. Maybe the message
we can take from ‘Let Me Speak’ and its delicate yet thunderous soundscape
is to get stuck in, but take care of yourself…
‘Let Me Speak’ is out now on Outré 59
NEW
HORIZONS:
THE DAWN
OF AMBIENT
JUNGLE

LTJ BUKEM, 2 018 - PHOTO: SAR AH GINN


In an exclusive extract abridged from their new book,
‘Renegade Snares – The Resistance And Resilience Of
Drum & Bass’, authors Ben Murphy and Carl Loben
pick their way through the origins of the more mellow
offshoot, and it all starts with LTJ Bukem
here was a flipside to the rugged beats, raw samples,
and pummelling sub-bass happening in early 90s UK
T dance music. Amid the wild abandon of acid house,
hardcore, and jungle, there was chill-out culture.
DJs like Mixmaster Morris and groups such as Global
Communication and The Orb played and made mellow
ambient records, infused with all the synths of the past masters but with
an ear cocked to modern dance beats. Chill-out rooms proliferated in clubs
and at raves, offering a calming counterpoint to the frenzies elsewhere,
and records like Aphex Twin’s ‘Selected Ambient Works 85-92’ and the
Warp ‘Artificial Intelligence’ compilations offered armchair raving to soothe
dancers into a post-ecstasy calm. Blissful beatific textures proliferated
through the work of Sueño Latino, B12, and Carl Craig – and jungle was not
immune to the musical worlds conjured by digital synths either.
While swirling tones had already become a regular feature of jungle
as early as 1993 – mainly in the intros or breakdowns of tracks, before an
avalanche of breakbeats and bass – some pioneering artists dared to imagine
ambient atmospheres as a key feature.
LTJ Bukem (real name: Danny Williamson), a classically trained DJ and
producer from Watford, was introduced to the jazz fusion of Chick Corea and
Lonnie Liston Smith by his schoolteacher, Nigel Crouch, at a young age. He
started going clubbing and had his own sound system – Sunrise, not to be
confused with the big rave brand – for a while, and despite working as a chef
was still going out nearly every night.
When he started making some inroads into the rave scene, he had the
idea to foreground lush textures in his productions. One of his earliest tunes,
1991’s ‘Logical Progression’, followed the early hardcore template to some
extent, with its 4/4 kick-drum, breakbeat, and pianos, yet it also had an
oceanic, dreamy quality.
The follow-up made the ambient aspect explicit: 1992’s ‘Demon’s Theme’,
which rapidly became a rave/club classic, placed soaring digital chords in the
middle of the action, providing a dramatic juxtaposition to the intense rolling
drums of the Amen break that hammered away below. As if to explicitly state
a link with the ambient past and future, ‘Demon’s Theme’ featured, among its
samples, the bird call also used on 808 State’s ‘Pacific State’ and a synth lift
RENEGADE SNARES
from Rhythmatic’s bleep house missive ‘Frequency’, as well as a small
snippet of pan pipes from Germany’s arch cosmic rockers Tangerine Dream,
arguably one of the first bands to pioneer the ambient/new age sound.
Bukem’s ingenious idea worked not because it lulled the listener into
a blissful stupor, but because it existed between two states, at once
dreamlike and rhythmically rugged; dancefloor-ready yet stimulating to
the mind. The follow-up was even more gorgeous – 1993’s ‘Music’ centred
around a hypnotic techno loop and soaring strings, plus orgasmic moans
from a Raze house classic. Combined with offbeat rolling Amen breaks,
it felt like a camera panning over a verdant landscape, before a low melodic
bass note added a sublime additional musicality.
“You had a record collection, you loved a piece of music from it, took
a snippet, and off you went,” Bukem told XLR8R in 2019.
Bukem was acknowledging his influences with his sample choices,
though the ambient elements that would increasingly populate his tracks
also emanated from further back in time. Heavily inspired by jazz and soul
in his formative years, he also had in his mix the cosmic tones and searching
melodies of 70s greats like Roy Ayers and Pharoah Sanders. At eight minutes,
49 seconds long, ‘Music’ wasn’t afraid to stretch out either, just as these
exploratory jazz epics had done. Larry Heard’s ‘Washing Machine’ had been
a big game changer for Bukem. “Cosmic soul, man, that was my link between
Lonnie Liston Smith and the electronic age,” he told DJ Mag. “That blew
my head off. Took me somewhere I’d never been before and I didn’t want
to come back.”
“Personally I’m a big soul head, and people often look at me weirdly when I
tell them this,” Bukem later told FACT, “but what I see is that there’s a parallel
from soul to jazz to reggae to 80s soul to hip hop, early house to hip house to
the early acid to techno to drum & bass. In that way they’re all connected.”
Bukem began to attract attention for his different take on jungle – though,
to start with, his style was simply considered part of the rich blend of
influences the genre could exhibit, and he could be found on many a club or
rave flyer amid acts more known for playing hard beats. Still, his open-ended
approach made his Good Looking Records label a home for other like-
minded producers who were also interested in exploring the combination of
musicality with tough drums and bass. 61
 Around the same time in Hertford, Omni Trio (Rob Haigh) was beginning
to combine the ambient music he’d already been making as Sema as early
as 1984, with the hardcore and jungle beats he’d heard and been excited
by while working in the town’s Parliament record shop. With tunes like 93’s
‘Mystic Steppers’ and ‘Renegade Snares’, he was another formative influence
on ambient jungle. And in Coventry, Skanna (John Graham) was another
artist experimenting with ambient elements as early as 1993. His ‘Heaven’
EP followed two roughneck jungle cuts with ‘This Way’, a track full of soul
soothing, sampler-stretched pads and warm bass booms.
In Luton, Blame and Justice began fusing influences from other dance
genres with jungle beats, spurred on by hearing LTJ Bukem, and producing
early ambient-tinged gems like ‘Anthemia’.
By 1994, records by Sounds Of Life (later to become one half of Source
Direct), Blame & Justice, Peshay, Spring Heel Jack, and many more all
provided a mellow contrasting sound with the dominant jungle club/sound
system style. Artists more associated with the heavier incarnation, like
Photek (as Aquarius, ‘Dolphin Tune’) and Doc Scott (‘Far Away’) tapped
into the ambient mode, and 4hero’s galactic drum & bass masterpiece
album ‘Parallel Universe’ featured tunes like the chilled and jazzy vocal gem
‘Universal Love’. Wax Doctor, who had made his name making raw hardcore
and proto jungle on Basement Records, delivered the sublime, style-defining
‘Kid Caprice’ for Metalheadz, taking the break from Kurtis Blow’s ‘Do The
Do’ (one of the earliest of many tunes to do so since) and merging it with
a cascading ambient melody and languid funk flute to mesmeric effect. There
was a collective realisation that jungle had many more musical applications,
and that its fast tempo opened up exciting avenues when combined with
influences from elsewhere.
This jazzier, more ambient style of jungle soon had a club to call its own.
Just off Tottenham Court Road, near the old Astoria venue in central London,
the Mars Bar hosted Speed from late 1994; LTJ Bukem could be found holding
court there alongside resident DJs like Kemistry & Storm and Fabio.
“Things started happening,” says Storm. “The first night, Nicky
Blackmarket and Bukem played. We met Photek there, Fabio was brought in.
People started coming really early because they wanted to experience the
whole night. It was exciting. It established, if you want to give it a name,
drum & bass.”
One of the regulars at Speed was J Majik, the producer responsible for
a host of classics, from ‘Your Sound’ to ‘Arabian Nights’ for Metalheadz. First
breaking through at the age of 14 in 1993 with the storming ‘Six Million Ways To
Die’ under the name Dextrous – the tune that led Goldie to sign him to the label
– J Majik was inspired by the fresh sounds he heard at the club. “I thought, ‘How
long can you keep making music with a ragga vocal in?’,” he told Melody Maker
at the time. “Now production has improved, it’s become more mature.”
Speed was one of the seminal jungle club nights, and its signature
combination of roughneck breaks and the more atmospheric side of the genre
attracted a growing crowd of devotees. Bukem’s Good Looking label (and
its Looking Good offshoot) was concurrently putting out a steady stream
of soon-to-be classics. The Wild West saloon bar brilliance of PFM’s ‘The
Western’ was followed by ‘One & Only’, a soul-soothing ambient hyper-ballad,
combining crisp breakbeats with a yearning lovelorn vocal, aquatic chords,
and a lush 808 bassline that made it equally powerful on the dancefloor.
Aquarius’s ‘Drift To The Centre’ showed Photek’s mastery of the mellower
mode, while Seba & Lotek’s ‘So Long’ managed to make the swift velocity
and damaging power of the Amen break a calming energy flow rather than
a maelstrom. Bukem’s own masterpiece, ‘Horizons’, with its inspirational Maya
Angelou sample and dramatic chord stabs, began to get him noticed outside the
jungle scene, too. He headlined at the Big Chill, taking ambient jungle to a fresh
set of left-field electronicists, and he started doing his Logical Progression
nights at Ministry of Sound and other prestigious venues in the UK and beyond.
The wider music industry eventually recognised this new strand of jungle
– and its marketability. The media, especially the dance press, latched onto
the sound. In the past, there had been a snobbishness towards hardcore
and jungle in the magazines and weekly music papers, where they were
sometimes viewed as less worthy of coverage than the more “sophisticated”
likes of house and techno, and either too cheesy or too raw to be given
column inches. Now, with the advent of Good Looking Records, LTJ Bukem,
and Speed, journalists started to write more approvingly about the genre.
Goldie’s ‘Timeless’ also contained more ambient-leaning material, like ‘Angel’
and ‘Sea Of Tears’, so music scribes had something they felt was worthy of
writing about, while Bukem, accompanied by the smooth tones of MC Conrad,
did an ‘Essential Mix’ for Radio 1 in 1995 – an indication that drum & bass
could be canonised like other dance genres.
GOLDIE, LTJ BUKEM AND ROB PL AY FORD, CRE AMFIELDS 19 9 6 - PHOTO: DANIEL NE W M AN
 RENEGADE SNARES
A big problem at this time, though, was rebranding. To differentiate the
mellower sound, some began to describe the music as drum & bass rather
than jungle. Some promoters used the term to compartmentalise DJs they
saw as playing material that was less hard than jungle – and less lyrically
focused than the ragga style that predominated.
“All of a sudden, when you were being booked by a big rave, you were
seeing this: jungle in room 1, and in room 2, drum & bass,” says DJ Storm.
“I was like, ‘Hang on a minute, I’m a junglist. Why are you doing this?’. The
promoter would say, ‘You lot have got a slightly different sound, it’s drum
& bass, not jungle’.”
The producers and DJs making or playing the more ambient style simply
saw it as an extension of jungle – another branch of the tree, rather than
a replacement for what already had strong roots. “In drum & bass, I don’t
consciously play across the spectrum,” Doc Scott, who made and played
everything from mechanical techstep to mellower ambient jungle, told
Melody Maker. “Anything goes, I’m just into good beats at the end of the
day. Whether a track has a jazz-tinged edge or an ambient feel or is some
industrial techno kind of thing, it doesn’t matter. I don’t enjoy DJing on just
one level.”
Nevertheless, the ambient producers and sound were placed in their own
category, and for a while their style became the epitome of cool. Out of this
arose the unfortunate terms “intelligent jungle” and “intelligent drum & bass”
– a troubling genre descriptor that, while it aimed to describe the musicality
and depth of the new sound, ended up insulting the entire community. By
talking about “intelligence”, the implication was that all other iterations of
jungle were somehow stupid or unsophisticated. Considering that most jungle
was made or played by black and working-class artists, there was more than
a hint of racism and class snobbery embedded in the idea. By rebranding the
sound, the name seemed to imply, it could suddenly become acceptable to the
ears of white middle-class hipsters.
Whatever the implications of the genre name, or what people chose to
call it, this ambient jungle sound produced many classic records, and it would
prove a gateway drug for listeners getting into the sound for the first time.
In 1995, 4hero, having already delivered the jazz-tinged classic ‘Parallel
Universe’, produced a self-titled album for R&S ambient offshoot label
Apollo under the name Jacob’s Optical Stairway. It nodded to their love of
Detroit techno, adding deep jazz elements, astral synths, and soul vocals,
creating a classic of the era that remains puzzlingly underrated today.
LTJ Bukem’s era-defining mix compilation ‘Logical Progression’,
released in 1996, was a snapshot of the greatest tracks to emanate from
this micro-scene. It contains tracks like Chameleon’s ‘Links’, made by
Tom Middleton and Mark Pritchard (who were behind the ambient/chill-
out classic album ‘76:14’ as Global Communication), many of Bukem’s best
tracks, cuts by Wax Doctor and Moving Shadow’s JMJ & Flytronix, and
a tune apiece by DJ Trace and DJ Crystl, on hiatus from their usual
roughneck material.
The ‘Logical Progression’ series and its companion set, ‘Earth’ – with
their lush, sophisticated design on both vinyl and CD – helped set up
Good Looking as the scene leader in this particular lane. “All my money
goes straight back into Good Looking, ’cause that’s my dream,” Bukem
told DJ Mag in 2000. “My dream isn’t to drive a Ferrari, do crack, have
two mansions and 17 birds a night. Those things don’t turn me on… I’ve
turned down the money, I’ve turned down the drugs. People have offered
us millions for Good Looking. They’ve offered us money that makes most
record deals look like pocket money. What would happen? OK, so I’m sitting
there with 10 million pounds. Phew. Blinding. But what have I got? I’ve got
nothing. My label’s gone to someone who’s given me 10 million pounds.
I’m a music man at heart, and my whole music and everything I’ve built have
gone somewhere else and I can’t control it. I’m like, you couldn’t do a worse
thing to me than buy my label off me, for any amount of money… I’ve got 15
staff and 20 artists. I work 15 hours, seven days a week, for the last 10 years,
and I don’t see it stopping for the next 10.”

