Audio Journal by MJA Smith : 19/10/2009

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Though perhaps not as radical or aurally challenging as some of their earliest work, Einstürzende Neubauten’s Ende Neu (1996) still finds the Berliners hammering away at steel, deploying compressors and all manner of junkyard mechanics to produce their highly individual artistic sound. Frontman, vocalist and guitarist Blixa Bargeld, more recently departed of Nick Cave’s Bad Seeds, holds the lot together with vocal deliveries that transcend the German language’s supposed lyrical limitations, and on the highly un-Neubuaten string-soaked tracks with Meret Becker, shows that the gradual progression of Nick Cave’s writing while Bargeld was on board – from Old Testament fervour to romantic wonder – was not wasted on Blixa‘s own writing. Nevertheless, despite those stretching tracks, my favourite tracks are ‘Installation No.1’, with its vocal of ‘Disobey / It’s a law’ and the frantic, dystopian opener ‘Was Ist Ist’.

When I was a subscriber to The Wire magazine – a music magazine, not a monthly publication based on the cult US TV crime drama – they would rave about the elusive, illusory character Jandek, a prolific artist reclusively skulking on the fringes of alternative music. His music was always on my list to sample at some point, but I simply never got around to it. This week, UbuWeb, the go-to site for all things alternative, sent round a link to a blog containing 31 Jandek albums, from the early 1980s through to Skirting The Edge, released this year on Jandek’s own Corwood Industries label. I figured the latter would be a suitable entry point to his music. Essentially, Skirting The Edge is four tracks of vocal musings over incandescent acoustic guitar, with a bleak tone throughout. ITunes labelled it as ‘lo fi’ when I added it to my library, which is probably right, given its raw production aesthetic.

On to slightly more accessible things, this week I downloaded the eponymous debut from The Little Death, or, more appropriately, The Little Death (NYC) as there are apparently two bands with that name in existence. It’s tempting to describe the band as Moby’s low key side-project, as he is indeed a core member, providing guitars across their debut album. In truth, The Little Death is principally a vehicle for vocalist Laura Dawn, who has appeared live with Moby and contributed vocals to at least one of his albums. The overall sound is one of soulful blues, as filtered through a bunch of musicians living in New York. Gutsy female vocalists aren’t ordinarily my thing, but on this album I’ve found it pretty engaging. My favourite songs are the upbeat tracks ‘Mean Woman’, ‘Hurricane’ and ‘Love Or A Gun’.

From the blues I moved effortlessly to ambient electronica, as crafted by Sheffield’s Richard H. Kirk, founder member of Cabaret Voltaire, one of the bands – like Neubauten – who were grouped together under the banner ‘industrial’. Virtual State (1993) was released on Warp Records and contains lots of trademark Kirk elements – burbling synths, African percussion and distorted samples of speech covertly culled from radio frequencies. This was an album I used to stick on whilst at university to aid concentration while doing my coursework, and consequently hearing it again this week left me feeling rather queasy as I recollected hours spent poring over balance sheets and econometric calculations.



In response to the BBC’s Synth Britannia documentary, it would be all too easy at this juncture to prattle on about all the bands that I like from the synth-pop era, but I won’t. I was castigated by a reader a couple of weeks back for the admission that Erasure remain my favourite band, so let’s not even go there. Instead, in deference to the influence of the humble synth on popular music, I’ll mention a single released about fifteen years ago by Node – U2 / Depeche Mode / PJ Harvey producer Flood and Suede producer Ed Buller and a couple of others – called ’Terminus’ which saw the duo setting up massive modular synths on the concourse of Paddington Station. One can only imagine the reaction of travellers heading to the South West upon hearing the sounds the duo coaxed from their monolithic walls of dials, switches and cabling, but no doubt it was as similarly divisive as when Kraftwerk’s ‘The Model’ first graced the charts.

Audio Journal by MJA Smith : 24/08/2009

‘I was working as a waitress in a cocktail bar’ is potentially the most evocative lyric of the Eighties, but the Human League story didn’t start with Dare, the album that ’Don’t You Want Me’ was taken from. Dare was in fact their third and there are few indications on their previous two – Reproduction and Travelogue – that point to the glossy pop brilliance that producer Martyn Rushent would lend to the 1981 album. Travelogue includes a track called ’Gordon’s Gin’ which may inadvertently allude to the lyric above, but aside from a turgid disco track the earlier albums are mostly spiky and experimental.

According to an Amazon review of one of the League’s first two albums, the sound of the early trio of Martyn Ware, Ian Marsh and Philip Oakey was more like fellow Sheffield band Cabaret Voltaire or the Cabs’ counterparts Throbbing Gristle. This is the kind of lazy music journalism that gets my goat. Sure, the sound of the first two albums is more out there, more gritty, but I own every Cabaret Voltaire album and those two Human League albums are really tame in comparison. All the reviewer has done is looked at who else on the nascent electronic scene came from Sheffield and namedropped casually. As for the TG comparisons? Well don’t even get me started.

Rant aside, Reproduction and Travelogue have some good songs. The enduringly minimal early cult electro of the Mantronix-esque ‘Being Boiled’ is included as a bonus track on the former, while the latter includes an electro-glam medley of Glitter’s ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll’ and Iggy’s ‘Nightclubbing’ which predates and predicts Goldfrapp’s dabbling in the genre circa Black Cherry. Marsh and Ware left to form Heaven 17, Oakey recruited Susan Sulley and Joanne Catherall, recorded ’Don’t You Want Me’, defined the synth pop sound of the early Eighties then rapidly went downhill. I interviewed Martyn Ware a few years ago – my interview is here.



Music recommendations often come from unlikely places. In a recent profile, one of my fund manager colleagues was asked what he was currently listening to. He namechecked a band I’d never heard of, Datarock, which piqued my curiosity and so I took a listen. The consistently time-robbing website rcrdlbl.com has a couple of free Datarock songs, one of which is ‘True Stories’ whose lyrics are entirely made up of Talking Heads song names and whose clipped funk vibe authentically evokes the distinctive sound of that band. The Norwegian duo are clearly off their (data) rockers, and may be a huge joke, but I remain intrigued. They remind me of The Hives crossed with Daft Punk, but don’t ask me why.

Although terrible quality, I’ve been listening to a couple of sonically intriguing downloads from the expansive UbuWeb archive. One is the seven-minute track ‘Loop’ by a very early Velvet Underground (although it seems to just be John Cale). In ‘Loop’, which is essentially a pure noise feedback piece that was originally released as a rare flexi-disc, you really hear what attracted Andy Warhol into the band’s orbit originally; it’s rock ’n roll music reduced to its basest elements, justifying the band’s reputation as NY punk’s guiding lights. ‘I’m Sticking With You’ it ain’t.