14 posts tagged “synth”
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!
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!
Ghostland Observatory seem poised to be this year's Big Thing, leading to overexposure and backlash, but a month after listening to their new album, Robotique Majestique, I still have several of the melodies and choruses running through my head. Ghostland Observatory are a synth/vocal duo in the classic mold of Soft Cell, but where Soft Cell looked to 60s female soul hits for influence, G.O. starts with Queen's "Another One Bites the Dust." Case in point: the insanely catchy "Heavy Heart"--
Singer Aaron Behrens even brings rock histrionics to the stage show; can he compensate for the lack of any actual instrument-playing onstage through a whole concert? That will be insteresting to see, if I ever get a chance.
Of course everyone knows that "On the Road Again" is a blues standard made famous by Canned Heat in 1968:
But I didn't know that in the 80s; my first encounter with it was on synth band (or what in retrospect is referred to as "minimal wave") Schleimer K's debut album from 1981:
I love the stuttering kick drum in this version, you won't hear that beat anywhere else. Probably. The organ noodling by Dominique Brethes is also nice. What does it say about me that my favorite song on this album turned out to be an old blues cover? Obviously my musical tastes were not as esoteric as I once thought they were. I'm fine with that now, but it was a rather embarrassing bit of self-discovery when I finally heard the Canned Heat song for the first time. (And even that is a cover of sorts, based on a much older song by Floyd Jones, which in turn is based on an even older song. I lack the fortitude to track down the whole provenance.) This Schleimer K album is one of the many I sold during the 90s, thinking I would never listen to it again, so why keep it? Ten years later my life is completely different, and I do want to revisit the music I used to like, and thanks to Mutant Sounds and Phoenix Hairpins I can. And I still like it!
Finally, since every song reminds me of another song, I'll mention that Schleimer K singer Michael Wolfen's offhand, half-spoken vocal style was used extensively by Nik Fiend on Alien Sex Fiend's second (and best) album, Acid Bath. The atmospheric quality and midtempo beat of "Breakdown And Cry (Lay Down and Die...Goodbye) make it a good pairing with "On the Road Again"--
Some other time I'll relate how Alien Sex Fiend almost played in Adelphi, Maryland.
Mrs. Veneer and I have never been able to watch a television show regularly, at least not until we got a DVR and found a show worth watching regularly (Ugly Betty). Then along comes the writers' strike, and kablooey. But the strike gave us time to catch up on a show we missed the first time around, Arrested Development. That's got t o be the funniest American TV show of this century (that's an easy claim to bandy about, with the century being just eight years old, but still), and it leaves Seinfeld in the dust. In only a month or so we managed to watch the entire three seasons, and now that we're done we quote it all the time. But what comes back more than anything is the "majestic" keyboard line from Europe's "The Final Countdown," which hapless magician GOB ("jobe") Bluth (Will Arnett) used as the backing music to every one of his doomed magic acts. Will Arnett is a masterful character actor, as long as the character he is playing is venal, conceited, insensitive, cowardly, self-pitying, blustering, immature, mean, or just plain evil. So in honor of Will Arnett and GOB Bluth, here's the song:
"But where did the lighter fluid come from?" -- GOB Bluth
I rarely remember to search for my old favorites on YouTube, so it often happens that I happen upon them while blog surfing. That's how I just turned up a couple lip-synching performances by Japan of the first song I ever heard by them, "Ghosts." Having discovered New Wave and WHFS in 1981, it seemed there was a whole aternate universe of music to catch up on, and the only way to do it was to listen to HFS as much as possible, often long into the night. It was late at night when I first heard "Ghosts"; I thought it was Bryan Ferry, but the arrangement was way futuristic, unlike anything I'd heard from him before. I was fascinated with Bryan Ferry at the time (still am); I had always taken singers for granted before then, but his unique vocal style made me pay attention and realize that he was doing something artistic, and by extension, so do all singers. Looking back on David Sylvian's career I see that his Ferryisms were just one stop in a long stylistic journey, and that he has always had a lot more power in his voice than Ferry. Likewise, the weird synth burbles of "Ghosts" were the terminal point in Japan's evolution, their sound having started with glam rock and progressed through eurodisco, new romanticism, and dark balladry. Hearing "Ghosts" again I think it sounds as fresh as ever, with lyrics that have stuck with me over the decades (despite my ignorance of lyrics in general):
Just when I think I'm winning
When I've opened every door
The ghosts of my life grow wilder than before
Just when I thought I could not be stopped
When my chance came to be king
The ghosts of my life grow wilder than the wind
Here are two choices of video, both to the album track, one from Old Grey Whistle Test, in color with some cheesy effects, the other in black and white from I-don't-know-where, focused almost exclusively on Sylvian. In both videos he's wearing more makeup than a Maybelline man.
The whole "new wave of new wave" fad has been fun, with bands emulating the sounds of the Clash, Gang of Four, The Cure, Duran Duran, Joy Division, etc. Brooklyn's Radio 4 is one of the best, putting forth a mix of the Clash and Gang of Four, sprinkled with electronics. The raw energy and (faux?) DIY production values of their second album, Gotham (2002), have made it a fan favorite. Their followup, Stealing of a Nation (2004), featured more mainstream production, increased synth presence, and a certain homogeneity among the songs, and thus it seems to be everyone's least favorite Radio 4 album. But the sound is quite junior-high-friendly (it sounds like Hard-Fi), so it's gotten some play in the Veneer household and minivan, and it includes my favorite Radio 4 song of all, the foot-stomping "Dismiss the Sound"--
I especially like when the vocal comes in, at first it sounds like real heavy-metal wailing; it takes a few seconds to realize it's just a regular singing voice, heavily filtered. And I love the guitar riff that skitters under the verses. YMMV, of course.
The Spiderman theme is fine as a jingle, but I've never thought of it as an actual cop-show theme. Until today, that is, when I found Norwegian electro duo Ugress's groovy remake:
That's definitive; I doubt you'll ever hear a better version of that song. Who are Ugress and what are they all about? Rather than trying to paraphrase I'll just paste in the statement from their MySpace page:
Ugress is mad sound professor Gisle Martens Meyer and his groovetight percussive assistant, The Igor.
With a sexy crew of guest vocalists and instrumentalists, Ugress bloom with references to the last decades of pop, film and cult culture.
Symptoms of exposure include subtle drift towards the dancefloor, uncontrollable rhythmical movements, hightened auditive pleasure and a out-of-reality experience reported as "being part of an epic film".
On stage an überhybrid mash-feist of mad professorizing, cloned musicians, steampunk instruments and multiple synchronized video projections keep your eyes, ears and consciousness glued to an escapist reality of multiple dimensions.
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"--
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.
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"--
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.)
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.
