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passionate-reply · 3 years

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Great Albums is kicking off Pride Month with a special feature on one of the weirdest and wildest queer artists of the New Wave era: the one and only Klaus Nomi! Combining glam, synth-pop, and opera, of all things, Nomi’s tragically short career is nothing short of mystifying. Check out the video or read the full transcript, below the break!

Welcome to Passionate Reply, and welcome to Great Albums! In this installment, I’ll be looking at the self-titled debut album of one of the most unique, incomparable, and unforgettable artists in music history: the one and only Klaus Nomi. What is it that makes Nomi so noteworthy? Perhaps the most obvious thing is his background as a classically trained opera singer. While a lot of pop vocalists have some degree of classical training, it’s rare to find one who worked so hard to bring ultra-mannered, literally operatic lead vocals into an otherwise pop context.

The other thing I should mention is that Nomi’s voice part was the “countertenor,” giving his vocals an even more unusual dimension. Countertenors are men who sing in a high range usually covered by women, and even in the operatic tradition, they weren’t necessarily all that common, particularly since the rise of opera coincided with that of the infamous castrati--male singers who were castrated to preserve their prepubescent voices. The combination of partially electronic, New Wave compositions with these bizarre, but ultimately “traditional” vocals results in something that sounds simply otherworldly.

Music: “Total Eclipse”

“Total Eclipse” is probably Nomi’s best known track, due in part to being featured in the seminal concert film Urgh! A Music War, which sought to capture the diversity of the early 80s New Wave scene. Like a lot of classic songs of this era, it tackles the subject of nuclear annihilation, albeit with a nearly depraved, gleeful tone, that makes it feel like more of a party. For the verses, Nomi adopts a sort of rhythmic speak-singing, which was much more par for the course for “New Wave” music, only to shockingly explode into a powerful operatic rendition of the refrain. It reminds me a bit of how, in musical theatre, tension builds through spoken dialogue, before characters are so emotional they feel compelled to burst into song--or, of course, how recitative blossoms into arias in opera. In the context of this particular track, it’s easy to interpret it as an embodiment of how “cold wars” can suddenly burst into flame. While “Total Eclipse” was a new composition, written specifically for Nomi by Kristian Hoffman, this album also features several covers of past hits, such as “You Don’t Own Me.”

Music: “You Don’t Own Me”

Nomi’s covers of the Midcentury pop ditties “Lightning Strikes” and “You Don’t Own Me” repeat the structure of “Total Eclipse,” showing that this signature pattern of increasing tension leading to increasingly mannered vocals is just as effective when retroactively applied to pre-existing compositions. What’s also significant about “You Don’t Own Me” is that it was originally written for a woman, Lesley Gore, and its defiant assertion of self-confidence has long been associated with women’s liberation. Being openly gay, Nomi sees fit to leave the lyric “play with other boys” just as it is, and could be interpreted to be deliberately emphasizing that last word, intentionally queering his rendition of the song. Nomi’s ability to sing in a traditionally female voice range, combined with his eccentric, gender-bending personal aesthetic, makes the interrogation of traditional concepts of gender an integral part of his art. Some of the other covers on the album are even older than the Midcentury, coming from the golden age of opera, such as “The Cold Song.”

Music: “The Cold Song”

Also known by its opening lyrics, “What power art thou?”, “The Cold Song” is a rare operatic aria that was actually designed for the countertenor voice part. It was written by the English composer William Purcell, a noted fan of countertenors who lived outside the influence of the Italian castrati, for his 1691 opera King Arthur. Well, King Arthur is actually what’s sometimes called a “semi-opera”: not all characters sing, and those who do often tend to be supernatural entities. “The Cold Song” is sung by a winter spirit called the Cold Genius, when reluctantly awakened from icy slumber by Cupid. His lines are sung so as to stutter, as he shivers from the freezing cold of his surrounds. Unlike the pop covers on the album, the arias are actually played pretty straight, almost as if they serve as evidence of Nomi’s actual chops doing traditional opera the old-fashioned way. “The Cold Song” is certainly a great fit for Nomi’s unique stage persona, which presented him as a fey or elfin non-human visitor from some mythical Otherworld, or perhaps an extraterrestrial from outer space. This theme is addressed most directly by the one track on this album composed entirely by Nomi himself: “Keys of Life.”

Music: “Keys of Life”

“Keys of Life” is the album’s opening track, and perhaps serves as Nomi’s personal introduction to the people of our realm--a sort of musical “we come in peace” message. Its lyrics seem to portray Nomi as a benevolent visitor, but one with a dire warning for mankind: we need to get our act together soon, for our actions now are of great import, as we humans “hold the keys of life.” Perhaps Nomi’s mission is to prevent climate catastrophe on Earth, or, given the context of “Total Eclipse,” a nuclear apocalypse. With its warbling synthesiser backdrop, and Nomi singing fully in the operatic style throughout, “Keys of Life” is arguably the most experimental piece to be had on the album, and putting it as the very first track certainly pulls no punches.

It is, of course, difficult to fully address the significance of Nomi’s persona without getting into his visual identity. The cover of Nomi’s self-titled debut features his most iconic outfit: an oversized plastic tuxedo, with hugely exaggerated shoulders, and a pointed hairstyle with a bit of Streamline Moderne flair. I mentioned earlier that Nomi’s work seems concerned with gender, and in that context, I’ve often interpreted this look as a sort of caricature of masculinity, parodying men’s formalwear and calling attention to Nomi’s receding hairline. There is certainly something absurd about a high-pitched, perhaps feminine-coded voice emerging from a ludicrously masculine sort of character. The use of thin, shiny, reflective plastic, and the aforementioned Midcentury feel of the hairstyle, make me also consider interpreting it as less of a parody, and more of an alien’s bad attempt at adopting the appearance of an “ordinary,” upstanding, conservative human male in attire, using space-age materials to cobble it together.

The oversized, geometric appearance of Nomi’s garb reminds me of the great Dada poet, Hugo Ball, founder of the legendary Cabaret Voltaire. Ball was the inventor of what he called “sound poetry,” and enacted lively readings of poetry that consisted of entirely nonsensical words. He did this while wearing a strange, cylindrical-shaped cardboard suit, said to restrict his movements so much that Ball needed to be ceremoniously carried off stage when he was finished reciting. Given their shared German heritage and cabaret avant-gardism, I can’t help but wonder if Ball’s striking costume was something of an influence on Nomi here.

This album is, of course, self-titled, but that, too, is an artistic choice that can be analyzed. The artist was born Klaus Sperber, but adopted the stage name “Nomi” for his creative endeavours. In the context of the track “The Nomi Song,” the name is often used punningly in comparison with the English phrase “know me.” Nomi’s choice of stage name is almost a dare or a challenge, a request for us to attempt to know and understand this seemingly inscrutable being before us. As with many other portrayals of queerness as alien or otherworldly, the messaging here seems to be that Nomi may seem different at first, but his intent is ultimately benign, should mere mortals like ourselves be kind enough to give him a chance.

Nomi’s follow-up to this debut album was 1982’s Simple Man, an album which is much more similar to its predecessor than different. It has a wider variety of contributing musicians and different instruments employed, but it’s got a similar overall feel, and mix of tracks. You’ll find more covers, like “Falling In Love Again” and even “Ding Dong, The Witch Is Dead,” more original compositions, like the Hoffman-penned sequel to “Total Eclipse,” entitled “After the Fall,” and even some more arias, like this stunning rendition of another work of Purcell’s. Referred to here as simply “Death,” it comes from Purcell’s Dido & Aeneas, and is sung by the titular Carthaginian queen, Dido, as she prepares to commit suicide. Also called “Dido’s Lament” or “Thy hand, Belinda,” its darkly descending melody is as captivatingly ominous today as it was when it was written, over three centuries ago.

Music: “Death”

Sadly, Nomi became gravely ill at around this time, and his own untimely death was just around the corner. He died of complications of AIDS in 1983, at the age of just 44, leaving behind an unfinished opera of his own creation, Za Bakdaz, which would go unreleased until 2008. That, and a posthumous live album released in 1986, would be the only other works under Nomi’s name. As with all artists who die tragically young, we will always be left wondering what else Klaus Nomi might’ve accomplished in the ensuing decades. I find it hard to imagine a timeline in which this sound ever became particularly mainstream, but anything else Nomi came up with would have undoubtedly been fascinating.

My favourite track on Nomi’s debut is “The Twist.” Yes, this is indeed Chubby Checker’s “The Twist,” another one of those Midcentury covers that Nomi was so fond of. But compared to the rest of Nomi’s covers, this one is much more of a deconstruction, perhaps even a “piss take,” featuring a sparse instrumentation, centered around a lethargic bass guitar, and the overall pace is slowed to a crawl. Add in Nomi’s piercing vocals and some nearly demonic, chittering laughter, and you’ve got a track that turns a fun, light-hearted dance craze into a surreal nightmare. As difficult as it is to be the strangest track on an album like this, I have to give that honour to “The Twist.” That’s all for today--thanks for watching!

Music: “The Twist”

#music #great albums #album review #album reviews #klaus nomi #new wave

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dustedmagazine · 2 years

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Listed: David Boulter

Tindersticks co-founder David Boulter released his second solo album, Lover’s Walk, earlier this year. It’s a full-length version of a spoken word vision that’s been slow-melding its way to realization for decades. Boulter penned his first composition in the style in 1995, before subbing his own voice for frontman Stuart Staples’ on his second effort in 2012. “Chocolate,” the opener of the band’s ninth album, The Something Rain, also added a setting to Boulter’s recollections: early-1980’s Nottingham. Boulter had been steadily accumulating film scoring experience with Tindersticks along the way and, beginning with Mista (co-written with Vasek Havelka) in 2014, he started to branch out on his own. His first proper solo album, Yarmouth, applied his instrumental prowess to a collection of songs with names like “Seesaw” and “The Morning Mist,” that evoked the emotional experience of his childhood summers spent in the resort town of the album’s title.

In 2021, he put all of these pieces together on Lover’s Walk – a beautifully understated album that, as Dusted’s Chris Liberato noted in his review, “floats gracefully around the edges of its biggest moments while somehow only deepening their impact.” Set in the period before Boulter left Nottingham for good, the album pays tribute to a person, place, and time that shaped who he is, using his signature blend of organ, accordion, and percussion. He also released a digital instrumental version of Lover’s Walk in early November, in response to numerous fan requests. Below, David Boulter shares a list of the “music that shaped me, continues to shape me.”

