I first checked in with the The Cure at the time the remix album Mixed Up came out. I remember hearing the 12” version of Fascination Street while playing Talisman(!) with friends, and being absolutely astonished. I had no musical reference point for it, and it just seemed so dark and deep.
Initially I was not entirely sold on the band. First, I was avidly into classical music, and, er… Jean Michel Jarre, and rock seemed a bit down-market to me. Even setting snobbery aside, the group was supported by people in my social circle whom I disliked. Thankfully this pettiness didn’t hinder me from finally shamefacedly borrowing their Cure albums. Otherwise, I’d have missed out on the Cure’s many melancholy delights.
Although The Cure makes sense now as a mostly-pop act with a few early angsty albums, to a desperately naive 15 year old, everything of theirs sounded confronting, be it Faith or the highly commercial Head on the Door (I remember even being spooked by the rather straightforward Kyoto Song). What this has meant is that all Cure songs have remained really vivid to me.
Here follows a commentary on select works by the group. Is there anything you need to know about the Cure before we start? Well, the band is Robert Smith, and… that’s probably it. The group is considered goth, although - as is universal with goth groups - they deny it.
This was a US compilation of the band’s first LP, Three Imaginary Boys, with adjacent singles added and filler tracks excised. US retoolings of UK albums can be questionable - the gold standard being Capitol’s nonsensical handling of the Beatles’ early albums - but Boys Don’t Cry turns out to be a superior listen. My favourite songs are Fire in Cairo and Three Imaginary Boys. As an aside, Boys Don’t Cry was on heavy rotation during the winter I turned 17. Other associations from the time: the taste of Montana “Blenheimer” Reisling casked wine (class!) and Mahler’s 6th Symphony. Happy, happy memories.
The highlight of this disc is A Forest, but the other songs are equally, bleakly, beautiful, especially In Your House and M. I really like Matthieu Hartley’s understated organ work: augments the songs nicely without drawing too much attention. Words I’d use to describe this album are tight, dry, spare, and claustrophobic.
Despite the fact it’s miserable as all get-out, I quite like this album. It’s got a sort of languorous, consumptive mood. There’s only eight songs, but each is (or feels like) five minutes long so it all works out. “There’s nothing left but faith!” wails Bob at the end. Faith’s lyrics felt intensely profound to me as a teenager, but now I like it more for how remote it sounds. What else… I love the double-tracked bass on Other Voices, and the strumming-in-wilderness guitar on The Drowning Man. Shout out to my favourite song from the Cure’s ‘80-‘82 “misery” period, is Charlotte Sometimes, a single nestled between Faith and Pornography.
The height of the group’s having-a-bad-time-of-it phase, I find this hard to listen to now, not so much for the nihilism, which is intellectually insubstantial, but because it’s the sound of a group that’s in a bad place psychologically. Little wonder The Cure nearly expired on the subsequent tour.
Between Pornograpy in 1982, and the The Top in 1984, The Cure’s release activity was limited to three singles. After the Pornography tour and the ejection of bassist Simon Gallup, Smith’s interest in the group had waned, not helped by him doing guitar duties for Siouxsie and the Banshees, as well as running a side project, The Glove, with the Banshees’ Steve Severin.
Japanese Whispers is an 8 song compilation of the A and B sides from the three singles. I have to confess that this slight and entirely label-contrived collection is my favourite Cure release. The singles are boppy, and the B sides are strong and the overall vibe is 80s pop/dance. It’s a much more relaxed set after the gloom of Pornography. My favourite songs are La Ment and The Upstairs Room.
Eventually Smith rededicated himself to the Cure, and The Top was the resulting album. It shares the psychedelic mood of the Banshees’ album Hyaena from the same year (which Smith also played on). The Top is a patchy album; on their own each song is decent enough, altogether it’s not a very coherent collection. My picks are the very odd Piggy in the Mirror and the agreeably weird Bananafishbones.
The Head on the Door marked the beginning of a period we might call “mature Cure”. Band personnel would be largely constant for the next four albums - the longest period of continuity the group enjoyed.
The Head on the Door was arguably the most commercial album the Cure released, with the disgustingly catchy Inbetween Days and Close to Me. My favourites are the flamenco The Blood, the utterly 1985 Push, and the songs A Night Like This, and Screw.
We’re skipping over 1987’s Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me, which features some good songs but was a bit too long for its own good. On, then, to Disintegration, an album where Bob was moody about turning 30 and perhaps feeling his best was behind him. Unlike with Pornography, where the emotional pain was a bit too mawkish, Disintegration is a more tastefully restrained melancholic wallowing. The first half of the album is more dynamic than the samier second, but overall it’s a very solid record.
I remember the excitement at my school when Wish came out (at least among us girlfriendless sensitive types), though in retrospect it’s a fairly ho-hum record, sort of Cure-gone-grunge. There’s also an irritating tweeness to it, esp on To Wish Impossible Things. The success of the single Friday I’m in Love was a bit of an “egad!” shock to my too-cool frenemies, but I thought it jolly enough. My favourite song from the period is the B side This Twilight Garden, a desperately melancholy pop song reminiscent of the B sides compiled on Japanese Whispers. I’m pretty baffled the song didn’t make it on to Wish; perhaps Smith found it a bit old hat.
The Cure played a concert in my home town in mid 1992 and I almost could have gone, only my father forbade me because he feared I’d be beaten up by gang members(?!). There was no convincing him how embarrassingly off the mark that assessment was. Jeez Dad! Apparently the gig was amaaazing, but in adulthood I’m not too fussed, really. Ah, whatever, it’s fine.
Another four albums followed, but I mostly stopped paying attention. The group no longer seemed relevant to me. The last album came out in 2008, although Smith has recently threatened to put out one last one. If a new disc should appear, I don’t hold out much hope for it; what seems to have gone wrong in 21st century Cure is too much dour guitar grinding and not enough melodies and (most of all) a sense fun.
If my favourite album is Japanese Whispers (quelle horreur!), what do I think is their best album? Well that’s tricky. I think I’d say it’s Disintegration, though 17 Seconds and Faith are more raw and perhaps more interesting.
Like Bauhaus, the Cure were an outlet for alienated weirdos rather than the genuinely cool. They were even the subject of a moral panic in the late 80s NZ when a rash of suicides were linked (fairly or otherwise) with the band’s music. But I think of the Cure as relatively cheery overall. I mean, sure, it gets bleak at times, but after 1982 there’s usually a spark of humour to put the weltschmerz in its place.
]]>So what kicked it off? Well, it was lunchtime at my high school on a cloudy April (possibly March) day in 1992, and we were playing cricket using metal bats (not Dennis Lillee style) constructed from decaying roof guttering. (if that sounds a touch Lord of the Flies, it kind of was). Someone had a boombox and it was playing Bela Lugosi’s Dead by Bauhaus, and as we played the music sort of skittered around the courtyard. The urgent pounding rhythm was hypnotic, but what really got me was this avalanche of cascading, hissing feedback, a sound I’d never heard before, so abstract it could have been anything. That was the thing that hooked me, though there was a lot else to the song.
The band originated in Northampton, England, in 1978. The groups’s lineup consisted of singer Peter Murphy, guitarist Daniel Ash, bassist David J Haskins, and his little brother, drummer Kevin Haskins. Bela Lugosi’s Dead was the first song they wrote, and the first they recorded, in early 1979.
The best starting point learning about the song is this interview with the band, published to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the song’s release. In a nutshell, though, David J provided the lyrics (he liked old horror movies), Kevin Haskins only knew three drumbeats at the time and chose bossanova for the song. Murphy brought a very singular vocal style, and Ash contributed weirdly tuned guitar chords. The song structure is simple: the implacable beat pounds away for nine minutes, with no variation; alongside the drums marches a simple, sepulchral bassline. Vocals, guitar and studio fog round out the sound. The song has a sort-of verse/chorus structure, although it might be better to say it has a repeated alternation of groove and bridge.
The genius of Bela Lugosi’s Dead is that it’s both incredibly simple and wholly original. I suspect it’s the sort of song that can only be written by youngsters who have been informed by idiosyncratic and disparate influences. Ash’s guitar (when playing chords rather than feedback) sounds slightly Country and Western to me, or maybe like Velvets-era Lou Reed? Murphy’s vocals baritone muttering and tenor wailing owes more than a little to David Bowie.
The Haskins brothers rhythm section brings reggae to the party. David J’s dead, harmonic-free bass tone is a clear nod to reggae bass, and Kevin’s superficially incongruent bossanova beat makes turns out to be very close to a reggae steppers beat. Finally, the creeping, jittering echoes featured heavily in the song are a mutation of the echoes of dub reggae; even the feedback soloing is essentially a rockish extension of dub.