‘Renegade Snares – The Resistance And Resilience Of Drum

& Bass’ is out now, published by Jawbone Press 63
DAMMIT,
JANET!
From wartime bombings to the creaking of tree bark, Janet Beat
has always been fascinated by sound. Now in her 80s, this
contemporary of Daphne Oram and Delia Derbyshire is finally
being recognised for her pioneering electronic work

WORDS: BOB FISCHER


lthough I lived in the countryside, we had three bombs
fall on our little road,” says Janet Beat with softly-
“A spoken stoicism. “One of them fell onto a neighbour’s
house when I was in it. I only lived to tell the tale because
the bomb didn’t explode, but I heard it come down.
They spin and there’s a screaming noise. And before
they land, because of the way sound travels, there’s a silence. We were
taught to throw ourselves to the ground at that moment.
“I heard it crash right through the roof and I was later told that it was
an incendiary bomb, so we wouldn’t have survived. The heat generated by
it sears the lungs. But I remember not being afraid, just being fascinated,
until I heard the adults start to scream.”
I don’t mind admitting that I am completely in awe of Janet Beat. She is
genuinely extraordinary. Born in 1937 and raised in rural Staffordshire, her
hair-raising wartime memories alone form part of an essential social history.
But they are just one tiny element of a life defined by her unyielding sense
of adventure. Crucially, her abiding preoccupation with sound has led to her
becoming one of Britain’s first – and perhaps most unjustly unrecognised –
pioneers of electronic music. A contemporary of both Daphne Oram and Delia
Derbyshire, Janet has had to wait until her 84th year for the first release of
her collected electronic works.
“I was always very sensitive to sound,” she notes. “I spent a lot of time
on my own and I used to put my ears to the bark of trees. If it was windy, you
could hear them creaking deliciously. The rest of the scientific world have
caught up now – they’ve got microphones and they can hear trees drawing
up their water. I did that as a child. I just didn’t have the microphones.
“There was a big rhododendron bush that was hollow in the centre and
I used to crawl inside to listen to the nature all around me. Rabbits thumping
and seed pods bursting. I noticed that different leaves make different sounds,
according to whether they have a serrated edge or a smooth edge. Some
make pink noise, some make white noise. I can still hear the difference.”
JANET BEAT
JANE T BE AT, AGED 3, W ITH HER PARENT S
Her interest in composition began with a tune written on a toy piano at
the age of three. When she was six, she overheard her mother suggesting
the infant Janet might benefit from a spell in a children’s home “where the
nuns will knock the music out of her”. Undeterred, her obsession was further
fuelled by the BBC’s post-war radio output.
“There were only two radio stations – the Home Service and the Light
Programme,” she says. “My mother and I used to search them for classical
music. On the radio dial, it said things like, ‘Moscow – Oslo – Hilversum –
Luxembourg’. The reception was very distorted. Sometimes it emphasised
the upper frequencies and sometimes other stations butted in. That taught
me about sound collage.”
Studying for a degree in music at Birmingham University in the mid-1950s,
Janet began to assume more esoteric leanings.
“I first became intrigued by electronic music when I was a student,” she
continues. “I went to a shop that sold second-hand records and I picked up an
LP of work by Pierre Henry. I thought, ‘What is this?’. So with the money from
my 21st birthday, which was in 1958, I bought a Brenell Mark 5 tape machine.
It was mono, with an interchangeable capstan for very slow speeds. That was
great. With the mono track being in the middle of the tape, you could play it
backwards too. Later on, I did tape loops.”
Where on earth, I wonder, did that practical expertise come from? Those
are pretty unorthodox pursuits for 1950s Staffordshire.
“There were books by various electronic engineers, so I learned about
tape loops from those,” she explains. “I was only the ninth person in the
UK to make musique concrète. There was Daphne Oram, a few men, and then
there was me! Some of the others stopped because they were ridiculed.
But I bought a Tandberg stereo machine, which meant I could start to
multitrack. I also took a correspondence course in electronics, after which
I built an oscilloscope. It was probably a bit like painting by numbers to begin
with. And then I got into elektronische music after buying the 10-inch LP
of Stockhausen’s ‘Gesang Der Jünglinge’.” 65
 anet graduated from Birmingham in 1960 and accepted
a teaching post at Worcester College of Education.
J It was here that she found an unlikely champion for
her interests – a man now widely recognised as one of
the 20th century’s leading experts on church music.
“The head of the department was Watkins Shaw,
the musicologist,” she says. “He was the person who encouraged me. We had
lots of long talks. We bought our own little studio oscilloscope and everyone
working in the physics department was delighted that a woman was getting
involved in science. Their technician built a ring modulator for me, then a
low-pass and high-pass filter, and I introduced a course on electronic music
to the students. Everywhere else that I have been, I’ve had opposition from
department heads.”
Buoyed up by the experience of watching Wendy Carlos performing on
television in the early 1970s, Janet spent a year marking Open University
coursework to earn the money to buy her first synthesiser.
“The EMS Synthi A!” she exclaims. “In suitcase form. Watkins Shaw
came with me and we went to Peter Zinovieff’s place in Putney. God, he was
arrogant. He wasn’t certain whether he wanted to sell me one of his synths
because I was ‘provincial’. And when I mentioned Daphne Oram… that was
a red rag to a bull. He couldn’t stand her. The prices were going up all the
time, but his secretary said, ‘This is Friday and the price doesn’t go up until
Monday… so I’ll sell it to you at today’s price’.”
In 1972, Janet joined the teaching staff at the Royal Scottish Academy
of Music and Drama (RSAMD, now the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland)
and founded another electronic studio. During her time at the Academy,
she finally encountered her musical kindred spirit.
“The director of studies at the RSAMD had been a BBC producer and he
invited Daphne Oram up to give a talk,” she recalls. “He took me to lunch
with her and she was thrilled to find another woman who was interested in
technology. She asked me to visit her at Tower Folly, her home in Kent. It was
a converted oast house and she had a studio in her garden shed. She was
delightful and told me about various suppliers that I could visit to help me
build my own circuits.”
Electronic music is far from the sum total of Beat’s lifetime of work.
In the 1960s, she worked as an orchestral horn player until her technique
was limited by a serious mouth operation – “I was told I would never play
again… ‘Stop trying to be like a man, go away and have babies’, they said” –
and her electronic experiments have always gone hand in hand with a prolific
body of classical material. In 1980, she was a founder of the Scottish Society
of Composers. In 1992, she became visiting composer at Hochschule für
Musik Nürnberg, the respected German conservatoire. She sees no great
divide between the electronic and classical disciplines.
“They seem like two sides of the same coin to me, because I’m a person
full of curiosity,” she insists. “I think the world is a wonderful place to live.
I still pick up stones to see what’s underneath them.”
Inevitably, her tirelessly inquisitive nature has found its way into her
teaching practices.
“When I started the studio at the RSAMD, I’d tell the students about
harmonics and get them to miaow like a cat,” she chuckles. “When a cat goes
‘miaow’, it’s acting like a band-pass filter. So I’d say, ‘Sing on a note to suit
your voice and then miaow, and you should be able to hear the sine waves
inside your head’. The rest of the staff always knew they were my students
when they went into the refectory miaowing.”
Perhaps no less predictably, her unorthodox approach also brought her
into conflict with the more traditionally minded patricians of 1970s and
1980s academia.
“I worked alongside three different principals and 10 heads of department…
and only one of them was helpful,” she sighs. “At times, I was told to stop
composing. Some of them increased my teaching hours to try and stop me.
I said, ‘You cannot tell me what to do in my leisure time’. Somebody once said
to me, ‘I bet you’re pleased about the Sex Discrimination Act’. I said, ‘In one
way, yes, but in another, it just makes the misogyny go underground’. I like to
know where it’s coming from, so I can be prepared for it.”

n 1981, ‘Dancing On Moonbeams (An Electronic Fantasy)’,
a twinkling 10-minute ambient track by Janet Beat, was
I included on a compilation called ‘Music By Scottish
Composers Volume One’. For 40 years, it remained the
only commercial release of any of her electronic work.
“I’d bought some more units for my Roland System-
100M synthesiser,” she says gleefully. “In fact, with the various keyboards
I had, I was able to run 16 oscillators together, like ‘A Clockwork Orange’!
But I made the mistake of writing tongue-in-cheek sleeve notes for it – ‘Close
your eyes and become an aural astronaut…’. Big mistake. All of the other
composers on the disc had written very serious notes about their music.”
‘Dancing On Moonbeams’ is the opening track on Trunk’s new collection
of Janet’s work, the mischievously titled ‘Pioneering Knob Twiddler’. The
album also includes two 1983 modular pieces produced to accompany Eddie
McConnell’s atmospheric ‘Lighthouse’ film for the Channel 4 series ‘Second
Glance’, a wordless documentary following the daily travails of these lonely
maritime outposts. Another absorbing track is ‘Echoes From Bali’, a hypnotic
Yamaha DX7 recreation of Indonesian gamelan music.
“When I was a schoolgirl, there was a 78 rpm ‘History Of Music And Sound’ my mother died of myeloid leukemia. In the 1970s, it was a death sentence.
record of a gamelan orchestra,” she says. “I loved it, particularly the tuning
of the metal bars of their instruments to be – to Western ears – slightly out of
tune. You get a shimmering effect. That made me want to go to Java to hear
the real thing.”
It was an ambition that she fulfilled decades later.
“I chose a tourist holiday, but then stayed behind to play Javanese-style
gamelan,” she recounts. “It’s very beautiful and the dancing is incredible.
The devils and the demons and the monkey characters move so rapidly. In fact, it reminds me of my mother. Don’t worry, I’ll get over it.”
the monkey gambolled and landed with his head in my lap. And said, under
his mask, ‘Sorry’. But when he made his next entry, he was eyeing me up
and I thought, ‘He’ll do it again…’. He did, and this time he whispered, ‘Nice’.” both an education and a privilege. She signs off in an upbeat mood.
Recorded in 1987, ‘Echoes From Bali’ is the newest track on ‘Pioneering
Knob Twiddler’. Although she continues to compose in the classical idiom,
Janet’s electronic work stopped over a decade ago with the sale of her ailing
studio. Much of her earliest music, she admits wistfully, is now lost forever.
JANET BEAT
“A lot of my old tapes are missing,” she reveals. “My father used some
of them to tie things up in the garden. I don’t think he did it to deliberately
destroy my music, he was simply a great recycler. I came home once and
found his raspberry canes tied together with my tapes. So I lost everything
that was on them. We had a blazing row. The tapes still performed though,
by acting as a wind chime. If I could have dragged the Brenell Mark 5 into
the garden, which I couldn’t because it weighed a ton, I would have written
a piece called ‘Phoenix’.”
You might be forgiven for assuming Janet had a fractious relationship with
her parents, but there’s a heartrending sting in the tale. As we wind up our
conversation, she tells me about ‘Aztec Myth’, a 1987 composition for voice
and tape. She shares the anecdote as an example of her multifaceted thought
processes, but it becomes something else entirely.
“I’d remembered reading an extract from an Aztec poem,” she says.
“But it wasn’t long enough for what I wanted. So this is where my curiosity
came in again. I’d heard that a scientist was considering whether viruses
were once part of our DNA. I’d also heard that, in trying to help people with
brain damage, researchers were experimenting with enzymes. And also…
So I put all these elements together…”
She pauses for a moment and then recites the lyrics to me.
“Your enzymes changed my brain cells / Then my pulsing heart came
verdant / Greener than the springtime grass / I put forth crimson flowers /
But oh, alas, like the rosebush / I flowered and withered…”
At which point, she breaks off, clearly emotional.
“Sorry,” she apologises, entirely unnecessarily. “I’m getting upset because
And that softly-spoken stoicism swiftly returns. She finishes the recitation
undaunted. We’ve talked for two hours and my time with Janet Beat has been
“I’ve come back into fashion,” she laughs as we say goodbye. “Normally,
that happens after you’ve died, so I’m enjoying being here to appreciate it.”
‘Pioneering Knob Twiddler’ is out now on Trunk 67
A KIND
OF HUSH
Minimalist electroacoustician Sarah Davachi
reveals her love of prog rock (sshhh!) and
the impetus for her distinctive ambient and
drone compositions