Cabaret Voltaire – “Nag Nag Nag”

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I was so sad to hear of Richard H Kirk’s death. I was never a dancer. But I couldn’t resist the pull of this track in Nottingham’s Rock City. I’d do my weird jig and sink back into the shadows. Whenever I hear this track, I get the feel of those first steps out as a boy in the grown-up world.

John Barry – “The Midnight Cowboy Theme”

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I was a big film fan as a boy. Later, I’d hunt down the soundtracks, which took years for some. As I became more aware of the films that were having a big impact on me, I began seeing names repeated. John Barry was my first love in the soundtrack world. And the Midnight Cowboy theme was one of the first to really get me. It’s probably the moment, after punk, that I understood my path.

Lee Hazlewood and Nancy Sinatra – Nancy & Lee

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An obvious choice now. But not so as a child. My Dad bought this album when it came out. So, it’s been with me most of my life. For a long, long time, it was played at least once a week. I’ve still got the original copy we had as a family. And it still gets me. I never lose that wonder of it.

Joy Division – Unknown Pleasures

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I know, another obvious record. But I can’t imagine what I would be without it. I was too young for the Sex Pistols. And in retrospect, in 1979, they almost felt part of the world they wanted to smash. I love P.I.L.’s Metal Box. But when I heard Joy Division, it was the first music that felt really mine. I know Martin Hannett had so much input on this album. But the sound, music those four people made was incredible. And it’s still so amazing.

Janet Kay – “Silly Games”

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The summer of 1979. I was in love with a girl called Lydia. We were still children. Kicking about on the council estate I grew up on. We didn’t even kiss. Just chased each other around outside the chip shop. And this song was stuck in my mind. Musically, that little keyboard melody has been the basis of all my own efforts in some way.

King Horror – Loch Ness Monster (Trojan Records compilation)

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I left home when I was 17 and moved into a shared house with friends. The band I was in rehearsed in the cellar. If you ever saw a UK TV comedy program called The Young Ones, that’s exactly how our house was. Needless to say, there were a lot of late nights, my first use of substances. It lasted about a year and this Trojan compilation kind of soundtracked it. Listening to King Horror takes me straight back.

Broadcast – Work and Non-Work

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It was the mid-1990’s. Tindersticks were a success, but I was still working in a record shop in London. Broadcast came down to play their first London show in a tiny club. It was packed. I was amazed. They had that retro vibe, but something else completely. I remember they kept swapping instruments. Something my punk heart hated. But my growing musicality loved. And I fell in love with them. It was such a loss when Trish died. A sadness which still gets me.

Ennio Morricone – Oceano

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There’s so much music of his I could choose. There was a point in my life, after we had our first child, I changed. Perhaps for the first time, I really grew up. We were on a tour. A long tour. And Tindersticks were falling apart. I’d stopped drinking in bars all night after shows. I remember laying in my bunk on the bus, listening to this track on repeat. It felt like a kind of therapy. And it’s beautiful.

Plinth – Music for Smalls Lighthouse

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This was my introduction to Clay Pipe records and the world of Frances Castle. And it was her artwork that caught me. I saw a review somewhere. The image took me to a world that felt familiar but also new. And musically, I loved it too. The whole feeling and connection to a place or moment in time renewed my love of music. And like a lighthouse, lit my way into making my own music. Something I’d always been afraid of.

Bob Marley and the Wailers – “Stir It Up”

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I remember seeing this footage on The Old Grey Whistle Test. Music programs were few and far between growing up. There was Top of the Pops and a few other mainstream shows. The Old Grey Whistle Test was something else. A kind of real musicians show that had started to allow the music I loved in too. Of course I knew who Bob Marley was. My sister was a big fan. I was woken by Exodus every morning before school for quite a while as she got ready to go to work. But this was the first time I understood. Peter Tosh, such a cool dude. The whole band. I think that’s what got me. The whole band. Amazing.

#dusted magazine #listed #david boulter #lover’s walk #tindersticks #cabaret voltaire #john barry #lee hazlewood #nancy sinatra #joy division #janet kay #trojan records #king horror #broadcast #ennio morricone #plinth #bob marley and the wailers

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rivetgoth · 4 years

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Lol yes specific recs are good idk where to start

You either came to the wrong or right person. This is a lot. HONESTLY, one of the cool things about Skinny Puppy is literally all of their albums are very very different and they have a huge range of styles and a million ways you can get into them from all sorts of directions. They have a very long history and extensive discography and endless connections and collaborations and associations so you can come at them from a million angles.

Here’s a list of the main albums chronologically. The band’s lineup has changed a little due to band members leaving or dying but Ogre and cEvin have always been members. For more specific recommendations I’m also including their arguably most popular song from each album (veteran fans might wanna dispute me on some of ‘em cuz I think there are a few toss ups but I tried my best to pick the most iconic) if you just want that basic of an overview, although I definitely recommend delving deeper.

Remission (1984) - Their very first album on a label. Sounds like synthpop with baby Ogre vocals (Ogre doesn’t learn to sing until the 90s and just sings in a way where he screams and tears his vocal chords up). Kind of simpler music, sounds a lot like Cabaret Voltaire. Not as uniquely experimental yet maybe. Really dancey and fun a lot of the time. Ogre, cEvin, and Bill Leeb as musicians. Song suggestion: Smothered Hope

Bites (1985) - Their first full length album. Kinda an evolved version of Remission’s goth synth electronic stuff but still definitely experimental and cool new sounds being thrown around. Ogre, cEvin, and Bill Leeb as musicians again. Tom Ellard from Severed Heads and Edward Ka-Spel from Legendary Pink Dots (who forms The Tear Garden with cEvin) contribute. Song suggestion: Assimilate

Mind: The Perpetual Intercourse (1986) - Their first full length album after the lineup changes and Dwayne Goettel replaces Bill Leeb, who goes off to form Front Line Assembly. Dwayne adds another layer of complex experimental sound and noise to the band. More experimental and abrasive in sound. A little less dancey maybe. Song suggestion: Dig It

Cleanse Fold and Manipulate (1987) - Their second album with the Ogre/cEvin/Duck lineup. Evolution of the M:TPI sound. I definitely group these two together in my mind, they overlap a lot with the directions of the experimental electronic noises they’re going in. Song suggestion: Deep Down Trauma Hounds

VIVIsectVI (1988) - Slight change in direction, this album sounds much more chaotic, abrasive, and experimental imo. Darker album for sure with more ambient tracks and harsher sounds. Same lineup as before. Heavy focus on any vivisection, war, and other social inequality. Song suggestion: Testure

Rabies (1989) - Industrial metal. Al Jourgensen from Ministry joined the lineup because Ogre wanted to male bond with him. It has a ton of electric guitar and screaming. Way angrier and more aggressive music. Song suggestion: Warlock

Too Dark Park (1990) - Really intense, noise-heavy, complex experimental stuff. Al Jourgensen is gone and we revert back to something along the VIVIsectVI trajectory but way more intense with a ton of layers to the sound. Lots of themes of environmental degradation. Ogre/cEv/Dwayne lineup. Song suggestion: Spasmolytic

Last Rights (1992) - Too Dark Park x2. Even more experimental and abrasive and harsh; really dark content, really sad, lots of personal themes surrounding Ogre’s battle with drug addiction. Song suggestion: Killing Game

The Process (1996) - 90s industrial rock-y. Simpler in sound than the complex noise layers in TDP/LR era, with less chaotic experimental sound and more rock noise like guitars. Ogre is doing some early singing and more untreated vocals. This is the last album with Ogre/cEv/Dwayne as the lineup, and Dwayne passes before the album is even released. Song suggestion: Death

Greater Wrong of the Right (2004) - First album with the new (current) lineup where Dwayne Goettel is replaced by Mark Walk. Ogre has learned to sing in a way that doesn’t damage his voice; the music is more electronic and dancey than before, has obvious overlap in sound from the band ohGr that formed between The Process and GWOTR, less heavy noise and more focus on slightly cleaner electronic sound. Song suggestion: Pro-Test

Mythmaker (2007) - Same lineup as before; very fast paced album, with a lot of vocal distortion and treatment to Ogre’s new singing vocals. Very electronic, very dancey. Song suggestion: politikiL

HanDover (2011) - A little more noise based, with interesting recurring sounds and some more experimental noises. Very melodic electronic music. This album always feels very dreamlike to me. Song suggestion: Cullorblind

Weapon (2013) - Some people consider this sort of a throwback album, the music is a little more abrasive and “messy” than the last few albums while still retaining a lot of the more recent cleaner electronic sounds and staples from the previous few albums. They actually cover a song off of Bites and give it a new revamped version. Song suggestion: illisiT

I don’t think I could ever order these from most to least favorite or anything, but I will say that Greater Wrong of the Right tends to stand out as my top favorite... I really truly absolutely love it all though.

Aside from these albums, there’s three live albums (Ain’t It Dead Yet? in ‘87, Doomsday in 2000, andBootlegged, Broke, and In Solvent Seas from 2010), there’s Back & Forth which was their original debut demo EP from 1984, and there’s the subsequent Back & Forth series which includes lots of demos and outtakes and stuff. There’s also Puppy Gristle, which was a collaboration Skinny Puppy did with Genesis P-Orridge of Throbbing Gristle, and it’s just a really long experimental jam session. There’s also Remix Dystemper which is a remix album from 1998. These are all also really good, but I would probably recommend their main albums first :]

As you can see, the industrial community is super close knit and every band has a ton of overlap and if you just start with one band it’s really easy to get swept up in all the others!!

Cabaret Voltaire is a great band to check out if you wanna hear one of Skinny Puppy’s big inspirations.

Throbbing Gristle is an inevitable inspiration since they straight up invented industrial music and they ended up collaborating like I just mentioned too

Severed Heads is also great to hear their inspiration and the music from one of their collaborators

Legendary Pink Dots as well, and you can listen to Tear Garden to hear Ka-Spel’s collaborations with cEvin Key.

cEvin also has solo music, as well as music with Hilt, PlatEAU, and Download. Phil Western collaborated with him in these a lot, and Dwayne Geottel, before both of their deaths.

Dwayne also has a few solo songs released as aDuck.

Ogre is the frontman of ohGr alongside Mark Walk, which has five albums out since 2001 and is fucking fantastic. They just released a new album last year in June and it’s so good.

He also collaborated with Al Jourgensen from Ministry and helped write some of their music for the album Mind is a Terrible Thing to Taste, and he does the vocals on “Get Down” from the Revolting Cocks and “Show Me Your Spine” for PTP (two of Al’s other projects).

