Macintosh Plus - Floral Shoppe (2011)

I kept reading that this was the vapourwave album you need to hear before you die, and all of the usual shit, but every time I tried it was gone - removed from whatever platform it had turned up on due to uncleared samples. At least that was the thrust of the apology as I remember it, unlikely though it now seems given that the entire thing is nothing but samples and yet here it is again; and this time I managed to nab a copy before they all vanished.

Vapourwave seems to have been an internet phenomenon, popular amongst young people who spend way too much time playing computer games and talking about Chinese cartoons in chatrooms. I don't think it ever occupied any space formerly inhabited by the music biz as it existed in the days of physical media, so it's probably a bit odd that this vapourwave Never Mind the Bollocks should have been pressed onto vinyl. I'm not complaining because it means I can listen to it, although it seems equivalent to some ageing fifties guy rejoicing that they've taken the trouble to issue the songs of this Elvis Presley person on wax cylinder. Should anyone be grumbling about such parallels, citing the distinct absence of gangs of vapourwavers slashing cinema seats at their local picture house as evidence of it having failed to be a thing in any meaningful sense, then it's probably worth remembering that not everything is a repeat of some earlier form.

Perhaps ironically, vapourwave sort of is - or possibly was, given that I have no idea what the kids on the streets are up to these days so it may all be ancient history - constituting a repetition in so much as that it's mostly sampled eighties muzak, emphasising the slick, bland, overproduced and even corporate to the point of surrealism - swollen synth and MOR sax slowed down, cut up, processed, stripped of context and pulled back together without concessions to familiar structure or purpose; and Floral Shoppe seems to exemplify this like few other albums, so the legend would have it.

I haven't heard a lot of this stuff, although for my money, Blank Banshee do it better, further abstracting the source material before building it up into something new, weird, and shiny. Nevertheless, Floral Shoppe really is one hell of a record. The sampled material sounds almost familiar, something on the tip of one's recall which never quite gets there, heard through a codeine haze and repeating bars in rhythms which ignore the existing tempo and feel like fractal thoughts going through the mind of a console game with a hangover. The effect is weirdly hyperreal and is perfectly illustrated by the cover art. It's something bland polished up and put on a pedestal, presenting a juxtaposition of past and present so weirdly angular and shocking as to invoke J.G. Ballard - or what J.G. Ballard seems to represent to people who actually enjoy his writing, which I mostly don't.

Of course, it's supposed to be ephemeral - or that's the impression I get - but then maybe its having been immortalised on vinyl can be taken as simply another contradiction, just one of the many. Vapourwave, and particularly this album, demonstrate the impossibility of predicting the future - being absolutely alien while sounding familiar to the point of mundanity, and that's a good thing.

+DOG+ - The Ship of Dreams (2020)

Just when you thought you had noise all figured out (or at least I did), along came +DOG+ to demonstrate just how limited so many noise artists have been over the years - the sound of a jet engine blasting your face off, balaclava helmet, and what else have you got? Usually nothing, except in the case of +DOG+ who seem to have moved way, way beyond such basic tactics; and just when you thought you had +DOG+ all figured out, they release another album.

Some of the above will inevitably be off centre because, there's nothing wrong with the sound of a jet engine blasting your face off, and I suspect there must almost certainly be a shitload of other equally worthy noise artists whose work I simply haven't heard.

Once again, there's nothing musical in the conventional sense - excepting possibly a few drum rolls supplementing the cacophony on one of the earlier tracks - and it mostly resembles someone poking a screwdriver around inside an old transistor radio and shorting everything out, but amplified and multitracked allowing different strands of grinding texture to work against each other, and in ways which become so relentless that the whole somehow crosses over and is actually sort of relaxing, or at least hypnotic. I suppose if you happen to be on a plane and in flight when the jet engine conks out, having been previously knackered during some power electronics performance, if you're plummeting to earth from several miles up and you somehow manage to make peace with the idea of your chips being well and truly cashed, then The Ship of Dreams is possibly how that sense of serenity may sound. I expect I've said it before but I'll say it again, I find it genuinely astonishing how this lot keep coming up with something new from what you might imagine would be very much a restricted palette.

