Burl Veneer’s Music Blog

The 80s are coming back

nobody@vox.com(Burl Veneer) — Mon, 12 May 2008 19:50:27 -0700

They've been coming back for quite some time now (since 1990), of course, but now my 1980s are coming back. Since my recent post on Slab!, band member Stephen Dray has announced their imminent reformation (in the comments on this blog post), or resumption rather, since he maintains they never officially broke up. Woo-hoo! And now Portion Control have announced a new album, Slug, to be released May 31. Portion Control's early recordings, originally released on cassettes, were obviously inspired by Throbbing Gristle. But by their first proper album, I Staggered Mentally (1982), they had settled on a more beat-oriented sound, or as they billed it, "Hard, Rhythmic Electronics." Their 80s career peaked in 1985 with their most successful single, the industrial dancefloor staple "The Great Divide"--

Great Divide

Portion Control

There's some nice percussion in there; I'm finally learning to play a bit in a local drum circle. It hurts after a while, but it's great to actually make the sounds I've enjoyed listening to for so long.

Portion Control ceased operations after their 1986 album, Psycho-Bod Saves the World, but returned with a new album, Wellcome, in 2002, and Filthy White Guy in 2004. So their reactivation isn't exactly news, but Slug is, which is a good enough reason to dig out my old Portion Control records for another listen.

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I'm still listening to Nine Inch Nails (and Peter Hope)

nobody@vox.com(Burl Veneer) — Fri, 09 May 2008 16:03:47 -0700

Here I am saying The Slip is the best Nine Inch Nails album since the first one when I haven't really listened to any of them since Broken. So I've been trying to catch up, going from recent to older; Year Zero and With Teeth are actually better than I thought, but neither are reach-out-and-grabby like The Slip, and both suffer from album bloat. I am especially impressed with the opener from With Teeth, "All the Love in the World," which starts with a dub beat before morphing into a piano ballad (with falsetto, even!) and then finally an arena rocker:

Trent is relentless with his morbidly dour lyrics, though; it becomes overbearing after a while. I think I can place them all into three categories:

I have low self-esteem.
We live in a dystopia.
Living in a dystopia has given me low self-esteem.

Did I miss anything? What would Nine Inch Nails sound like if fronted by, say, Tom Waits and his morbidly gleeful lyrics? Like this, I bet:

A1 Too Hot

Peter Hope and David Harrow

This song contains one of my all-time favorite weird couplets:

Turn the dust out, oh clear a way
When the injury swells up, it will not be contained

Yeah! What the hell does that mean? I don't know, but it sure is catchy! Peter Hope first emerged in 1983 as the lead singer for The Box, a Sheffield band made up of former ClockDVA members. Mick Fish give some details in his book about Cabaret Voltaire, Industrial Evolution:

The Box tried a number of singers, one who sort of whooped like a Red Indian chief but couldn't sing in tune. They even played two gigs with Mal [Stephen Mallinder of Cabaret Voltaire] on vocals -- a marriage of styles that was quite successful in its own way.... The Box eventually advertised for a singer. By far the best response came from Pete Hope from Hertford. Vocally somewhere between Tom Waits and Howlin' Wolf, he moved up to Sheffield with his young family.

Hope's inventive lyrics and unbridled singing style perfectly complemented The Box's no-wave skronk. Although they released several records, The Box never broke out, and they disbanded in 1985. Peter Hope then embarked on a series of one-off collaborations: this EP with synth whiz David Harrow (now known as James Hardway), an album with Cabaret Voltaire's Richard H. Kirk, an album with Jonathan S. Podmore (now known as Jono Podmore a.k.a. Kumo), and a 12" single with studio engineer Mark Estdale as Chain:

Chain - Chains(1)

Chain

I just adore that gothic-industrial-funk sound; if only that had caught on in the way Nine Inch Nails did. Maybe it'll come back... Peter Hope, where are you?