AND he collaborated with Martin Atkins and does a few songs for the band Pigface and together they released the album Bedside Toxicology as RX.

Ogre and Bill Leeb were in a short-lived project together called Muteual Mortuary. Also, Bill Leeb’s band Front Line Assembly is really good.

Ogre has done a lot of one-off collaborations and projects, like writing “Ode to Groovie” for the In Defense of Animals compilation album, a Madonna cover for a Madonna compilation album, working with KMFDM on their albums Symbols and Adios, Paul Barker on his Fix This!!! album, and with Bill Rieflin as The Petty Tyrants.

He’s also done music for the Descent II OST, remixes for John Carpenter, and since he’s been in some musicals he’s also featured on the Repo! the Genetic Opera, Devil’s Carnival, and Alleluia: The Devil’s Carnival soundtracks.

Dave Rave Ogilvie (their sound engineer/producer until 2004) mixed Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe.”

Yeah :) Good luck :)

#ythaenagor

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futuresandpasts · 5 years

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Futures & Pasts | MRR #428

I didn’t do a column for issue 427 because I was too maxed out from getting ready to go on tour when the deadline rolled around in October, so this one is from issue 428 (January 2019).

NAKED ROOMMATE is the latest project from Amber and Andy of the WORLD (not to mention a slew of other former or current Bay Area bands between the two of them), and though there’s definitely some echoes of the latter group’s skronked out, early Rough Trade-aligned post-punk gyrations on NAKED ROOMMATE’s self-titled debut cassette, they also wander down some other very disparate and sneaky pathways here. The buzzing keyboards and clattering drum machine pulse in “Fondu Guru” and “Love Gains” hit a similar thrift-shopped minimal synth aesthetic as CRASH COURSE IN SCIENCE, while Amber’s deadpan vocals over the jittery new wave basslines in “I Need A Slob” and “Lube Boys” evoke the loopy, Su Tissue-centered side of SUBURBAN LAWNS. Of the tape’s six songs, “John Is Gone” probably comes closest to the WORLD’s spiky rhythms, only stripped of the fiery dual saxophone clash and skimming a sparse, ESG-worthy bass/drum tumble occasionally punctuated by bongos and clanging metallic percussion. Limited to 100 copies with a great risographed cover (clearly a band after my own heart here); get in while y’all still can. (nakedroommate.bandcamp.com)

Julius of Gothenburg, Sweden’s foremost shambolic punks SKIFTANDE ENHETER is behind two other projects with new 7” releases in the last month, and each single continues his fixation with the halcyon ‘78-83 DIY era, albeit in ways that go beyond SKIFTANDE ENHETER’s economically ramshackle DESPERATE BICYCLES/SWELL MAPS approach. JJ ULIUS is his solo endeavor into perfectly crafted, threadbare pop along the lines of TELEVISION PERSONALITIES, CLEANERS FROM VENUS, and if you want to go really deep, the brilliant, one-off single from VOICE OF THE PUPPETS. “Tänder Ett Ljus” sounds like it could unravel at any moment, with some trebly guitar jangle pinned in the red, cheap organ warble, cardboard box-quality drumming, and nonchalant vocals (in Swedish), all over and done in two minutes flat. The BUZZCOCKS have been thrown around as a reference point by people who aren’t me, and I could maybe see that, if the more subdued and pining hooks of the post-Howard Devoto era were recast into the sort of lo-fi, bedroom home-recording context befitting the PASTELS or the VASELINES. Then there’s MONOKULTUR, his dystopian-punk duo with Elin Engström (formerly of Slumberland-backed C86 revivalists LIECHTENSTEIN and also currently of SKIFTANDE ENHETER) with a new four-song EP on I Dischi Del Barone that crawls through the sort of dimly-lit, post-industrial urban decay occupied by bands like CABARET VOLTAIRE and the NORMAL on the other side of this century. The cavernously echoed vocals and warped motorik beat running through “Lindholmen-Stenpiren” could have been pulled from a secondhand dub of a THIS HEAT cassette after it’d been slightly mangled in a tape deck, and “Äckel” slinks into some skeletal and slow-burning futuristic dub with reverberations of spectral synth. Swedish DIY domination now! (Happiest Place, happiestplacerecords.bandcamp.com; I Dischi Del Barone, monokultur.bandcamp.com)

Outer Reaches is a new UK-based record label with a focus on the far edges of the weirdo DIY fringe, and you can’t really argue with the statement of intent made by their very first release, a reissue of the one-and-done 1983 single from scrappy English art-punks GARAGE CLASS. The 7” originally appeared on Gymnasium Records, the label started by the equally scrappy UK DIY combo HAPPY REFUGEES, who technically formed in the wake of GARAGE CLASS (the single was recorded in 1980 but didn’t physically materialize until a few years later) and whose vocalist Tim Shutt provides the overlap between the line-ups of both groups. A-side “Terminal Tokyo” is textbook Messthetics material—total freewheeling, primitive glam clamor with emotionally detached monotone vocals, off-kilter handclaps, wiry guitar, and just a touch of first-gen punk sleaze for a result that’s one part NEON BOYS and one part SOFT BOYS. In a somewhat odd move, the reissue adds two versions of a previously unreleased track called “I Got Standards” (one original take, and one contemporary dancefloor banger remix by JD Twitch) in place of the frantic, punky thrash of the single’s B-side “One Hell of a Kiss”... and did I mention that the Outer Reaches edition of this record was pressed on that most dreaded of all vinyl formats, by which I mean, of course, the 10”? Just include both sides of the 7” AND throw in the bonus odds and ends if you’ve got the extra inches to spare! At any rate, the raw version of “I Got Standards” is great, channeling a darkly psychedelic TELEVISION PERSONALITIES/Whaam! Records mod-pop sound and throwing in the extremely Dan Treacy-ish line “I’m pretty young but I don’t take chances / I once had a girl like Jackie Onassis” for good measure. Brilliantly amateurish, amateurishly brilliant, and necessary enough for me to actually recommend that you buy a new 10” record in 2018. And a side note: Outer Reaches also just reissued the incredible, painfully hard-to-find single from early ‘80s minimalist post-punks INDIFFERENT DANCE CENTRE that I’ve previously raved about in this column, so use those postage funds wisely and grab both records while you’re at it. (Outer Reaches, outerreaches.bandcamp.com)

The one and only 7” from early ‘80s Canadian post-punks the HUNGER PROJECT was something that I came across entirely randomly and without any background context whatsoever, so it was more than a little strange when I finally did some research on the record and found out that half of the band actually wound up in the COWBOY JUNKIES after their first group fell apart. Stay with me here, though! So, the HUNGER PROJECT formed in Toronto in 1979, allegedly after being inspired by the first wave of post-punk coming from the UK, and it definitely shows on the single—it was actually released in 1983 after the band had relocated to the United Kingdom, following a spell spent in New York’s Lower East Side where their take on moody, atmospheric 4AD-style post-punk was likely a little out of step with the confrontational and caustic downtown No Wave scene that was enjoying its heyday circa 1981. Singer Liza Dawson-Whisker’s dark, dramatic vocals suggest a slightly introverted SIOUXSIE SIOUX, and the twin guitars (they didn’t have a bassist) alternate between the sort of chorused chime that bands like the CHAMELEONS were concurrently exploring (the gothy A-side “Assembly”) and a jagged, staccato harsh-funk slash descended straight from GANG OF FOUR (the sprawling seven minutes of “The Same Inside” on the flip). An unexpected femme-punk gem, and worlds away from what any “ex-COWBOY JUNKIES” associations might conjure in your mind.

#naked roommate #jj ulius #monokultur #garage class #hunger project #futures & pasts #maximum rocknroll

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dofstc · 5 years

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INAGURAL RUN - Wausau/Dubuque, June 21-22

After six months holed up in the basement honing our set, the time had come to play shows. First up was Wausau, two hours due north of Madison. Frank, the Polack Inn booking agent, has been a long-time fan of my previous bands and had willingly agreed to book our first show at the PI. We loaded in and grabbed some dinner. By the time we got back my old friend Brad and his band Wardehns were loading in. We nervously watched the blistering thrash of the Wardehns set and then quickly set up. Problems arose immediately: no sound from the computer to our dedicated drum PA. After a few minutes of panicked power cycling and rebooting, it turned out that trying to send a signal to FOH was preventing sound from getting to our on-stage monitors. (Super weird -- will have to figure out later). Moving on. Testing the fog machine then made the computer drop the audio interface. FUCK. Reconnected and everything seemed OK. We launch into our set. Pete's bass starts cutting in and out immediately. I plow ahead on my own while he switches cords but that doesn't really help. Then the he hits the fog and the drum tracks stop. We finish the song, I reconnect the interface, and Pete fiddles around with his bass. We launch into our second song and the bass immediately cuts out and doesn't return for the rest of the song. The computer drops the interface again and when I get it going, I advance to the wrong song and have to start over. Fucking nightmare. Finally we're on our last song which is a Joy Division cover. We get through it pretty well -- drums play through, bass stays audible.

And then we're done. We sheepishly break down and pack up and slink to the bar to nurse our wounds. It was a disastrous first show made all the more heart breaking by the months of flawless rehearsals we'd been grinding out in the basement. Elms played after us and crushed an amazing set of intricate-yet-heavy post-metal. Despite our mess of a set, it actually seemed to have gone over fairly well. The other bands dug it and after several more encouraging and supportive comments from audience members and Frank, we started to feel a bit better about it. We crashed with Brad and stayed up well into the night listening to records.

In the morning we reconvened for coffee and a post-mortem at Culvers and then hit the road to Dubuque. We arrived early enough to ride the Fenelon Place Elevator up the bluff to the spectacular views of the city and the Mississippi. We wandered around the deserted down town, confused by all the shops closed on a Saturday afternoon?!? We grabbed some lunch and, after some internet research, went to Best Buy to purchase a UPS battery backup/power conditioner. (Apparently fog machines notoriously cause voltage spikes that were likely the cause of our problems.)

After loading in at Monks, we took apart Pete's input jack, identified the likely culprit -- a tiny break in the wire insulation -- and, lacking a soldering iron, covered it with electrical tape. We hooked everything but the fog machine through the UPS and then waited for our turn. Fat God, aka Bob Bucko Jr., did a super-cool set of weirdo synth pop filtered through the dark aesthetic of bands like Cabaret Voltaire and PiL. Embral, on tour from Indianapolis, did Squarepusher-inspired experimental ambience. Then it was us. We set up and lo and behold, redemption! The set went flawlessly with nary a technical glitch. We played well and seemed to go over quite well. We even had a few dancers for the Joy Division cover. Laced Hash rounded out the night with mathy instrumental craziness. Good stuff. We basked a bit in the glow of not only a set well played, but in the knowledge that our problem-solving skills pulled us through. Spent the night with our friends Brett and Lisa and once again stayed up way too late watching YouTube videos of stuff I honestly don't remember.

