Konstruktivists - Dark Odyssey (2004)

 

This is one of those Konstruktivists albums that sort of fell through the cracks, at least relative to those you will have heard of, or stand a chance of having heard of. Konstruktivists were between labels at the time but persisted regardless with CDRs here and there as the internet slowly began to happen, meaning you can now bag this one from Bandcamp should you so desire, but that the total bandwidth is shared by fifty million useless wankers all screaming for your attention without any good reason to be doing so and the only way you're going to seek this out is if you already know about it. Anyway, I was never keen on CDRs and didn't really know what to make of this one in 2004. It sounded, as I recall, overly digital, very much something which happened on a screen. To be clear, it didn't sound bad but, as I say, something wasn't working for me*.

Anyway, twenty-two years later, not only am I delighted to discover a CDR that hasn't degraded into the usual beer coaster, but that whatever I didn't get about Dark Odyssey no longer seems to apply so probably I just didn't have the right ears; or else it was simply a grower. Generally speaking, it sounds closer to the krautrock than previous efforts, in so much as that there are mesmeric grooves aplenty rather than songs or any of that angry stuff with all the funny noises and shouting. The layered instrumentation which I apparently didn't appreciate last time is beautifully balanced with all manner of lavish melodies contributing to the whole rather than dominating centre stage. It has some of the high definition of Glennascaul but isn't quite so in your face. Given the Neu-adjacent rhythms, Dark Odyssey feels like a travelogue, music in constant motion, probably at night and maybe a little too relaxed to be at the wheel but thankfully there's no-one else on the road. It takes you somewhere, hence the title, I guess, and I'm glad to have got there in the end.

Isn't it about time one of you fuckers pressed this onto vinyl?

*: I was additionally a little phased to see that the cover art was a pen and ink drawing I'd done in 1991, over a decade earlier when I was a briefly a member of Konstruktivists. I didn't mind, and it was nice to see my art used for something, but the drawing simply wasn't anything special to my way of thinking.

Severed Heads - Come Visit the Big Bigot (1986)

 

...or just The Big Bigot as was its initial Australian release. One thing I've taken from conversations with Glenn Wallis of Konstruktivists, and which has stayed with me, is the importance of layering when mixing a record. Glenn had strong opinions on mixing, often insisting greater effect was to be had with certain sounds or instruments some way down in the mix, half heard and not always obvious on first listen. This, as I've found, gives the ear more to work with, achieving effects and juxtapositions which you just don't get with the bog standard mix which strives to leave everything on more or less equal footing in the overall sound, and which is usually the mix for which everyone else will settle. Part of this is simply paying attention to the treatment of the original sounds so as to avoid music from which you can identify the exact synth, drum machine or whatever within the first minute of listening - which is how Depeche Mode have always sounded to me, at least before the leather trousers.

Anyway, whatever the fuck it is I'm referring to has one of the most powerful demonstrations of its validity in the back catalogue of the Severed Heads, and particularly on this record, possibly their greatest to my ears, although it's a tough choice between this, Haul Ass, Rotund For Success, and er… probably seven or eight others.

The Big Bigot is, I suppose, synthpop by virtue of tunes, song structure, lyrics and so on, and these are songs which really tear your fucking heart out; yet it's often difficult to tell what the Severed Heads were doing that apparently no-one else has considered. Beyond the bass, the rhythm, the pensive yet arrestingly cheery melody, there's all sorts of sampled or looped clutter in the mix gurgling away, and yet none of it sounds arbitrary. Somehow the whole always blends into something so beautifully arranged as to suggest old masters more than abstract expressionism, as it probably should. It's that deal with a tornado blowing through a scrap yard to assemble a jumbo jet, and I can only assume that an approach similar to that described by Glenn Wallis must be responsible. It feels as though random elements have worked together to carve out songs equivalent to Plato's perfect solids, compositions existing in the subatomic underpinnings of the universe channelled and brought into being by Tom Ellard and occasional pals. There's nothing here to remind you of anyone else or how anyone else works, nor anything that anyone else has been able to duplicate. I've been listening to this record for more than thirty years and I didn't even realise there's a Clapton cover on side two.

So what does it sound like, given that the above is probably less than helpful as descriptions go. Confidence! sounds like being trapped in the head of a terminally lovesick teenager with a near death experience for a chorus. Harold & Cindy Hospital begins as big band for malicious elephants and ends up getting Raptured in the evangelical sense. Legion is the most terrifying song you've ever heard that doesn't involve either distorted guitars or metal types pulling faces - it really feels like it's coming for you. I don't know, and I'm not even sure what the songs are about, but there's something Biblical going on in this unnerving euphoria threaded through with something weird and dark, almost old testament, without having delivered any of the cues which might usually lead to such conclusions. It shouldn't work, but it does, and it's genuinely glorious. If Legion doesn't bring a lump to your throat at the very least, are you even alive?

Chris & Cosey - Techno Primitiv (1984)

Comparing the respective careers of the four Throbbing Gristlers after they parted ways, I realise Gristle itself could be pretty much summarised as Chris & Cosey with Porridge providing a picture of a chair for the album cover, then telling you 'Hermann Göring sat on that chair,' with that lurid smile which lets you know you've been Porridged good and proper. It's strange how this only seems obvious - at least to me - with a couple of decades of hindsight. I'd guess the music of Chris & Cosey mostly sounded happy, doubtless as a result of having left a band which included Porridge, although it didn't seem so at the time. It seemed more like they'd divided into the polar opposites of weirdy stuff with pierced nobs on the one hand, and nursery rhyme proto-techno on the other; but having noticed that 2018's Tutti is almost pure Gristle with more polish, yet without sounding like a trip down memory lane, this is the rabbit hole I've chosen today.