So the seminal goth rock song owes as much, if not more to reggae than Bram Stoker. (For all the gothiness Bela Lugosi’s Dead is the apotheosis of the have-a-go punk ethos: play what you like without really knowing what you’re doing.)
Bela Lugosi’s Dead is widely credited as the original goth rock song, but it’s debatable how influential it really was. We’ll discuss this more later.
After Bela Lugosi’s Dead sold well, the group got picked up by 4ad and then Beggar’s Banquet. They released the singles Dark Entries, Terror Couple Kill Colonel, and Telegram Sam. The latter is a T-Rex cover, and this track (and its B side, a cover of John Cale’s Rosegarden Funeral of Sores), revealed another strand of influence on the group: glam rock. (In fact you can think of the visual style of goth rock as being glam rock by way of the Rocky Horror Show.) My favourite of the three singles, though, is the ponderous, medicated and unnerving Terror Couple Kill Colonel.
After a year of singles and touring Bauhaus released their first album, In the Flat Field, the following year. It’s a set of stricken, monstrous songs that - very much in my head only - reminds me of the smell of my 1993-era Doc Marten’s boots. If their debut single was largely an exercise in gloomy atmosphere, the songs on In the Flat Field are flashes of flame and spikes of adrenal fury.
The title song seems to be about wandering around a sex district, similar to the early grubby fascinations of Soft Cell, except with more guitars and fewer synthesisers. Developing his technique considerably since the Bela bossanova, Haskins provides some thunderous drumming (he was - like many drummers of the era - a fan of Budgie, the tomtom-favouring drummer from Siouxsie and the Banshee). The song is rounded out with bustling bass, furious guitar, vocal keening; make no mistake, this is an avalanche of a song.
The other songs on In the Flat Field have a similar monochrome vein. God in an Alcove is tautly psychedelic; Double Dare is panic inducing. Spy in the Cab is a slow-burn meditation with excellent synth-boop percussion. Stigmata Martyr is claustrophobic and disquieting. The final song, Nerves, is a Kurt Weil-gone-demonic epic.
So great album then? Well yes, those songs are great, but there’s three poorer quality songs (Dive, Small Talk Stinks, and Saint Vitus Dance). Now a ratio of six good to three bad should still make for a decent album, but to me the bad songs are bad enough that they significantly detract from the good. Rather than listen to In the Flat Field, I prefer to consume the first disc of Bauhaus’ “1979-83” compilation, where I can hear In the Flat Field’s good songs plus the excellent early singles and B-sides.
When I was a teen I found Mask to be quite intimidating. It commences with the highly intense Hair of the Dog and ends with the elementally Pagan title track. Looking back today, however, the album feels more defined by its uptempo dance(!) tracks: Dancing, Kick in the Eye, and In Fear of Fear. Constrasting again is the eerie ballad Hollow Hills and the 12-string shimmer of The Passion of Lovers. The result is an album that’s fun for the whole family!
Bauhaus’ third album has a peppy kick-off with a cover of Eno’s Third Uncle, followed by the death glam Silent Hedges, and then the industrial decayscape Swing the Heartache. The first side concludes with the incongruously cheery Spirit. This song would be a bit of a bum note if not for the fact that it’s extremely welcome after all the midnight misery preceding it.
Side two starts with the three parts of The Three Shadows. Part one is all groany-ghosty, part two is an interlude of Bad Seeds-esque country, and part three concludes with some regulation Murphy shrieking and wayward fiddle-playing. Then there’s the surprisingly effective ballad All We Ever Wanted was Everything, followed by the Dada closer Exquisite Corpse, a - well - exquisite corpse construction that’s as good a way to end the album as any.
As a teenager I reckoned The Sky’s Gone Out was Bauhaus’ best studio album, as the varying styles and predominantly weltschmerzy tone made for a splendid existential epic. As a grownup I now feel the album is a patchy piece of water-treading.
The group’s final album continued the surrealism featured in The Sky’s Gone Out, most overtly on the track Antonin Artaud, but also in the giddy King Volcano and the atmospheric Who Killed Mister Moonlight?. The standout track is She’s in Parties, another reggae-inspired number that’s arguably the group’s final masterpiece. Elsewhere there’s a sense of burnout. Peter Murphy was absent from a good portion of the recording sessions because of illness, leading to several songs having vocal duties performed by Daniel Ash and David J, who weren’t as strong or distinctive singers. In some ways the album feels like an audition for the post-Bauhaus band Love and Rockets.
Bang for buck-wise, and as a record of Bauhaus as a live act, you’d do well to also check out the live album Press the Eject and Give me the Tape, which I accidentally obtained when it turned out to be the B side of my cassette copy of The Sky’s Gone Out. (This remains my crowning musical retail experience.) You could make a case that Press the Eject is Bauhaus’ most essential album. It is missing songs from the group’s final two albums, but since those albums aren’t so great that’s less of an issue than it might be.
If it’s not already clear, my pick for best Bauhaus album is Mask. As a teenager I preferred The Sky’s Gone Out, but as an adult I’m less attracted to gloom, and more appreciative of Mask’s effectiveness.
Bauhaus’ goth rock bona fides are an enduring conundrum to me. They’re clearly goth-ish, but they’re somewhat to the side of other, more popular Goth groups, such as the Cure, or the Sisters of Mercy, or the Cult, or the Mission. Perhaps Bauhaus would have been better integrated into the milieu if they hadn’t disbanded in 1983, prior to goth’s mid-80s commercial peak.
I think musically Bauhaus is more interesting to listen to than the other goth groups. Lyrically, however, the melancholy of The Cure was more to the point, while the more conventionally 80s rock of the Sisters of Mercy is more what people have in their head when they think of goth rock.
A perhaps more interesting comparison is between Bauhaus and Joy Division. Again, Bauhaus was more sophisticated musically (although to be fair Joy Division’s style was intentionally minimal), but lyrically they were inferior. No less a luminary than Peter Hook has suggested the difference can be explained by the members of Bauhaus being middle class, whereas Joy Division was working class. I’m not sure if Hooky has done a full analysis on the socio-economic backgrounds of all concerned, but I get his point. Joy Division was sensitive in the social/industrial decay of 70s Britain, while Bauhaus was interested in quite different world of Weimar Cabaret and Aleistair Crowley, which the class conscious may interpret as a bourgeois, frivolous luxury. And, as far as it goes, that’s true. But though Joy Division is the more Important group, I can tell you I’ve listened to them about a tenth as much as Bauhaus, because for me Joy Division is a joyless listen, whereas Bauhaus is fun. Of course, I’m middle class too, so perhaps I would say that…
What indeed is my attraction to Bauhaus? As a teenager I enjoyed the group’s manic silliness, which I found to be a source of courage and solace. As a somewhat calmed-down adult what I chiefly love about the group is their unique sound. Ash eschewed macho guitar posturing in favour of tense, sinewy licks. The drum production was always innovative, definitely following in the footsteps of Martin Hannant’s work with Joy Division, but much less frosty. The group clearly enjoyed working in a studio; nowhere is this evidenced more than the dub versions of the group’s singles, and their frequently out-there B sides (my fave is the dub reggae Earwax). Murphy had a great voice, even if his stage persona was too derivative of Iggy Pop (there’s a story that Jim Osterberg himself turned up to a Bauhaus gig in New York and proceeded to - good-naturedly? - abuse Murphy for ripping him off). His singing, too, was a bit too self-consciously Bowiesque. (Another story has it that Murphy met Bowie at a party, and was so overwhelmed the only thing he could think to say was “I like your shoes.”)
Bauhaus has retained a fierce following over the decades. They’ve reformed and toured multiple times, even managing to produce a new album in 2006 (the sadly uninteresting Go Away White). Love and Rockets had a reasonably successful career, although their efforts to chase commercial success meant their music was less original and compelling. Peter Murphy also had a respectable indie solo career. Overall their fame remains… well I want to say “undead”, but that’s a bit on the nose. Alright then: their fame lives on!
]]>I guess some would argue that the real highlight came after that, when he produced U2. That was probably a highlight for his bank account, but I feel his creative peak had passed. Never mind that it ended, though, what a marvellous peak it was!
What follows is a survey of Eno’s works.
After learning that Eno’s first two albums were glam rock, I didn’t bother to seek them out for many years. When I did hear them though I found them much more enjoyable than his later 70s rock albums (especially the under-inspired Before and After Science). Here Come the Warm Jets is an absolute romp, my favourite songs being Pawpaw Negro Blowtorch (that title sure hasn’t aged well) and Baby’s on Fire. The back end of the album hints at ambient forays to come. Overall the album kind of reminds me of Rocky Horror?!