Onward. Upward. Forward.

#tour diary #technical problems #disaster #redemption #live

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acehotel · 6 years

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INTERVIEW: Matthew Higgs with Justin Strauss

Matthew Higgs trucks in ideas. He is a curator, DJ, artist, producer, writer, critic and national treasure who’s also kind and well-spoken, known in wide circles for his unflinching support of art and artists and his uncanny ability to find the good work that’s being made. Though coming of age in Manchester, Higgs lives in New York now where he’s the director of White Columns — New York City’s oldest alternative non-profit arts space that, through brave exhibitions, creates an experimental place for ideas to fester and bloom. In this day, we are so thankful for such a thing. Higgs sat down with Ace friend and NY legend Justin Strauss to talk about fanzines, producing the first nationally-advertised New Order concert, and the generosity of sharing ideas.

Justin Strauss: Hi Matthew. What was it like growing up near Manchester in the 70s and 80s?

Matthew Higgs: I was born in Wakefield, Yorkshire, which is just across the Pennines from Manchester, but I grew up in the Northwest of England in the late 70s and early 1980s. In 1979, I would've been 14. I was a little too young to have had any kind of meaningful relationship with punk, but I was aware of it. What interested me most at the time was what came immediately after punk, so 1978, 1979, 1980: what we now call post-punk, or new wave. It was the beginning of the independent music scene. So, as a 13- or 14-year old I would devour the weekly music press, and at the time there were three weekly newspapers dedicated to music, that were all interesting in their own ways.

JS: NME and Sounds?

MH: NME, Melody Maker and Sounds. They were quite different from each other, and trying to understand, as a teenager, what made them different was interesting too. I became especially interested in the bands that came after punk, and in particular the bands that came from the North of England. Each city had its own distinct scene, even its own ‘sound’. Liverpool and Manchester, which were less than an hour apart from each other, had their own distinctive scenes, their own distinctive ‘sound’. The same with Sheffield, and Leeds, and further north in Scotland with Fast Records in Edinburgh, and a little later the Postcard label in Glasgow. It was just an amazing time for music and independent labels. And as a teenager, like many people at the time, I tried to find a platform for my unformed adolescent ideas , so aged 14 I started to write and publish a music fanzine.

JS: Was there a band that galvanized your interest at that age? For me, when I saw the Beatles when I was 7, that was it. From that moment on, I just knew that nothing would be the same and music would be my path.

MH: The first band that really interested me was the Buzzcocks, and they still interest me to this day. The first run of records they made remain extraordinary. They also set the stage for my subsequent interest in what was happening in Manchester. So I quickly moved from the higher-profile Buzzcocks and Magazine, to bands like The Fall and Joy Division, both of which I first saw live in 1979.

JS: I remember getting a copy of the Buzzcocks “Spiral Scratch” when it first came out, and it was just an amazing record.

MH: Clearly it wasn't the first independently released record, but it acted as a catalyst for the whole DIY and indepedeent label explosion in the UK at that time. The Buzzcocks and Howard Devoto and Pete Shelly were clearly interested in things outside of ‘punk’, art, literature, and more experimental music such as Can. Through following certain bands, and reading about their interests, these other cultural worlds started to come into focus. So music became a form of cultural education for me and stimulated my nascent interest in art.

JS: Living in New York around that time, I was obsessed with all of it. To get NME and Sounds. I would drive in from Long Island to go to a newsstand on Sixth Avenue and Eighth Street that got it first, every week, on Thursdays I think. I was obsessed with the music, and wanting to know where everything came from, and the history. I would just sit in my room and read these papers, and magazines, and devour all the information and obsess over the records.

MH: For me, as a young person at that time — I would have been 14 or 15 when I was writing my fanzine — it was a question of how does one go beyond being a fan, and how does one get closer to the thing that you're interested in? And then beyond that, how does one get involved with the thing that you're interested in? I think it was sort of those kind of thoughts that led me to start writing a fanzine.

JS: What was the name of it?

MH: It was called “Photophobia”, which was the title of a song on Cabaret Voltaire's first album. But before that, I had written another fanzine, which was called “Eat And Digest” (which included an interview with the Swell Maps). I made the whole issue and laid it all out, and took it to my local photocopy place. Photocopying was pretty rare at the time, and it was quite expensive, and I asked the guy how much it would cost me to print 100 copies, and he said it would be like 100 pounds. About a pound a copy! Which would have been insanely expensive at the time. So, I just walked home with my complete fanzine, and put it to one side, and regrouped. Eventually, I discovered a cheaper community-based printer in Manchester, so I started my second attempt at a fanzine, which was “Photophobia”, which retailed for 20p.

JS: And at 14 years old would you just write to these bands like, "Hey, I'm just starting a fanzine," and they would be happy to participate?

MH: Oh, yeah. I was clearly a naïve teenager. And I was also pretty shy, so the fanzine allowed me to have conversations with people including bands and record labels. One of the extraordinary things at the time was just the degree of access you had to people, which I think was a part of the whole ethos and transparency of the DIY music scene. And, for the most part, the bands I was interested in were in their late teens or very early 20s, so they weren’t that much older than me, even though a few years at that age is a big difference. But it definitely felt like there was a sense of community, ot sorts. Or at least the idea that everybody was in it together. But I’m still surprised that bands were tolerant of my teenage inquiries. One of the first bands I interviewed was The Cure, in late '79 when I would have been 14, and I can still clearly remember them being unbelievably nice to me! Eventually other people strated to contribute to the fanzine so it became more than just my voice. I wasn’t able to travel much at that time — due to my age — but through the fanzine I would correspond with people from across the UK, then Europe and beyond. So, all of a sudden, as a teenager in the late 70s, growing up in a small town in the North of England, my world got a little bit bigger. My frame of reference got a little big bigger too. More than 30 years later (i just turned 53) it is easy to relate this teenage experience to my subsequent interest in art and working with artists — which also came out of a similar set of ideas and a similar sense of community.

JS: Did you have a lot of friends who were of this similar mind at the time?

MH: Only a few. I had four or five close friends in my hometown and we were all interested in music, playing in bands and so on.

JS: How did you distribute the fanzine? Did you sell it to the local record shops? Was it something people subscribed to?

MH: Local record stores would carry it. Record stores in Manchester would carry it. Rough Trade carried it. I would sell them at gigs. That was a nice hands-on approach, where you're trying to convince someone to spend 20p on this thing you've made. I think by the final issue it was selling around 300 copies a time.

JS: That’s pretty impressive.

MH: It was a modest enterprise! For me it was probably more important as a catalyst for other ideas and conversations. Around that time — 1980/1981 — when I was 15/16 I started a little cassette label, and I also started organized a few gigs in a community center in my hometown. I organized New Order's first nationally advertised concert in January 1981, shortly after I had turned 16. All of these things were simply geared towards trying to make something happen. I think that's what I've always been most interested in, in the idea that somebody would go to all this trouble to make something happen, to create situations that other people could enjoy and participate in: to create a social situation. I had the same feeling later when I started going to clubs, I was always fascinated by the generosity involved in people creating platforms for other people’s ideas.

JS: So, you're 16 years old, and you'd seen Joy Division, and you'd seen many shows of theirs, and you became friends with them?

MH: We definitely got to know them as well as 14 year-olds could! My school friend Rex Sargeant (who was 13 at the time we met them) would remain close with them, and would eventually produce records for people including The Fall. We would watch Joy Division rehearse on Sunday afternoons, in their rehearsal space in Little Peter Street, the one depicted in Kevin Cummins’ famous photos of the band. They were incredibly nice to us, and it seemed to me that they were very interested in their relationship with their audience. I was, and remain, impressed with the degree of self-determination that Joy Division — and later New Order — had as a group. The way they worked with Factory Records, the way that they refused to do large tours, the way they did everything on their own terms, the way they collaborated with Peter Saville on how their records looked, etc. It struck me — as a young person — that you could actually do things on your own terms, and be successful, and retain your integrity. It was a very powerful and tangible example of that. Similarly, the way they treated us and their fans was pretty exemplary.

Joy Division by Kevin Cummins

JS: And the connection between the art and the music, which is something that always fascinates and interests me. Did you meet Peter Saville then who did their artwork ... was he a local guy as well?

MH: Peter studied in Manchester, but he left Manchester for London at the end of the 1970s and started working for Virgin/Dindisc, and other record companies . So I didn't meet him at the time. But, I met Tony Wilson, who ran Factory Records, and a lot of the bands that recorded for Factory Records, interested me a great deal: A Certain Ratio and especially the Durutti Column.

Peter Saville’s design for Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures

JS: Section 25?

MH: I loved Section 25! I still do. I interviewed them for my fanzine in early 1980s when they supported Joy Division at Preston Warehouse. My fanzine was titled after a song by Cabaret Voltaire, but at the time — aged 14 — I didn’t know what Cabaret Voltaire was. But I eventually found out. And of course, Malcolm Mclaren and Tony Wilson would make references to the Situationist International, which I also knew nothing about, but through these ‘clues’ I started to get more interested in art and the 20th Century avant-gardes. Someone like Linder Sterling from Ludus was also an important reference point for me ...

JS: She did art for the Buzzcocks.

MH: … and Magazine. The way that she presented her band Ludus, and her work with collage. So by '81 or '82 I'm starting to become as interested in art and visual culture as I was in music.

JS: More than music?

MH: I think so. I definitely remember my interests shifting.

JS: I remember seeing New Order and, I think Quando Quango in 1983, at Paradise Garage, when they came over, which was quite something. Were you aware of the scene in New York at that time?

MH: Only through what we could read in the British music and style press, as I would have been too young to visit New York and it was way too expensive to travel back then. In a way I was also too young to visit London much, as I didn’t know anyone there and no one I knew in the early 1980s would have, or could have afforded to, stay in a hotel aged 17 or 18. Obviously some of the music being made in New York made its way over, and some of it would eventually find domestic release in the UK, but at the time I couldn't afford to buy imports.

JS: Did you go to the Hacienda at that time?