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Hold all calls, I'm listening to Nine Inch Nails

nobody@vox.com(Burl Veneer) — Tue, 06 May 2008 15:48:38 -0700

I'm a Nine Inch Nails fan from way back. I was hanging out with my pal $ean at the original Kemp Mill Records where he was assistant manager the day Pretty Hate Machine came out; I bought one right out of the shipping box. I listened to it and knew immediately that "Head Like a Hole" was a future classic. It wasn't as hard as the stuff on Wax Trax! or KK, so there were plenty of haters who derided it as watered-down industrial; too bad for them. I saw NIN on the Pretty Hate Machine tour, at the Grog and Tankard in Baltimore, with Meat Beat Manifesto opening. I still have the t-shirt from the show. Come to think of it, I still have the SPK t-shirt I wore to the show; talk about threadbare! But since then I haven't really connected with NIN; Trent took a long hiatus, I started listening to different music, and I just skipped over everything else he put out. I really dug "The Perfect Drug," but not enough to buy it. So now he's free of record label ties and is giving away his new music; I downloaded Ghosts I-IV, but it didn't hook me. Yesterday I downloaded The Slip, and it did hook me! I've listened to "1,000,000" three times so far today! My initial reaction is that this is Trent's best album since Pretty Hate Machine. This is the new music buzz I remember from my youth!

Love that false ending! "1,000,000" is my early favorite, with "Demon Seed" in second place:

The Slip has the feel of Trent's live-on-the-radio performances with Peter Murphy: no more futzing around in the studio with umpteen overdubs trying to get everything just perfect, he's just laying down a few tracks and rocking out! And it works beautifully!

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It's raining queens (Mississippi Queens)

nobody@vox.com(Burl Veneer) — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 18:43:01 -0700

I have previously written about my dear friend, the late Mark Harp. Mark's band Null Set brought postpunk to Baltimore; when another band called Null Set, from another city, put out a record, Mark's Null Set changed their name to Cabal. The singer for Null Set and Cabal was Bill Dawson; after Cabal broke up, he teamed up with George Hagegeorge to form Black Pete and play guitar-charged industrial music in the vein of Ministry and Skinny Puppy. They put out one twelve-inch in 1989, recruited an apparently substance-addled young glam-metal dude as their "bassist" (though it was speculated that his real role was to get into fights and thereby gain "cred" for the band), and folded shortly thereafter. I missed my window for getting a copy of the record back then, but thanks to the Internet and GEMM, the window is open again. I found a copy and ordered it (from a dealer with multiple copies), and it arrived yesterday. The A-side is a cover of Mountain's "Mississippi Queen"--

Black Pete - Mississippi Queen

Black Pete

Coincidentally, on the same day, Ministry released their supposedly final album, Cover Up, a collection of covers of classic rock tunes, one of which is... can you guess? That's right, "Mississippi Queen"--

(Thanks for Jeff for bringing it to my attention.) Do we need a new album of guitar-charged industrial covers of classic rock tunes? Isn't it about eighteen years too late? Another remake of "Get It On (Bang A Gong)", for pete's sake? Didn't Laibach already write the book on industrial covers (and close it) with their interpretations of the Beatles in 1988, and the Rolling Stones in 1990?

02 - Laibach - Sympathy For The Devil (Dem Teufel Zugeneigt)

Laibach

That last part of this version (one of eight they recorded) has the best bass-drum workout since Steam's 1969 hit and perennial stadium favorite "Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye"--

I would have loved Cover Up in 1990, perhaps as late as 1995. Maybe if I pretend it's a reissue, or long-suppressed recordings just released from the vault!!!, I'll like it better.

Finally, wouldn't it be funny to refer to Laibach as Audioslav?

Let_it_be3

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The Dream Ticket

nobody@vox.com(Burl Veneer) — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 17:45:33 -0700

With all the buzz about an Obama/Clinton (or Clinton/Obama) "dream ticket," the time is ripe for posting Cabaret Voltaire's "The Dream Ticket." Recorded in 1983, it is arguably their earliest mastery of American-style electro, overlaid with their unique Sheffield sound. It was released as a single on Virgin, but somehow never ended up on any of their Virgin albums (not counting CD reissues).

05 - The Dream Ticket(1)

Cabaret Voltaire

Apparently there is a Red Bull Music Academy, not a bricks-and-mortar institution but a nomadic series of seminars and workshops with prominent (?) musicians and DJs, with a distinct electonic bent. The great thing is, many of the talks and interviews are available on Academy's website, including one with Cabaret Voltaire founding member Stephen Mallinder: Quicktime video and text transcript here, audio podcast here (scroll down). There's another one of Adrian Sherwood! And the late, great Bob Moog!