I'm not sure if Techno Primitiv was exactly the last good thing for me, but as I still can't remember what Pagan Tango sounds like, it was the last to make an impression, following which my attention span wandered off somewhere else. The couple hit the ground running with 1981's Heartbeat, released the same year as the split and sounding like they were at least fucking trying. More records followed and a sound developed with some sense of direction, meaning we never quite bought the same album twice while allowing for occasional flashes of tangential brilliance - the Elemental 7 soundtrack or collaborations with Konstruktivists and the Eurhythmics for example. However, we shouldn't underestimate how different these records seemed to what had gone before. Without Porridge providing some vaguely sinister subtext - and I honestly don't know how much else - the music became its own subject in so much as that it lacked an overt message. These were studio experiments in building a groove and seeing where it led, with Cosey's vocalisations more about mood than anything. Technically, the electronics were always a couple of years ahead of everyone else, usually meaning there was enough going on to keep it from sounding like all those plug it in and press a button cybernauts who came later. So considering the improvisational nature of the composition, and that Chris & Cosey albums had a diary quality of what we've been working on since the last thing hereby presented for your consideration, there's no obvious singularity of vision or focus to sharpen a record into the sort of point you might get with other artists. Practically this meant what sounded to me like diminishing returns, more and more nursery rhymes, bass patterns which may as well have been the Birdie Song, Cosey sounding slightly bored, and albums suggesting the work of people titting about in the studio because they have nothing better to do.

Yet when they're good, they're great - moody and sensuous like a cyber-age Serge Gainsbourg, hypnotic with some mathematically ornate rhythm track taking centre stage within a vast sonic space windswept by half-heard melodies, noises, groans, sighs - all captured in digital hyperclarity so sharp that it's almost weird. Techno Primitiv has a few of those tracks which never quite worked, I felt, due to an incongruously chirpy quality - He's an Arabian for example, but then you hit the pseudo-tribal panorama of Do or Die and all is forgiven; and even the more uptempo tracks, the almost songs, have a certain frisson of the forbidden which elevates them above the frosty jangle of Christmas muzak. Above all, this one still sounds like an album regardless of whatever themes it may carry remaining ambiguous. It sounds like possibilities, like effort made beyond sticking a skull on the cover and giving the kids what they want. So credit where it's due, and all that.

Nurse With Wound - Chance Meeting on a Dissecting Table of a Sewing Machine and an Umbrella (1979)

My first Nurse With Wound was Insect & Individual Silenced, thanks mainly to a school coach trip down to that London and the wonderful Virgin Megastore, as was. Otherwise their work - as described by John Gill in Sounds in terms by which I knew I needed to hear it - eluded our local record shops and by extension me. We had a record shop in my tiny market town for about six months, and I recall Geoff, who ran the place, shaking his head and wondering why anyone would name an album Homotopy to Marie while my sniggering contemporaries browsed Def Leppard without actually buying anything, which is presumably why Geoff went out of business. About a decade later I had the first three on CD, including Chance Meeting, but I didn't have a CD player, didn't really plan to buy one, and ended up giving them away.

It's therefore taken me one fuck of a long time to finally hear this, and I'm sort of shocked to discover that it doesn't sound anything like I expected - although this is of course exactly what one should expect from Nurse With Wound. Steve Stapleton has said something about how he regards Homotopy to Marie as the first real Nurse recording, so this was himself pissing about with his pals, technically speaking, and was similarly distant from the insanity of Insect & Individual Silenced, for what that may be worth. The biggest surprise - although it probably shouldn't be - for me, has been how much Chance Meeting sounds like a relative of Faust and other krautrock predecessors* routinely ignored by history of industrial music podcasts put together by edgy fourteen-year olds with pierced eyebrows. Almost all of the sounds on this record are generated by actual musical instruments, albeit by unorthodox means - someone playing the piano with his arse, droning harmonium, and even a long-haired guitar solo. It's all improvised, of course, and I seem to recall reading that none of those involved had so much as picked up a musical instrument before getting this on tape.

It's a racket, as you would expect, but I've always felt Nurse With Wound made more sense as heirs to Man Ray, Kurt Schwitters, and Max Ernst than to even Yoko Ono's sonic experiments; and in this context, as firmly established by both Stapleton's cover art and the title deriving from Les Chants de Maldoror by the Comte de Lautréamont, they work for me - at least in so much as the art of Man Ray, Kurt Schwitters and Max Ernst works for me. As with the very best music of this admittedly general type, it established the terms by which the listener experiences it, meaning there's probably not much point comparing it to Out of the Blue by the Electric fucking Light Orchestra; and while there have been a few weirdos doing this kind of thing, with the possible exception of Richard Rupenus, no-one really seems to do it quite so well as Nurse With Wound. Alan Trench of Temple Music, amongst others, said Steve Stapleton remains one of the few people he's met whom he would describe as a genius, which I honestly think is fair.

It lives in neither the rock venue nor the art gallery as we know it today, because like the landscapes of de Chirico and the rest, this Chance Meeting takes place in some psychological realm, one which may not even have existed before the needle first encountered the groove; and, should I have failed to communicate as much, it's also a lot of fun to listen to, albeit weird, angular, confusing fun.

*: I've also been surprised by how sonically close it sits to the first Konstruktivists album - clearly a case of shared influences. Steve Stapleton and Glenn Wallis were friends, although Glenn was never particularly a fan of Nurse With Wound.
 

Peter Hope & the Exploding Mind - 20 Speed Metal Death Threats (2023)

I'm generally sceptical of both downloads and CDRs because there are too many arseholes out there releasing five noise albums a week by such means and treating anyone who doesn't fall over themselves to bag the lot like some corporate tool who should probably stick to BTS*. Happily, there are exceptions to most rules, and in this case Peter Hope very much continues to be one of them. This you can tell by how much care and attention goes into these things - each short run CDR edition of the new download being lovingly put together with artwork, booklets and so on by the man himself as something which will remain a pleasing object even should all the zeroes and ones eventually turn to digital mush - which is where the download comes in handy. More significantly still, prolific though he certainly is, Peter Hope is always worth a listen. Not many can issue five or six full length albums a year to this sort of standard.