MH: The Hacienda was a bit later. It opened in '82 when I would have been 17. We went a few times in the early days, mostly to see bands. I remember everyone, myself included, was very impressed with the space — Ben Kelly’s architecture - there really was nothing like it in the the UK at the time. I went to art school in Newcastle between 1984 and 1987, and we would go to The Hacienda when we were home for the holidays. Around the time House music was starting to get played in UK clubs, and in Manchester and at The Hacienda in particular. But when I was younger the American bands that interested me most would have been The Talking Heads and Devo. I saw Devo on that second UK tour. I remember that they showed their short films before they came on, which left a lasting impression - not just the films but the idea of showing films in a concert setting. I hadn’t experienced that before.

The Hacienda, designed by Ben Kelley

JS: In New York, in the late 60s, Andy Warhol was doing that with the Velvet Underground at the Dome, projecting his films behind them, designing their record covers. I loved that coming together of the art world and the music world. And the downtown scene in New York in the 80s with Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, Kenny Scharf and Andy Warhol.

MH: I think something probably like that — albeit a British version — probably existed in London, around people like Derek Jarman and then later Throbbing Gristle etc., i.e. that intersection between art, music and other cultural spheres, but I certainly hadn’t experienced anything like that as a 15 year old. But, clearly those connections — between art , design and music etc. — existed, because people like Peter Saville or Linder Sterling were already exploring those ideas in their work. Music was, for me and many other people that I know, a kind of ‘gateway drug’ into art. I’ve never actually met anybody that got into art through going to galleries. Everybody I knew got into art through music.

JS: And, did you study art at school?

MH: II went to art school in 1984 as an undergrad. I went to Newcastle-upon-Tyne Polytechnic, which is in the northeast of England. I think my interest in art school wasn't necessarily to do with becoming an artist per se, I was probably more interested in the legacy of the relationship between art school in the UK and music. And how, art school, at least at that time in the mid-80s, still seemed like a fairly ‘open’ or elastic place space, to spend three years without worrying about the outcome. It is worth stating that education was free at the time!

JS: Were your parents supportive of all this?

MH: My mother certainly was. My father had less interest in my interest in art. My sister became an architect and I went to art school. My mother was very supportive of us in whatever our independent paths might be. In the early 80s, before I went to college, as my interest in art was developing my interest in music shifted too, I was basically only listening to dance music, of one kind or another.

JS: And that came through going to the Hacienda?

MH: It pre-dates that, but The Hacienda —and Manchester more generally — played an important role. My interest in dance music came through post-punk, Public Image Ltd., early New Order, A Certain Ratio, the Bristol scene, The Pop Group, Maximum Joy, etc. A lot of the music I gravitated to around ‘80-’82 was essentially coming out of reggae and dub. A Certain Ratio often had a DJ as their support who would play current early 80s dance music before they took the stage. The pre- House era, circa '84–’86, when I was at college, was a great time for underground and mainstream club music, which was constantly in transition. There were good clubs at the time in Newcastle playing all kinds of dance music, Rockshots in particular on Tuesday and Thursday nights (the rest of the week was mostly Hi-NRG!) I started a weekly club night in Newcastle called ‘Fever’ with my art school friend Matt Rice, which ran for a year or so on Wednesday nights and the highlight was when our club chart got printed in the NME! I still have the clipping somewhere.

JS: Do you remember what was on that chart?

MH: It would have been c. 1986-87 and we were playing a mix of rare groove, Hip Hop, Go-Go (which was huge in the UK), and early house. We played everything — as most clubs did at that time — probably influenced by the approach of London clubs and warehouse parties. Things hadn’t become musically segregated yet: i.e. only House, or only Hip Hop, etc.

JS: That was happening in New York as well. In places like Mudd Club, Area and Danceteria. Everything was just new music and we just played it.

MH: Same in the more interesting clubs in the UK. Later in the 1980s you started to see the separation of musical genres, and the social aspect of clubbing becoming more ‘tribal’, more codified and based around specific genres, or micro-genres of music. I became less interested in going out in the late 80s when the club scene started to fragment and become more specific muiscally.

JS: And how long did you DJ for?

MH: Our night didn’t last long. Just over a year or so. We did it for fun and as a way to make some money to buy records! Newcastle was a very cheap place to live. My rent for my room in a house was 4.50 pounds a week! The money we made at ‘Fever’ - which wasn’t much - still allowed us to buy the latest releases and the occasional import from Hitsville USA, which was the best dance music and only import store in town. That’s where I saw import House 12”s for the first time.

JS: And at this time, you're kind of getting more into the art world. What was steering you more towards that?

MH: There were two art-related magazines that I read as a teenager in the late '70s and into early '80s: ZG magazine, which was edited by Rosetta Brooks, which made amazing connections between what was happening between New York and London at that time. It would include things like an article by Dan Graham writing about Malcolm McLaren and Bow Wow Wow. So through ZG I could start to make connections between art and music that I think would otherwise have eluded me. There was another great magazine around this time called Performance Magazine, which covered the UK performance scene, which at the time was very active and important. But they also covered free and experimental music, and visual art alongside figures like William Burroughs and Laurie Anderson. It was an education. One that really expanded my knowledge and interest in art. By the late '80s, after art school, I was definitely looking at and thinking about art more than music, but I was still buying the NME every week. So I was still following whatever was coming out but not with the same kind of focus. In late '87, I moved to London, but I didn’t really know what to do with my interest in art. I certainly hadn’t thought about a career in the art world, and didn’t know anyone who worked in the art world. The British art scene was very small in the 1980s. After a few years in London, after looking at a lot of new art, and thinking about what I wanted to do I started a modest independent publishing project in 1993, called Imprint 93, where I collaborated with artists on publishing artworks and projects that I would then distribute by mail.

JS: And, it was a magazine?

MH: It was different things inc. artist’s books, pamphlets, cassettes, multiples etc. I made about 60 projects between ‘93 and ‘99 with different artists. It was really a way for me to create a kind of ‘space’ for myself to work in. It wasn't a physical space, like a gallery, but more like a ‘platform’ that allowed me to work in a fluid way with artists - and mostly artists of my generation.

JS: New artists?

MH: For the most part. I published early projects by artists including Peter Doig, Elizabeth Peyton, Martin Creed, Ceal Floyer, Jeremy Deller, and Chris Ofili, among many others. In a way, Imprint 93 mirrored the logic of my teenage fanzine and cassette label from the late '70s and early '80s: applying similar same strategies to thinking about art and artists.

JS: You would show this somewhere, have exhibits?

MH: They were sent unsolicited to people via the mail. You couldn't request or ask for them. They were sent, anonymously, to a mailing list of around 100 to 150 people each time we did a project. The reason they were mailed was I saw them almost as a ‘gift’, a kind of “thank you” note, to other people that I felt were doing something interesting. I put the mailing list together with each artist I worked with, so each mailing list was somewhat different. Some people received them all, but most people would only have received a small number of them. I really didn't want them to circulate in the economy of commerce, partly because I had bought so many amazing books and records in the UK equivalent of the ‘dollar bin’. I always thought that it would be the worst day in your life, to walk into a record or book store and to see your own work in the ‘dollar bin’: that idea of success being determined by the market. So the idea was to allow them to circulate more freely, outside of the realm of commerce, and to see what happens.

JS: But, now they must be worth quite a bit?

MH: They are now collectible. You see individual titles that I published occasionally on book-sellers lists or at the annual NY Art Book Fair. I think an almost complete set of the Imprint 93 projects recently sold for something like $10,000. I was always interested in how ostensibly ‘democratically’ distributed things — zines, flyers, other kinds of printed ephemera etc. —over time accrue ‘value,’ culturally and economically.

JS: How long did that project last?

MH: Six or seven years years, by which time I'd sort of moved on and was doing other things. I was mostly working as an independent curator in London throughout the second half of the '90s, and I'd also started to teach, eventually working simultaneously at Goldsmiths College, the Royal College of Art, and Chelsea School of Art.

JS: When was the first time you came to New York?

MH: Not until the early 1990s to visit my friend Gavin Brown, who I was at art school with in Newcastle. We used to make paintings together. He moved here in 1988 to study on the Whitney Program. It was still relatively expensive to fly to America at that time, very few people I knew in the UK had been.

JS: Yeah, to travel. It was a big deal to go anywhere. What was your impression at that time?

MH: The art market had crashed in the late 80s, so a lot of that excess had gotten shook out. It was a time when a younger generation of artists and curators were starting to create a context for themselves. The same thing was happening in the UK too. It was a generational thing, and that interested me. There were interesting connections between some of the things that Gavin and his friends were doing in New York and some of the things that me and my friends in London were doing.

JS: When did you decide that you were going to move to New York?

MH: I didn't move to the US until 2001. Initially to San Francisco, where I worked as the curator at the Wattis Institute, which was the gallery for the California College of the Arts, CCA. We were there till the end of 2004. I really enjoyed my time in the Bay Area. It was also the first full-time job I’d ever had in the art world and also my first regular paycheck! (I was in my late 30s by this time.) And then I moved to New York in the end of 2004 to become the director of White Columns.

JS: When did you become aware of White Columns?

MH: I knew about White Columns from the 1980s - but only from a distance. My first visit would have been in the early 1990s when the gallery was on Christopher Street. I’d always been interested in the history of the so-called ‘alternative art spaces’ in New York.

JS: How do you find new artists?

MH: Primarily in conversations with other artists. That's always been the case. And also by looking at a lot of art, visiting galleries and artist-run spaces, and doing studio visits. White Columns also has open submission policy, our online registry, which anyone can apply to. So we get to the work of hundreds of artists that way too. Art comes from all over. I’m especially interested in the work of self-taught artists and artists who have unconventional backgrounds or training — people who came to art from different routes. At White Columns we hope to reflect something of the complexity of art, to acknowledge the idea that not all art comes from the same place, that not all art is made for the same reason, and that not all artists’ intentions or motivations are the same.

JS: And, when you think about New York, there was this period where it was Warhol, then Keith Haring, Basquiat, becoming so huge, does that still happen? Is there still that underground thing, that can bubble up?

MH: I think it is harder now - simply because the cost of living here now is increasingly prohibitive.

JS: Because, I don't find that connection so much if at all anymore. You go out to a club, it's just nothing to do with anything. It was like, The Mudd Club was a space where music, and art and all that, was kind of living harmoniously, and feeding off each other's creativity. I knew Keith, he had a cheap flat on Broome Street. No one can do that anymore.