WORDS: CLAIRE FRANCIS


he Mellotron has such an iconic sound. You hear it and
it brings up lots of obvious references. I like to work
“T with instruments in a way that releases them from that
and allows them to have some other form of existing.”
Those who are familiar with Canadian musician and
composer Sarah Davachi will know that her work is
characterised by sonic deep dives, often using instruments in unexpected
styles or contexts. ‘Cantus, Descant’, her critically acclaimed double album
from last year, is a stunning and expansive ode to the organ, something
that has regularly featured across her many releases and in her live shows.
The 18 tracks explore the organ’s unique character and sound through
recordings made at six different sites across North America and Europe.
For her latest album, ‘Antiphonals’, Davachi has turned this microscopic
focus to the Mellotron, the electro-mechanical instrument used by The
Beatles on ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ and The Moody Blues on ‘Nights
In White Satin’, before being further popularised by the likes of Tangerine
Dream, King Crimson and Genesis. It’s a staple of prog rock, a genre that
Davachi confesses to being a huge fan of. So what was it that drew her to
the Mellotron for this record?
“I don’t know how to say this diplomatically about myself, but sometimes
I’m a little slow on things,” she laughs. “I’m slow to grasp what’s important
to me. The Mellotron has come up in my sound palette so often. So I think it’s
important to me and I have been using it for a long time, but it hadn’t ended
up on a record before now in any straightforward way.”
arah Davachi is being modest. It’s obvious that there
is more than a touch of genius to her methods. Her
S background is in classical music, but her interest in
synthesisers was piqued by one of her first jobs, as
interpreter and content developer of the collection of
acoustic and electronic keyboard instruments at the
National Music Centre in her home city of Calgary.
Having graduated with a degree in philosophy from her local university,
Davachi went on to take a master’s in electronic music and recording media
at Mills College in Oakland, California. It was here that she became heavily
involved in minimalism, ambient and drone. She’s currently based at the
University of California in Los Angeles, where she’s working towards a PhD
in Musicology in the field of critical organology, studying instruments and
their construction and timbre in early, popular and experimental music.
For ‘Cantus, Descant’, Davachi travelled the world on a quest to unearth
the sounds of organs throughout history. The result is a truly unique and
site-specific album, featuring the Hammond in her Los Angeles studio and
an 1890 reed organ at LA’s Museum of Jurassic Technology, a reproduction
Renaissance-era organ in an Amsterdam church and EM Skinner’s 1928
Opus 634 organ in Chicago’s Rockefeller Chapel, as well as pipe organs in
Vancouver and Copenhagen.
SARAH DAVACHI
She hasn’t travelled so far for her recent adventures with the Mellotron,
though. Which seems appropriate when you consider how the instrument
was initially designed for home use.
“I generally plan records a couple of years in advance, so I knew that
‘Antiphonals’ was something I wanted to do long before lockdown. Early on
in the pandemic, I did a couple of demo EPs – ‘Five Cadences’ and ‘Gathers’
– as part of Bandcamp Friday. I’d already decided that I was going to situate
myself in my studio anyway, and also focus on the instruments that I use live
a lot, so this made sense in terms of the timing.”
‘Antiphonals’ is a hushed and gentle record that places the Mellotron
centre stage. Featuring whispers of electric organ, piano and synthesisers,
it’s closer to Davachi’s 2018 album, ‘Let Night Come On Bells End The Day’,
than the organ-focused immensity of ‘Cantus, Descant’.
In a heuristic move that typifies her music, Davachi wanted to see what
happened when the Mellotron was removed from its customary settings.
On ‘Antiphonals’, the instrument is accompanied by an array of what she
calls “quiet companions” – cor anglais, clarinet, recorder, oboe, bass flute,
French horn, violin, chamber organ and nylon-string guitar tape samples,
all recorded using only an RE-501 Chorus Echo and a TEAC A-2340 4-track
reel-to-reel. Essentially, she has taken the prog rock out of the Mellotron –
but not without some misgivings.
“I’ve been threatening to do a full-blown prog album for years,” she says.
“I’m not opposed to that idea, but I would actually have to make a concerted
effort to not make my usual sound. Every time I approach an instrument,
it ends up sounding like something I would do. That’s because of the natural
progression I follow. I’d have to really try to be like, ‘Nope I’m not going to
do that, I’m going to be more obvious with it’. We’ll see!”
There’s an excellent line in the press notes for ‘Antiphonals’ that describes
the album as “like listening to a half-speed progressive rock album, except
it’s just the keyboard parts”. Who said that?
“That was my boyfriend, but I left out part of the quote. What he actually
said was, ‘It sounds like you’re listening to a prog album on LSD at half
speed’. I initially kept the LSD part in there, but then I thought it could be
a bit cheesy. I listen to prog records quite frequently and I always think,
‘Oh, that’s a cool keyboard part, I wish I could get hold of the mix and
remove everything else’.”
hile the Mellotron has a place in Davachi’s heart, it’s
the organ that she is most commonly associated with,
W perhaps because her compositions have a sort of
Baroque quality. The name of her record label, Late
Music, which she established last year for the release
of ‘Cantus, Descant’, plays on her connection with
early music. And early music crops up again on ‘Antiphonals’ – from the
austere plucked strings of the opener, ‘Chorus Scene’, to the celestial tones
of ‘First Cadence’. 69
 It’s quite a contrast to the prog rock sounds of the 1970s. Does she see
a link between these two disparate eras?
“In terms of how a track sounds, especially on this record, I do a lot of stuff
with modal scales. That tends to be where the early music aspect comes in,
at least structurally, because the instruments that I’m using are not obviously
within that realm! It’s definitely something that I like pursuing, but it also feels
normal and interesting to me.”
Which begs the question, if time travel was an option, would she rather go
back to the Renaissance period or to the 1970s?
“I do think about that a lot,” she admits. “Those are probably my two most
favourite eras. I tend to think of my interest in 70s music from a technological
perspective. It’s a preoccupation with studio sound and with what the studio
can do in terms of producing certain types of environments. And that era was
the pinnacle.
“But my brain likes the idea of having limitations. There’s a vast array of
instruments that were around during the Renaissance that have disappeared
now. But the possibility of bringing things back – even the Mellotron – and
putting them into a new context, giving them a different kind of life, is very
interesting to me.”
Context is certainly central to Davachi’s approach to music-making.
One of the aims of ‘Antiphonals’ was to merge studio practice with the tonal
characteristics and sound-on-sound tape delay processes that are typical
of her live performances. Given the nature of the instruments she uses,
her shows often take place in churches, but there’s a sense that she has
struggled to reconcile herself with these ecclesiastical environments.
“It’s the bane of my existence,” she laughs. “But I have definitely gotten
better at figuring out how to feel more invisible. When I play live, I’ll often
look out at the audience and it’s mostly people with their eyes closed, or
their heads down, or they’re perhaps even lying down. They’re in their own
world, which is nice. If it was up to me, there wouldn’t be a stage and I’d
be positioned in the middle of the room, in front of the speakers, where the
sound engineer sits.
“I do consider myself to be a spiritual person, but without being religious.
I think they are very different concepts. Organs in churches have sacred
connotations, but I want to try to remove those kinds of associations, so the
instruments can be meaningful outside of that. I’m really not trying to be
disrespectful, though. It’s a good thing, right? To remove it from that context
and give it a new life? I’ve made my peace with playing in churches all the
time. It’s nice to be able to reclaim it for the secular folk.”
There are definitely moments on ‘Antiphonals’ that could be perceived as
alluding to religion. The 10-minute track ‘Magdalena’, for example, takes a
biblical name and melds it with reverent, heavenly tones from the Mellotron.
For Davachi, however, this is about mindfulness and deep listening.
“In a weird way, I get pleasure out of making the audience uncomfortable
and forcing them to listen. If I’m getting the sense they’re like, ‘This has been
happening for too long’, I think, ‘No, it’s going to keep going, you have to be
patient with it’. People have a lot of issues with patience.
“Not all music is about virtuosity. It’s about lots of different things – the
endurance aspect of it, or the subtlety of the sound, or the control. When you
strip away a lot of the musical elements that people rely on, these things have
to be more considered. That is what becomes more important. Anybody can
make bad techno. Making music that’s engaging and still says something is
not easy.
“I never try to be overt. If there’s anything that I deliberately try to do,
it’s to create the experience of slowing down and being comfortable with
something that maybe you don’t want to be comfortable with. It can be
unpleasant, but once you get there, once you cross that threshold, I think
it’s such a rewarding way of listening.”
PHOTOS: DICK Y BAHTO
 SARAH DAVACHI
he focus on durational, slow-moving music and listening
as an act of mindfulness also reflects a sort of balance

T that Sarah Davachi feels had been missing from her life
until recently.
“Prior to the pandemic, my life was chaotic. At the end
of 2019, I was super burned-out. What I wanted was time.
I think a lot of other people felt like that too, wanting uninterrupted time to
work on stuff. For several years, my touring schedule has necessitated being
able to be flexible. I’ve finished records in hotel rooms, I’ve done editing on
aeroplanes, and you make it work. But it’s going to be hard to go back to that.
And I don’t really want to.”
‘Antiphonals’ is unquestionably an album that requires time and patience.
It feels particularly suited to late-night listening. Is she a night owl by nature?
“Yes, I’m very much a night person,” she says. “I always have been. I’m
completely useless in the morning. I only like the mornings when I haven’t
gone to bed. When I’m going to bed and the sun is coming up, I think that’s a
peaceful time. I would say that I’ve made the majority of my music between
the hours of 9pm and 4am.”
Davachi has been speaking from her parents’ home in Calgary – sitting on
the floor of her childhood bedroom, in fact. As the conversation draws to a
close, it seems fitting to ask her what she wanted to be when she was a child?
Did she envision a career in music?
“When I was younger, I had the classic problem of having too many
interests,” she says. “I think that’s why, when I got to university, I decided
to study philosophy. I was interested in so much and philosophy is a way of
thinking about many different things. I’ve always been a pretty technically
and creatively minded person. When I was a kid, I fantasised for a while
about being an architect.”
It’s perhaps a good way of looking at Davachi’s music. If an architect
is someone who plans, designs and oversees the construction of buildings,
it makes sense to view her as an architect of sound, crafting wonderful sonic
spaces that invite the listener to inhabit and linger for a while.

‘Antiphonals’ is out now on Late Music 71

BACK TO
THE FUTURE
SAINT ETIENNE
I’ve Been Trying To Tell You
H E AV E N LY

The journey of Saint Etienne, now entering their fourth decade of existence, The instrumental ‘Little K’ follows next, centred around a looping riff
is often seen as a search for the perfect pop moment. With their impeccably that’s half John Cage, half Spiritualized. There are quietly muttered spoken
constructed, polished productions and sharp, knowing lyrics, they’ve come word snippets, and more Cracknell vocal phrasings – rather than actual
pretty close to hitting that mother lode. words – adding an ethereal layer and heart-tugging emotion to the mix.
‘I’ve Been Trying To Tell You’ is a different thing entirely, however. The Another instrumental, ‘Blue Kite’, is woozy and disorientating, a sort of
same ingredients are at play – namely Sarah Cracknell’s angelic voice and Bob sonic bridge to ‘I Remember It Well’, which has affectionate family squabbles
Stanley and Pete Wiggs’ collective ear for a neat melody and a canny sample – playing in the background as saxophone and guitar pick out simple melodies.
but the results are very much new territory for the three-piece. The traditional ‘Penlop’ sees the band return to a Scritti-style electronic reggae jaunt, light
verse-chorus-verse structure that so many of their songs follow has been and gloriously breezy – at least until Cracknell’s looping refrain of “I really
dispensed with in favour of a more amorphous, less ordered palette of moods, loved you / But I loved to shun you” lends it some darker relief as it moves
a more nuanced mix of samples, electronics and live playing. towards a climax of epic-sounding chords.
The fact that ‘I’ve Been Trying To Tell You’, the band’s 10th studio The album’s closer, ‘Broad River’, is a moment of both simplicity and
long-player, is accompanied by a film of the same name, shot by Vogue impact, a lilting piano and a final vocal edit – “A love like this again!” – adding
photographer Alasdair McLellan, is probably the biggest clue to this new the last pieces to the puzzle, as florid strings take on the mellow glow of an
direction. Much more, almost certainly, than the fact that the album was all-too-fleeting sunset.
recorded remotely during lockdown in three different locations, with Hove We all knew Saint Etienne could pen a decent tune. They’ve always
now home to Pete Wiggs, Sarah Cracknell living in Oxford and Bob Stanley known the right names to drop, the best remixers to hire and which tracks to
residing in Bradford, where film and TV composer Gus Bousfield also sample. At times, it felt like they were perhaps hiding behind that knowledge
chipped in with some co-production nous. and confidence. If anything, ‘I’ve Been Trying To Tell You’ is the sound of
If the global reset button and prolonged solitude has had an effect, Saint Etienne laying themselves open, exposing their vulnerability. In doing
it’s probably been in shaping the concept behind the work. Based around so, they’ve achieved something that’s not only as cool and snazzy as you’d
optimism, nostalgia and memory, the samples are taken from the years 1997- expect, it’s genuinely touching and emotionally resonant. That’s quite a result.
2001, a significant period that began with Labour’s landslide election victory
and ended with the 9/11 terrorist attack. It’s easy, given the shadow cast over BEN WILLMOTT
humanity by the pandemic, to view that period as a golden age. The truth is,
Saint Etienne seem to be saying, a lot more complicated and contradictory.
Certainly, that’s the impression one gets from the mixture of sweet joy
and bitter melancholy that push and pull the eight tracks here. The album
starts with the simple sound of a guitar being plucked, the key shifting up
with optimism and then plunging back down as ‘Music Again’ begins
in earnest at a funereal pace – so slow it actually reverses at one point.
Cracknell’s voice pings from left to right, subject to more processing as the
track continues, swaddled in clouds of harmonies.
‘Pond House’ is similarly adorned with Cracknell singing a single line
(“Here it comes again”) over a Scritti Politti-style skank, the sound of
seagulls evoking happy summer memories while wiry electronics and
Mellotron-esque textures duck and weave their way around the soundscape.
‘Fonteyn’, meanwhile, starts with two plaintive Rhodes chords not a million
miles away from the atmospherics of DJ Shadow’s ‘Endtroducing…..’, its
phasing, off-kilter backbeat and slow-motion house peppered with vocal
fragments. It manages to be simple and upbeat but there’s still a hint of
sadness as a field recording of birdsong brings it to a close.
 THE BACK

73

SUUNS
The Witness
JOY F UL NOISE
The 2018 departure of bassist/
keyboard man Max Henry has freed
the remaining three members of
Montreal art rockers SUUNS to
explore fertile new ground on
‘The Witness’, their fifth and
possibly best long-player yet.
Fusing elegant downtempo
electronics with some of their
more left-field influences – cosmic
krautrock and glossy synthwave
included – the results have a
satisfyingly narcotic late-night
allure. Standout tracks are ‘Witness
Protection’ and ‘The Trilogy’, both
shot through with requisite drama. CG
BLAK SAAGAN
Se Ci Fosse La Luce
Sarebbe Bellissimo
M A P L E D E AT H
Translated as “If there were light it
would be beautiful”, this magnificent
concept album by Venetian musician
Samuele “Blak Saagan” Gottardello
soundtracks the 1978 kidnapping
and murder of Italian prime minister
Aldo Moro by Red Brigade terrorists.
Influenced by Ennio Morricone,
Goblin and psychedelic Italian film
scores from the 1960s and 70s,
Gottardello’s sinister, hypnagogic
synthscapes channel kosmische,
industrial and dark ambient vibes,
most chillingly on the relentless
synthwave of ‘Scuola Hyperion’,
which throbs with John Carpenter-
like suspense. VI
GASPAR CLAUS
Tancade
IN F IN É
Constructed around deeply
evocative cello tones, French
musician Gaspar Claus creates
waves of melancholy before
allowing them to break across subtle
snippets of natural sound. While
undoubtedly similar in feel to his
most recent project – the soundtrack
to ‘Adrienne’, a short film by French
director Colin Solal Cardo – the
emotive swooping strings of ‘Un
Rivage’ and ‘Aux Confins’ place it
more closely to the low-key unease
and understated dread of Mica
Levi’s music for film. ST
SUUNS
STEVE COBBY
Shanty Bivouac
DÉCL ASSÉ
It’s been a while, well February,
since we’ve had a Cobby album.
Long wait, short wait, it’s always
worth it. ‘Shanty Bivouac’ is no
exception. From the chiptune
flecks of ‘Whip And Tongue’ and
the filmic flavour of ‘Everyone Is A
Salesman’ (my, when those piercing
strings sweep in) to the carnival
drums of ‘The Departure Lounge
Awaits’, as always, Cobby sucks
up his influences from everywhere
and makes them his own. No matter
how much material radiates from
his Shedio, Cobby is as reliable as
Neil Arthur when it comes to quality
control… now there’s a collaboration
worth thinking about. NM