Anyway, getting to the point, here's another one, and if the back catalogue is perhaps a little too eclectic to allow for anything to be meaningfully singled out as his finest work, it might be this one. At least I've been playing it a lot. There are twelve tracks rather than twenty, and none of them constitute speed metal, but the title nevertheless makes intuitive sense if you're familiar with Hope's approach to his art where ideas and sounds are bolted together with the urgency of a Schwitter's assemblage - no obvious concessions to traditional aesthetics and yet seeming entirely faithful to the kind of blues which was played on a broken guitar under circumstances of grinding poverty. It's mostly electronic, although doesn't quite feel it, revelling as it does in its own dirt, crackle and distortion. This is nothing which would comfortably accommodate a barcode - in both the aesthetic and ideological sense - being genuine outsider music - not the cute version, but the untamed stuff which resists commodification or repackaging as a consumer accessory. This is a free-range noise which probably shouldn't exist given the focus groups and how many surveys we're bombarded with on a daily basis.

The Exploding Mind seems to represent a particular focus exemplified by Hope's work under that banner, although in practical terms also typically features collaborators. Mrs. Dink and Glenn Wallis of Konstruktivists both feature on this album, despite which 20 Speed Metal Death Threats maintains its pace without sounding like the latest by various artists; and Warmonger - created with Phil Jones and stealing Requiem's malevolent synth-pulse from Killing Joke - is frankly a masterpiece.

Avail thineself of this long player yonder.

*: I had to look this up for the sake of making a contemporary reference rather than just invoking Rick Astley or someone else who is probably dead by now. If you don't know who BTS are, I honestly wouldn't worry about it.

Beautiful Pea Green Boat - Get Religion (1988)

If Third Mind Records have endured to any extent in the collective musical memory, I've an unfortunate feeling it's probably as - ugh - old school industrial pioneers, as young people who know more than the rest of us are wont to put it, thanks to the undeniably seminal Rising from the Red Sand and status as a footnote in the saga of Front Line Assembly - apparently. Having actually been there at the time - and even painted a couple of the record covers for that matter - I can confidently state that this is complete bollocks, and nothing underscores the back catalogue's resistance to silly labels quite like Beautiful Pea Green Boat.

At the time, Third Mind seemed cut from approximately similar cloth to Some Bizarre (who weren't fucking industrial either), not least because they seemed to have booked all the Wild Planet people which Some Bizarre should have bagged - Nurse With Wound, Konstruktivists, Attrition and so on; but right from the off it was obvious that Gary Levermore simply intended to release great music regardless of how industrial or otherwise it might be deemed, and there was a point at which his main focus very much seemed to be Beautiful Pea Green Boat. He sent me a stack of records for services rendered or something, amongst which was an early Front Line Assembly release that I liked, but thought it sounded like a Cabaret Voltaire knock off - mostly grunting and sequencers. Get Religion, on the other hand, was clearly the prize of the litter. With hindsight it probably sounds very eighties, but at the time it seemed like the newest thing we'd ever heard. I'd already encountered sampled orchestral stabs and the synth pulse of New York high energy disco but never quite like this, and never with the same depth of feeling as the most heart wrenching sixties soul. The key to their power seemed to be in the contrast of Ian Williams' state of the art technical overload - at least as of 1988 - with Heather Wright's sweet, almost folksy voice. I'd say imagine a combination of the Pet Shop Boys and the Cocteau Twins, but as comparisons it captures nothing of the tumult or drama of their music which, in spirit, is almost Byronic.

Third Mind was a pretty great label while it lasted with more than its fair share of classics, of which Get Religion was possibly the finest. They really should have been fucking massive.

Severed Heads - Haul Ass (1998)

I bought one just before it got deleted, the better tracks creamed off for a wilderness years retrospective named Focus. Neither Cuisine, Gigapus, Haul Ass nor Under Gail Succubus were shifting units on Bandcamp and were therefore deleted and reprocessed lest their antinumismatic energies irradiate other releases with a spirit of failure. I only discovered its existence as a download album when receiving news of its impending deletion. I didn't even know there was a Severed Heads page on Bandcamp prior to my purchase of the Clifford 2000 compilation from Medical Records, and I've considered myself very much a fan of the Severed Heads for at least the last three decades. Tom Ellard seems to have become the weirdy music Van Morrison in terms of online grumbling about stupid fans and lack of support; and yes, I could have googled Severed Heads at some point to see if he was still alive, but dude, I have a life to live, and wonderful though most of your music certainly is, it's probably best not to assume it will be central to the existence of everyone who hears it and thus subject to pilgrimage.

Cuisine was pumped and dumped by our Canadian label over a few months in 1991.

I started work again, now meeting rejection after rejection. We were out of style.

In 1993 I tried flying to Canada to talk face to face about Gigapus. Old friends were now too busy to meet. The A/R guy suggested a bass player and a female singer. Soon after that label was nothing but female singers.

I didn't have a CD player when either of those came out, and I didn't have an internet connection until 2007, which is probably why I didn't get around to buying a copy of that later Severed Heads album which was issued in an edition of three CDR copies in a fucking suitcase, like the lightweight fairweather fan that I am. While we're here, Cuisine and Gigapus still sound like transitional albums, a little too digital for their own good and driven by a slightly more downtempo version of the bassline that kept Stock, Aitken & Waterman at the top of the hit parade for a couple of years - which is probably why the A/R guy suggested a female singer, sort of like Lisa Maxwell who sang the chorus on Heart of the Party; and while we're still here, I'm pretty sure World Serpent - the international label and distributor with which I was dimly associated for most of the nineties through Konstruktivists - would have bust a nut to get Severed Heads on the books, given some of the losers they did sign thanks to tenuous association with David Tibet's milkman or whoever.