MH: There are less rough edges or loose threads. Obviously the pressures of making a living, paying exorbitant rents, and having less free time here inevitably affects the art (and the music) produced in New York at any given time. Its probably why Berlin, for example, has such a great electronic music scene - as the artists-musicians have the resources, time and space to develop their work. So we have to work with the situation we have and the circumstances we find ourselves in. At White Columns we still primarily work with artists who have yet to benefit from any kind of critical, curatorial or commercial support. We operate in the spaces in-between the commercial art world and the institutional art world. What I always loved about New York was that there were so many great organizations committed to working in these ‘in-between’ spaces: places like Anthology Film Archives, Printed Matter, Participant Inc., The Kitchen, and many others, all committed to creating idiosyncratic platforms for artists. So I remain optimistic - despite the challenges of working here!

JS: And people were saying, when Donald Trump was elected President, that these times are when the art becomes underground, when all that bubbles up, and everyone's super creative and trying to find their way to express their dissatisfaction. We shall see I guess. How is the gallery funded?

MH: White Columns is a not-for-profit and its funded through grants, individual donations, support from foundations, our annual fundraiser, and the editions we make with artists. We start every year with $0 as we don’t have an endowment. In 2020 we’ll celebrate our 50th anniversary.

JS: Have you found that process more difficult in these times?

MH: It's always been difficult to raise money! It hasn't got more or less difficult, it just remains the same! Partly because we are not working with established or known artists. So for the most part we're asking people to put their faith in the organization and its mission: which is to support largely untested ideas. We're interested in artist’s ideas before consensus forms around them, and ultimately there's a relatively small audience for that. It's the same in the field of, say, experimental poetry, dance, music, film or theater. Our hope is that we can create an engaged audience for the ideas that we can support, and that subsequent opportunities will happen for those artists. So one of the interesting things for White Columns to think about is how can we present a program to the public that feels idiosyncratic, that feels distinct, that is somehow fundamentally different to the other things you can encounter elsewhere in the city. I think that's the challenge. I believe that you can do it, and you just have to look harder, and also look elsewhere.

JS: Judging by your Instagram account, and your posts of many of your favorite records, you seem to have reconnected with music?

MH: I'm probably having a mid-life crisis. I'm 53 years old now, and I have something like 8,000 records, maybe more. I still love music. It seems almost endlessly fascinating. You can never know enough, and you can never know everything about it. It seems to be in a constant process of revealing itself. And records, for me, represent the best ‘value’. For $10 or $20 you can own something extraordinary, that will outlast you. It can give you a lifetime of pleasure and inspiration. I read a lot of novels — costing almost $30 new — but after I’ve read them I rarely, if ever, revisit them, so I take them to the Housing Works bookstore instead. I still buy 20 or more records every month, and still mostly music that was — in one way or another — intended to be danced to, so the majority of my collection is disco, 1980s house, Italo, post-punk, and a lot of early 20th century disco edits. Social music: music to be listened to in company with other people.

JS: You did start a club night here, which I was lucky enough to play one. What was the idea behind it?

MH: I did that with Spencer Sweeney at Santos Party House, we only did a few nights. Santos, I think, was modeled on the idea of the earlier 80s downtown clubs, like the Mudd Club.

IJS: That’s how i felt when i first walked in there as well.

MH: The idea that the art, music and fashion crowds would all mix. Santos was a great space, in a great location, and had a totally amazing sound system. We had some great guest including you, Eric Duncan, and Joakim amongst others. It was fun whilst it lasted!

JS: And, do you see White Columns bridging that gap of music and art?

MH: Probably not! I’m not sure those connections exist now in the same way they did in the early 1980s in New York. We have a record label called The Sound of White Columns, named for the great 70s soul and disco label The Sound of Philadelphia. We release records by artist-musicians and artist-performers. It’s vinyl only and we made about 15 records to date with people like Meredith Monk, Kim Gordon, Billy Childish and Malcolm Mooney, among others.

JS: You were involved, recently, in an exhibit in Manchester?

MH: I co-curated an exhibition with Jon Savage and Johan Kugelberg called “True Faith” that looked at the cultural legacy of Joy Division and New Order. It was at the Manchester Art Gallery this summer. They had over 100,000 visitors! It wasn't really an exhibition about the groups per se, it was more about how the band’s ideas and work has informed and influenced the work of other artists. The designer Peter Saville was central to the exhibition because his contribution was probably as important as the music that Joy Division and then New Order made.

JS: Do you still listen to your Joy Division and New Order records?

MH: All the time. If you're ever bored, just listen to ‘Closer’ or ‘Power Corruption and Lies’ - it is hard to figure out how they created such extraordinary, visceral and original music. It still stands up. It still sounds relevant. The soundtrack to my life!

#yes #nyc #interview #just talk #justin strauss #matthew higgs #white columns #art #new order #music #DJ #artist

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passionate-reply · 3 years

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This week on Great Albums: a stupendously underrated classic of queer punk meets synth sophistication, and an album without which we wouldn’t have Dare by the Human League: Homosapien, the 1981 solo opus of Buzzcocks frontman Pete Shelley. Find out more by watching the video, or reading the transcript below!

Welcome to Passionate Reply, and welcome to Great Albums! Today, I’ll be talking about one of those albums that isn’t necessarily the most acclaimed or best remembered work of its period, but nonetheless played an important role in history, and remains unrivaled for its uniqueness: Pete Shelley’s Homosapien, first released in 1981.

Shelley has historically been chiefly remembered as the frontman of the punk act, Buzzcocks. But, despite punk’s reputation for simplicity to the point of obnoxiousness, Shelley was one of many musicians to come from the punk scene with a penchant for experimental or otherwise ground-breaking music. His very first solo release, 1980’s Sky Yen, features little more than a brash wall of oscillating electronic noise, not unlike the earliest provocations of industrial artists like Cabaret Voltaire.

Music: “Sky Yen (Part One)”

Subsequent generations of critics have gone great lengths to coin and define terminology, in the hopes of breaking this period down into constituent parts, but the more I study it, the more I’m inclined to view it as just a huge soup. There was, quite simply, a lot going on in Britain’s underground in the late 70s and early 80s, and in practice, the lines between punk, post-punk, industrial, synth, noise, and other avant-garde miscellany are frequently illegible. As an artifact of this era, Homosapien resonates with all of the contradictions this melting pot would imply, fusing emotional rawness and pristine production in a way that never quite settles down and feels comfortable.

Music: “I Don’t Know What It Is”

“I Don’t Know What It Is” served as the opening track of the album’s second side, as well as its lead single. With a bona fide guitar solo as well as a propulsive, and truly soaring, chorus, it somewhat resembles that most 1980s of art forms, the power ballad. It is, ostensibly, a love song, and is revealed to be one quickly enough, but its portrayal of love is far from kind. While a real power ballad might take the concept of love for granted, “I Don’t Know What It Is” seems to portray it as something mysterious, inscrutable, and dangerous. And I can’t forget to mention just how much Pete Shelley stands out as a vocalist--his high-pitched, perhaps even fried or shrill vocals add a great deal to the song’s sense of unease, and really sell the idea of someone who’s being overtaken by an uncontrollable and dominating force.

Of course, perhaps the most noteworthy thing about Homosapien’s sound is its fusion of the hard, driving acoustic guitar of punk with the electronic sensibilities of its producer, Martin Rushent. I wouldn’t say this combination is ever terribly cohesive in its sound, but I think that’s why I find this album so interesting: there’s a tension that permeates each track, a feeling that things don’t fit together. While Homosapien is a pioneering work of electronic-centered production, enough of the pieces are still in place that you can certainly hear the shape of music to come as you listen to it. It’s not just the synthesisers, but also the use of electronic percussion here--it’s difficult to overstate the impact that so-called “drum machines” had around this time. While reviled by many, both then and now, rhythm machines were undeniably “instrumental” in changing what popular music sounded like. Even synthesiser-based electronic acts like Gary Numan, OMD, and Kraftwerk often relied on traditional percussion, so this genuinely was pretty shocking at the time.

Perhaps the most important element of the legacy of Homosapien is the fact that Martin Rushent would go on to use the skills he honed here to produce one of the most influential albums of the 1980s, and perhaps of all time: The Human League’s Dare, which would go on to cast an enormous shadow on nearly all popular music to come, after playing an enormous role in instigating an era of popular dominance of synth-pop. In that sense at least, Homosapien is certainly a very historically important album, and for that reason alone, I think it deserves a fair bit more attention than it gets. Still, for as much as the electronics might be the most forward-looking element of this album, one also can’t deny that it remains full of aggressive and perfectly punk overtones, as on the crass or perhaps dismissive screed of “Guess I Must Have Been In Love With Myself.”

Music: “Guess I Must Have Been In Love With Myself”

While Homosapien has many moments of seemingly being too thorny to get a good grip on, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t also times in which it can feel like a bit more than the sum of its apparent parts, as on its most narrative-driven track, “Pusher Man.”

Music: “Pusher Man”

“Pusher Man” is one of, if not the, most synth-centered compositions to be had on Homosapien, but its insistent pacing and neurotic portrayal of the “low life” theme of buying illicit drugs mean you’ll never confuse it for run of the mill synth-pop. Moreso than anything else the album offers, this track reminds me of the sort of “synth-punk” that American acts like the Units and Crash Course In Science would put forward at around the same time. “Pusher Man” was, at the very least, a sufficiently experimental track to earn the honour of being cut from the US release of the album in order to make room for some non-album A-sides, as happened to many albums at the time. But hey, that’s enough beating around the bush. Let’s talk about the real crown jewel of this album.

Music: “Homosapien”

If you’ve heard anything from this album before, chances are, it was probably the title track, which proved to be quite the commercial success--despite being banned by the BBC on account of its homoerotic content. Given that this very same year, they also came after OMD’s “Enola Gay” for its obviously nonexistent reference to homosexuality, one might be forgiven for thinking that a tune called “Homosapien” was simply misinterpreted. The title track isn’t terribly explicit material, but its clever wordplay nonetheless deals quite deftly with issues of sexuality and personal identity. In the earlier verses, Shelley introduces us to typified roles of gay male sexuality--the “cruiser,” the “shy boy”--only to seemingly doff them with the tune’s defiant refrain, asserting that the only truly important identity a human being has is that of “Homosapien.” Far from being an unfortunate coincidence, the similarity of “Homosapien” to “homosexual” is being employed here completely deliberately, particularly with it being mashed into a single word and thus gaining a greater resemblance to the word “homosexual” in print. It not only allows Shelley to belt out a borderline dirty word, but also creates a sort of unconscious syllogism, suggesting, in a sense, that homosexuals are people too.