PARK HYE JIN
Before I Die
N IN J A T U N E
House producer/rapper Park Hye
Jin made her name from DJ sets in
her hometown Seoul, South Korea,
in 2017 before touring Europe,
performing with Jamie xx in London,
and settling in LA. This debut solo
album follows two acclaimed EPs,
‘If U Want It’ (2018) and ‘How Can I’
(2020). Dreamy, hypnotic vocals are
anchored by minimal drum samples,
swoopy electronics, grungy bass
and jazzy piano chords, with ‘Never
Die’ being an optimal moment, as the
track’s speech samples disintegrate
into lush washes of feedback. JH
SON OF CHI &
RADBOUD MENS
The Transition Recordings
A S T R A L IN D U S T R I E S
Dutch pair Hanyo Van Oosterom
(Son Of Chi) and Radboud Mens
present two 20-minute pieces, all
fourth world atmospheres, droning
electronics and jazz instrumentation.
‘The Transition Recordings’ comes
after the death in 2019 of Van
Oosterom’s music sidekick Jacobus
Derwort, and as the title suggests,
serves as a moment for reflection
and change. The arrangements on
both ‘Side A’ and ‘Side B’ denote
this, conjuring up dense, vivid
soundscapes which evolve through
field recordings, flutes, keys, vocal
samples, vocoders and drums.
Subtle, but deeply immersive. ILS
BODY CORP
Monument
BEDROOM SUCK
Sydney-based Marco Vella, aka
Body Corp, teamed up with a painter
and an actor to create the 10 radiant,
sun-dappled electronic compositions
that make up ‘Monument’. Created
to accompany an exhibition of the
same name by Australian artist Max
Berry, and featuring spoken word
vocals from actor Sam Smith, the
ambient textures and galactic bleeps
of tracks like ‘Without Beginning Or
End’ amplify Berry’s otherworldly
painted landscapes. A particular
highlight is the muted synth melody
and Smith’s guiding intonations on
‘Everything Is Talking, an antipodean
take on Laurie Anderson’s ‘Walking
And Falling’. CF
THE BACK
PARK HYE JIN - PHOTO: PARK DAN MEDHURS T
EMT
Electrical Medicine
BE AUTIFUL WORLD / DOWNTOWN
Produced by ex-Flowered Up and
Republica man Tim Dorney, this
second album from London-based
duo Ema Walters and Tony Blue
is a tour de force homage to the
poppier side of electronic music
history. Powered by Walters’ throw-
your-hair-back vocals, ‘Electrical
Medicine’ absorbs it all, marching
through 80s Sino-tinged synthpop
anthem ‘Vulnerability’ to millennium
synth-funk (‘Diva’) and noughties
Goldfrappy electropop (‘Feel Me’)
without blinking. If you’re looking for
a tune or two to release the glitter
bomb above the dancefloor, you’re
spoilt for choice. ILS
75

SOCCER96
Dopamine
MOSHI MOSHI
Soccer96 are two-thirds of London-
based cosmic jazz supremos The
Comet Is Coming: Dan “Danalogue”
Leavers (electronics) and
Max “Betamax” Hallett (drums).
‘Dopamine’ builds convincingly
on TCIC’s arch-futurism and sci-fi
psychedelia, its aesthetic moving
between the downtempo gothic
synth lines of ‘Prelude To The Age
Of Transhumanism’ and the lush
robot funk of ‘Entanglement’.
The title track is the standout,
Nuha Ruby Ra’s stark vocal
combining with electrifying riffs
and layers of zoned out digitalia. JB
DERECK HIGGINS
Future Still
FPE
Wedged practically dead-centre
in the continental United States,
Omaha, Nebraska is a place where
indie rock and corn are grown in
almost equal measure. Local big
fish Dereck Higgins is a multi-
instrumentalist and vinyl YouTuber,
whose many solo releases skew
between prog/fusion workouts and
in-the-box electronic explorations.
His latest album, ‘Future Still’,
tilts decidedly towards a sound
reminiscent of early 1980s Yellow
Magic Orchestra, probably best
exemplified on the ultra-hooky
opener, ‘Ramped’. JS
DEVENDRA
BANHART & NOAH
GEORGESON
Refuge
DE AD OCE ANS
Freak folk figurehead Devendra
Banhart has been working with
award-winning engineer Noah
Georgeson for 20 years, and ‘Refuge’
is the first fruit of an egalitarian
collaboration. The pair posted files
to one another from their respective
LA residences during lockdown,
reacting to the uncertainties of world
events with an album designed to aid
meditative practice (‘In A Cistern’)
and act as a refuge in troubled times
(‘Into Clouds’). Other artists in their
coterie provided synths, pedal steel,
harps etc (also recorded remotely),
giving the end product a panoramic
flourish of sound. JA
SOCCER9 6
PHARAGONESIA
Geocentrics
T HI R D K IN D
“Between a reissue and a restoration
project” is how Brighton’s Nick
Langley describes this collaboration
with David “Dark Half” Dilliway, a
spruced-up version of their lavish
1990s attempt to capture the feel
of a retreating Earth, seen as
a blue dot from the vastness of
space. It’s hugely eclectic: there
are hints of The Orb here and there,
‘Geocentrics Theme’ is the driven,
post-punk offspring of Talking Heads,
‘Continental Overide’ is Goldie-esque
drum ’n’ bass, and ‘Coral’ is 12
minutes of superlative Eno-esque
weightlessness. Think Carl Sagan at
the Ministry of Sound. BF

BRUNO BAVOTA
For Apartments: Songs
& Loops
T EMPOR A RY RESIDENCE
When lockdown shut his country’s
citizens up in their homes, Italian
composer Bruno Bavota got to work
using the instruments he had to hand. Jane Lancaster and Edward Barton
The resulting solo compositions
divide into two segments here.
Built around simple repeated
melodies, ‘Apartment Loops’ are six
subtle swathes of emotive ambient
exploration, which resonate most
vividly through ‘Apartment Loop #1’
and ‘Apartment Loop #5’, while the
following 13 ‘Apartment Songs’ are
pensive contemporary classical
piano solos, so intimately acoustic
that you can hear the creak of the
instrument’s wood. DP
JANE AND
BARTON
Too
CHERRY RED
“If it’s not wazzing down, I lie on
my back on the bank.” That’s very
Manchester. It’s 38 years since
inadvertently created a cottage
industry of 1990s dance samples
with ‘It’s A Fine Day’, but this
touching reunion album is a similarly
minimalist delight. Opener ‘Late
At Night’ is a paean to silent, solo
rambling, as ‘Shushy Time’ and
‘Daisies And Buttercups’ speak
wearily of sensory overload: “Stop
saying words, they make my ears
hurt”. Barton’s lyrics are poignantly
pragmatic, while Lancaster remains
the breathy voice of northern
melancholy. Exquisite. BF
MUSLIMGAUZE
Jackal The Invizible
S TA A L P L A AT
‘Jackal The Invizible’ pulls together
14 tracks by late Mancunian
producer Bryn Jones, a drop in
the ocean for a prolific artist
who has around 130 albums to
his name. What this compilation
communicates best is the frenetic
sense of urgency Jones infused into
his politically minded conjugations
of Middle Eastern samples and
grinding electronics, as the album
progresses through industrial, dub
and psychedelic breaks – or perhaps
all three simultaneously, as on the
apocalyptic, circular drumming of
‘Anti Arab Media Censor Part 1’.
As introductions to Muslimgauze go,
it’s a damn good one. ILS
THE BACK
BRUNO BAVOTA
BENJAMIN LEW /
STEVEN BROWN
Douzième Journée: Le Verbe,
La Parure, L’amour
C R A M M E D DI S C S
This fortuitous Brussels encounter
between electronic musician
Benjamin Lew and Tuxedomoon’s
Steven Brown was originally
released by Crammed Discs as part
of their ‘Made To Measure’ series in
1982, slotting in alongside Byrne &
Eno’s ‘My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts’
for its fusion of African music with
electronics. ‘Dans Les Jardins’ is
a low-slung, ominous workout,
while ‘Elle Avança’ is a playful relay
between Brown’s saxophone and the
rhythms and Korg MS-10 sequences
crafted by Lew. Nearly 40 years on,
this album’s discreet innovations
remain powerfully fresh. MS 77

EQUATIONS
COLLECTIVE
The Helicon Sessions
99CHANTS
Greece’s Mount Helicon is the
unusual backdrop for this debut
album from Equations Collective,
a multi-disciplinary artist group
whose members hail from across
Germany and the Netherlands.
Recorded at a solar-powered
outdoor studio on the mountainside,
it’s an expansive assemblage of
abstract electronica, from the
soothing drone waviness of ‘Cut
2.2 (Part II)’ to the fluttering acid
techno of ‘Cut 3.4’, made all the
more impressive by the collective’s
progressive vision of an eco-future
powered by renewable energy. CF
RP BOO
Established!
PL ANE T MU
Chicago-based producer and
DJ RP Boo, aka Kavain Space, is
credited with initiating the fast-
paced footwork genre (through
1997’s ‘Baby Come On’ single) to
accompany footwork dance battles.
‘Established!,’ his fourth album
for Planet Mu, credits the label
for establishing his music on the
international dance scene. Lead
track ‘All My Life’ is typically Boo-
ish, with its sparse choppy vocals,
repeating three-note keyboard riffs,
speedy rhythms, elegant splashes
of rhythmic delay, and snatches of
distant brass. JH
ROBERT
CURGENVEN
Beyond Enclosures
R E C O R D E D F I E L D S E DI T I O N S
The Ireland-based, Australian artist
Robert Curgenven serves up three
releases all connected to “air” here.
‘Bardo’ is an extended meditation
of pipe organ and piano harmonics,
created with experimental turntable
techniques. ‘Spectres’ is an
interrogation of sound within nine
former Soviet edifices. And ‘Bronze
Lands’ (alternatively titled ‘Tailte
Cré-Umha’) is a live recording from
last year’s Sydney Festival, featuring
unmodernised pipe organs from
County Cork and rural Cornwall. In
each case, the context very much
brings an added dimension to the
act of listening. JA
EQUATIONS COL L EC TIVE
R.SEILIOG
Ash Dome
CUE DOT
The latest album by Snowdonia-
based producer and sound artist
Robin Edwards (R.Seiliog) features
rhythmically propulsive tracks
crafted from field recordings,
inspired by a vortex of 22 ash trees
planted in a secret Eryri location
by artist David Nash in 1977. While
Edwards never found the lost
installation, the journey through
the calming ‘Gwlith ’77’, the building
tension of ‘22 Onnen’ (not unlike
Anna Meredith’s ‘Nautilus’) and
the joyous high of ‘Rotunda’ is a trip
worth taking. JT

MACHINEFABRIEK
Re:Moving (Music For
Choreographies By Yin Yue)
G E I S T I M K IN O
‘Re:Moving’ by Rotterdam-based
Rutger Zuydervelt contains two
20-minute accompaniments for
performances by New York’s Yin
Yue Dance Company, postponed due
to Covid. ‘Music For A Measurable
Existence’ ebbs between metallic
splinters and regimented, fractured
sub-bass rhythms, while the piece
that gives the collection its title
comprises quiet, gentle pulses
and sweetly unadorned viola from
Anne Bakker, before wending its
way toward a nightmarish distorted
classical motif. Music for physical
movements that, for now, can only
exist in your imagination. MS
VARIÁT
I Can See Everything From
Here
PROS TIR
Ukrainian experimental musician
and multimedia artist Dmytro
Fedorenko traverses a dark road on
his debut album as VARIÁT. Berlin-
based Fedorenko takes a liberated
approach to musique concrète via
blown amps, metallic synths, drilled
cymbals and raw textures of found
objects. ‘Crowds Are Gone, Time’s
Not Needed’ buzzes and drones like
an angry bee battering against a
window pane, while ‘There’s Lots
Of Light Leaking All Over’ spits
and fizzles like a sputtering candle.
Not for the faint-hearted, but still
compelling stuff. CF
SHUTTLE358
Chessa
KEPL AR
Released in 2004, ‘Chessa’ by
Californian producer Dan Abrams
(aka Shuttle358) brought sensuality
to the often insentient microsound
genre, music made of sounds lasting
less than a thousandth of a second.
Reissued on vinyl for the first time,
with three previously unreleased
tracks, these warm ambient textures
have lost none of their spirit, imbued
with nostalgic record crackles that
serve as ultra-minimalist percussion.
Often reminiscent of John Beltran’s
more ambient mixes, you’d do well
to get the swooning atmosphere
of ‘Melt’ out of your head, while the
beat-driven ‘Scrapbook’ could be an
indie off-cut by The Album Leaf. ILS
THE BACK
M ACHINEFABRIEK
TRIFECTA
Fragments
KSCOPE
Trifecta are Steven Wilson
bandmates Nick Beggs (bass,
Kajagoogoo), Adam Holzman
(keyboards, Miles Davis) and Craig
Blundell (drums, Moonparticle).
Described by Beggs as “fusion
with fallout”, ‘Fragments’ consists
of 15 tracks loaded with expressive
synth hooks, funky basslines and
adaptable drumming. ‘Check Engine
Light’ strides out on vamping Rhodes
and a nagging synth line, while ‘Lie
2 Me And Take My Money’ offers
a late-night jazz melody affixed to
a muscular rhythm and bursts of
distorted electric guitar – nothing
short of atomic. MS
79

PEARL &
THE OYSTERS
Flowerland
T IP T O P / F E E LT R IP
French-American duo Joachim
Polack and Juliette Davis’ latest
album uses the optimism of space-
age pop to inject some hope into
our uncertain times. Refining the
retro direction heard on 2018’s
‘Canned Music’, ‘Flowerland’ dabbles
in 1950s exotica and soft 1960s
pop in the same playful manner
as Stereolab and The Cardigans.
Standout moments? Les Baxter
vibes and Joe Meek sci-fi collide to a
samba beat on ‘Soft Science’, while
‘Ostreoid Asteroid’ offers a warped
take on synthpop. JT
FROM NURSERY
TO MISERY
Tree Spirits
DA RK ENT RIES
‘Tree Spirits’ is the second
compilation rounding up the music
of late 1980s synthwave trio From
Nursery To Misery. Founded in
Basildon, Essex, by talented teenage
producer Lee Stevens, most of the 11
tracks here were either unreleased
or collected from impossibly rare
cassette compilations. While
Stevens’ raw synth work and no-fi
drum machine beats give you a right
drubbing, they work well with the
sardonic lyrics and stark vocals of
identical twins Gina and Tina Fear,
whose feminist industrial anthem
‘The Daily Raper’ has lost none of its
startling power. ILS
YANN TIERSEN
Kerber
MUTE
Inspired by the Breton landscape
around him, composer Yann Tiersen
drops his most electronically-hued
album to date. Named after a chapel
on his home island of Ushant and
meticulously pieced together,
‘Kerber’ is typically gorgeous,
as soft, immersive textures,
processed soundscapes and piano
flourishes gently percolate to forge a
captivating ambient piece. It’s most
compelling on the perky, babbling
squiggles of ‘Ker Al Loch’ and the
skittering drifts of ‘Poull Bojer’, both
of which evoke a truly scintillating
sense of place. VI
PE ARL & THE OYS TERS
LOVE-SONGS
& U SCHÜTTE
Spannende Musik
BURE AU B
The title means “exciting music”.
Which is presumptuous, like calling
your pet poodle Cujo. Hamburg trio
Love-Songs, whose mechanical
rhythms are partnered here with
analogue experimentalist Ulf
Schütte, are certainly along for the
party. But ‘Spannende’ can also
mean tension, and as wavering
harmonics trade places with densely
clattering otherworldly beats,
drama abounds. The conclusion is
wonderful, as the titular “long-
drawn higher tones” of 20-minute
closer ‘Langgezogener Hoher
Ton’ leave an afterglow of tribal
ambience. Excitement achieved. FR