Never mind. Sometimes one has to disassociate the art from the miserable bugger who didst gift it to us, his unworthy, ungrateful so-called fucking fans; and the irony is that now that circumstances have aligned in such a way as to allow me to finally listen to Haul Ass without having to jump through all sorts of silly hoops, it is - I would argue - revealed as what happened at the other side of the transitional phase represented by the previous two, and easily the best, most convincing thing he'd recorded since Big Bigot or Rotund for Success - neither of which should ever have been considered acts easily followed. My only criticisms would be that it's CD length and therefore probably a little longer than it needed to be, and that Ellard's voice is often what makes his albums so I probably could have stood to hear more of it than on just three tracks - or however many it is.

Haul Ass is mostly techno, or techno drifting off into other realms, but techno of the pure, heavily layered Severed Heads variant and hence unlike anything over which one would ever expect to hear Kylie Minogue squeaking away - a sort of sombre optimism with brief interludes of euphoria. More than anything, the album packs the kind of powerful emotional punch which got me buying their records in the first place - not just the heartbreaking watercolour melodies you might expect, but even those screwy, kitschy sound collages such as Dreamsong and All That Matters is You. Anyone can plug a synth into an effects box, but there was never really anyone who sounded quite like Severed Heads or who did the same thing. They should have been huge but weren't, and that's unfortunately all there is to it; and you can't even buy this one any more. I would have bought the fucker twenty years ago had it been a realistic option.

Here's where you can't buy it from.

Konstruktivists - Konstruktive Kontinuum (2020)

That Konstruktivists are now in their fourth decade should probably seem stranger than it is, but even more significant is how they've improved with age. The last couple of albums have been decent, and this may even be the best one yet - probably ironic given that there were only a hundred of the physical version, but never mind. Having actually bashed the triangle for Konstruktivists at one point, my impartiality might be called into question when it comes to a review such as this; but I'd argue that, having been in the group - which was after all a long, long time ago - I at least have some understanding of what Glenn was trying to do, the sort of effect towards which he's been working all these years. It was never particularly industrial, as the cliché would have it, because his influences have always been wider than a couple of post-punk albums which sounded like someone rogering a printing press. Even when it hasn't been communicated well, Konstruktivists have always had a strongly theatrical element - painting pictures and telling stories with music, if you will, but dark, slightly peculiar, and occasionally fetishistic stories as you might reasonably expect of a bloke who used to hang around with Clock DVA.

This is another album recorded with Mark Crumby - formerly of Cathedra, Binary, Codex Empire and a host of others - a name associated with the very best of Konstruktivists, which probably isn't a coincidence. Whatever it is, he clearly gets it, and to the point that listening to this I finally understand what Glenn was getting at all those years ago. This is like Lovecraftian cabaret, moody and disturbing but without pulling silly faces or taping a handmade no parents allowed sign to your bedroom door. There's something joyful here, weirdly stylised and arty without apologies; and not quite like anyone else I can think of, off the top of my head, so jolly good show!

Buy! Buy! Buy!

Mrs. Dink - Death by Misadventure (2019)

 

This is my third helping of Mrs. Dink, and one which would seem at least as resistant to description as the previous two - or at least resistant to description which isn't me either repeating myself or talking bollocks. Death by Misadventure is techno, or possibly dubstep, or possibly some other variant I've never heard of, but an interpretation which doesn't quite repeat anything else I recognise - not lacking a formula but definitely fucking around with the established recipe.

Leaving aside whatever may be suggested by either the cover or titles such as Batshit Crazy and This is Gunna B Lit, beyond the pounding beats and trippy squiggles of electronica, I found this album had me thinking about landscape the more I listened, and specifically Islamic landscape, places with mosques and a lot of sand. I gather Mrs. Dink either served or serves in the US forces, which immediately makes me think of Afghanistan for possibly unfortunate reasons, so I'm tempted to wonder if she might have soaked up some of the ambient noise of civilisations beyond our own bubble; and if it isn't the case, that's at least how this music sounds to me. We have the familiar pulse, and throb, and of course the hi-hat doing something approximately familiar, but the rest seems to come from some non-western setting, melodies which weave a backdrop rather than pick out a tune; and while you could certainly dance to it, that's not all it does. At times it makes me think of Muslimgauze - although its nothing like so insular or obsessive - or Konstruktivists' Black December album.

Of course, this may all be just me and the sounds on this album just happen to be what came out of a black box on such and such a day, so I don't suppose it makes a lot of difference. Whatever the case may be, it's a lovely bit of work.

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.

Neu! (1972)

My introduction to krautrock was Glenn Wallis selling me a massive pile of albums in one huge job lot back in the nineties - forty, maybe fifty of them incuding Neu!, Kluster, Kraftwerk, Conrad Schnitzler, Faust, pretty much everything. I hadn't actually expressed any real interest in the form beyond that some of it sounded okay from what I could tell, but Glenn was converting to compact disc, needed the money and was asking just a few quid per album. I guess he'd reasoned that it was better that I should benefit than for him to get a few quid per album from some shop which would then have them all in the window for treble figures the following week. Vinyl Experience in Hanway Street had a bit of a reputation for such transactions, for example.

Really, I agreed to buy the collection more or less based on the idea that what I'd heard sounded okay and might turn out to sound amazing on closer inspection, and if so then I'd already have a ton of the stuff and wouldn't have to go through the rigmarole of tracking it all down. However, the collection was such as to stop up a sort of mental bottleneck in my listening habits, meaning I never quite got around to giving any of it the attention it probably deserved because there was so fucking much of it and anyway, maybe I was busy listening to - off the top of my head - the first Denim album that week; which is probably why it's taken me nearly thirty years to get to grips with this one.

I'm a little weary of hearing about how everything can now be traced back to krautrock and how I was listening to krautrock when none of you lot had even heard of it and so on and so forth, not least because it gets in the way of the music, and the music is - in this instance - pretty great and a lot more accessible than might be suggested by its reputation.