Now, about that other "dream ticket," here's how the dream would go: Hillary Clinton on the Democratic presidential ticket, and the Democrats win the election, and then... nothing changes at all! Like the 2006 midterm elections all over again. No thanks.

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Belatedly, Cabaret Voltaire

nobody@vox.com(Burl Veneer) — Sun, 03 Feb 2008 10:09:36 -0800

Here I've been going on about Sheffield and the great industrial dance music of the 80s and I haven't even gotten around to Cabaret Voltaire yet, arguably the godfathers of that whole scene. So to remedy that, here's the video for what is probably their best-known song, "Sensoria"--

CABARET VOLTAIRE - SENSORIA

This video was a pre-show staple at the 9:30 Club, and it got a lot of play on the college radio station, too, even though there was no station copy: everybody had their own. I recently read Industrial Evolution: Through the Eighties with Cabaret Voltaire by Mick Fish for a more-or-less firsthand account of CV's ascendancy. (More-or-less because Fish lived in London and only visited Sheffield on the weekends, where his childhood friend Paul Widger was his connection to the music scene.) It's a real DIY success story, because as Fish tells it, neither of the core duo of Richard Kirk and Stephen "Mal" Mallinder knew how to play any instruments when they started, and the vocal duties fell to Mal, who also didn't know how to sing. He developed an odd octave-jumping rap style for their first major-label album (The Crackdown, 1983) which, while effective for one or two songs, became rather grating after a whole album. He used the same style for "Sensoria" from the follow-up album, Microphonies (1984), but thankfully came up with some variations for the rest of the songs. CV had left their own Sheffield studio, Western Works, to record The Crackdown in London; Fish maintains this was a good move, giving the duo an outside perspective on their music and spurring some artistic growth. Of their return to Western Works to record Microphonies, he writes:

Microphonies had the feel of a band having second thoughts about commerciality. By recording under their own stem again at Western Works, it meant a return to the rougher more home-made approach of their earlier material. Obviously in Paul's opinion this was not altogether a bad thing. He tended to prefer the idea of the Cabs as a kind of electronic garage band rather than a dance act. But many others viewed it as a step backwards. It seemed that after a flirtation with the big time, they were still hovering on an island of indecision between the indie and mainstream seas.

Alas, they hovered until it was too late, and mainstream success slipped away from them even as they finally secured major-label support in the US. That said, I think Microphonies is superior to the rather monotonous The Crackdown, and they kept up a high level of danceability and creativity for a few good years. Their huge catalog of both experimental and dance-oriented electronic music is an impressive legacy. Since their breakup, Mallinder resurfaces with new music very rarely, but Kirk has produced tons of music under a small army of pseudonyms and through myriad collaborations. Come to think of it, I've got a lot of catching up to do on that.

"Sensoria" has been blessed with a reference in a Jonathan Carroll novel, A Child Across the Sky (IIRC): it is the opening theme music for an arts radio show hosted by one of the characters. I think. That reference alone should keep it bubbling around for decades to come.

Industrial Evolution: Through the Eighties With Cabaret Voltaire (Poptomes)

Mick Fish

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Organico: file with Mahjongg

nobody@vox.com(Burl Veneer) — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 14:32:22 -0800

A week after discovering Mahjongg, a band playing exactly my kind of music, I've found another one without even trying. The Vintage Library Emporium sharity blog shares old albums (1978-1990, mostly) of library music, instrumental music intended to be used in soundtracks of promotional films, slideshows (these are from pre-PowerPoint days), or any other production that needs music but can't afford to commission it. The albums were typically quite expensive, as built into the price was a flat fee for royalties. Thus the music could be used royalty-free in unlimited quantities (per purchaser). They're all instrumental, they're all competent, and they're perhaps even more reflective of their respective time periods than pop music. The most sought-after library albums prominently feature synthesizers as lead instruments, Moog and ARP in particular; there's also a lot of good car-chase music to be found. The Vintage Library Emporium blog is based in France and run by Paul Durango, and in yesterday's post he put up some videos from his band, Organico. And as I just mentioned, they play exactly my kind of music! They use 1980-era synths and drum machines to make real rump-shaking synthbeat music (as opposed to happier-sounding, finger-snapping "synthpop"). Here is the intriguingly-titled "Fevers as a shemale"--

Organico - Fevers as a shemale

Could you play that? I can't play it under Windows Vista, the whole thing will load and I can scroll through it but it won't play at all. Windows Vista may be the best advertisement for Linux yet. It drove me to install an Ubuntu partition (using Wubi), which plays the video just fine. Eat hot lead, Vista!