FIELD WORKS
Maples, Ash and Oaks:
Cedars Instrumentals
T EMPOR A RY RESIDENCE
Stuart Hyatt’s delightful Field Works
series continues with this reworking
of his ‘Cedars’ album, which was
released earlier this year. For this
new suite of instrumental music, the
Indianapolis musician deconstructed
and rebuilt each track, replacing the
original vocals with birdsong, piano
and a forest soundscape recorded
in the Welsh countryside. Moments
of loveliness abound, like the gentle
twang of ‘And Blue-Green Spruce’
and the dancing keys of ‘What Was
That? Leaves Rustle’, but the album
is best listened to in full, in one
dreamy and very relaxing sitting. CF
HELIOCHRYSUM
We Become Mist
BEDROOOM COMMUNIT Y
If, as we are often told, the devil
is in the detail, then this album
is positively satanic. Based in
Los Angeles, composers Michael
Deragon and Daniel Lea make
highly atmospheric instrumental
soundscapes as Heliochrysum,
and they work hard to ensure
‘We Become Mist’ retains its energy
throughout. Teeming with fascinating
minutiae, the sound design is
exceptional – tracks such as ‘We
Remain Beneath’ and ‘My Dreams
Sleep In Your Hands’ feel as though
they’re constantly evolving and
casting new sonic shadows. BW
SCANNER
Earthbound Transmissions
ROOM4 0
Robin Rimbaud dug out these old
loops during lockdown, originally
captured in the late 1980s on a
Fostex 4-track. Reverberating
drones meet melodic cobwebs
and abstract pitch-bent samples.
Scanned voices flitter teasingly
or crash land in alarming staccato
strips. The minimalist muted organ
of ‘Teledrone’ has the wonderful
wooziness of a waking dream. Just
brace yourself for a fraught dog
story, and a spiky father-child
conversation (“shut up moaning!”)
that foreshadows his brilliant leap
into voyeuristic ambience. FR
THE BACK
FIELD WORKS - PHOTO: S TUAR T HYAT T
PAUL FISHMAN
Art Official Intelligence
JAMBO
Producer, session musician and
composer, Paul Fishman has popped
his head above the battlements
before. Re-Flex’s 1983 classic ‘The
Politics Of Dancing’ was him. Here
he revisits that infectious pop song
territory. Lyrically barbed, with an
older/wiser sensibility, the rich synth
work on the cracking opening title
track could’ve B-sided ‘Politics…’,
while you can almost imagine Prince
tackling the funky ‘ON’ (Fishman
was acquainted with the Purple One),
which he brings slap bang up to date
with the skills of new London jazz
talents, saxophonist Leo Richardson
and guitarist/singer Todd Oliver. Well
worth investigating. NM
81

GLENN FALLOWS
& MARK TREFFEL
The Globeflower Masters Vol 1
MR BONGO
Lush strings. Funky basslines. The
timeless tinkling of Fender Rhodes
pianos. Bored during lockdown,
Brighton soul boys Fallows and
Treffel passed their time creating
this gloriously ripe homage to the
1970s soundtracks of Lalo Schifrin
and Serge Gainsbourg. And it’s
perfect – the nexus between
Blaxploitation cool and seedy British
grime. ‘Faith In Time’ is the sound
of Richard Roundtree clamping a
silencer to his freshly-chilled Colt,
and ‘Fear Me Now’ an irresistible,
subliminal order to pull on black
leather gloves and threaten Ian
Hendry with a one-way trip to the
Thames Estuary. BF
AAIRIAL
As Above So Below
R E DN E T I C
A combination of rhythmic
restlessness, freneticism and
stately melodies from Paris-based
producer aAirial make this an
understated and strained but
ultimately pleasurable listen. ‘Call
From Afar’, for instance, has a
touch of Rephlex-style braindance
about it, although it’s much more
playful and relaxed than an Aphex or
Squarepusher effort. Likewise, the
tranquil ‘Lotus’, which gently soars
while a nicely glitchy, stumbling
beat keeps it company. This album
definitely creates its own world and
invites you in. You could do a lot
worse than accept the offer. BW
CM VON
HAUSSWOLFF
& CHANDRA
SHUKLA
Travelogue (Nepal)
TOUCH
Over the course of a week in
September 2019, Carl Michael Von
Hausswolff and Chandra Shukla
travelled through various locations
in Kathmandu, Nepal, recording
whatever they heard. Assembled
into four long compositions,
‘Travelogue (Nepal)’ evokes a sense
of time and physical places – traffic,
construction, voices – while also
tapping into a soundworld that’s
almost beyond the audible. ‘Anadu’,
for example, is filled with brooding
texture and oscillating murmurs, as
if the pair have succeeded in opening
a portal to another dimension. MS
GL ENN FAL LOWS & M ARK T REFFEL
HARMONIOUS
THELONIOUS
Instrumentals! (A Collection Of
Outernational Music Studies)
BURE AU B
Since 2008, the work of Düsseldorf’s
Stefan Schwander has always hit
hardest when sinking deepest into
the rhythmic traditions of Africa.
As a testament to that, Bureau
B duly collects eight choice cuts
from across his singles and EPs
to date. Feeling truly global and
effortlessly fresh, ‘Beiläufige
Muziek’ repositions Detroit techno
as an ancient tribal dance, while
‘Halb Ding’ drags high-life rhythms,
Moroccan flute and minimal bass
pulses into hypnotic techno-jazz.
It all adds up to a borderless and
timeless dancefloor ritual. JT

MASTON
Souvenir
IN N O VAT I V E L E I S U R E
Hot on the heels of ‘Panorama’,
released in April on the legendary
KPM label, LA producer/musician
Frank Maston teams up with Swiss
groove merchants L’Éclair, recording
‘Souvenir’ together in just 48 hours
at the Tone Boutique studios in the
Netherlands. From the vibraphone-
led ambience of opener ‘L’Eau Bleue’
to the sturdy synth vibes of closer
‘Swiss Franc’, it’s an exploratory
dreamscape with analogue tootling.
Furthermore, songs like ‘The
Doors Are Opening’ manage to
bridge a previously insurmountable
gulf between library music and
Californian sunshine pop. JA
GREG NIEUWSMA
In C: Flea Market
S U B M A R IN E B R O A D C A S T IN G
C O M PA N Y
After releasing albums of vacation
field recordings and psychedelic
trips through Wonderland, Detroit-
born, Krakow-based Greg Nieuwsma
stayed much closer to home for
his enchanting rendition of Terry
Riley’s venerable ‘In C’ – his local
flea market, where he purchased
the guitar, zither, glockenspiel and
harmonium used for this version.
In Nieuwsma’s hands, ‘In C’ loses
its orchestral structure and takes
on a folk dimension, almost as if
performed by a one-man band in a
village square, while simultaneously
retaining its distinctive and
rapturous forward motion. MS
CANDLESNUFFER
Apsomeophone
ROOM4 0
It’s 16 years since ‘Apsomeophone’
first saw the light of day, and yet
its 10 aural sculptures – to use
their Melbourne-based creator’s
own words – sound pretty fresh.
David Brown (aka Candlesnuffer)
makes no bones about borrowing
from others for these tracks, even
listing the names, from Bartók to
Cage and Pierre Henry. There’s
plenty here that echoes the world
of musique concrète, as notes and
voices jump in and out of the mix,
but the original and ingenious ways
it’s augmented by Brown’s guitar
and pedals elevates it well beyond
mere homage. BW
THE BACK
M AS TON
HERON & CRANE
Streams
HIB E R N AT O R GI G S
US duo Dave Gibson and Travis
Kokas return with a switched-on
successor to 2019’s ‘Firesides’.
Psychedelic stylings remain intact,
but – from the moment stadium
rock drums infiltrate the analogue
synths of opener ‘Fogline’ – there’s
a tougher, whip-smart edge. On
‘Projectiles’, Kokas even shakes his
head at the cataclysmic end of the
Trump presidency: “We washed our
hands of their demands / Shouted
over the siren rings”. Gibson
contributes a wistful vocal to ‘Tired
Empire’ too, and elsewhere there
are lashings of mellotron and Byrds
guitars. Delightfully pastoral, but
decidedly peeved. BF
83

WARRINGTON-
RUNCORN NEW TOWN
DEVELOPMENT PLAN
People & Industry
C A S T L E S IN S PA C E
In which Gordon Chapman-Fox continues his
laudable one-man crusade to document the urban
heritage of 1970s Cheshire in analogue synth
form. A swift sequel to ‘Interim Report, March
1979’ – which was released earlier in the year –
this is a warmer album than its predecessor, with
the brutalist new-town ambience of his debut
replaced by an emotional homage to the plight of
the North-West workforce.
So, ‘Petrochemical’ is a strident salute to the
belching refinery at Weston Point, and ‘Man And
Manufacturing’ a wistful memorial to the days
of roaring furnaces and clattering production
lines. Melancholy pervades: both the proto-
Human League beats of ‘Built By Robots’ and the
tinkling lament of ‘Managed Decline’ ominously
foreshadow early 1980s dole queues and boarded-
up social clubs.
It’s retro-futurism as head-shaking social
comment, a heartrending experience for those of
us brought up beneath the orange haze of northern
industrial smog. An album of stained overalls and
shattered pride. BF
NICOLAS BERNIER
+ SIMON TROTTIER
Les Éternités Vibrantes
L E BURE AU DES F RÉQUENCES
Nicolas Bernier is the founder of Montreal test
oscillator botherers Ensemble D’Oscillateurs.
His collaborations with fellow Canadian sonic
explorer Simon Trottier started 15 years ago,
and this, their sixth album, has one hand in the
electronic/modular hinterlands, while the other
creates multi-dimensional landscapes of sound
design and cinematic melodies of slowly unfolding
sci-fi jazz.
Their painstaking studio technique constantly
reshapes and smudges sound like an abstract
painter pushing paint on a canvas. There are five
pieces on ‘Les Éternités Vibrantes’, the 11 minutes
of the title track perhaps best representing the
psychedelic electro-jazz trip on offer.
But if there’s a hit here, it’s the gorgeous
opener ‘Éternité Subséquente’, with its beautiful
and hesitant chord progression and multi-faceted
movements squeezed into just five minutes. The
thematic returns across the album create an
instant sense of familiarity, while the underlying
strangeness of proceedings make for an ever-
shifting adventure. MR
WARRINGTON-RUNCORN NE W TOW N DE VELOPMENT PL AN
BEST AVAILABLE
TECHNOLOGY
Inscape Routes
THE FLORIST ’S MUM
Prolific Oregon-based producer Kevin Palmer
continues to push a mercurial sound as Best
Available Technology. Here we find him splicing
ambient, electronica and dub distortions to
scintillating effect.
There’s much to immerse yourself in, from the
acid squelches of ‘Division’ to the bass-heavy,
downtempo ‘Tracer Leak’, which brings to mind
Palmer’s excellent 2017 album ‘Exposure Therapy’
– a riotous electronic reinterpretation of golden
age hip hop. Equally good is ‘Observation Hill’,
its musique concrète buffeted by cryptic judders
and hyperactive strums and thumps.
Ultimately, though, ‘Inscape Routes’ is defined
by its deeper textures. ‘Arctic Taan’ is all haunting,
Tim Hecker-grade atmospherics, like a rusting
vessel lost at sea, forlornly blowing its horn,
while ‘No Pier Port’ fuses its melodic lullaby with
a hissing static that steadily disintegrates until it
practically falls apart.
Approaching 30 years of making experimental
music, Palmer’s deftly woven sonics remain as
supple and intriguing as ever. ILS

VARIOUS ARTISTS
Spaciousness 2: Music Without Horizons
L O R E C O R DIN G S
This is the much-anticipated second instalment
of Jon Tye’s ‘Spaciousness’ compilation, on
which the Lo Recordings founder “explores the
connections, overlaps, roots and future of a music
variously referred to as ambient, deep listening,
new age, fourth world and post-classical”.
As spellbindingly genre-definitive as 2019’s
inaugural volume, this follow-up is an essential
gateway into a group of artists and labels
whose work is as accessible as it is searchingly
inventive. Tracks from US experimental harpist
Mary Lattimore, Salmon Universe’s JQ and
British-American vocal talent Lauren Doss feature
prominently alongside more established names
like veteran modular synth composer Suzanne
Ciani and Texan new age musician JD Emmanuel.
Each of the 14 tracks captivate hugely, their
originality in form and texture a thrill to behold,
but Ariel Kalma’s ‘Space Forest’ is something
else – an exotic, kaleidoscopic trip into the
peacefulness of some verdant future idyll. CG
THE BUG
Fire
N IN J A T U N E
Kevin Martin, aka The Bug, hasn’t been afraid
to stray off into esoteric projects recently, but
‘Fire’ concentrates on his most celebrated skill,
namely creating industrial-edged, experimental
soundsystem tracks, then sourcing the best MCs
to spit over them.
Regular Bug collaborators Daddy Freddy and
former Roll Deep man Flowdan feature again, the
former providing relative lightheartedness with his
tribute to the green stuff (‘Ganja Baby’), the latter
delivering three hard-hitting lyrical onslaughts in
the shape of ‘Pressure’, ‘Hammer’ and ‘Bomb’.
But they’re not the only distinctive voices here.
Logan’s speedy, energised delivery on ‘Clash’
is compulsive listening, Nazamba matches the
foreboding vibe on ‘War’, and Manga Saint Hilare’s
efforts on ‘Bang’ and ‘High Rise’ sound like they’re
fresh from a street MC battle.
The album is bookended by ‘The Fourth Day’
and ‘The Missing’, two spoken-word pieces by
Trinadadian poet Roger Robinson about Grenfell
Tower and lockdown respectively. Both are
exceptional – much like the rest of this hugely
engaging album. BW
THE BACK
SPACIOUSNESS 2: MUSIC W ITHOU T HORIZONS
SPACE AFRIKA
Honest Labour
DAIS
Space Afrika are Manchester duo Joshua Inyang
and Joshua Reid, and the lifelong friends channel
the culture, diversity and grey skies of their city
into this dazzling, free-flowing 19-track collage.
An expansive follow-up to last year’s head-
turning ‘hybtwibt?’ mixtape, rooted in downtempo
dub techno and shattered instrumentals, ‘Honest
Labour’ vibrates with pent-up energy – from the
late-night ambient ripple of ‘yyyyyy2222’ and
unspooled trip hop of ‘Lose You Beau’ to the crackle,
drone and sirens of ‘Like Orchids’ and the barely-
concealed riot of ‘Meet Me At Sachas’.
Visionary vocal cameos breathe life into these
oblique vignettes: ‘Girl Scout Cookies’ features
the saintly voice of London-based experimental
musician Bianca Scout, before flipping the script
with an ominous bass rattle, and ‘B£E’ is an uneasy
meditation on urban life with a star turn from
Salford rapper Blackhaine.
A true soundtrack of UK life in 2021, you’ll be
pretty hard-pushed to find another release this
year that’s more poignant, urgent and captivating
than this. CF
85