Neu! was formed by two members of Kraftwerk who decided they didn't want to be robots, and continues the original, somewhat more organic spirit of the same, combining the machine with the music but without negating the human component. It's possibly not actually that far removed from either Pink Floyd or similarly flared psychonauts of the musical abstract of similar vintage, but my reference points are limited to Neu! essentially being Throbbing Gristle's Second Annual Report five years earlier but without either the darkness or Porridge's ego getting in the way. It's very much the same sonic exploration with effects transforming music to noise, subtracting nature from the sound, and predating Neubauten's road drills by at least a decade. As a whole, it really is a sonic sculpture, and it still works because I guess it was so far ahead of the curve that it could have been recorded yesterday. Where Gristle may have invoked castration and other unmentionables, here we have - pure and unalloyed - the sheer euphoria of strange new sounds which take our thoughts to places previously unvisited.

It wasn't to last, and Dinger in particular perpetrated some truly underwhelming stuff under the same name in later years, but this remains arguably as startling and joyous within its field as did Never Mind the Bollocks in its own; and the reputation is, for once, fully deserved.

Robert Rental & Glenn Wallis (2017)

Having misspent at least some of my youth knocking around with Glenn Wallis, I vaguely recall having heard this as one of a million tapes plucked from the drawer of a million cassettes with nothing written on them at two in the morning. We'd usually been in the pub for the best part of the evening and I'd most likely be gearing up to my third or fourth report of being completely fucked and wanting to go to bed and we can listen to it in the morning, can't we? If that sounds like a complaint, it isn't, and should be taken as namedropping combined with an indicator of Glenn's absurdly prolific work rate. We once lived on the same continental land mass, even in the same town for a while, and he was always recording, tape after tape of experiments, fucking about and what have you; and the tapes all got slung in a drawer, and that drawer was pretty fucking full. As you probably know, some of that material was polished up or re-recorded and released on Konstruktivists records and tapes, but I always had an impression of the material which reached a slightly wider audience being the tip of the iceberg. He played me a lot of tapes of things I never heard again over the years, and of the stuff he played me, it was mostly pretty great.

Here's a good example, lovingly restored and pressed onto vinyl by Dark Entries - Glenn improvising with Robert Rental, whom you may remember had an album with Thomas Leer on Industrial Records: two men improvising, guitar, effects, Wasp synth, tape recorder and almost certainly a couple of those special jazz cigarettes. It's simple, powerful, almost certainly improvised live onto tape, and quite clearly descended from Cluster and the like. It's proof, if it were ever needed, that you don't need either an ostentatious display of technology or conventional musicianship to make a statement. It makes me very happy to hear this music again, and by means of a more durable format. There have been a ton of artists associated with the unfortunately misleading industrial label who released far too much over the years, spoiling a once deserved reputation with noodling excesses which should have stayed in the can. Glenn Wallis, on the other hand, is someone whose unreleased back catalogue could stand a little more mining. This is a great release, so let's hope it's part of a general trend.

Third Door from the Left - Face the Firing Squad (1981)

Face the Firing Squad really feels like it should be referred to in the same sentences as Second Annual Report, The Voice of America, Tissue of Lies and other brooding classics of the admittedly loose genre which I can never quite bring myself to consider industrial. It dates from roughly the same era and I played it to death at the time, but being released as a cassette, I suppose it's inevitable that it shouldn't be so well remembered. Third Door from the Left were Kevin Thorne and Raye Calouri, who met at Throbbing Gristle's performance at the YMCA in 1979, and Kevin's name appears in the list of those invited to the recording of Heathen Earth, alongside members of Coil, Konstruktivists, and others you will have most likely heard of; and you may recall Kevin's name adorning the covers of numerous Chris & Cosey releases in his capacity as designer.

Anyway, we might lazily characterise Third Door as occupying a sort of half way point between Cabaret Voltaire and Throbbing Gristle, or at least live Gristle. The comparison isn't entirely unjustified, or no more so than saying the Rolling Stones were just Charlie Patton for suburban whities; but there's a lot more going on than just strange sounds and dark moods. For starters, Third Door from the Left were never afraid of a guitar sounding like a guitar, and regardless of the pensive sense of menace, you might say they were significantly more accessible than anyone from whom they may have taken inspiration. The sheer emotional weight of It's Not Us still floors me thirty-five years later in ways that Joy Division never quite managed. Seriously, it makes New Dawn Fades sound like the theme music from the Generation Game.

This edition has been lovingly pressed up as a record by Vinyl on Demand, meaning no more coughing up hundreds of quid on Discogs for a Woolworths cassette which probably won't play. The quality remains as it was on the original cassette release, which isn't a problem as it was a fairly decent recording given the limitations of the equipment of the time. At the risk of sounding like a bit of a knob, I'd suggest that this one is essential.

Alec Empire - Generation Star Wars (1994)

I've always liked the idea of Alec Empire without really having heard much of anything in which he's been involved, I suppose excepting the Sham 69 cover, regarding which I much preferred the original. His name returned to me as I was reading Simon Reynolds' excellent Energy Flash, a history of dance music since acid house and techno; and a few days later I happened across a copy of this, apparently his first full length album.

The first thing that occurred to me as I listened was I could have done this. I own half of the equipment listed on the sleeve, have on occasion faked the rest, and fuck it - there are a few tapes I've done which sound a lot like this stuff so the process is no mystery. Just listening, I can tell exactly how it was done. I was expected to find myself confused, as I often am with the more labyrinthine and technologically baroque production of, for example, Front 242, but no matter; after all, Empire has always been very much in the spirit of punk - not just the aggression and the anti-establishment message, but the hard, raw sound and the DIY attitude - something anyone could have done. This shouldn't be taken as a criticism. There's nothing wrong with simplicity, with taking things back to the rock 'n' roll basics, and when someone curls a lip and sneers I could have done that, the salient point is usually that they nevertheless didn't.

Alec Empire's musical career seems to have been facilitated by the increasingly weird twists taken by all the subdividing strands of dance music in the early nineties, the point at which the disco biscuits ceased to pack a punch and as this particular stretch of the dance floor was getting dark and kind of nasty. There isn't even really a bass line anywhere on this lot because the bass mostly comes from a drum machine shoved through a fuzz pedal or equivalent effect. Consequently Generation Star Wars sounds one hell of a lot like one of those really noisy early Nocturnal Emissions albums - overdriven production line rhythms, distortion, and something more ethereal looping away in the background by way of contrast. I'm not even sure you could dance to this, or at least not all of it, although it would doubtless sound magnificent in a club.