This was only a year after the Here Come the Warm Jets’ equally glam successor Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy), but stylistically it’s worlds away. About half the album consists of sung songs - albeit fairly subdued ones - with the rest being a set of ambientish instrumentals. Another Green World is widely viewed as Eno’s finest rock album, but for me it’s a not really rock at all, nor wholly ambient either. Even if it occupies a genre no-man’s land, it’s an album brimming with creativity and imagination, even if Eno was going through a period of doubt in his ability. It seems strange that after two albums of bravura glam our hero felt like he was past it, but a great album resulted from that instinct, so I’m not going to question it.
Curiously, the songs-plus-instrumentals template of Another Green World was repeated on Low and Heroes albums two albums on which Eno collaborated with David Bowie. I don’t know how conscious this emulation was, but I’m almost inclined to suggest that a more real (if less Berliny) trilogy could be comprised of Another Green World, Low, and Heroes.
I bang on about liking ambient music, but if you take ambient as being Eno’s strict formulation (music as ignorable as it is listenable), I really don’t. Discreet Music is the first album of intentionally ambient music, and - to me at least - it’s not very good. The album’s first half is a series of tape loops that hint at a musical structure or direction, without ever quite having one. I find it deeply frustrating. The slow speed (re)arrangements of Pachelbel’s Canon on side two is even drearier than the original. Discreet Music’s significance today is merely as being a step towards much better things. I’ve seen Discreet Music described as a “classic” album, but I just don’t agree.
I bought this album in 1998 and on first listen absolutely hated it. I don’t think I really got it until maybe ten years later. Looking back now, I’m not sure what my problem with it was. I have a dim feeling it wasn’t what I was expecting, and though the music was a bit banal. Now, though, I think it’s an exceptional album. (Eno’s follow up with Cluster, After the Heat, is also very good.)
Low and Heroes are pretty close, quality-wise. I happen to prefer Heroes because its second side is flawless, though I think side 1 of Low is stronger than side 1 of Heroes (the song Heroes notwithstanding). (Also, is it sacrilege to say I prefer Sense of Doubt over Warszawa?)
Much has been made of the influence of Krautrock on the Berlin trilogy. Bowie’s change of style from Station to Station to Low suggests something was afoot, but the resulting music doesn’t bear a lot of stylistic resemblence to Krautrock. I think perhaps the spirit of Krautrock was more of an inspiration than the music.
Music for Films is a collection of remixed offcuts from Eno’s rock albums packaged (perhaps a little cynically) as potential film music. As unpromising as the formulation of this collection sounds, I have to say Music for Films is my favourite Eno album. I wouldn’t say it’s his best, but it is a record I find rewarding with every listen.
I first heard music from Music for Films on a documentary about journeying to Timbuktu (which I was astonished to learn was an actual place). I enjoyed the soundtrack so much I made sure to check the credits, which referred rather grandly to Music for Films by Brian Eno. Eno’s name didn’t register at the time, but when I did get hold of the album four years later, I recognised the tunes, so I guess they made quite an impact on me.
What I enjoy most about Music for Films is that the tracks are often isolated tracks of Eno’s rock multitracks, often slowed down. These sources have more intent than the ambience of Discreet Music or its equally dull successor Music for Airports.
Eno’s collaboration with David Byrne is pretty astonishing, all funky whirl and American weirdness. It’s widely considered influential, but I feel the record is actually pretty singular. It’s not like you can see its imprint on the work of others the way you can with Kraftwerk’s Computerworld. I suppose you could argue there’s a resemblance to Cabaret Voltaire’s mid-80s sampler-driven work, but you can equally argue that Cabaret Voltaire was largely influenced by Cabaret Voltaire.
(Somewhat counter to this argument, see my Jean Michel Jarre essay for some speculation that My Life in the Bush of Ghosts was an influence on Jarre’s Zoolook.)
My Life in the Bush of Ghosts doesn’t have to be influential to be a great album, and great it certainly is. It’s not an album I listen to often, though; when I think about why, I’d say I find it a bit arch and aloof. (For an example of something a bit more committed, see Cabaret Voltaire’s Micro-phonies.)
In case you’re not up to speed, Ambient 1 was Music for Airports, and Ambient 2 was Eno’s first, somewhat high-GI collaboration with Harold Budd. Ambient 3 was the aptly named Day of Radiance, an album of performances by the dulcimer player Laraaji, with Eno slopping on layers of Eno in the background. Ambient 4 finds Eno again tinkering with fragments of old recordings, repeating the formula of Music for Films. (He got into a bit of hot water when he helped himself - without permission - to an offcut recording of trumpet by Jon Hassell from Hassell’s Eno-produced album Fourth World: Possible Musics.) Again the outcome is atmospheric and introspective, and is easily the most satisfying of Eno’s ambient series. (It’s worth pointing out that with the exception of Music for Airports, the ambient series isn’t particularly ambient in Eno’s original Discreet Music conception of the idea. However Eno would return to his origin with the extremely tedious Thursday Afternoon in 1984, and numerous times thereafter.)
This was Eno’s second collaboration with Harold Budd, and much more accomplished than the first. Luminous, limpid, pellucid!
One thing I’ve noticed writing this survey is that many Eno has repeated his collaborations (with Fripp multiple times), with improved results each outing. Examples:
Even collborating just with his ambient self, Discreet Music: feeble; Music for Airports: better; On Land: best
Examples of other repeat encounters include Bowie, Cluster, Talking Heads/David Byrne, U2, and even his Roxy Music career, in retrospect.
A more common trajectory with musicians is that they evolve to an artistic peak, which then delivers diminishing results. Eno managed to multitask his way through several peaks: glam rock, ambient, “Cluster & Eno”, “Bowie”, and “Talking Heads”. That’s a tremendous achievement. He did eventually run out of steam in the mid 1980s, but that doesn’t diminish anything that went before.
Eno described himself as a non musician, but clearly his non-abilities as a performer didn’t hold him back. His art-school derived adaptability probably served him better, allowing him to be by turns a flamboyant glam provacateur, an ambient boffin, and studio guru. (I suspect his interactions with Editions E.G. probably constituted an “executive producer” role too.)
Another thing worth commenting on is Eno’s commitment to process in music. I’ve always felt that process is only as valuable as the quality of the resulting music, and in the case of No Pussyfooting and Discrete Music, I’m not very impressed with the outputs. To this day I still find strict Eno-ambient a bit of a dead end, though his work has fed into a booming “industry” of sound art installations lovingly process-crafted by a legion of academically trained, po-faced artists. As you can see from how I’ve cast these works, I don’t think much of them.
Eno’s a fascinating character. On the one hand he was a surpreme innovator, and I like a lot of his music. On the other hand, he’s also a bit of an art-school wanker, and an anti-Romantic, something at odds with my sympathy towards (a constrained) Romanticism, and respect for the Sublime. Still, can’t deny the man’s body of work.
]]>Back in the 90s I was a very serious maker of mix tapes, but I didn’t take to mp3 playlists in quite the same way, and kind of fell out of the habit. The mp3 blog revolution also passed me by. But in March 2020, with the world in the grips of a Pandemic, I felt a strange need to sum up something about me, to coalesce a bunch of songs that felt like a bulwark to All That. And having a Spotify account, well I made a playlist.
I feel duty-bound to add that Spotify is also instrumental in the impoverishment of creators, but you know, if not them then some other company would be. The real tragedy is the advent of intangible digital media. No more reason to visit music shops, no more questing for obscure disks. We have everything everywhere all at once, but it’s not nearly as satisfying, somehow.
I know there’s something of a rebellion against that, with a vinyl and (against all logic) cassette tape revival, but I just don’t have the hipster energy to buy into that. The ship has sailed, it’s time to for all you can eat at the music buffet.
Moving on from that depressing aside, I have to say that that first lockdown was rather wonderful. It was great to have a chance from the usual madcap tedium of life, the weather was nice where I lived, and when we went for socially distanced walks everyone kept each other at arms’ length, which is how I’d prefer to have them. My wife overcompensated for the uncertainty with unconstrained grocery buying, so we feasted like kings.
I suppose I should acknowledge that in New Zealand covid was controlled relatively quickly, so the lockdown felt worthwhile. Not everyone had such a benign experience, and much of the planet went mad over the following two years, including New Zealand too, at the very end. But that first lockdown, I enjoyed it.
Back to the playlist: now these songs have a kind of spirt about them that induces a kind of gleeful mania that I call “Yeah!”. But while most of these songs have significance for me, but they aren’t necessarily my all time favourites. For example: California Uber Alles is a rollicking good time, but I’ve never checked out the band’s catalogue beyond their debut. To complicate things further, some tracks are from bands I do like but aren’t my favourites. And to cap it all many of my favourite groups (and composers) aren’t represented at all because they simply didn’t create the kind of music that stimulates yeahness in me. So this playlist is a kind of non-sequiteur slice of excitement that definitely represents something of me, without giving a sense of the totality of my musical taste whatsoever. I have a conceit that no algorithm monitoring my life’s listening could ever compute this playlist from this material, because yeahness is solely defined in my brain with no obvious external criteria. But in 2023 I don’t feel I can say it definitely won’t happen.