SHIRE T
Tomorrow’s People
DAMA DAMA
This cracking solo debut by Maribou State’s Chris
Davids (aka Shire T) ratchets up the downtempo
grooves of his day band with an altogether
clubbier feel. “Listen, you / I need your attention”
implores guest singer Rodney “Roots Manuva”
Smith on opener ‘Full Attention’, hooking you in
right from the off.
Inspired in part by the tunes he grew up with –
and Maribou State’s more uptempo DJ sets – the
London-based producer says ‘Tomorrow’s People’
is a “celebration of British dance music culture”.
It’s certainly an album big on thrills. Both ‘Blue
Kiss’, with its TB-303 bass and Prodigy/Stanton
Warriors vibe, and the mighty ‘LDRA’ are proper,
hands-in-the-air bangers. Pure, sweaty old-
school rave.
Gentle, piano-led interjections break the flow
nicely – the meditative ‘London. Paris. Berlin.’ and
the Broadcast-ish ‘Serve No Tea’ are beguilingly
lovely. But it’s the big tunes that Davids keeps
coming back to, as the full-on funk of ‘Burnin’
Jungle’ (imagine a Basement Jaxx/Boney M mash-
up) and the head-nodding bleeps of ‘Mind Games’
beckon you back to the dancefloor. Irresistible. VI
VAN DER GRAAF
GENERATOR
The Charisma Years 1970-1978
U M C / V I R GIN
Always the black sheep of the 1970s prog rock
scene, Van Der Graaf Generator delighted in
noise and chaos in a way that made most of their
contemporaries seem tame and over-mannered
in comparison.
Hugh Banton’s organ and David Jackson’s
sax provided the main instrumentation, with
effects and extreme playing often turning their
sound into a howling electronic maelstrom. Add
in Peter Hammill’s apocalyptic declamations and
Guy Evans’ aggressively jazzy drumming, and
it’s not hard to hear why VDGG terrified as many
audiences as they entranced.
‘The Charisma Years’ is a 20-disc boxset
that includes everything from their classic era.
Alongside remastered original LPs and radio
sessions, the real treasure here is a previously
unreleased live 1976 Paris concert, featuring
wonderful renditions of songs such as ‘Meurglys
III’ and ‘The Sleepwalkers’. And the new stereo
mixes of key albums ‘H To He, Who Am The Only
One’, ‘Pawn Hearts’, ‘Godbluff’ and ‘Still Life’
sound fantastic. Plus, there’s a DVD of promos
and footage from various European TV shows. An
incredible and unique archive. JB
SHIRE T
MAX RICHTER
Exiles
DEU TSCHE GR A MMOPHON
The sound of Max Richter is a balm in the best of
times, but there’s always more than meets the ear.
The 33-minute ‘Exiles’ was written in 2015 for Sol
León & Paul Lightfoot’s ballet ‘Singulière Odyssée’,
a piece about the predominance of travel set
among the comings and going of a train station
(little did they know, eh?).
Composed when millions were fleeing conflict
in the middle east, Richter explains that the
work was inspired by the movement of those
migrants. “The refugees’ journey is made against
their will,” he offers, “even the idea of that is
really disturbing”. Recorded in 2019, the choice
of orchestra is just as thoughtful – the Baltic Sea
Philharmonic are an inspirational ensemble of
young players brought together from across the
Baltic countries, an idea that totally fits with the
weight of the inspiration.
The piece itself is utterly glorious as it
delicately builds across 18 short parts (each one,
curiously, one minute and 52 seconds long) to its
powerful, heart-bursting crescendo. Bonus among
bonuses, the orchestra also reworked a few of
his greatest hits (yes, they did ‘On The Nature
Of Daylight’), which are included here. Essential,
but then Max Richter always is. NM

IMMERSION
Nanocluster Vol 1
SWIM~
Newman/Spigel bring friends to their yard
An album of joyful and unconstrained collaboration,
‘Nanocluster Vol 1’ brings together the experimental post-rock
pedigree of Immersion – Wire’s Colin Newman and Minimal
Compact’s Malka Spigel – with four heavyweights of the
global left-field music scene: namely Stereolab co-founder
Laetitia Sadier, German electronic royalty Tarwater and Ulrich
Schnauss, and sound designer/composer Scanner (Robin
Rimbaud), none of them strangers to these pages.
This all-star cast coming together gets even more
interesting when you factor in that ‘Nanocluster’ takes its
name from a popular Brighton club night run by Newman and
Spigel, where an evening of avant-garde music showmanship
culminates in a one-off performance of material, written,
improvised and worked up by Immersion and the various
headliners just three days prior to the show. Having polished
up the original recordings, Newman and Spigel capture the
impromptu magic of the collabs here, divided neatly into three
songs per partnership. It all adds up to a charming collection
of jams.
Immersion and Tarwater are up first, opening with ‘Ripples’,
a whimsical, upbeat synth instrumental, before launching into
the swinging rhythm of ‘Mrs Wood’, featuring Ronald Lippok’s
deadpan lyrical delivery, and tongue-in-cheek synthpop ode,
‘All You Cat Lovers’.
Sadier then steps up to the plate with ‘Unclustered’, an
engaging cosmic-kraut instrumental, while Tangerine Dream’s
Ulrich Schnauss takes a winding journey through the reverie of
‘Remember Those Days On The Road’ and the sublime celestial
kosmische of ‘So Much Green’.
The final act sees Immersion team up with Scanner. The
trio are no strangers to playing together – having formed their
acclaimed Githead collective in 2004 – and their synergy filters
through the moody electronica of ‘Cataliz’ and the swampy
atmospherics and percussive groove of ‘Metrosphere’, before
closing with ‘The Mundane And The Profound’ featuring a
recording of a vexed-sounding flight attendant and a gentle
piano melody.
With a cast of musicians and friends so accomplished and
daring, ‘Nanocluster Vol 1’ manages to be even greater than the
sum of its very proficient parts. Here’s hoping there’s a Volume
2 in the works.
CLAIRE FRANCIS
Brief Encounters
THE BACK
Immersion’s Colin Newman and Malka Spigel
gang up on the quick-fire question machine
Hello, where are you right now and what can you see?
Malka: “We’re sitting in our office, side by side, the computer screens in front
of us and our nice Brighton street behind us through the window.”
Last time we were in touch, Colin talked about how he doesn’t produce other
artists… does collaborating count as producing?
Colin: “Ha-ha! I see the producer as the person physically putting the music
together. I spend hours coming up with something that reflects what went into
the recording, the performances and the ideas of everyone involved. I guess
that’s a kind of collaboration.”
‘Nanocluster’ is the album version of your Brighton night out of the same name.
It’s been a while in the making hasn’t it? The first night was in 2017!
Colin: “The first collaborative Nanocluster and the first at our spiritual home,
The Rose Hill, was 8 September 2017 with Tarwater. There’s a lot that goes into
making these happen – we need to be free, our collaborators need to be free,
the venue needs to be free!”
Care to sketch out the big idea?
Malka: “The artists stay with us and we develop and rehearse the collaborative
material in our studio. You need to be able to stand on a stage and play new
material with people you don’t normally play with. For some that’s way out of
their comfort zone.”
The collaborations are written and recorded in the days leading up to the
performance, but Ulrich Schnauss only took a day?
Colin: “We’ve worked with Ulrich before, he’s very able musically and very
good at finding his way very quickly in any piece of work.”
Malka: “He could only come the night before the show so we had to work fast.”
Laetitia Sadier has such a wonderfully distinctive voice doesn’t she?
Colin: “The first time we played with Laetitia was at one of Kenishi Iwasa’s
Krautrock Karaokes. We both played guitars and Malka played bass.”
Malka: “I love Stereolab and the way her voice works in it. You never know if
a collaboration is going to go smoothly until you get into a room together, but
she was easy-going and great to be with.”
Scanner brought some of his trademark scanning to the project didn’t he?
Colin: “It was Malka’s idea for him to bring some of his ‘classic scanning’.”
Malka: “I thought it might bring a certain atmosphere to some of the music.
It felt like no time had elapsed since we were last working together on Githead.”
‘All You Cat Lovers’ with Tarwater is great fun. Who’s the cat fan among you?
Malka: “I’m a big cat fan! We had a cat, Samy, who died in November 2019, aged
21. Ronald from Tarwater noticed I was obsessed with him, always worrying
if he was in or out. So it was Samy that made Ronald want to sing about the cat
being inside. The video for ‘All You Cat Lovers’ is a kind of homage to him.”
‘Vol 1’ suggests there’s more to come?
Colin: “As a live event, it was meant to be an ongoing, if occasional series.
It all got rudely interrupted by the pandemic, but we are hardly alone in that!”
So are there plans for more shows?
Colin: “We don’t have a fixed idea about how to continue. The idea is flexible
and we could make it work in another city, in another country...” 87
Buried Treasure
SPACE RAIDERS
Don’t Be Daft
S K IN T, 19 9 9
Prince said we should party like it was 1999, and, as far as we know, he hadn’t
even heard the debut album by Middlesbrough’s Space Raiders. The trio of Gary
Bradford, Mark Hornby and Martin Jenkins – named after a bag of crisps and
signed to Skint – were, hands down, one of my favourite bands of the late 90s.
Their delicious floorfiller ‘(I Need The) Disko Doktor’ soundtracked one of
my more messy “work” trips to Ibiza, while high levels of arsing around made
them a total joy live. There was much dressing up, bad dancing and waving of
toy guns and light sabres as they unleashed their irresistible big beat salvoes.
I first came across them while doing the singles reviews for Melody Maker.
Mary Ann Hobbes, in her Radio 1 days, was our guest reviewer and she turned
up with her own pile of singles. Naturally, we ended up swapping a few –
as I recall, she took my DJ Downfall ‘A Song For Kelly Le Brock’ seven-inch
(an early outing on the now long-standing Where It’s At Is Where You Are
label), and I bagged her copy of Space Raiders’ ‘Glam Raid’, which brilliantly
sampled Kenny’s ‘The Bump’. It only missed out on being single of the week
due to being released at the same time as The Beta Band’s ‘Patty Patty
Sound’ EP.
There are two Raiders albums, 1999’s ‘Don’t Be Daft’ (67p on CD via
Discogs, vinyl for not much more), and 2000’s ‘Hot Cakes’ (85p, CD only).
Go on, break the bank. They both still get a pretty regular outing round mine.
At the time, Skint was a cut above. Fatboy Slim was king of the castle,
but his runaway success opened the door for the label’s more left-field artists
and Space Raiders fitted right in alongside acts such as Lo-Fidelity Allstars,
Indian Ropeman, Cut La Roc, Hard Knox and Midfield General. They had that
Fatboy Slim knack for an infectious groove and, on tracks like ‘Middlesboogie
(U Give Me Hot Love)’, from ‘Hot Cakes’, they just locked it down and headed
for the finish line.
I’ve banged on about how great Space Raiders are to anyone who’d listen
and plenty who wouldn’t in various publications and websites over the years.
I’ve also kept in touch with the band’s Gary Bradford as a result of being
their number one fan. He set up the Space Raiders label in 2009 and released
a small but perfectly formed pile of singles as well as Penny And Ashtray’s
‘Monolith And Mirrorball’ album, all of which are, of course, well worth
checking out. You’ll find it all at spaceraiders.co.uk. There was also some
talk of a release by the Bogely Factory, a compilation drawn from an 80s
Boro cassette label if I remember correctly, and Gary tells me there’s new
music afoot. Rest assured, I will be writing about all of that when it lands.
NEIL MASON
BLANCMANGE
Commercial Break
BL ANC CHECK
No let-up for the ongoing purple patch
Almost 40 years after Blancmange had their first hit with
‘Living On The Ceiling’, the band are still breaking all the rules.
It’s certainly hard to think of many acts who are down to
just one original member – singer Neil Arthur, with Stephen
Luscombe having long departed due to illness – but are
producing their best work. With trusty co-producer Benge
once again twiddling the knobs, ‘Commercial Break’, their
14th album, has an appropriately solitary feel as Arthur both
soundtracks and responds to the pandemic and how it has
impacted us as human beings.
While some artists have felt creatively stifled by
lockdowns, the Blancmange man has been on a mission,
tapping into the slower pace of life to emerge with a collection
of songs that are both pensive and reflective. Found sounds
proliferate. The album opens with waves gently breaking on
a beach and also includes indistinct chatter, a dishwasher,
a gate closing and birdsong as Arthur tours the pandemic
environment. Musical reference points vary from minimal
Kraftwerk to ‘Airwaves’-era Thomas Dolby, while the excellent
‘Endless Posts’, all existential unease with hints of Joy
Division and Wire, taps into post-punk electro. ‘Empty Street’
is beautiful acoustica.
‘Commercial Break’ really captures this current period’s
mix of uncertainty, fear, relentless mundanity, TV repeats and
personal disconnect. “Having a bath, bird spotting, endless
DIY, hello, goodbye”, Arthur narrates in ‘Strictly Platonic’.
‘Duo’ manages to make the simple act of putting bins out seem
sinister, while the title track brushes with Test And Trace:
“I could get you arrested / We could all get tested.” The brilliant
‘Dog Walk In A Cloud’ – imagine John Cooper Clarke fronting
Sleaford Mods – finds Arthur going for a stroll with “sanitised
hands”, encountering “lunatic dogs” and socio-economic
breakdown. The baritone’s old pop sensibilities haven’t
deserted him either, and the superb electropop of ‘This A State’
pairs one of his best tunes to lines such as “The memorial lawn
needs cutting, so does my hair / No job too big or small, no job
at all”. A vivid and compelling document of 2020-21, all told.
DAVE SIMPSON