This came out in 1994, somewhere within the general vicinity of my having a letter published in Melody Maker moaning about their lack of coverage of experimental types such as Konstruktivists, Nurse With Wound and others, cheekily informed by the fact of my being a member of Konstruktivists at the time. Their reply was something along the lines of how the musical future lay not with the cranky outsiders I'd mentioned, but on the dance floor. With hindsight, and particularly since having listened to this, I'm slightly embarrassed to realise that they were probably right.

Porcupine Tree - In Absentia (2002)

This review might come out a bit lopsided due to Porcupine Tree's Steve Wilson being a friend of a friend. Specifically my friend Carl has worked on quite a few of the guy's record covers, and so I've met Steve Wilson around Carl's place at some point or other. I wasn't really sure what Porcupine Tree were supposed to be beyond assuming them to be something to do with everyone from Japan who hadn't been David Sylvian, and I didn't quite make the connection. Conversely, Steve knew of Konstruktivists - of which I was once a member - and had read a few things I wrote in The Sound Projector magazine, so that made me feel satisfyingly famous. I also knew he'd had something to do with remixing old Muslimgauze tracks, so he seemed an interesting if fairly quiet sort of bloke. I had no real idea he was some massive stadium-filling megastar until an old friend from school mentioned that Porcupine Tree were one of his favourite bands, thus allowing me to showboat with the I know that dude routine whilst experiencing simultaneous astonishment at how big this group actually were without my having had the faintest idea.

Porcupine Tree - my wife pointed out that the name suggests one of those bands formed by Andy Dwyer in Parks & Recreation: Mouse Rat, Scarecrow Boat, Teddybear Suicide and the rest; and for no particularly good reason I'd assumed they would probably sound a bit like Japan, which they don't; and Steve Wilson has supposedly been known to read my blog posts, so thank God it turns out that Porcupine Tree are actually decent. Admittedly, I probably wouldn't bother writing anything if In Absentia resembled Jonathan King out-takes, but all the same it's nice that I won't have to lie.

Eight or nine plays in and I'm amazed at how good this record sounds, and how it works very much like a single piece of music in an almost symphonic sense. Of course that's probably not such a surprise for something so obviously evolved from progressive rock roots, but the surprise is how the term progressive has been taken literally as a challenge so as to yield something genuinely new, genuinely forward looking - as opposed to twiddly fingered nostalgia for bands playing songs about Bilbo fucking Baggins. In Absentia retains the best elements of its tradition, the folksy acoustic morning dew sparkle of Jethro Tull and mathematically peculiar time signatures of such conviction and raw emotional power that you don't immediately notice the structural eccentricities. In addition, the contrast of crushing digital slabs of overdriven metal with the softer, more ethereal elements - not least Wilson's fantastically evocative voice - are captured with startling clarity, and so what might otherwise sound like an exercise in studio jiggery-pokery carries itself with a beautifully organic sense of pace.

Somewhere in that paragraph is probably a clue as to why the first comparison which came to me was Ray Davies of all people, not quite the same kind of storytelling, but a similarly wistful quality which goes somewhat further than Radiohead having a bit of a sad. In fact this is what Radiohead probably imagine they sound like.

It's not a happy album, and it in fact sounds like the anatomy of a breakdown in places, without quite invoking the sort of melodrama which needs to spell it all out in case you missed something. It's Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea rather than a self-harming character in a Neil Gaiman comic, and that's probably about as close as I can get it, which is why this is a piece of music rather than an essay. We've all had days like this.

Konstruktivists - Destiny Drive (2015)

To continue my ongoing and impartiality-free series of reviews of work by bands of which I was once a member, and books from the same people who publish my own shit, here's Konstruktivists once again. I may no longer spend my evenings stood next to Glenn whilst playing an accordion, but I was invited to contribute cover artwork to this one, alongside a couple of other people, the idea being that whichever submission worked best would be chosen. I was actually a little peeved when they rejected my crayon drawing of Glenn chuckling away in a tree, trousers down as he poops out a log onto the head of a pissed-off looking Boyd Rice dressed as Adolf Hitler, but never mind.

Anyway, aside from a collection of early tapes released as a double album a couple of years back, this is Konstruktivists' first proper vinyl album since Glennascaul way back whenever that was, and either Glenn and Mark have really upped their game of late, or Konstruktivists just make a lot more sense pressed onto a big fat slab of hard - and blood red, I couldn't help but notice - wax, because this is probably the best thing they've done since Psykho Genetika; in fact it may be the best thing Glenn has done, full-stop. In my view, Glenn's music tends to be at its finest when he's working with people who aren't busily trying to sound like someone else, persons tagging along for the sheer thrill of atmospheric noise and seeing what the hell will happen next, and whose criteria for success reaches a bit further than how closely the end result resembles fucking Borghesia.

Cough. Cough.

Anyway, to get to the point, Mark Crumby clearly fits this sonic bill, and so everyone involved brings the best out of everyone else. Like the greatest of Konstruktivists' music, Destiny Drive has a strong element of soundtrack, a certain dramatic tension going beyond the bog standard efforts of just wacking the decay setting of the reverb up to five minutes and thus leaving more free time in which to sift through the usual Blade Runner samples like every other fucker and his milkman. This is something more theatrical, more European and less industrial by the usual terms, and Glenn is afforded full reign to vent his love of characters darkly drawn within the grooves - much more akin to the legacy of Yello, Tuxedo Moon, or even the Residents than you might have suspected. Destiny Drive is closer to a performance than any conventional soundscape, I suppose fulfilling the promise of tracks such as Housewife's Choice - music as narrative, more than just a beat and a feeling. I know I'm biased, but I really never anticipated this record being anything like this good.