Third Uncle is a Brian Eno cover. The original is an art rock classic, but it feels a bit flabby compared to this Bauhaus do-over, which is a Plinian eruption of punk mania.
One of these days (God help you) I’ll write an essay on Bauhaus, who are an enduring wrong-headed pleasure. As well as writing many excellent, strange songs of their own, they did a sideline in glam rock covers. Two of note they did were T-Rex’s Telegram Sam, and Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust, which was released as a (Top 20 UK) single. All of these covers are (in my rather sacrilegious view) superior to the originals.
Tones on Tail featured two Bauhaus alumni, and Go! has similar energy. More from them later.
Probably a pretty unorthodox choice for a YMO track, but I like this song’s genial mania. Wheee!
RIP Sakamoto-san and Takahashi-san.
We’ve had three post-punk/new wave fest, so let’s mix it up by zipping to the 21st century, to hear some weird jazzy neo pagan antics by one of modern electronica’s finest producers. Wordless groaning? Check! Bewildering changes in time signature? Absolutely! Hippie flute? Er, sure! Subliminal sparkling synthesis? Absolutely! Just ecstatic.
This one conjures in my head a back alley chase on a desert world a thousand years from now. Glorious track.
This track was the opening theme for the late Satoshi Kon’s surreal anime masterpiece Paprika (which lamentably turned out to be Kon’s final film). Again, this track is very high energy, to the point where the mix is (to my humble ear) a touch oversaturated, but it’s a perfect intro to the movie’s bonkers world.
Hirasawa’s work is worth expanding on. Originally an art/punk/synth rocker in P-Model, a group that could be described as “YMOish”, he evolved in the 90s into a singing electronica producer. He provided the score for several of Kon’s movies, and perhaps most memorably for songs on the soundtracks for the Berserk anime (sadly not available on Spotify). I’m usually happy enough with atrocious singers like Morrissey or Ian Curtis, but Hirasawa really has an astonishing voice.
A bravura piece of disorienting, gritty dance-o-tronica. The robot’s circuits are malfunctioning.
This probably doesn’t need much introduction, it’s a classic rocker. My favourite bit is the line:
Put your space face close to mine, love
When I first heard the song I misheard space face as “space bass”, which made me immediately think of Bootsy Collins.
This song is a ball of sinewy fury, and, well, “so silly”. “Silly, silly, silly”, etc. Great guitar and bass work and wonky low fi synth drums… well, the whole band’s great, really.
I have a soft spot for early ACR. This song’s a northern soul cover, with the scratchy funk arrangement weirdly undercut by Joy Division-esque vocals. The rhythm section and the slightly rancid guitar make it for me.
A grand old juggernaut, Jaki pounding away on the skins, Holger plucking out a two note bassline, Damo intoning whatever it is he’s intoning. And Irmin’s Irmining. Classic.
Speaking of Spotify, I first heard this on the work Sonos. The music in our office is pretty dire, really, and I’ve often tried to fight the blandom by playing something with personality. (One time I managed to play Chopin for an afternoon, which went alright. Another time I tried playing The Shamen’s Boss Drum album, and someone switched it off halfway through the first song. Philistines!) Just generally people play colourless “lo fi” hip hop or inocuous light funk/jazz. I mean sure, you can’t put on Einsturzende Neubauten in the office or people will get upset, but still… better if it didn’t exist at all really. Most of us wear headphones anyway.
But one day, out of the blue, in the office I heard Frontier, and I was so taken I had to check out what it was. And a couple of hours later I had worked my way through Holly Herndon’s entire discography. I was moved enough to eventually buy Frontier’s parent album, which I think is an excellent collection reminiscent (to me at least) of Laurie Anderson’s Big Science.
The arrangement is mostly voices - real and synthetic - and drums. It’s another paganish piece full of tension, with a wonderful climax at the end. I first heard Frontier perhaps a month before Covid hit, and it became for me linked to the pandemic, and a big motivator for building this playlist. It’s a strange song for strange times.
This is such a joyful song, everyone just thrashing about for three minutes. The highlight for me is Brian Eno’s repeated three note synth “solo”. On paper it’s a bit pathetic, but with his, well, Enoesque treatments it has a kind of understated cool.
Maybe everyone’s favourite Can song? The drumming is just majestic, the lyrics are inscrutable, and the jamming reveals unexpected details. It’s an utterly unique work.
This is perhaps the piece of music dearest to my heart. From the first time my friend Michael played it to me, more than 20 years ago, it’s sounded to me like the apotheosis of everything I love about 1970s electronic music. It feels like the future, but also intimately like childhood… It’s sort of hard to explain. More objectively it’s archetypal, the refined aspirations of the Krautrock movement. It’s the closest thing I’ve ever heard to my conception of aesthetic, sonic, philosophical perfection. Well, hope you like it!
The Plaid duo had left the Black Dog, but for this track, on their first post-Black-Dog album, the Black Dog hadn’t yet left Plaid. A restless, urgent, weird rhythm periodically pierced by dramatic chord stabs. Superb. Plaid have had an odd career, essentially piling up innumerable editions of about three or four track archetypes. They never produced another one like this, though, which is a shame. In this case, redundancy would be good.
The hiatus from manic music ends here… Forty years on it’s hard to understand how revolutionary this song felt at the time, but it really was. I think the track’s chief merit is how conventionless it is. As a kind of lockstep conformity later developed with house and techno in the later 80s, the Art of Noise got left behind. (There’s a series of wonderful mid 80s electronic danceish albums produced using the Fairlight CMI: Cabaret Voltaire’s Microphonies, Jean Michel Jarre’s Zoolook, and Depeche Mode’s Construction Time Again. While these albums might have enough in common to be their own genre, maybe, they left no immediate descendents and were essentially marooned in the mid 80s. Shame really.)
It’s hard to categorise this madness, but kudos to Daniel Ash’s guitar work. If there’s one word to describe the song, it’s “hurtling”.
“They keep calling me!” bellows Ian. “Yeah, right on”, I yell back. Can’t believe it was only a B side.
We’re 20 tracks in, so how about some Dead Kennedys? Probably the most energy out of any song here. The secret of this song is that although DK were punk, and they certainly pour petrol on it, it’s really a surf rock number. The lyrics about hippie totalitarianism are amusingly dated, yet still strangely relevant… From the same album I also love “Holiday in Cambodia”, from the same album. And also, er, “Too Drunk to Fuck”.
Another song that’s the future. Giorgio’s sequencer does most of the talking, while Donna’s cooing does the rest.
By the Orb’s fourth album, Orblivion, the band were well off their earlier pace, but Toxygene represented one last hurrah, a furious barn stormer of a track.
I suspect Sisters fans will find it disgraceful I picked this track over any number of worthier ones, but this dodgy cover just makes me laugh, and comes from the early period when Andrew Eldritch didn’t take himself too seriously. Having a man singing what was originally a female part adds a bit of an amusing gay overtone to procedings, but what I love most is the inconcruous chugging guitars and Eldritch’s stentorian delivery.
Another anecdote: back when I was in my teens I dubbed this track off another dub (probably off bootleg vinyl) I borrowed from a friend. Now in those days making dub of a dub was considered a bit disreputable, because cassette tape is a pretty degraded format, so multi-generational copies are pretty rubbish. Because the original recording was lo-fi to start with, the dub’s distortion sort of warped the sound in a way that actually improved it. (A similar situation was when, through poverty, I was reduced to listening to my walkman on mono headphones, and I found that Nevermind sounded gruntier that way.)
Finally, I love Reptile House from the same period.
I didn’t pay any attention to Adam Ant until very recently, but he was quite the phenomenon. I still struggle to understand how a song with an arrangement as uncommercial as Prince Charming managed to get to number 1, but that was the genius of Ant and his age. Dog Eat Dog has a bit more bite (hoho!) than subsequent tracks, when Adam really leaned into his pantomime persona, so this one gets my pick. (Honourable mention: the Link Wray “homage” Killer in the Home, from the same album.)
This is far from being my favourite Smiths song, but it is the most relentless. The rhythm section is blistering, and Johnny’s as majestic as ever. Meanwhile Moz’s lyrics and singing floats somewhere between new Dylan profundity and just pissing about.
It’s got the same rhythm and chord relationship as the Knightrider theme, so clearly that bodes well, but these lyrics:
My heart was just an open sore
That you picked at, till it was raw
chef’s kiss
I do have a thing about early ACR. The song Flight, though slower and more otherworldly, could also easily be on this compilation.
He’s got to have it, you know. Shout out to Bootsy, whose bass playing is magnifique.
Speaking of Bootsy, let’s move on to the P-Funk milieu. All hail DiscordiaGeorge Clinton! This particular song is, well, furiously horny… While I’m here, let’s salute some of the silliest and most profound lyrics in the P-Funk canon:
I have tasted the maggots in the mind of the universe...