LEE GAMBLE
A Million Pieces Of You
HYPERDUB
British sound sculptor Lee Gamble began
his ‘Flush Real Pharynx’ album trilogy in 2019,
converting blizzards of shaped noise and digital
sounds into unique forms, all to depict the
“semioblitz” – the overload of sensory stimuli
experienced in cities or virtual spaces.
While the first release, ‘In A Paraventral Scale’,
moved from cascading melodies (‘Many Gods,
Many Angels’) to speedy electro beats (‘Moscow’),
and the second part, ‘Exhaust’, contained
everything from warped garage (‘Envenom’) to
dog bark-driven dubstep (‘Switches’), the latest,
and final work in the series, ‘A Million Pieces Of
You’, is a more low-key suite.
‘Empty Middle Seat’ is the kind of twisted
classical piano piece you might expect of Clark,
while ‘You Left A Space’ is xenomorphic hip hop
with odd but compelling notes. ‘Balloon Copy’,
meanwhile, finds Gamble weaving strange synth
sequences into something strikingly modern,
yet connected to IDM’s past. Fittingly, this final
instalment is the best of the lot. BM
RICHARD PIKE
How To Breathe
SA L MON UNIV ERSE
A “lost” album from the London-based Australian
composer, Richard Pike, who you may also know
from Warp’s PVT, as ambient adventurer Deep
Learning or from his very fine Salmon Universe
tape label. Doesn’t matter, the fact is you’ve found
him because ‘How To Breathe’ is a showstopper.
The album began to take shape around 2012
during downtime sessions in London, LA and
Sydney with Warpaint drummer Stella Mozgawa,
and marks a period of personal change for Pike
– displacement, acceptance, trauma, death and
connection are all themes.
The heavy oscillations and huge chords of the
Hopkins-like ‘Memory Circa’, featuring Planet
Mu’s Ital Tek, is a clear standout. That said, the
pensive ‘Don’t Hide’, the warm ambient swells of
‘MH370’, or the Radiohead-y ‘Case Is Closed’ run
it close.
Not so much lost as Pike just taking his sweet
time to make it. Nearly 10 years have gone into
this, enlisting the help of Luke Abbott, Jon Hopkins
collaborator Cherif Hashizume and producer Ben
Hillier along the way. Worth it? Very much so.
Your ears will thank you. NM
THE BACK
L EE GAMBL E
SUPER FURRY ANIMALS
Rings Around The World
BMG
When Kliph Scurlock left The Flaming Lips in
2014, he exchanged their fuzzy American
psychedelia for its Welsh counterpart. Alongside
live work with Gruff Rhys and Guto Pryce’s Gulp,
Scurlock also became Super Furry Animals’
de facto archivist, scouring their sonic vault
to compile a series of reissues. On this 20th
anniversary edition of ‘Rings Around The World’,
his choice of additional demos, alternative mixes
and lost tracks reveal the album’s evolutionary
history and hidden magic.
Across three demo versions of ‘(Drawing)
Rings Around The World’, the track morphs from a
single looped synth into a lolloping cosmic stomper,
while ‘Receptacle For The Respectable’, stripped
of technicolour bombast, has a kernel of pure pop
radiating at its core. And where that track originally
submerged the sound of Paul McCartney chewing
on celery deep in the mix, it’s presented here as 60
seconds of pure masticatory delight.
There’s no doubt that ‘Rings Around The World’
is one of SFA’s finest albums, and Scurlock’s
comprehensive and compelling curation duly
enhances it. ST
89

NITE JEWEL
No Sun
GLORIE T T E
LA chillwave pioneer Ramona “Nite Jewel”
Gonzalez has had her life upended in recent years,
due in no large part to splitting from her husband,
producer Cole “MGN” Marsden Greif-Neill.
Lyrically, ‘No Sun’ is a divorce record, but also
a musical uncoupling – MGN, who has worked
with the likes of Beck, Laurel Halo and Washed
Out, also produced and wrote songs for all of
Gonzalez’s previous albums.
As a result, the glossy, upbeat R&B sheen of
Gonzalez’s previous work has gone too. She still
sings like Janet Jackson in ballad mode – on the
almost imperceptible synth backing of ‘Before I Go’
and the glorious vocal key changes of ‘To Feel It’
– but the compositions are inspired by traditional
laments, where female voices are used to express
grief. In the context of pop songwriting, where
women often channel the words of men, it’s an act
of refreshing auteurship.
“I can’t rely on anything from before,” she
muses on the muted rave ambience of ‘Anymore’.
“The sky is a sea of darkness,” she keens over the
melancholy, John Carpenter-esque pulse of Sun
Ra’s ‘When There is No Sun’. These songs are
heartbreaking, but they express a sense of power
and recovery. DP
VARIOUS ARTISTS
Caves – A Compilation Of Silences
OTHER PEOPL E
The past 18 months have been a prolific period for
Chilean-American experimental musician Nicolás
Jaar, and ‘Caves’ is another welcome curveball in
his wide-ranging output. This is, as it says on the tin,
a compilation of silences, and though conceptually
it veers into John Cage ‘4’ 33”’ territory, Jaar has a
more functional purpose in mind.
Featuring frequent collaborators such as
Lucrecia Dalt, Sary Moussa and Will Epstein, Jaar
and chums have composed silences of varying
lengths, with gentle and often delightful sounds
bookmarking where the pieces start and finish.
From Marzio Zorio’s ‘Three Minute Cave’ to
Laraaji’s ‘Twenty Five Minute Cave’, Jaar envisages
these as timers for everyday use, for cooking,
meditation, running, walking or napping. The
album also works just as nicely as a whole – an
unobtrusive companion for background listening.
One of the joys of Jaar’s work is seeing which
direction he’ll take next, and this latest release on
his own Other People label is a quiet and pleasant
surprise for, as he puts it, “these loud times”. CF
NITE JE W EL
STEPHEN PRINCE
The Shildam Hall Tapes:
The Falling Reverse
A Y E A R IN T H E C O U N T R Y
Hiding behind monochromatic tree branches
since 2014, UK-based Stephen Prince – with his
multimedia project A Year In The Country – has
created a tangled, overgrown enclave of twisted,
rustic oddness. Fragmented throughout his various
releases has been the tale of the fictional Shildam
Hall, here fleshed out with a short but gently
disquieting album.
An accompanying novella tells the story.
In 1799, the lovelorn Lady of the Manor writes a
lament for a travelling labourer, a song set to jinx
Shildam’s unsuspecting residents for centuries
to come. Opener ‘On The Moors’ carries a whiff
of this keening melody before darkness descends.
‘Day 12, Scene 2, Take 28 – Hoffman’s Fall’ enters
appropriate horror soundtrack territory, a lurching
depiction of a 1970 attempt to film in the haunted
hall. And ‘An Ancient Find’ is spectral chamber
music, whispered on a moorland breeze.
Lurking in the coal hole, Prince continues to
weave his own darkly entrancing magic over the
surrounding countryside. BF

ANNA MEREDITH
Bumps Per Minute: 18 Studies For Dodgems
MOSHI MOSHI
Roll up, roll up – maverick Scot delights again
Anna Meredith and dodgems. The perfect combo if you ask us.
The Scottish composer certainly enjoys roller-coasters. Well,
she has a complicated relationship with them. “I love them, but
I fear them,” she told us back in issue 60 of this very magazine.
So you’d think the light-hearted, energetic madness of the
fairground would be an obvious inspiration for Meredith, too.
Well, you’d be right.
‘Bumps Per Minute: 18 Studies For Dodgems’ was part of the
recent ‘Dodge’ experience at London’s Somerset House, where
Meredith has her own studio. In collaboration with BAFTA-
winning sound artist Nick Ryan, she designed an interactive
18-dodgem installation – a pandemic-friendly replacement
for the ice rink – where every crash and bump triggered an
individual composition. There are even virtual dodgems for
those who prefer to have a go from home (see bumpsperminute.
com) – it’s like a hallucinogenic Ceefax page, allowing you to
fling multicoloured dodgems into each other.
Anyway, we digress. All this feeds into ‘Bumps Per Minute’,
a collection of extended cuts from the installation, and just the
sort of maximalist electronic excellence we’ve come to expect
from Meredith.
If her 2019 stonker ‘Fibs’ was full of glorious synthy chaos,
this is chaos distilled. After the gentle thrum of ‘Start Engines’,
a sort of spoken-word safety announcement, Meredith rockets
full throttle into the rest of the album. Full of electronic squeals,
‘BPM 100: Lil’ Waltzer’ swirls and sways like an aural house of
mirrors, before ‘BPM 178: Heartbreak Staircase’ arpeggiates
comically, like a synth tumbling down a staircase. It’s bombastic
and frenetic, never stopping for breath and all the better for it.
There are slower numbers – ‘BPM 62: Ballad Of The Sea’,
for example, is a melodic, circus-like jaunt. But then you’re
thrust straight back into the frenzy. ‘Mario Kart’ on acid? ‘BPM
72: USS Seesaw’. The devil blaring his horn while his car alarm
goes off? ‘BPM 194: Tom Cruise Runs’. And there are shades
of ‘Fibs’ on ‘BPM 131: Joy Subdivision’, like Meredith took the
tracks from that album and put them on a merry-go-round.
Like all the best fairground rides, ‘Bumps Per Minute’ is a truly
exhilarating experience.
FINLAY MILLIGAN
Label Profile
THE BACK
Label: A Year In The Country
Location: Hay Under Wythe, UK
Est: 2014
Potted History: “For years, I’d been working in left-of-centre urban-
orientated pop/counterculture, while living in city locations,” says label founder
Stephen Prince. “One day I found myself drawn to the undercurrents of more
rural, folk-orientated culture and the spectral parallel worlds of hauntology.”
None of this will sound at all surprising to anyone who already knows his
mightily fine imprint. Add a formative interest in science fiction, as well as the
paranoia of the Cold War and growing up in the countryside “quite literally
alongside related infrastructure” and, well…
“Many years later I found myself living in the country again and plans
for A Year In The Country began to take shape, in part influenced by my
surroundings and the hazily half-remembered memories of the events,
atmospheres and culture from when I was younger.”
Mission Statement: “I’ve long been fascinated by work that creates its
own world or dreamscapes and contains a sense of exploring hidden half-
known stories and interconnected pathways that have sometimes become
buried in the cultural undergrowth over time,” says Prince. “A Year In The
Country and its releases are a reflection of that fascination.”
Key Artists & Releases: “I tend to think of the releases and the work
created for them as being part of an interconnected project and I value
and appreciate the various contributors’ work equally,” says Prince rather
diplomatically. “Our releases often take the form of themed compilations
based around, for example, the flashpoints of history and conflict in the
landscape, the faded dreams of the space race or imaginary lost films.
They have featured new work created for the albums by, among many others,
Field Lines Cartographer, Pulselovers, The Heartwood Institute, Howlround,
Vic Mars, Listening Center, Grey Frequency and myself working as both
A Year In The Country and Stephen Prince.”
Future Plans: “There are still a fair few pathways to wander down,
including some further flung corners and nooks and crannies of
interconnected culture,” says Prince, cryptically. “Where that will take me
and the label is difficult to say as often that “wandering” can arrive at and
discover some unexpected and intriguing places.”
Any advice for anyone setting up a label?
“It’s worth remembering that there’s not necessarily a “proper” way to set up a
label, and the flexible distribution and promotion allowed by digital technology
alongside the availability of smaller scale and/or bespoke production methods
means there’s a lot of freedom to do things in different ways and, hopefully,
carve out your own particular niche.”
For more, visit ayearinthecountry.bandcamp.com
91
First And Last And Always
Alice Hubble on the first and last albums she bought and
the one she turns to in an emergency
FIRST MADONNA
Like A Prayer
S I R E , 19 8 9
“Like so many children of the 80s, Madonna was my
pop idol. This album was, and still is, my absolute
favourite. I remember buying it on tape from a
music shop in the small village in Surrey where
my grandmother lived. Me and my friend made up
a routine to the title track that we subjected our
parents to. I can still remember some of the moves.”
LAST LAURIE SPIEGEL
The Expanding Universe
P HI L O, 19 8 0
“I bought this after watching the ‘Sisters With
Transistors’ documentary. I knew a lot about
the British musicians featured in the film, but
the Americans were more of an unknown. It’s
an absolute delight of a record, the arpeggiating
synths sound like the inside of my head. I can’t
believe I only just heard this record.”
ALWAYS LADYTRON
Witching Hour
I S L A N D, 2 0 0 5
“This is perfect ‘head cleaner’ music. It’s part
therapy, helping to clean my head of a stressful day.
Ladytron create such an evocative world with this
record and Helen’s vocals are lush. It’s relentless,
menacing and pop in equal measures. Other
head cleaners include Jon Hopkins’ ‘Singularity’,
Carly Rae Jepsen’s ‘Emotion’, Tangerine Dream’s
‘Stratosfear’ and Blanck Mass’ ‘In Ferneaux’.”
ALICE HUBBLE
Hexentanzplatz
HAPPY ROBOTS
‘Polarlichter’ follow-up hits the heights
It’s a mountain, in case you were wondering – 454 metres above
sea level in the Saxony-Anhalt region of Germany, and reputedly
once the site of pagan worship in honour of the Hagedisen
forest gods. This isn’t explicitly the reason Alice Hubble sings
“Oh, what a beautiful mountain” on the shimmering title track
of her second solo album, but she was at least driving through
the region when she misheard Michael Patrick Kelly crooning
‘Beautiful Madness’ on the car radio.
Appropriately then, it’s an album of tangents. Opener ‘West
Reservoir’ is a haunted, ambient storm, but it doesn’t set the
tone. ‘Power Play’ is angry post-punk electronica, a bitter
shrug at post-#MeToo indifference. “Will they pay? / The scars
that they leave, they don’t easily fade away” she seethes. But
there are moments of pure romantic pop, too. Fuelled by a love
of vintage OMD, ‘Projections’ could stand tall in the more arty
corners of any mid-1980s chart rundown. It’s a love song to a
partner at arm’s length, their imperfections obfuscated by the
distance (“1-2-3 and I fall in love with my projections of you / I’m
just seeing what I want to see”).
Let’s not entirely forget those pagan influences, either.
The literal translation of the album title? “Witches’ Dancefloor”.
As with previous release ‘Polarlichter’, Hubble is clearly not
averse to the odd spot of moonlit weirdness. ‘Make Believe’ is
dark synthfolk with Hubble a sinister wronged lover. “Make
believe a world for me / Comfort in being somebody” she
sings, lowering her voice to a powerful contralto as baroque
keyboards cast a beguiling spell around her.
These forays into the more esoteric corners of the electronic
world feel like her most natural home, the quintessential
essence of Hubble. It’s certainly a long way from her stint as
one half of indie-poppers Arthur And Martha, but she hasn’t
lost her flair for detailing the everyday. “Words unsaid / I see
you in the letters that you sent,” she sings on ‘My Dear Friend’,
recounting the heart-tugging discovery of a yellowed pile of
billets-doux once sent by her late mother.
Hubble remains charmingly unpretentious. “One lady at
home with her enormous collection of synthesisers” is her
modest self-description in the album’s PR. But her adept
combination of the affectingly familiar with this gentle musical
expansion is leading her to increasingly impressive peaks.
BOB FISCHER