Annoyingly, the cover artwork is also fantastic, and I can see why it was picked over the thing I came up with; so darn, but also yay!

Andrew Cox - Past Imperfect (2014)

To get the usual disclaimer out of the way, I used to know Andrew Cox fairly well, or at least as well as it was probably possible to know him. Back when I was living in Chatham in Kent, Glenn Wallis of Konstruktivists gave me a large carrier bag full of cassettes which people had sent to him, and the best of these were Vice Versa's eight track demo - a damaged copy as individually stamped upon by an irritable member of Cabaret Voltaire after some show in Sheffield - and Andrew's Methods C60. I had vaguely heard of MFH, the band Andrew formed with his friend David Elliott, as a name from the fanzines, but Andrew Cox himself was unknown to me. Several years later shortly after moving to London, I found that by unlikely coincidence, Andrew Cox and David Elliott lived around the corner and so I introduced myself. Andrew and I became good friends, but he died in 2009 which was incredibly shit, all things considered.

David Elliott's efforts to get the work he recorded with Andrew as both MFH and Pump heard have been commendable, as is this latest release gathering a selection of Andrew's solo work harvested from old tapes, not least because the poor old bugger deserves wider recognition even if it's unfortunately posthumous, and because Andrew recorded some great stuff in his time.

Much of what is gathered here was ground out on primitive equipment, some of it home-made, but is of such quietly inventive composition as to render concerns about sound quality entirely superfluous. It has that stressed quality of those very early instrumental Throbbing Gristle jams with Albrecht D - at least prior to the member of that particular group most resembling Mrs. Slocombe from Are You Being Served? deciding he wanted to be Lou Reed; so Past Imperfect is too abrasive to be considered entirely ambient without being necessarily harsh, or being as limited in terms of mood as anything which might ordinarily be labelled industrial or - God forbid - dark ambient. My friend Carl described this disc as the Forbidden Planet soundtrack as recorded by Nurse With Wound, a comparison which works quite well and which I believe Andrew would have enjoyed. If - I suppose - lacking sophistication in certain respects, this is music which nevertheless could not have been made with more modern digital technology. It's all about getting the most evocative atmospheric effects out of that which is to hand, and in this capacity Andrew worked some real magic.

Lordy - how I miss him.

Available from Forced Nostalgia.

Konstruktivists - Persona Non Grata (1997)

Here's another with which I may not be able to exercise absolute impartiality, having once been in the band. I'd left by the time this was recorded, although I should probably mention that I supplied some artwork for the cover of the original 1997 release, this iteration being a timely reissue from Klang Galerie.

For anyone not familiar with the name, Konstruktivists were formed by Glenn Wallis, a founding member of Whitehouse and a former Throbbing Gristle associate. I began writing to him around 1984 or thereabouts, having been impressed by A Dissembly, his debut album on the Flowmotion label. A couple of years later by fairly massive coincidence I found myself living around the corner from Glenn and his wife when I moved to Chatham, and so we became good friends and I ended up in the band for a while. We put out an album called Forbidden on the World Serpent label in the early nineties, and although it has its moments it was never something about which I felt entirely convinced. My contribution had been negligible, and I had disliked the rushed recording, and the fact that the other guy in the band, the one with the massive sampler and all the technology, would apparently have preferred to be in Front 242 or one of those stomping around in camouflage trousers groups. His ambitions seemed limited to making records which sounded like records which had already been made by other people, and he didn't seem to like me very much.

Tapes aside, this was roughly speaking the first Konstruktivists studio album since Forbidden, recorded by Glenn who by this time was working with Mark Crumby, former editor of Impulse magazine. Whilst Glenn has always been entirely capable of producing great works on his own, he tends to be at his best - in my opinion - when able to spark ideas off an inspired collaborator. So with Persona Non Grata it was great to see him once again raising up a din with someone capable of generating ideas, and who was himself bringing more to the table than just hands up if you like Nitzer Ebb.

Persona Non Grata samples from Konstruktivists' own back catalogue, although it's quite different in sound to any of those earlier works, and serves as an indication of what set this band apart in the first place. As ever, the aesthetic seems more in tune with the likes of La Düsseldorf, Heldon, and other European experimentalists than the usual industrial suspects, even if the sound is quite different. Percussion and rhythm are employed as texture rather than in acknowledgement of a beat, and it generally does all the things you wouldn't expect. Having worked with Glenn, it's difficult to guess at quite what inspires him to compose as he does. His preferred notation and compositions appear to have their own logic, and are unpredictable by familiar terms, at times seeming like they have slipped through from a parallel reality. They occur at right angles to what we already know in the same way that the music of The Residents seems to belong somewhere other than this Earth. A few tracks hint at the distant influence of the trance and techno that was knocking around in 1997, and yet this is like an angular cargo cult recreation that bears little in common with anything.

Persona Non Grata has none of the obvious industrial clichés, no wanky attempts to recreate the music of fucking Cassandra Complex, no ambient sea of digital reverb concealing a dearth of inspiration, and it sounds somehow composed on the cheap Casio keyboards of a world in which such things are made from cogs, pistons, and flywheels; and it's one fuck of a lot better than the one on which I played guitar. It was a pisser that the original edition suffered from such a limited run, so hats off once again to Klang Galerie for spreading the good word.

Frontline Assembly - Hard Wired (1995)

I shouldn't really like Frontline Assembly, and yet I find them difficult to resist. They seem at times like just one of a million bands who watched Blade Runner and then tried to pass themselves off as a strategic futuristic entertainment delivery unit, as opposed to a bunch of blokes stood around frowning at a drum machine. I first heard them when Gary Levermore of Third Mind Records bunged me some freebies because I'd painted some of his record covers and he's a generous sort of bloke. Amongst said freebies was Disorder which was nice enough, but did sound a lot like an angrier version of mid-eighties Cabaret Voltaire - a ton of sequencers with added mysterious whispering. A few years later, Gary blessed me with copies of Caustic Grip and the Virus twelve-inch single, which were at least good enough to compensate for the unfortunate fact of my somehow having managed to quack my pants on the bus as I went over to visit him in Hackney - must have had a bad pint. Anyway, here I am with Hard Wired, the next album on from the stuff with which I am familiar and now, weirdly, of nearly two decades vintage.