With elements of both unapologetic pride in one’s own queerness, as well as the uncompromising assertion that humanity is something much deeper than that, the title track of Homosapien is one of the most fascinating and inspiring queer anthems of its time. Its artsy slipperiness has prevented it from feeling more shallow with time, and its straightforward or raw quality, intensified by that constant acoustic guitar, has kept it sounding equally sharp. It genuinely does surprise me that this album isn’t at least a little bit better remembered than it is. Outside of the title track, most of this album is currently not available on services like Spotify and YouTube Music at the time of this writing, and I actually struggled to present musical examples here. That’s really a pretty high level of neglect in this day and age, and I hope it can be rectified in the relatively near future.

It would be no exaggeration for me to say that Homosapien features some of my very favourite cover art of any album. Homosapien’s sleeve design sees Shelley occupy some sort of sleek, but hollow hyper-modernist office. Geometric forms suggest the world of the artificial or ideal. An Egyptian statue beside Shelley is a reminder of history, and the idea that even the greatest empires must eventually fall. Likewise, the telescope and early computer positioned nearer to Shelley are evocative symbols of science and technology--but in context they seem more sinister, being juxtaposed against a phrenology bust, which evokes the ways in which our attempts at science have caused misunderstanding and great human misery in the past. The central scene is framed in with large areas of black, which make the space feel even more claustrophobic and uninviting, and Shelley appears to be pushed into the background, almost belittled by the inanimate objects. Overall, I think it’s sort of funny that this album’s cover is perhaps more iconally “New Wave” than the music itself ended up being, particularly with Shelley clad in this somewhat foppish white suit and bow tie--certainly a big change of attire for a former punk!

Given the experimental nature of the collaboration between Shelley and Rushent, you might be surprised to learn that Homosapien actually wasn’t a one-off. Just two years later, Shelley would release a follow-up LP, XL-1, which was also produced by Rushent and largely continues the same ideas. While Shelley would never see the success of “Homosapien” again, the XL-1 single “Telephone Operator” would also chart to a lesser degree.

Music: “Telephone Operator”

My favourite track on Homosapien is “Qu’est-ce que c’est que ça,” which closes out the first side of the album. If you’re familiar with my other work, you probably already know that I’m coming at this as someone chiefly interested in the electronic side of things, and I think that of everything on this album, “Qu’est-ce que c’est que ça” is the closest to being convincing as a synth-pop tune. With a bubbly, synth-dominant sound and lyrics that are more contemplative than aggressive, it’s much closer to the mould of what I usually listen to for fun than a lot of the other tracks are. That’s everything for today--thanks for listening!

Music: “Qu’est-ce que c’est que ça”

#music #great albums #album review #album reviews #pete shelley #buzzcocks

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stue1967 · 5 years

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Ranked.

Listicles.

All the rage apparently.

I’ve never done one before but thought the old Rough Trade Album of the Month would be the place to start. So going from least to most (as opposed to worst to best), here are the 12 albums and the order in which I have enjoyed them. The difference between “enjoy” and “best” should become apparent as the list goes on. It has been (mostly) fun revisiting these albums and I hope you have enjoyed keeping track of them during 2018.

12. audiobooks: Now! (in a minute) November 18

Still to be reviewed on the old BlackCountryRock blog. In the two months since I’ve received it, I’ve played it through a few times. At best it is reminiscent of the great Black Box Recorder. The problem is that the best is pretty rare on this album. Occasionally we get tuneful and humorous, such as in the Human League aping Friends in Bubblebath and the disco chops of Salt. But more often than not it is under-developed, wilfully experimental and smug. A double-sided 12″ of the aforementioned two tracks would have been just the ticket – 48 minutes is really stretching it.

I think you can get that I don’t really like it.

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11. Idles: Joy As An Act Of Resistance (September 18 – click here)

I’ve tried. I really have. I’ve seen “Joy etc” crop up in all of the usual end-of-year lists. It is in everybody else’s “best of’s”.

Not me though. I still don’t get it for all of the personally difficult reasons that I expressed here. Interestingly since I’ve posted that write-up, quite a few friends who I would have expected to enjoy Idles have expressed the same reservations that I did.

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10. Superorganism: Superorganism (March 18 – click here)

As I suspected at the time, this one hasn’t really lasted for me. It is relentlessly catchy but its joys have worn a little thin through the year. There are some very good songs but it is a little too self-consciously kooky to have stickability.

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9. The Shacks: Haze (April 18 – click here)

Playing this back now on a cold December evening, it feels like an opportunity missed on my behalf. The clue is in the title – Haze. This is music for a hot summer’s afternoon (and boy did we have one hell of a summer in the UK). Strummed acoustic guitars, breathless vocals, sweet harmonies – and I didn’t listen to it much beyond April and May.

More fool me. It sounds a great deal better than I gave it credit for. I’m sure that I can find some app on my IPhone that will link the first sunny day of 2019 to this album so that I can pick up where I should have let off. It’s a wee understated gem of an LP.

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8. Lump: Lump (June 18 – click here)

Laura Marling and Tunng’s Mike Lindsay – it’s a very good partnership. There are a couple of very good songs, especially Curse of the Contemporary. It just isn’t really an album. Effectively six tracks and just over half an hour long. I’ve enjoyed it every time that I’ve listened to it. It just doesn’t feel essential like so much of Laura’s other work.

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7. Gabe Gurnsey: Physical (August 18 – click here)

There is very little wrong here. Possibly a tad overlong but aside from that it is a very high quality electronic vocal album. Apparently, Gurnsey had over 30 demo tracks which needed thinning out and I don’t think he quite got there.

It’s still worth a listen though if electronica is your thing. Think Virgin-era Cabaret Voltaire. Think early Human League. Gurnsey has carried his excellent work with Factory Floor into his solo career.

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6. Amor: Sinking Into A Miracle (December 18)

Hot off the press, this is the latest Album of the Month. I’m still absorbing it but it did resonate with me at first listen. The Glaswegian band’s first album, it is a percussive rhythmic affair with a particular focus on Michael Francis Duch double bass and Richard Fowler’s vocals, which are redolent of Peter Gabriel, Bowie and the Blue Nile’s Paul Buchanan. The songs stretch out and have space to breath – think the first side of Talking Head’s Remain In Light.

More to follow soon but first impressions are very good.

5. Daniel Blumberg: Minus (May 18 – click here)

This one’s a bit of an outlier. A product of the improvisation scene, yet recognisably containing song structures. Yet again, the weather played a part in how this one gets enjoyed – either extreme heat or cold. Australian outback or Arctic chill.

It’s a bitter break up album cut from the same cloth as Neil Young’s Tonight’s The Night. If you are thinking Joni’s Blue or Blood on the Tracks then forget it. They are floor packing party albums compared with Minus. Listening to Blumberg 6 months later and going through a bit of a dark patch myself, you can still hear the quality.

It’s an excellent album – you just might want to brace yourself in for the emotional rollercoaster ride.

“All of my records are stacked, and I can’t stop looking back”

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4. Bodega: Endless Scroll (July 2018 – click here)

The four to two slots here are easily interchangeable. I’ve enjoyed all of the next three albums but I’ve ranked them on how much they’ve touched me as much as how much I’ve enjoyed them.

As such, whilst Bodega’s album is excellent and is a blast of hot fun, it didn’t resonate with me quite like the next two LPs. I’m off to see them in London in the new year and it should be an exciting evening.

In any event, I think they’ve nailed the catchiest song on all of these albums in the shape of Jack In Titanic.

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3. Shame: Song Of Praise (January 18 – click here)

To be honest, this could be number one if it weren’t for the personal storms I’m weathering at the moment. This is a classic example of a very good debut album that was transformed in a live setting. Seeing the band in-store at Rough Trade the same month the album was released was transformative. As is often the way, first LPs feature material which has been honed in a live environment before being committed to vinyl (or digitals zeroes and ones). It was a privilege to see Shame in such an intimate venue with a supportive crowd of their youthful contemporaries. Something to get the blood pumping.

Plus it contained One Rizla, which ran Jack In Titanic close as the Album of the Month song of the year.

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2. AdriAnne Lenker: abysskiss (October 18 – click here)

AdriAnne plays with capitalisation on this album. The line between upper case and lower case letters are blurred. Your English teacher would have a hissy fit.

AdriAnne sings in Joanna Newsom “little girl lost” voice. She sometimes waivers slightly off key.

AdriAnne has spent a great deal of time recently in Brooklyn. She probably cycles up and down Bedford Avenue on a fixed gear penny farthing,

Any or all of these factors could render Lenker’s recent LP an irritating turn-off in my book (or blog). She has however made an album which is beautiful, heartbreaking and life-affirming. Preconceptions have dissolved.

This and the number one selection are records that have helped get me through some tough times in 2018. They are close to my heart at the moment.

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1. Nils Frahm: All Melody (February 18 click here)

Not just my favourite Rough Trade album of the year but my favourite album – full stop.

All Melody feels like the culmination of the various strands of Frahm’s to date – the fragile beauty of Screws, the propulsion of Says and the playfulness of Toilet Brushes (trust me on the last one). It’s his ninth album and is his most complete statement to date. It is 73 minutes long and doesn’t outstay its welcome, a triumph in itself.

It translated brilliantly to the live environment as we saw at the Barbican in February. This is human music, despite much of it being electronic. His sheer energy on stage, diving between vintage keyboards, teasing sounds out of a grand piano, enables the music to transcend from the typical “guy with a laptop” that personifies much of this genre. Frahm reviewed another side – a humorous side. Like a musical Henning Wehn.

Almost a year on and this album is still revealing its charms (and I can play it around the house and not get accused of listening to that weird/atonal/noisy stuff).

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So that’s it. My first listicle. I must admit I enjoyed writing it. As wrong as it may be to try and qualitatively rank thinks, it does introduce a certain mental rigour. Relativity can be a focus.

Please don’t make me listen to the Idles album again for a while though.

Ranking - it's all the vogue apparently. Here's the 2018 @RoughTrade albums of the month as judged by yours truly Ranked. Listicles. All the rage apparently. I've never done one before but thought the old Rough Trade Album of the Month would be the place to start.

#Adrianne Lenker #Amor #audiobooks #Bodega #Daniel Blumberg #Gabe Gurnsey #Idles #Lump #Nils Frahm #Rough Trade #Shame #Superorganism #The Shacks

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depechemodespiritera · 7 years

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"We're living in a time of real change," says Depeche Mode singer Dave Gahan, a vision of intensity dressed head-to-toe in black. "As I get older, the things going on in the world affect me more. I think about my kids and what they're growing up into. My daughter, Rosie, was deeply affected by the election last year. ... She just sobbed, and I was like, 'Wow.'"