I was not offended.
and
Everybody's got a little light under the sun
and
We love to funk you Funkenstein
Your funk is the best!
I’m not the biggest hiphop fan, at least of hiphop past about 1993, but I have maximum respect Public Enemy and the raw fury of the Bomb Squad’s productions. This song is a righteous paean to Black women (somewhat against the flow of hip hop tradition), which absolutely kitchen sinks it from beginning to end.
The KLF’s oeuvre wasn’t added to Spotify until 2021, but this track, a grand old acid house warhorse, makes for a welcome addition. Pure Trance purists will prefer the 1988 original, but this successful retooling was a template for the KLF’s remarkable achievements and hijinks in 1991.
This is definitely the most minimal yeah! song in this comp, but the commencement of the motorik three note sequence never ceases to rouse my passion. I’d always thought the song had no percussion, but just listening back just now I noticed a fairly discreet kick pulse. Who knew?
I’ve never been quite sure of where I stand on Alan Vega’s Elvis-having-a-seizure singing, but I guess it served to put off squares. It’s strange to hear a song that’s not at all rock and roll and yet utterly rock and roll.
My favourite Aphex Twin album is Selected Ambient Works ‘85 - ‘92 - in fact the only other album from him that doesn’t aggravate me is Syro 25 years later. As for Green Calx, it isn’t ambient in the slighest; instead it’s a majestic acid banger.
I have a massive softspot for OMD, even if they’re a bit naff. This enconium to electromagnetic energy bounds along like a jolly labrador (and with about as much brains). I highly recommend its parent album, Dazzleships.
“Oh - oh - oh life can be cruel.” Not sure if there’s a song more 1979, with the Moroder-produced phased sequencer line, and David Sylvian’s hair (soon to be “emulated” by Duran Duran). Mick Karn (RIP)’s erotic(!) bass work is the chief delight.
This is as good a point as any to give an honourable mention to Gary Numan’s Cars, which is kind of a “Yeah!” song, but somehow in my head not quite.
Coming at the end of Warp’s golden age of “IDM”, Spanners is my favourite album of that genre, probably because it isn’t very representative (not too-cool like Aphex Twin, nor scornful like Autechre). End of Time is a UFO joyride near the end of Spanners.
I’m still a bit grief-stricken Spanners was the group’s last outing before splitting into Plaid and a one man Black Dog (Ken Downie). Thirty years later Plaid, though never less than immaculate, is just going through the motions, while the Black Dog bangs out solid but largely miserablist techno and ambient. Well, age shall not wither Spanners, nor the rush of End of Time.
Yeah! songs don’t feel very concludey to me - they’re a bit like an alarm clock being used to get a baby to sleep. So cap off this excursion I’ve picked the highly apt At Last, as a very decent - if not highly energetic - finale.
]]>It all started around about 1981 when I started getting lego sets as presents. I was 5-6 years old and anything coming into contact with my senses felt extremely vivid (or at least my memories I retain from that time are vivid), and the colour and feel of those first pieces of plastic loom large in my brain.
While the first, modest Lego sets my brother and I received were cool enough, we spied greater riches in the Lego catalogues we’d sometimes acquire. Seeing dioramas of many sets on display - whole cities sometimes - was like peering into another world: an idealised (Danish) version of reality peopled with friendly automatons. (All this was, of course, satirised very accurately in the first Lego Movie.)
What attracted me more than life on Lego Earth, however, was the possibility and promise of the Lego space sets, and when in toy shops I loved scanning boxes showing rocket ships in front of Star Trek-esque backgrounds.
Within a year I’d acquired some smaller space sets, but around 1982 my friend Kevin received one of the larger ones, model number 924. This was part of a series of three spaceship models: 918, 924, and 928; all variations of the same blue and grey spaceship archetype (reminiscent but of course legally distinct from a Star Destroyer from Star Wars). 924 was pretty decent; the engines at the back swung open to reveal a modest cargo bay. But the set that really impressed me was the big daddy of the series, 928. This behemoth sported four grey rocket engines, compared to 924’s two and 918’s one, and the cargo bay contained a moon buggy. When my grandparents went on holiday to Australia in 1983, my mother arranged, at my behest, for them to fetch back 928 (hopefully duty free!).
When they returned to Wellington some weeks later (in a short-bodied 747, landing at Wellington airport, can you imagine it?!), it turned out 928 was no longer being produced. Instead they picked up 6980, 928’s grand successor. (So expensive was the set that it was supposed to be my birthday and Christmas present combined. My parents seemed to have forgotten this come December, luckily.)
Now 6980 was a pretty decent ship (lucky boy, so much privilege, etc), and it did have more going on than 928 (a detachable science lab, a twin cockpit, and what looked like four cannons sticking out at the front). And yet it lacked the angular, solid seriousness of the earlier dreadnaught. So 928 remained lodged in a more wistful ventricle of my heart, and for many years afterwards (indeed, even into my late teens!) I would periodically attempt to build the most faithful of version of 928 I could from the lego pieces I had. I did a decent job, but I was never going to get there. 6980 turned out to be the last lego set I acquited as a child. Thinking about it now, I’m not sure if my parents felt I already had enough, or if I lost interest in acquiring more sets. Probably a bit of both.
Not much happened for nearly 40 years (has it really been that long?!), until my son Angus appeared on the scene and reached the age of lego acquisition. (And boy has he acquired it; I reckon he has perhaps three times as much lego as I ever did, and he plays with it about a tenth as much.) I frequently recalled set 928 wistfully as “the one that got away”. Well, my highly practical wife Sally wasn’t having any of that, and set about combing trading sites in the hope of acquiring the set.
I have to say that in adulthood I hadn’t considered getting my hands on the set because I was an adult, and it wouldn’t be the same as having the lego set in 1983. As far as that goes, that’s absolutely true, but Sally saw getting the set less as an exercise in whimsical indulgence, than an opportunity for Angus and his dad to build something together. Well, put like that, sure, why not?
Eventually a set of assorted space lego bricks came up, and spying components from 928, we took a chance and bought it. Our instincts were correct and from the pieces we were able to assemble a largely complete 928 set, shown below.
So, what’s it like the assembling the lego set of your dreams 40 years later? Well, I have to say it felt a bit like reading a book when you already know the plot. There’s a certain satisfaction in getting the job done, and curiosity about the detail, but my world wasn’t transformed. Even building 6980 (back then) was more momentous. Still, it’s satisfying to have the set, even if, perhaps, not having 928 was what made 928 so appealing. Oddly, the set doesn’t feel like mine, but more like I’ve borrowed someone else’s. Even so, I do get some satisfaction sometimes by briefly walking around my living room with it making psshew noises.
Sally didn’t stop there. Still keeping an eye on the second hand sites, another set, Benny’s Spaceship from the Lego Movie, came up for sale. She purchased it as a Christmas project for Gus and me.
I found the character of Benny in the Lego Movie a little frustrating. I mean, it was nice he was there to represent classic Space Lego (although I feel he would have been better wearing the OG red or white spacesuit; the blue one came along several years later…). I didn’t much like his spaceship in the movie, either. It was clearly intended to recall 928 (having LL929 printed on the side of its fuselage, like the original), but it lacked the clean lines of the original, and was much too busy in detail and festooned with crap. I would have preferred if Benny had just flown 928 itself. It wouldn’t have made any sense in the context of the story, but it would have been giving the set the due that one middle aged man felt it deserved.
Well, let’s moving on from all that pointless rumination. It came to pass that Angus and I built 929. Now that I’m acquainted with its physical form, I have to row back some of my criticisms. Although it certainly is excessively baroque, it’s well-thought-out baroque, with several nods to other classic space lego sets. And 929 is highly “playable” (a prized trait for a lego set, I’m informed): there’s two sets of missile launchers, and even a couple of mini-fighters attached at the tip of each wing. The rococo ornamentation on the ship does have benefits: the second-hand set we bought had a few pieces missing, but with so much greebley finish on the surface, it’s impossible to tell that some of it is not there.
There’s one final chapter to this sort-of tale. As part of its commemorations of its 90th anniversary in 2022, Lego brought out 10497, a tribute to 928 (the 10497 number is a reference to the US catalogue number for the set, which is 497 - the number on the side of the ship remains 928 though, as with the original 497). Sally asked me if I wanted it, and, perhaps inevitably, I said yes. So for Christmas 2022, Angus and I received and constructed 10497.
10497 is pitched as a modern version of 928 (150% the size of the orignal, with twice the number of pieces). Building it was like watching a story unfold, each element was had been chosen thoughtfully.
There are numerous improvements on the original. For starters, the new model makes extensive use of technic bricks for the skeleton of the ship. This provides an opportunity to project the fuselage at an angle to the wings, with the result that the new ship is sleeker and less boxy than the original.