One of the many things that irritates me about that which willingly terms itself industrial is the unspoken suggestion of boldly exploring new musical territory in contrast with how balls-achingly generic much of it turns out to be. In a past life I somehow ended up in a pub in Deptford with one of the less interesting members of Konstruktivists and that bloke from Lustmord. I sat listening as they discussed footage of tanks and missiles recently taped off the box for future use as visual material, comparing notes like a couple of stamp collectors. It was kind of depressing to experience such confirmation that all the industrial blathering on about mind control and conditioning was essentially just window dressing and of no greater import than goths pinning plastic bats to their clothes.

Frontline Assembly might appear to epitomise this tendency - all self-consciously darkly sciency song titles like Neologic Spasm, Barcode, or Transparent Species, and even the cover of this one is by comic artist Dave McKean, the absolute master of style over substance. The music itself is unusually formulaic even by the standards of the genre, almost every track being four or five minutes of the same pounding beat, overly busy sequencers, and some guy growling in the background, two out of every three songs punctuated with roughly the same three note minor chord chorus and a few distorted words.

Dying sensation.

Fascination.

Expectation.

Re-creation.

You see what the artist is trying to say here? Me neither, but it probably doesn't matter. The message is perhaps intentionally impressionistic, the invocation of a dark atmosphere, something that sounds good if you're standing in a club sweating your knackers off in leather trousers and sucking your cheeks in.

And yet...

For all the ham involved, Frontline Assembly somehow manage to pull it off through holding back in just the right places. They suggest rather than shove it down your throat like all those shitty trying too hard bands that mostly turned out to be Alain Jourgensen under one of his many wearying aliases; and the music grows on you because there's a lot going on beneath all the grunting and groaning, tricky little sequences which get right under your skin which you may not even have noticed first time around. Oddly Frontline Assembly put me in mind of those 1978 garage punk bands formed when someone borrowed their big brother's guitar and taught themselves a few Sham 69 numbers. They have that same relentless quality, fevered grunty songs chugging along on a bare minimum of chords reborn fifteen years later as a sort of cyberpunk Ramones, or summink. It's too loud and you probably won't be able to hear the words, but it does what it has set out to do nonetheless, and is as such very toe-tappy.

Aphex Twin - ...I Care Because You Do (1995)

So here I am catching up once again, having a listen to things which somehow passed me by at the time. Obviously I was aware of the Aphex Twin throughout the 1990s. He regularly appeared on the cover of everything on account of having single-handedly invented an entirely new kind of music. I was a Melody Maker reader for most of that decade, mainly because David Stubbs' Mr. Agreeable column was a work of genuine inspiration, something not to be missed regardless of whatever crap was then clogging up the other pages, The Liberties, The Shite Stripes or whoever. My frustration with the non-Stubbs derived content of said weekly would occasionally boil over into testy and probably grammatically ham-fisted missives thrust in the general direction of the letters page, one of which was actually printed. Why you no write about experimental band, I demanded to know, reeling off a list of names of artists who had been around for ages, who sold records, had plenty of fans, played well-attended gigs and yet remained ignored within the pages of the mainstream music press. We do indeed cover the work of interesting and innovative musical pioneers, came the reply, but the bold leaps of which you speak are occurring on the dance floor and within the DJ booth rather than with the sort of miserable industrial fuckers you seem to like.

I always assumed they meant Aphex Twin and his ilk, but I'd never heard any of his music. My friend Carl, once thumbing through my copy of Melody Maker, found a photograph of a grinning Richard James pulling a scary face, underlit and glowering at the reader from beneath portentously furrowed brow. 'That tells me all I need to know about his music,' Carl announced, and although he may not have been right about everything, in this instance I suspected he was close. My friend Andrew Cox was similarly underwhelmed by the Aphex Twin. Andrew was often described as a recluse, had grown up in Cornwall, and had been making electronic music with his own home-built synthesisers since the end of the 1970s, and was perhaps justifiably resentful that no music paper had ever stuck him on the cover as creator of the most wildly innovative music ever conceived.

Now, many years later and relatively impressed by the Come To Daddy video - even if it is just an old Hellblazer comic with a load of drum and bass sprinkled on top - I take the plunge and buy this; and  realise that I was right all along.

There are twelve tracks here, and nothing terrible, but - fuck - it's hardly a new kind of music. The names that sprang immediately to mind include Esplendor Geometrico, Nagamatzu, Pseudo Code, Nocturnal Emissions, Human Flesh, Kopf/Kurz, early Chris & Cosey, and Konstruktivists Black December album. In other words there's very little here which hadn't already been done, and been done better by about 1982 when the German Datenverarbeitung label put out their Sinn & Form compilation. I realise that nothing exists in a vacuum or without precedent, but most of ...I Care Because You Do could have been knocked up on a decent four track with a monophonic synth and an Alesis Quadraverb, and there's at least one number here which would have been someone tapping out a plinky plonky nursery rhyme on a Casio VL Tone had it not been drowned in a ton of reverb. I suppose this stuff may have sounded improbably futuristic in 1995 if this was the first electronically sourced album to find its way into your collection of Oasis and Morrissey records, just as fifth century yokels will believe you're a wizard if you flash your digital watch, but fuck...

This is the guy who changed the musical history of everything ever, whom they wheeled out to meet Stockhausen like it was some sort of clash of the titans rather than Michael McIntyre having a beer with Lenny Bruce? I prefer James' own assessment:

I'm just some irritating, lying, ginger kid from Cornwall who should have been locked up in some youth detention centre. I just managed to escape and blag it into music.

Well, hyperbole aside, ...I Care Because You Do is a thoroughly listenable album providing you keep in mind that it really shouldn't have been that big a deal even in 1995. It does what it does very well, which is fair enough, I suppose.