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Chrome: Das Gift der Musik

nobody@vox.com(Burl Veneer) — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 17:44:25 -0800

Once again I'm in "it's easier to download the album from a sharity blog than to find it on my shelves" mode, which is how I ended up with a digitized copy of Chrome's Raining Milk album yesterday. Hearing Chrome's cyborg metal for the first time was a revelation; their 1982 six-album box set was the best ten bucks I ever spent. The box set was initially the only way to get their two-album set The Chronicles. Sadly, that was the last album recorded by the classic Chrome duo of Helios Creed and Damon Edge. They parted ways and Damon Edge moved to France, where he continued releasing albums both under the Chrome moniker and under his own name. The first such Chrome album was Raining Milk, which was merely an abridged, single-album version of The Chronicles with a new song, "Raining Milk." That turned out to be a two-minute instrumental, so that album was not a very good value. However, I did use "Raining Milk" as the intro music for my college radio show, "Das Gift der Musik." (It sounds like "the gift of music," but it really means "the poison of music," haha. I defend my sophomoric humor by noting that I was a sophomore when I thought it up.)

Chrome - 06 - Raining Milk

Chrome

Wow, that takes me back; I feel like I should be announcing the concert calendar now.

Edge's recordings all lacked the metallic bite of his collaborations with Creed. When Creed finally put together a new band and started releasing albums, they were closer to the "real" Chrome, but still lacking something. After Edge died in 1995, Creed took back the Chrome name and has since released several Chrome albums with varying degrees of success, and none as vital as his work with Edge. What a shame.

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Mahjongg rewards my RSS addiction

nobody@vox.com(Burl Veneer) — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 16:11:26 -0800

I've been using Google Reader to subscribe to RSS feeds right and left, because if the information is out there I want to know it as soon as it gets there, dammit! And yesterday it paid off: reading my feeds at home, finally, after a gruelling two-day return journey from Indiana, the Ithaca Times arts blog announced a last-minute show at No Radio Records by Chicago band Mahjongg, that very evening! And I read the announcement in time to go! And the show was fantastic! They answered my question, "Where, oh where, are the bands using electronics in a rock context? And playing some extra drums?" Mahjongg is one of them! Five guys playing three sets of drums (with MIDI pads), analog and digital synths, bass and guitar (sometimes) made a glorious rhythmic racket in the tradition of my favorite 80s Sheffield bands, Hula and Cabaret Voltaire. They sound like a cross between Polyrock and the Cabs on "Aluminum" (and even adopt the violent imagery that was a favorite of CV):

Mahjongg - Aluminum

I was impressed enough to buy their new CD, Kontpab, and I love it! Don't just take my word for it, you can listen to the whole thing on the K Records website. Oh, please let this be the start of a new trend...

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Ultramarine reminds me of 23 Skidoo

nobody@vox.com(Burl Veneer) — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 15:38:44 -0800

Upon discovering, just last year (fashionably late again) that A Primary Industry had morphed into Ultramarine in 1990, I got Ultramarine's first album, Folk. It's a nice extension of the softer side of API, with lots of layered reeds (from both woodwinds and accordions) loping, dubby basslines. The bassline for "Bullprong" sounded familiar...

Ultramarine - Bullprong

Ultramarine

... because it's lifted straight out of 23 Skidoo's "Language"--

23 Skidoo - Language

23 Skidoo

Granted, it's only the bassline for part of the song, and Ultramarine builds a different musical environment on top of it, and it's no more blatant than a lot of sampling that goes on, and both bands came out of England's 80s "industrial" scene, so I guess it's okay. Now that I've called out API for copying Pigbag, and Ultramarine for copying 23 Skidoo, I'm going to make an effort to find a strikingly original Ultramarine song to post here. And I've got more to say about 23 Skidoo, but it's a bit of a jumble at the moment so that will have to wait, too. Enjoy these two tracks in the meantime.

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