928’s austere cabin gets more decoration; the larger fuselage provides room for beds for (the lack of which detail used to bother me as a child; now if they could just add in a toilet…) There’s also an airlock door between the cabin and the cargo area. The unfolding rear doors now latch more naturally - no need for the original’s separate 1x2 plate to keep the halves together. The ramp for the buggy extends in an ingenious fashion, and finally (but far from least) the ship sports retractable landing grear.
But there are downsides. One is that the wings, originally the thickness of a standard lego plate, are now built much thicker. This change makes for more realistic wings, but the result is an overcompensation, more reminiscent of the curtain of a hovercraft than the wing of a space plane. Similarly, the spoiler on top of the fuselage is a bit overbearing. And while the engines now have a more realistic look, the old grey cones and cylinders of the original are to me the most iconic Space Lego pieces of all, and I miss them on 10497 (and 929 for that matter).
But the biggest problem is that 10497 isn’t really a set you can play with. Much of the exterior, especially the wing, and the pieces supporting the cockpit, fall off when you touch them. The set is too heavy for little arms, as well. Aside from its antennas, which were forever falling off, 928 was built like a brick shithouse. So not without its faults, but I’ll say that on balance Lego did a pretty solid job with 10497.
Does 10497 justify its existence, or is it a bit of overindulgence intended to suck money out of the wallets of ageing Gen Xers? I think the answer is yes, on both counts. I can’t say I regret having it, though.
As with other fixations I’m documenting on this blog, there’s not much in the way of conclusion. I don’t have any great insights from seeing my childhood fixation through. I will though give a give a shout out to Jens Nygaard Knudsen (RIP), who invented not only 928 and many classic Space Lego sets, but also the Lego minifigure.
I’d like to give a “Lego isn’t what it was in the 80s” speech, but I don’t quite believe that’s true. Lego from long ago certainly feels purer than today’s swamp of sets licensed from media franchises (think Harry Potter or Star Wars), but the creativity and imagination put in to Lego remains high; maybe not in the sets but in the freeform creativity of Lego practitioners as evidenced on the various Lego Masters series. I do feel exhausted imagining all the plastic extruded to make lego each year, but I can’t begrudge kids today having the same fun I have. So, keep going? I guess?
]]>I have a somewhat complex relationship with the New Age project. As a rationalist I think a lot of it is embarassing boomer humbug, but as a bit of a romantic I think gee, it would be rather grand if aliens built the pyramids (for some reason?), or if dreamcatchers actually did something. It’s scandalous for me to admit, but in my teens I had a set of windchimes (luckily Wellington is so windy they tended to make a terrible racket, so I seldom had a chance to “use” them…).
As for New Age music, I had a bad formative experience with Constance Demby’s Novus Magnificat as a teenager, and I have maintained an instinctive wariness ever since. But over the past 20 years I’ve discovered quite a few genuinely New Age albums that I have to admit I think are genuinely good. Some are good in spite of their New Age trappings, and some are even good because of them. Here follows a write up of these albums. I’m not sure if I’m writing this as an act of penance, or because I’m so astonished I want to spread the word.
I first heard throat singing on KLF’s Chill Out, back in the mid 90s. We assumed the effect was artificial, and when we found out later that humans could actually make those sounds, I was absolutely astonished.
Although overtonal singing hails from central Asia, in the mid 1970s an American named David Hykes appropriated(!) this vocal technique and assembled his Harmonic Choir, to project over- and undertones to curious Western audiences.
Hearing Solar Winds was recorded in a French Church over several nights in 1982. It’s just voices and reverb and the occasional tinging Buddhist chime (which I find a bit unnecessary, but I don’t begrudge it).
Proceedings commence with Rainbow Voice, in which said voice emerges gradually from silence, producing, well, a spectrum of harmonics. (It reminds me of the numerous hours I spent as a late teen low-pass filter sweeping a squarewave bass drone, and enjoying the hearing harmonics wink in and out of existence.) This super bare arrangement - voice, harmonics, reverberation is a great platform on which to kick off the album.
“Multiplying Voices At the Heart of the Body of Sound” (not an early Tangerine Dream track title, but indistinguishable from one), as the title suggests, introduces multiple voices, singing the same tone but slightly detuned to create beats. The vocal control on display is impressive, while the detuning effect adds undercuts the tweeness with a bit of dissonance. Eventually the voices resolve into a major chords, but rather than be sappy, it manages to feel “right”.
Arc Descents features voices slowly descending, falling out of and into tune gracefully. Spacey. The strangely modernly-titled Gravity Waves is a 2001ish soundscape of gradually evolving harmonies. The longest track is Telescoping, where the voices ranging through one another in a slowly changing, hypnotic way.
On Ascending and Descending the voices range up and down in a way similar to the opener Rainbow Voice. It’s slightly reminiscent of the Popul Vuh track that opens Herzog’s Nosferatu. Then the sound fades away.
What makes this album so good? I think part of the key is that it’s powered solely by the human voice, which makes it timeless. The voices are suspended in space too, and the church’s reverb is suggestive of eternity. Hearing Solar Winds is a great showcase for Hykes’ vision and the Harmonic Choir’s skill. Also, the album has helped me to slumber on many a night, so thanks, team!
Steve Hillage and wife/partner Miquette Giraudy were previously in the prog-hippie band Gong, where the pair provided some of the group’s more contemplative electronic moments (ie tracks where no one banged on about bloody pothead pixies).
Rainbow Dome Musick was “Recorded for the Rainbow Dome at the Festival for Mind-Body-Spirit Olympia London April 21-29. 1979.”, which confirm’s the album’s New Age pedigree. Proceedings commence with the sound of water trickling into a pool, which, on playing back just now, encouraged my wife to use the bathroom. Over this noise electric piano and synth flutter gently. Gradually a spiraling sequencer comes in to play. Hillage’s guitar then holds forth.
Side 2, “Four Ever Rainbow”, starts with a bell ting and some raspy bass monosynth harmonic twiddling. There’s then a parade of catlike sinewaves and a plinky heavy delayed synth. It sounds a lot like the Orb, and this is no coincidence: Rainbow Dome Musick was a disc spun by the Orb’s LX Paterson and the KLF’s Jimmy Cauty when they (re)discovered ambient in the late 80s. Later Hillage and Giraudy performed on the wonderful Orb track Blue Room.
Iasos is an American-Greek New Ager, and though this album was recorded in the mid 1970s it feels much later than that, perhaps because it was an influence on what came after? The music is clear and peaceful without being cloying, and there’s a fresh, bright openness to the sound. The arrangement is reasonably jazzy, with flute, guitar, and piano, garnished with synth washes and plenty of space in the arrangements. It’s a musical document that while utterly New Age doesn’t feel doctrinaire about it. To me the standout track is Rainbow Canyon, which has a Gongish, Krautrocky vibe. Lots of shimmering slide or pedal-steel guitar.
Ashra was a solo project of German guitarist Manuel Gottsching, he of mighty Krautrock unit Ash Ra Tempel. The title of the first Ashra album, New Age of Earth (1976), gives a clear indication of Gottsching’s intentions, but the followup album Blackouts is the one I wish to include here.
The first track, “77 Slightly Delayed”, is a genial piece, synth-propelled and with interest maintained by Garcia-esque guitar. Track 2, Midnight on Mars, is a gentle space jazz outing. Don’t Trust The Kids, sounds more like Air than anything else!? Following on, the titular Blackouts, erupts in a blaze of guitar. Shuttlecock is a geometric spiral of multiple guitars and afro rhythms. Concluding the album is the more straightforwardly New Agey Lotus Part I - IV, which shuffles around reasonably cheerfully, although some dissonance is allowed in at one point.
New Age of Earth is more straightforwardly New Age than Blackouts, but because of that it’s less interesting. Is Blackouts New Age enough? Well, if you compare it to the primordial fire of Ash Ra Tempel’s first album, it is, yes. If you compare it to something Hearts of Spacey, maybe not so much. Interestingly, the Ashra album following Blackouts, Correlations (1979), was a more rock(!) affair, so it’s almost like over the course of three albums Gottsching recanted his New Age swerve.
Tony Scott was primarily a jazz clarinetist, but was interested in Japanese music, and produced an album considered to be the first of the New Age.
The arrangement is very minimal: Scott with his clarinet, plus koto and shakuhachi. At first the music is standard minor key folk Japanese, but Scott’s clarinet puts enough bend into the notes that you realise you’re listening to something intentionally other. Scott has the audacity to believe he has something to add, and he goes right ahead and does it. The chief joy for me in this is that because he was a pioneer (well, aside from all other appropriations from outside the western canon, over hundreds of years…), his performance is unselfconscious. He’s playing his way - but sensitively - and it just works.
