We Be Echo - Ceza Evi (1983)

I now have three versions of this, and I've a feeling I've reviewed it as many times over the years, with excerpts of my previous reviews having been reprinted on the cover of previous reissues, albeit reissues of related We Be Echo material rather than this specific collection. I'm quoted on the cover of this one too, which is massively gratifying, although it presents the weird possibility that you may even be reading this on the cover of some future reissue. Anyway, before I disappear up my own arse…

Ceza Evi was recorded by Kevin Thorne, formerly of Third Door from the Left and fairly close associate of Throbbing Gristle. It was one of the first independent cassettes I bought, and as such set an unusually high bar for the form. It had quite an impact on me. The music - and it is music rather than some dreary bloke scratching his nuts next to a tape recorder and declaring it sound art - utilises drum machine, synth, bass guitar, electronics, and a lot of tapes to communicate a powerfully brooding atmosphere approximately parallel to the sort of thing Gristle always did so well, something bordering on the edge of the profane or unthinkable - beat driven music which really grinds its way into your subconscious. The incredible thing is that this material didn't even have the benefit of a four track portastudio. It was captured by bouncing tracks from tape to tape on a domestic double tape deck. Naturally, no-one's going to mistake Ceza Evi for a Trevor Horn production, but nor does it quite sound like anything produced by a bloke sat cross-legged on the rug in his front room. Kevin got the absolute best out of the extraordinary limited equipment available at the time, even without the significant occurrence of tape hiss, and it succeeds because the simple power of these tracks sweeps you up and carries you away to some very dark places before it even occurs that maybe it wasn't knocked out at Abbey Road.

There were two versions of Ceza Evi. The special edition came out a year or so after the first, replacing more than half of the tracks with newer, more technically sophisticated material. This double disc from Cold Spring polishes up and remasters the special edition on the first disc - or rather Martin of Attrition polishes up and remasters, and a great job he's done too. The second disc collects the tracks which were lost in the update. They're perhaps more primitive than others on the special edition, harder or even more brutal, but - fuck - I'm glad they haven't been left completely by the wayside, and it's particularly great to hear I'm A Gambler, Micro Penis, and Knechtschaft again after all this time. Listening to this lot again, it's also interesting to hear formative clues as to the current We Be Echo sound, which has evolved greatly from these beginnings, but still carries some of the same mood.

I've lived with these tracks for what is now a bewildering two thirds of my existence on this planet, and can't imagine what life would have been like without this stuff somewhere in the background.