ZYKLUS
Stimulacra
BURIED T RE ASURE
Here’s a welcome second volume of rare and
previously unreleased gems from the deft hand
of Delaware Road and Revbjelde man Alan Gubby,
offering a priceless look at the way analogue
synth futurism has developed and evolved in ways
very different to the digital realm.
Recorded between 1983-2006 and remastered
from original cassettes, DATs and MiniDiscs,
‘Stimulacra’ features an essential array of genre-
spanning experimental electronica. From abstract
sketches, immersive modular synth explorations
and primitive tape jams, through to industrial noise
and library pieces, it’s cracking stuff. There’s
even a touch of left-field, late-1990s junglist rave
thrown in for good measure, in the form of the
giddily robotic ‘EX-Y Dred’.
But perhaps the most enjoyable moments are
those that feel formative and nostalgic, such as
the goth-shaded ‘Gallium’ from 1984, or the exotic,
android-like ‘Persian Rug’, recorded just a few
years later but still sounding as vital as ever. CG
THE LIMIÑANAS /
LAURENT GARNIER
De Película
BECAUSE MUSIC
The ascent of connubial French psych outfit
The Limiñanas has been breathtaking. From
humble Perpignan roots, they’ve found themselves
working with Anton Newcombe, Peter Hook
and Emmanuelle Seigner, artists who might have
seemed out of reach a decade ago. Moreover,
the duo have created their own universe,
recording mostly in their mother tongue, somehow
building up a loyal cult following in anglophone
countries in the process.
Their latest album, ‘De Película’, recorded
with techno overlord Laurent Garnier, immerses
itself in the world of Saul and Juliette, characters
in an imaginary psychedelic road movie, with lots
of hip references to Italian anthology films from
the golden age. Garnier’s hand is a guiding one,
consolidating the band’s pre-existing sound rather
than bringing sonic reinvention.
Opener ‘Saul’ adds a breakbeat and subtle
dance fortification to Lionel Limiñana’s cool
Gainsbourgian sprechgesang, while ‘Ne Gâche Pas
L’Aventure Humaine’, with Marie Limiñana purring
“Je t’aime…” over its irresistible, motorik rhythm,
further enhances an exquisite escapade. JA
THE BACK
Z Y KLUS
CHORA(S)SAN TIME-
COURT MIRAGE
Blues Alif Lam Mim In The Mode Of Rag
Infinity/Rag Cosmosis
BL ANK FORMS
Pioneering Swedish composer Catherine Christer
Hennix is a polymath of art, poetry, mathematics
and explorations of the infinite. Having worked at
the Stockholm Elektronmusikstudion (EMS) in the
1960s, she exists – much like her contemporary,
La Monte Young – at the intersection of 1960s
western avant-garde electroacoustics, and the
drones and ragas of Indian music.
Recorded in 2014 with her Chora(s)san Time-
Court Mirage intonation-only ensemble, Hennix’s
extended piece sets out to reveal the origins of
the blues in the eastern musical traditions of raga,
which is quite the intention. After one hour and 20
minutes of its ever-shifting drone and chorus of
voices, you may well feel you’ve entered the void.
It’s an extraordinary experience.
Ultimately, the spiritual heaviness of ‘Blues Alif
Lam Mim…’ may or may not resonate, and yet you
can’t help but vibrate to its sonic power. Turn off
your mind, relax and float downstream. MR
93

SPIRITUALIZED
Ladies And Gentlemen We Are
Floating In Space
F AT P O S S U M
The third stage of The Spaceman Reissue Program
sees us arrive at Jason Pierce’s masterpiece. Like
‘Lazer Guided Melodies’ and ‘Pure Phase’, it comes
remastered and reissued as a 180g double vinyl set,
with brand-new artwork by Mark Farrow. There’s
also a choice of black or limited edition Neptune-
blue vinyl. Decisions, decisions.
In 1997 it really took the breath away. They built
mountains with sound, the production prowess
and Kate Radley’s relentless keys showed just
what you could do. You forget the little details like
the London Community Gospel Choir serving up the
‘Wise men say / Only fools rush in’ lament at the
end of the opening title track, or just how epic the
closing 16-minute ‘Cop Shoot Cop…’ is. You also
forget it was NME’s Album Of The Year, pipping
‘OK Computer’ and ‘Urban Hymns’ to the top spot.
Pierce says he prefers ‘Pure Phase’, but
admits that ‘Ladies And Gentlemen…’ is where
everything came together. Which he must’ve
known subconsciously. How else do you explain
the awesome ‘Come Together’? ‘Ladies And
Gentlemen…’ was the real deal. Still is. NM
FS BLUMM & NILS FRAHM
2x1 = 4
LEITER
We all like surprises, right? German underground
mainstay Blumm and revered Erased Tapes
veteran Frahm have been gently exploring micro-
electronics since their intricate 2010 debut ‘Music
For Lovers, Music Versus Time’. So this latest
album, issued on Frahm and Felix Grimm’s new
label, Leiter, is a revelation. We’re talking bull-by-
the-horns electronic dub.
Blumm brings his experience from his Quasi
Dub Development duo, where a tuba did the bass
work. Electronic strings glide across processed
guitar plucks. Woodwinds offer creeping melodies
as dubby echoes zoom left, right and centre.
Cleverly, they damp down the core drum tracks to
allow the dub effects room to breathe, resulting in
a beautifully corroded backbone for the strangled
groove of ‘Neckrub’.
All along, Frahm’s melodies ooze with sadness.
Like the confused maths of its title, it shouldn’t
work but it does. Some surprises are bad. Sudden
clowns, stampeding elephants. But this one is a
digitally dubby thrill. FR
SPIRITUAL IZED
JOHN VANDERSLICE
John, I Can’t Believe Civilization Is Still
Going Here In 2021! Congratulations To
All Of Us, Love, DCB
BANDCAMP
LA’s John Vanderslice has 20-plus years of solo
releases in the rear-view mirror of his career.
And right from the start, this indie rock hero
and occasional St Vincent/Mountain Goats
collaborator has always relied on electronic
tonalities to see him through both the heartfelt
and the doomy sides of his material.
Armed with a hardcore stockpile of vintage
synths and strong psychedelics, Vanderslice has
now channelled his grief over the loss of friend,
mentor and Silver Jews frontman David Berman
into this engaging seven-tracker, filled with broken
bleeps and analogue laments. But he hasn’t
completely walked away from the uber-melodic
reflexes that have driven much of his music over
the last two decades.
Alongside experimental manoeuvres like
‘Uncommon Love’ and ‘White Chalk’ lies the
perfect pop of ‘I Get A Strange Kind Of Pleasure
From Just Hanging On’. Written, recorded and
mastered in just three days, it’s perfectly pitched
for these strange, pandemic-haunted times. JS

PUBLIC SERVICE
BROADCASTING
Bright Magic
P L AY I T A G A IN S A M
Berlin-inspired gem from J Willgoose and co
Over the last eight years, London’s Public Service Broadcasting
have pretty much nailed their idea of what a concept album
should be. From 2013’s ‘Inform-Educate-Entertain’ to 2018’s
‘Every Valley’, their propulsive guitars, electronics and archive
samples have compellingly chronicled the American and Soviet
space race and the Welsh mining industry. But ‘Bright Magic’,
their fourth studio album, magnifies and expands that well-
thumbed approach.
Taking its title from an anthology of short stories by German
novelist Alfred Döblin, ‘Bright Magic’ centres – as usual – around
J Willgoose Esq’s exhaustive research. An “impressionistic”
and very personal take on Berlin, it’s a heady and vibrant sonic
snapshot of the city’s culture, psychogeography and its status as
a cosmopolitan centre “ablaze with ideas, energy, inspiration…
illumination and imagination”.
Recorded at Kreuzberg’s famous Hansa studios, Willgoose
says Berlin became a prism for his ideas, as he envisaged
swirling, synaesthesia-like colours and sounds. The industrial
feel of ‘Der Rhythmus Der Maschinen’ (‘The Rhythm Of The
Machines’), for example – voiced by Blixa Bargeld – echoes the
grey/gold-tinged hues of Fritz Lang’s 1927 expressionist sci-fi
masterpiece, ‘Metropolis’. But while PSB’s familiar guitar surges
feature here and there, ‘Bright Magic’ feels like their most
electronic and epic work to date.
Channelling the experimental spirit of Bowie’s ‘Low’, it’s an
album segmented into three contrasting parts – building a city,
building a myth, and bright magic. The obvious standouts are
‘People, Let’s Dance’, an electro-rush of Depeche, Kraftwerk,
Daft Punk and Chemical Brothers-esque euphoria, and the
soaring, Marlene Dietrich-inspired ‘Blue Heaven’ – both mighty
pop juggernauts.
But the album’s later tracks, prompted by expressionist
“visual music” films from the 1920s, properly get under your skin,
too. ‘The Visitor’ recalls the shimmering atmospheric drift of
Bowie’s ‘Warszawa’, while ‘Lichtspiel III’ (“Lightplay”) and closer
‘Ich Und Die Stadt’ are gorgeous, Vangelis-inspired requiems –
billowing synths and amplified melancholy in perfect harmony.
It would be foolhardy to directly compare ‘Bright Magic’ to an
album as colossal and iconic as ‘Low’, but it’s a game-changer,
for sure. Easily PSB’s most ambitious, left field and majestic
work to date, this glorious creative peak – their magnum opus –
is going to be a hard one to top.
VELIMIR ILIC
THE BACK
JUSTICE
Viewpoints
H Y DROGEN DUK EBOX
Welcome reissue of 1990’s d’n’b classic
Drum ’n’ bass from the 1990s can be separated into three
colours. The ambient haze of Good Looking Records? Pea-soup
green. The jump-up floor shakers of Hospital Records? A bold
orange. And the experimental alleys of Krust and Metalheadz?
Metallic blue. This 1998 debut from British producer Tony
“Justice” Bowes, issued in its complete form on vinyl for the
first time, jumps so many of these colours it’s most likely an all-
encompassing brown. In a good way.
Justice cut his teeth with college friend Blame, whose
blistering DJ work with LTJ Bukem’s ‘Logical Progression’
series still reverberates now. Indeed, he cites Bukem’s 1993
track ‘Music’ as a major influence. As producers switched to
software in their Captain Ahab-ish quest for the most liquidy
of liquid beats, Bowes went hardware. This debut album was
outboard and proud.
There are no surprises in Justice’s equipment list –
Minimoog, Korg Prophecy, Juno-106 – but his approach made
this, er, brown noise shimmer that much more. Unlike some
drum ’n’ bass rollers of the time, the loops are easier, less
cut and paste. Rubber band synthlines playfully glide across
rhythm tracks, such as on the eddying Detroit-style washes that
counterpoint the fleet-footed breakbeats of ‘Westside Centre’.
That track, by the way, is seemingly named after a local Luton
shopping complex he remembers from his childhood.
Then there’s the scratchiness. There are Roland hi-hats
on here that are a few short frequencies from a modem
transmission. Take the serrated vocals scattered over the
snare-strewn, cha-cha stomp of ‘Gemini Reprise’ – they’re so
hoarse you’ll be reaching for a lozenge. The abraded pads of
‘Aeronautics’ are closer to early Autechre than Bukem. And on
the pleasantly featherlight single ‘Aquisse’, you can almost hear
the creaking of the pitch wheel, that staple of old synths. The
percussive rattles, sewer pipe snares and the oh-so-90s filters
all serve as an analogue almanac.
RE VIE WS BY
Like old shopping centres, this is a moment in time, but it’s JEREM Y AL L EN,
JOE BANKS,
important to stress there’s no sepia fading here. ‘Viewpoints’ is BOB FISCHER,
often overlooked in the timeline of drum ’n’ bass. Let this utterly CL AIRE FR ANCIS,
CARL GRIFFIN,
listenable reissue repaint history in whichever hue you choose. JO HU T TON,
VEL IMIR IL IC,
ISA A K L E W IS-SMITH
NEIL M ASON,
FAT ROLAND FINL AY MIL L IGAN,
BEN MURPHY,
DAVID POL LOCK ,
FAT ROL AND,
M ARK ROL AND,
DAVE SIMPSON,
JOE SILVA ,
M AT SMITH,
JAMES THORNHIL L ,
SPENSER TOMSON,
BEN W IL L MOT T 95
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97
BANGING ON
In among the known knowns, the known unknowns
and the unknown unknowns, try get your head round
the idea that our columnist is into Formula One…
WORDS AND PICTURES: FAT ROLAND
Mate. Hey, mate. Wanna buy this used car? Note the stylish bird poop sheen
and unique Frisbee steering wheel. Yep, I drew those go-faster stripes
myself. I see you’ve noticed the dead deer wedged into the smashed radiator.
Perfectly matches the polyester interior, don’t you think?
Would you like to pay for an extended warranty? Heaven forbid the wheels
suddenly fall off because the Sellotape gives way, or the growling engine
turns out to be a bonnet full of indignant guinea pigs. Just sign here, and sign
here, and here too, and stick your finger in here. Deal! Cheers, mate!
I’ve never understood cars. Kraftwerk tootled along their ‘Autobahn’ for
a bit, bless them, but generally cars are a bad fit for electronic music. Petrol
heads prefer guitars because, um, the strings remind them of fan belts or
something. Brilliant bleepy techno about future robots having alien sex
with a laser-controlled spaceship isn’t suddenly going to drop a breakbeat
about Ford Fiestas.
And who would you rather spend your weekends with? Middle-aged
blokes guzzling warm lager while mansplaining about miles per horsepower
torque shaft blah nonsense? Or happy house clubbers pilled to the rafters
blithering about oscillating knob-twiddle patchbays and how our bodies are
full of 5G? Oh wait. Bad example.
Cars are complicated. Just like knee surgery or shampoo adverts. There
are too many dials, and manual gear sticks are fiddly, like trying to solve
a Rubik’s Cube down your trousers. I’m wary of anything too technological,
to be honest. I watched a documentary the other day which showed a horrific
science experiment. Readers of a delicate disposition may wish to skip this
paragraph or stare blankly at the opposite page for a bit.
There was a nine-year-old boy, an American lad, filmed sometime in
the 1970s. They miniaturised him using advanced matter transfer usually
deployed by the confectionary industry. This wasn’t so bad, but then they
tried to reverse the process. It went horribly wrong and Oompa-Loompas
had to come to the rescue. I’m against censorship, but I really don’t think
they should be showing this kind of thing.
There was one good car innovation, now obsolete. The cigarette lighter.
This was a burning dashboard disc that set fire to anything you shoved into it:
Marlboro Lights, cheeky spliffs, unwanted body parts… the electronic music
version of this would be a Minimoog with, just next to the pink noise button,
a portal to the earth’s core that constantly spits lava in your face. That would
make Rick Wakeman concerts way more interesting. “This next song…
aaargh… is called… aaaaargh…”
I do have one car obsession. I run an upside-down fantasy game called the
F1 Losers League. Teams run the worst possible virtual Formula One outfit,
and get rewarded for retirements, red flags and rubbish behaviour. Honestly,
it’s real: google it. Friends act surprised when they discover I like F1, as if I’d
just told them about my third leg, third nipple or my three Play-Doh statues of
Earth, Wind and Fire out of Earth, Wind & Fire. It’s not really about the cars.
I love league tables and statistics. My music blog is full of lists. I’d have ‘The
Guinness Book Of British Hit Singles’ tattooed on my whole body if it didn’t
carry the risk of having Jive Bunny on my genitals.
Why have a car when you can have a lovely Jaffa Cake? Much nicer. Gary
Numan once said “nothing seems right in cars”, and he’s spot on. Just don’t
get into his Ford Fiesta because those guinea pigs are getting very bitey.
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