My only criticism of Music for Zen Meditation - and a more general criticism of this mode of Japanese folk music - is that the minimal arrangement, the meditative mood, and the traditional scale used make for a very limited style. I know that that’s kind of the point - to transport the listener’s mind to the same Zen place, every Zen time. Even so, I think this limitation is still worth pointing out. If you like, Music for Zen Meditation is the Alpha and Omega for this sort of thing.
Michael Stearns’ biggest claim to fame is that he scored the early 90s “non-narrative” (their term) documentary film Baraka. His career began a long way before that, however, and Planetary Unfolding is a remarkable document from the early 80s. The first track, “In the Beginning”, unfurls inexorably from a quiet bass drone into a transcendent crescendo that I would have to say is the transcendiest and cresciendiest that I’ve ever heard.
The rest of the album proceeds with much the same majesty. The only duff track is Life in the Gravity Well, but even then because it contains a wailing chanteuse part that isn’t to my taste. (Now I’m not against wailing in itself: there’s a similar example in the KLF’s Chill Out, and I am completely in awe of Ofra Haza. No, it’s the particular style of this wailing: it’s a baldly New Age, swims-with-dolphins-and-gives-birth-underwater kind of a wail, and I don’t think the album needs it.)
The final track, Something’s Moving, starts with a tickyticky sound that is quite odd for a concluding track, but it music eventually resolves with a wonderful sense of completion.
On the face of it there’s not much about Plantary Unfolding that is definitively New Age (well, aside from the afore-mentioned wailing); it could be considered space rock, or ambient. For me the New Ageyness is in the unashamed embrace of grandeur and transcendence. It’s not something Eno would find tasteful, despite being dangerously close to New Age at times himself; early 70’s Tangerine Dream embraced grandeur but made it seem cold and alien. Another element crucial to the album’s success is the use of early 80s analog-synthesis-in-its-prime synths, rather than mid 80s digital synthesisers, which would have given the album a more brittle sound (see Constance Demby!).
I’ve already mentioned a similarity to the KLF’s Chill Out. This could be put down to the synthetic arrangements, but I suspect that somewhere deep down there is a kindred spirit between Rockman, King Boy, and New Age practitioners like Stearns. (Come to think of it, I’ve just remembered the KLF’s New Agey obsession with Ley Lines. And Jimmy Cauty did those posters for Lord of the Rings. More worryingly, if there’s a bit of New Age even in pop’s most piss-taking pranksters, then no one’s safe.)
Despite my disgust at Constance Demby (poor old Constance, RIP), 15 year old me did very much enjoy the fiddle-dee-dee Celtic stylings of Enya (and for that matter, her family’s work on the Robin of Sherwood soundtrack a few years earlier). Genre check: is Enya actually New Age, or merely Irish? Surely Irish music can’t be entirely synonymous with New Age, but the holdouts would be who? The Pogues, definitely, and Dexy’s. Foster and Allan, fo’ shizzle. U2? Ah, well, not really, hmmm. Ignoring that question, I’m confident that many babies have been birthed to Enya’s soothing multitracked warbles, so I’m going to say that yes, she is New Age.
Is Watermark actually good? Yeah, I reckon. Why not? Can I declare here and now my love for Orinoco Flow? Oh, go on then.
James Holden is an English DJ with a sideline producing wonky electronica using modular synthesisers. For The Animal Spirits Holden assembled a jazzish band. The Animal Spirits was recorded with a band. The result sometimes sounds a bit like Terry Riley, and sometimes it recalls a 1970s psychedelia-infused tribal jazz. The result is really great.
Without knowing more about motivations of Holden and his cadre, I can’t say if The Animal Spirits was consciously intended to be New Age, but I detect in the music a strong sense of English paganism. It’s not necessarily a paganism from the past; it could equally be a paganism of a post-civilisation come-down. Even if the intent and effect is of a different kind to crystals’n’chakras New Age, it still feels like there’s something New Agey in there. It’s not just me, right?
After two albums of Moog doodlings (one average, one pretty good), Popul Vuh’s leader Florian Fricke decided to ditch the electronics and form a band. The concept for Hosianna Mantra was to fuse Eastern and Western religious musical styles. That sounds like a recipe for prog bombast, but it was the early 70s and Fricke was German, so the result was always going to be more a bit unexpected.
The key to the album’s success is the earnest simplicity of the music. Fricke’s band had an eclectic and eccentric arrangement (piano, oboe, guitar, sitar, and - most crucially - the classically-trained voice of singer Djong Yun). The music is utterly earnest (I can’t imagine Can or Faust ever meaning it like Popul Vuh did) and pehaps feels rather naive to modern ears, but I can’t help but admire it as being wholly singular and, well, highly irregular.
So I think I can bring myself to say that New Age is not all bad. I suppose the lesson is that if you’re creative enough you can transcend the cliches of any genre. Should I have known that already? Probably, yes. Next style to tackle? Evangelical Christian music? Oh I’d be fascinated to hear something actually good and non happy clappy in that style. But not interested enough to seek it out…
]]>As with Jarre, my OMD listening started in the 80s. The first singles of theirs I remember were So in Love, If you Leave, and Forever Live and Die. I fell greatly in love with the latter, at the tender age of 11; I found something transcendent about the song, although today I find it a bit much, esp the steel drums. After those mid 80s hits. The band kind of disappeared after that in my consciousness, probably for the good reason that they split up (for a time) in 1988.
As mentioned in my Jarre survey, the Synthesizer Greatest compilation that I bought when I turned 15 featured OMD’s early single Electricity. Although Synthesizer Greatest credited the song only to its writers (McClusky and Humphreys), I managed to discover that OMD were the creators of the song. I think this was through listening to a BBC Radio series called This is Pop in 1994. This programme also introduced me to their song “Messages”, which to me sounded amazing. In early 1995 I managed to find a copy of the the group’s first, self-titled album.
OMD were primarily formed and fronted by Merseysiders Andy McCluskey and Paul Humphreys. The band’s prehistory is extensive. As McCluskey tells it, they saw Kraftwerk perform in Liverpool in 1975, and they resolved to emulate those unlikely German idols. The punk years followed, and the pair rotated through a series of groups as part of the Eric’s Club scene, and OMD didn’t crystallise until 1978. Their first single was Electricity, a Kraftwerk-style paean to energy, released on Factory Records in 1979. Factory passed on the band’s first album, and missed out on many sales as the group got snapped up by Virgin Records imprint Dindisc.
OMD’s album debut is a mixed bag. It’s got the singles Electricity, Messages, and Red Frame/White Light. Electricity is a belter, although McCluskey’s wailing double-tracked vocal doesn’t quite have the dead-pan dignity of Ralf Hutter. Messages is perhaps the most 1980 song ever written. Sparingly written, with two chords for the verses and one chord for the break (no chorus!), the song is sustained entirely by its bleak concrete brutalist mood. Red Frame/White Light is a spirited piece of punk electronic, a love letter to a public phone box the group used to arrange their affairs.
My favourite song on the album is the Messerschmidt Twins, a gentle ballad about… something, that has a well-observed arrangement.
So far, a great debut, but there are some squirm-inducing moments. Mystereality is a flatline (although I’ll concede the sax has an agreeable Roxy Music vibe), Julia’s Song is a dirgey drum-machine-and-organ number that goes on a bit too long. Dancing is throwaway silliness. Pretending to see the Future isn’t quite there. Even the achingly beautiful Almost is marred by perhaps the most risible lyrics in the pop canon:
I'd travel oh so far
To be where you are
I'd travel there by car
To be where you are
But if I get there I'd find
That I'd change my mind
It happens all the time
To a friend of mine
If there was ever a verse in desperate need of punching up, this is it.
Many first albums sound nothing like how a group will become. With OMD’s self-titled debut, they emerged remarkably complete. Half the songs could sit comfortably on later albums; the only real difference is that a larger proportion of songs don’t work. This aside, OMD’s debut is a very assured beginning.
Having released Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark in May 1980, the group were asked to do another one asap, and astonishingly they had it out by October. This period produced the group’s breakthrough single Enola Gay, an upbeat number about the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.
Organisation - named in honour of Herr Schneider und Herr Hutter’s pre-Kraftwerk band, is by turns bleak and cheery. 2nd Thought is Organisation’s version of the debut’s Messerschmitt Twins. Motion and Heart has the audacity to be in swing time, but features one of the most beautiful synth solos outside of a Kraftwerk album. The More I See You is an unexpected cover of a 40s song, which utilises McCluskey’s Deep Voice well. The most remarkable song on the album (though not necessarily the best) is the closer Stanlow, named for an oil refinery McCluskey’s dad worked at. While OMD songs of the time zip past in under 3 minutes, Stanlow stretches to an epic six.
Organisation is a confident improvement on OMD’s debut. Having hit their stride, the next step was to see where next the group’s talent would take them.