We Be Echo - Beat of the Drum (2020)

 

We Be Echo were one of a handful of groups who emerged at the beginning of the eighties in the wake of Throbbing Gristle removing themselves from the picture, specifically a handful of groups enjoying varying degrees of association with the same, even if just through members having met at some Gristle performance. Dave Henderson wrote about them in Sounds, and there's a reasonable possibility that you will have heard of at least Konstruktivists, Test Dept, Nocturnal Emissions, and Attrition. We Be Echo unfortunately never achieved quite the same level of relative infamy, releases being mostly limited to cassettes sold through the mail. By rights, some record company really should have been chucking money at Kevin Thorne, but it apparently wasn't to be.

Now - in anticipation of Darkness is Home, We Be Echo's first new album in a while - here's a reminder of what we missed, material dating from just after the Ceza Evi cassette which never really got a fair crack first time round. I've heard most, if not all, of these tracks on tapes which briefly did the rounds among friends of friends, and I've a feeling a couple of them may have been issued by the Mystery Hearsay label at some point; but Lordy, it's nice to have them cut into a big fat slab of vinyl at long last. A few of these feature a female vocalist rather than the taped voices which distinguished Ceza Evi, and so might be deemed, for want of a better description, what we all assumed Chris & Cosey would probably sound like before we actually heard Heartbeat. There's a dark edge, but nothing you could really call gothic, and the synths pump and pulse away in contrast to the moodier sort of ambient noise you may have associated with Gristle. Of all the Wild Planet bands, We Be Echo actually seemed to be the one you could just about play to friends who might otherwise shit themselves in the absence of anything recognisable as a tune. They might have seemed a fairly logical foreshadowing of Nine Inch Nails and the like, had anyone been listening; but were ultimately doomed to have become a sort of English counterpart to San Francisco's Deviation Social, among other names which should be better remembered.

Still, as Lenny Kravitz is my witness, it ain't over 'til it's over, and the new album is stunning. So here's a chance to get yourself up to speed - a pleasure which shouldn't be taken for granted given that for at least a decade it very much looked as though We Be Echo had fallen off the edge of the map.

Fad Gadget - Fireside Favourites (1980)

 

I can't help feeling that Frank Tovey never quite received his due or achieved the status he probably deserved, and I'm pretty damn certain it isn't going to be happening any time soon given that he's no longer with us. Fad Gadget didn't quite seem to fit anywhere even in their day, at least not with any degree of comfort - not quite independent in the sense of the Fall, ATV or Wire despite being on Mute, certainly not mainstream, too early and too weird for synthpop when that became a thing. Fad Gadget weren't even particularly or conveniently electronic, at least not as a way of life. I developed a bit of a fixation with them following something or other in Sounds music paper which brought the realisation that Fad Gadget seemed to be fucking everywhere, and yet I still had no idea what the hell they were supposed to be or sounded like. Then he was on the telly performing Coitus Interruptus with the help of a can of shaving foam and I became an immediate convert. I bought this one and Incontinent and played them more or less to the exclusion of everything else that summer. This was the summer during which I took up painting, left school, and first began to consider that the future might be different to the present, and that it might even be an improvement - at least for me. The possibilities seemed suddenly endless and Fad Gadget was somehow the soundtrack. I went for an interview at Maidstone College of Art half way across the country. I'm not sure I was even convinced an art degree was the right thing to do, but I turned up for the interview and was taken to the canteen which was in a bit of a state having played host to some event.

'Fad Gadget played here last night,' I was told, and that was enough for me.

Fireside Favourites still sounds incredible and like no other album, not even like any other Fad Gadget album. If synth-based artists were mostly pretending to be machines at the time, Tovey went further into weirder, more disturbing territories of the kind described by J.G. Ballard - something pervy and a bit damaged but with a pop sensibility that wasn't quite showbiz, unless we're talking the Iggy Pop end of things; something brooding and a bit reptilian - punk rock with a synth is probably as good a description as any. Fireside Favourites grinds and growls its oscillator driven hymns to consumerism, marketing and stupidity then winks to the camera like Val Doonican on the title track, paranoid, schizophrenic, claustrophobic, and yet somehow entirely human despite the sharp corners; and Arch of the Aorta may be one of the most beautifully epic pieces of instrumental music ever recorded.