Depeche Mode Look Back on 'Violator' 25 Years Later

The album was "the pinnacle of us having fun," says Martin Gore

It's an overcast mid-January day, and the singer, 54, is picking at some tagliatelle in a corner hotel restaurant located in downtown Manhattan, where he's lived for about a decade. Despite sharing his alarm about the state of the world, he's in bright spirits and can look at himself objectively. "Martin [Gore] and I both live in America, so we're both very affected by what goes on," he says. "Martin said to me, 'I know to some people, this will come off as rich rock stars living in their big houses in Santa Barbara with not a care in the world, and it's true that we're very fortunate. But that doesn't mean you stop caring about what's going on in the world. It's really affecting me.' And I said, 'I understand. I feel the same.'"

That sense of worry informed Gahan and his Depeche Mode bandmates while writing their upcoming album, Spirit, which is due out March 17th, as many of the LP's 12 songs deal directly with the general Weltschmerz circulating the planet lately. Although Depeche Mode became megastars to a legion of black-clad, disaffected malcontents with serious songs about universal compassion ("People Are People") and more personal revelations ("Enjoy the Silence," "I Feel You"), the new tracks seem like a different chapter for the group. "I wouldn't call this a political album," Gahan says, "because I don't listen to music in a political way. But it's definitely about humanity, and our place in that."

He sings of bigots "turning back our history" on "Backwards," cheekily calls for change in "Where's the Revolution?" ("Who's making your decisions," he sings, "you or your religion?") and looks inward on the brooding "Poison Heart." Musically, these songs are dark-hued with complex textures that are both icy and warm sounding, harkening back to the group's Violator era while still sounding musically like an extension of their last album, 2013's Delta Machine.

The realization that Gahan and Gore were on the same page with regard to world events came early when they regrouped last year with bandmate Andy Fletcher to begin work on the album. When they looked at everything they'd brought to the table, they saw a through-line. "We called the album Spirit, because it's like, 'Where's the spirit gone?' or 'Where's the spirit in humanity?'" Gahan says. "We considered calling it Maelstrom – that was a bit too heavy metal."

They brought in producer James Ford, whose work with Florence and the Machine, Arctic Monkeys and Simian Mobile Disco had impressed the group, and he helped get the musicians get back on the same page. Other than a few disagreements between Gahan and Gore that Ford settled ("We really had it out," Gahan says with a laugh, "It got pretty emotional"), the recording process went relatively quickly and easily, with sessions in Gore's Santa Barbara studio and in New York.

Now the group is releasing the record's first single, the Gore-penned "Where's the Revolution?" The slow-building number, which features fuzzy synths, serves as a call-to-arms, on which Gahan sings, "The train is coming/Get on board," along with the title question. "Martin wrote it in a very sarcastic, English way," Gahan says.

It's a mood that continues in another Spirit song "Backwards." It opens with Gahan singing, "We are the bigots/We have not allowed/We have no respect/We have lost control." It goes on to lambaste some people's "caveman mentality" and how others "feel nothing inside," amid jabbing keyboards and pounding rhythms and complete with Gore's backing vocals. "If we want things to change, a revolution, we need to talk about it and about caring about what goes on in the world," Gahan says. "It doesn't seem the way things are in London. We seem to be going in another direction, and I think Martin felt like he needed to express that."

That theme also resounds in another song written by Gore, "So Much Love," a more upbeat, electronics-driven number about realizing that everyone has love inside. "It's like we have so much love here, we really do, but we're afraid to use it and access it," Gahan says. "It's the old John Lennon thing, like, 'love and peace, man.'"

But while Gahan sees a connection to the Beatles, the tune sounds nothing like the Fab Four with its dense, noisy pastiche of keyboards, drum machine and an eerie guitar line. Gahan says that the song, musically, has more in common with Depeche Mode in their earliest days.

"Back in '79 or 1980, we would play these 25-minute sets where I would write the little dots on the drum machine and shift it up and down to make it go faster or slower," Gahan recalls. "It was a wall of sound. We'd plug these three keyboards into the drum machine, and three microphones – Vince [Clarke], Martin and myself – so it was three-part harmonies and a very distorted drum machine. … ['So Much Love'] also reminds me of early electronic stuff, like Tuxedomoon and Cabaret Voltaire, who did kind of punky, distorted songs."

It's the exact opposite sound of the ballad "Poison Heart," a particularly catchy and euphonious number Gahan concocted with the group's drummer, Christian Eigner, and keyboardist, Peter Gordeno. "They sent me this guitar line, and it had a bit of a Muscle Shoals vibe," Gahan says. "It was a very different feel and I got this melody in my head." It opens with a slow, funeral march in the vein of Screamin' Jay Hawkins' "I Put a Spell on You" and builds to an almost Beatles-like bridge with only a smidgen of noisy guitar. Gore, whom Gahan says is "not a man of many words when it comes to others' songs," called "Poison Heart" the best song Gahan had ever written.

"You have poison in your heart," he croons outright at the beginning of the song. And later, he sings, "You know it's time to break up/You'll always be alone," but Gahan says it's not intended to be a breakup song.

"I was watching the news on TV and I was writing through my own inability to really relate to another human being," he says. "There must be something wrong with me, poison in my heart or whatever. So it was fun to play with that imagery, and it became more worldly – greed and lust and wanting what you want when you want it and nothing else matters. So I was breaking up with myself – trying to evolve, trying to break up with old ideas that I think are working for me but are not in actuality. Fortunately, that's not my relationship with my wife."

He laughs, picking at his pasta, and says that "Poison Heart" complements another song on the album, which wasn't played for Rolling Stone, called "Worst Crime." "The lyrics to 'Poison Heart' are more of an internal dialogue, but 'Worst Crime' is looking outward," he says. "It's bringing about the change. You've got to do something different or act differently. We can all talk about whatever is going on until we're blue in the face but you have to take real action, and sometimes we don't know what that looks like. Individually, I believe people are inherently good, but we're really distorted by the information we get and we act out on that information out of fear."

Another way he expressed that opinion on the album is in a song called "Cover Me," which he describes as a story song. "It's about a person who travels to another planet only to find that, much to his dismay, it's exactly the same as earth," Gahan says. "It's a different planet but the same. He really can't get away from himself. If he wants things to change, he's going to have to implement it."

If that premise sounds like pure Bowie, it's only because the Starman loomed large as an influence on Gahan and Gore throughout their career. "When Bowie died, we both didn't know what to do with it," Gahan says. "There was a personal connection there. It was a huge loss."

Gahan recalls sobbing last January when he heard that Bowie had died. He had gotten used to seeing Bowie in surprisingly normal social settings – Gahan and Bowie's daughters are about the same age and attend the same school – and Gahan would sometimes chat with Bowie at school functions. "It was very different to the Bowie that I grew up adoring and living vicariously through," he says. He'd become a fan as a young teen watching Top of the Pops and latched onto Bowie's androgyny because his mother didn't like it. When he turned 16, he scrounged together some money ("I'm sure I stole something and sold it," he says) to see Bowie perform at London's Earl's Court in 1978, and he calls the double live album, Stage, which was recorded on that tour, "some kind of pacifier" for him, his go-to Bowie.

"I had seen the news but it wasn't until my wife told me he had died that I just broke down in tears," Gahan says. "My daughter came out and they were both hugging me. It really affected me. I felt a huge gap. One of the things I was most regrettable about was that I had never really gone up to him at any time I'd seen him in passing and said, 'You know, David, I bump into you every once in a while, but I've never told you how much your music has meant to me and continues to mean to me.'"

To right this, Depeche Mode paid tribute to Bowie at a special concert they recently recorded at New York City's High Line public park. They filmed the performance – which they did without an audience and which included several songs from Spirit – with just a drum machine and Gore on guitar, and they capped it with a cover of Bowie's "Heroes." "I was so moved, I barely held it together, to be honest," Gahan says. "Martin listened to 'Heroes' once it was mixed and randomly told me, 'Wow, that was really fucking good.' And I said, 'Yeah, it was, wasn't it?'"

Although Depeche Mode have not yet decided how they will release this film, Gahan is eager for people to see the whole thing and especially "Heroes." In the meantime, he's getting back into the headspace of performing live, and spreading the band's new message of world awareness to audiences. By his estimation, the band has already sold over a million tickets to a few dozen stadium European stadium shows later this year, and the group is still finalizing plans for a U.S. tour; rehearsals begin in mid-February.

But it's the early interest in the upcoming European leg that Gahan is most excited about, since many venues were nearly sold out before the release of the new single. "We spent a lot of years just fighting to be heard and to be respected," he says. "One or two reviews of our past albums over the years have been pretty harsh. And you go, 'Oh, those people really don't get us, they don't get it.'"

But over the last nearly four decades, Depeche Mode have amassed a dedicated fan base, something that resonated with Gahan recently when he was working on a side project with the cinematic production team Soulsavers. One of the members of that group, Rich Machin, told him that Depeche Mode records like Violator and Songs of Faith and Devotion were among his favorites when he was 13.

"They were like what Diamond Dogs and Ziggy Stardust were to me, those albums where you sit in your bedroom wondering why you don't fit in with the rest of the world," Gahan says. "That's what I was doing with David Bowie at that age. I had found somebody in him that I could understand, where I felt I was part of his world, when I felt alienated. And I think that's why Depeche Mode appeals to a lot of people. Somehow it's comforting, like, 'You're not alone.' You're not, of course. None of us are. But music is the thing that crosses all boundaries and brings odd people together."

It's a sentiment that also echoed last year when it was announced that Depeche Mode were nominated for the first time to enter the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame but ultimately didn't make it. "We're not just part of the fabric, and I'm proud of that," he says. "We stick out as being something that's a little bit odd. We knew we weren't going to get up there with the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, but someone wrote something like, 'They're a band wearing eyeliner, writing pervy songs about twisted, weird, depressing subjects.'

"I took that as a massive compliment," he continues. "Because we are a little odd, and we've always appealed to the odd out there, the odd in the world. Our fans and the people like ourselves are a squad that maybe didn't quite feel right hanging out with others. We're a little awkward, a little nerdy, a little different. We found each other and it became a gang." He laughs, looking proud. "And it's a pretty big gang now."

(via Depeche Mode's Dave Gahan on Urgent New LP, Bowie Influence - Rolling Stone)

#rolling stone magazine #depeche mode #dave gahan #spirit era

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