The album kicks of with The New Stone Age, an angsty bit of guitar janglage (possibly about nuclear annihilation, but you never know), rather out of keeping with the group’s previous synth-first tone. It gives the album an urgent kick-off. Following this up is She’s Leaving, a wistful song which manages to sound a bit like Joy Division (bass, synth pads) and later New Order (via the general arrangement). (Interestingly, OMD had played gigs with Joy Division, and the bleaker bits of Organisation is ascribed to Ian Curtis’ suicide occuring during that album’s recording. In retrospect, while OMD’s silly lyrics and pop style make it seem a bit lightweight compared to Joy Division’s deep seriousness, there’s less separating the groups (during OMD’s 79-83 period at least) than you would think.)
The next song is Souvenir, Paul Humphreys’ first turn at writing a single, and providing lead vocals. The song is 3 minutes of well-mannered if bloodless romantic pining. McCluskey later sniffily called the song “soppy”, and I kind of agree with him. It reached number 3 in the singles charts, though, so saleswise it was hardly a mistake.
The final track on the first side is Sealand, which features a remarkably long introduction, a brief vocal, and a lengthy conclusion. While it follows a similar template to Stanlow (the track being long and slow tempo), Sealand is more intimate and languid.
Side two kicks off with two singles about Joan of Arc: “Joan of Arc” and “Maid of Orleans”. “Joan of Arc” is the more conventional of the two, so conventional in fact I don’t have much to say about it.
By contrast, Maid of Orleans is a waltz-time march featuring what sound like mellotroned bagpipes. “If Joan of Arc/Had a Heart/Would she give it/As a gift”, intones Andy. It sounds unpromising but it was a big UK hit. (This was from a time when Laurie Anderson’s O Superman could reach number 2.)
After two slow songs about Jeanne d’Arc - neither of which I’m particularly fond - the album’s title track is a genial instrumental confection of sound-effects, mellotron choir, and glockenspielish. The description doesn’t seem that promising, but it’s mood is genial and it’s my favourite track on the album.
Following on is the tongue-lolling puppy-pop of Georgia, which isn’t so innovative, but decent enough. Proceedings are capped by The Beginning and the End, a very gentle ballad wit lots of plinky plonk sounds and guitar. Again, nothing too startling, but a splendid ending.
Although OMD’s debut and Organisation were both strong albums, Architecture and Morality marks simultaneously a maturing of their style and a keenness to push the boat out further experimentally. The album sold in great quantities and marks the high point of OMD’s career, the pinnacle of a continual progression from unlikely teenage experimental band to European stardom. Though there were more highlights to come, it all got a bit harder after this.
Dazzle Ships is both OMD’s best album and the point at which the group began a long, five year slide into oblivion.
The album kicks off with some time pips and an ident for Radio Prague, recorded over shortwave. This oddity is succeeded by Genetic Engineering, an extremely jolly single partially recited by a Speak and Spell. ABC Auto-Industry is a bit of tape or sample looping which is a decent bit of collage. Following on is Telegraph, a storming single, belted out by McCluskey in his Yelling Voice. Perhaps the piece de resistance is the manic tomfoolery of This is Helena (your MC for today), followed by the more sombre International. A song in the same mode as Maid of Orleans, this song concludes the first side.
Side II begins with the “difficult” Dazzle Ships (Parts II, III, & VII), which is short (though perhaps not short enough for some listeners). The Romance of the Telescope is a sort of bleary funeral march. Silent Running is a gentle and perhaps nondescript song, that serves as a platform for the launch of Radio Waves, my favourite song on the album. There’s a couple of minutes of speaking clocks in different languages, then the closer Of All the Things We’ve Made, a sweet farewell.
While Dazzle Ships is now universally recognised as OMD’s best album, at the time it was considered a commercial and critical failure, doing less than 10% of its predecessor’s numbers. (Even so, there’s many bands who would kill to do as badly as 300k UK album sales).
So what went wrong? To me, absolutely nothing: Dazzle Ships has the same eclectic “scrapbook” feel of Kraftwerk’s Radio-activity (incidentally my favourite Kraftwerk album). It feels like a carefully crafted album from start to finish, and the result of a clear vision. But reading through the Wikipedia for the album, I’ve discovered none of these things is true. Apparently the album was blighted by writer’s block. Similar to what happened with the Human League after their wildly successful album Dare, OMD didn’t really know what to do after Architecture and Morality ticked every box they’d wanted to achieve career-wise. Feeling compelled to continue, but having no inspiration, the group scambled to get an album together using whatever materials they could. Romance of the Telescope and Of All the things We Made were B sides to Architecture and Morality singles, and Radio Waves was a song written pre-OMD. Meanwhile, Cold War radio tape collages were added to create a bit of concept album garnish. The process was hard on the band. Andy McCluskey kept the faith, but Paul Humphreys and the seconary members were dissatisfied with the result.
The band’s production struggles make Dazzle Ships a fortuitous triumph. Does being able to see the seams change my view on the album? Not really. Even if it’s a more cobbled together compilation than anything else, Dazzle Ships is still a masterpiece. But it does make the recipe for greatness feel even more elusive than I previously thought.
As mentioned earlier, I contend that Dazzle Ships isn’t so different than Architecture and Morality. So why did it fail critically and commercially?
Critical failure doesn’t need much explanation; the band were always a bit too pop and too pretentious, and after four albums of much the same thing, the probability of critical disenchantment was only going to increase. As for commercial failure, well, I honestly don’t see Dazzle Ships as being less commercial than Architecture and Morality, especially since the latter album has plenty of uncommercial moments of its own. I think that if anything, Architecture and Morality’s success is more anomalous than Dazzle Ships’ commercial failure. Indeed, standing back considering general statistics of the music industry, Dazzle Ships’ “poor” performance can probably be best shrugged off as reversion to the mean.
But it is true that Dazzle Ships saw OMD in a bit of an artistic cul de sac. While OMD in 1980 was placed at a locus(!) for groups interested in combining electronics and pop (think Gary Numann, Ultravox, Human League, Visage), by 1983 that style had been comprehensively mined, and the world was moving on. To get an idea of of the state of the art in 1983, consider two other pop “industrial” releases from that year: Depeche Mode’s Construction Time Again, and Cabaret Voltaire’s The Crackdown. All three groups were using sampler technology (Dazzle Ships featured an Emulator and old-fashioned magnetic tapes, while the other albums utilised a Fairlight CMI), but the Depeche and Cabs albums were dance-oriented and slickly produced, while OMD was still relying on older electronics and following a by-now well-established template.
To conclude, think Dazzle Ships’ 21st century rehabilitation, I’d say it can be attributed to the passage of time making it easier to reconsider the album on its own terms.
After the commercial failure of Dazzle Ships, OMD regrouped. With hindsight, the most dignified course would have been dissolve OMD forthwith, with McClusky and Humphries perhaps carving out a career in the Stock, Aitken and Waterman production mould. But the group’s contract with Virgin left them with a low royalty percentage, so they were forced to continue making albums rather than use money they didn’t have to get out of their contract. (Terrible state of affairs! Hope it wouldn’t happen again today…)
Until compiling this essay I hadn’t listened to any of OMD’s post-Dazzle Ships albums, but I was familiar with its singles from my OMD Greatest Hits CD, obtained back in the day. Those singles suggested that the group underwent a Great Leap Popwards, and Junk Culture’s title certainly seems like a declaration of intent in that direction.
But if you think OMD had sold out, Junk Culture’s first, eponymous track, a baffling blend of reggae and musique concrete, would suggest a continuation of the Old Ways. Track 2, Tesla Girls, however, is a single very eager for chart placing. Not great, not terrible. This is followed by fellow-single Locomotion, an easy-going brass atrocity that I’m quite fond of.
After that: Apollo. Describing it feels slightly self-defiling, but here goes: Afro drum machine sample choir guitar travesty.
So far, mostly terrible, but then there’s the rather more earnest Never Turn Away, with chorused bass and a nice bit of church organ arpeggiation. Whatever else, it adds a bit of restraint and decorum to proceedings.
Things perk up again with Love And Violence, and the old OMD charm is back. The song has a riff contrived from car horns and baleful mellotron choir. Hard Day uses a theme reminiscent of past OMD glories, with McCluskey running the gamut of his trademark vocalisations, from soft baritone to shrieking fury of uncertain pitch. You can’t accuse him of having no vocal range; vocal credibility, however, remains elusive.
Following from this is All Wrapped Up, perhaps the most insulting appropriation of Carribean music since Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da. Moving on quickly, there’s the jarringly named White Trash, which seems mostly about filling up 4:36 of time. Finally, there’s the gently beautiful Talking Loud and Clear, hands-down best song on the album and I reckon in the band’s top five.
So very much a mixed bag, but not unremittingly fructose pop - indeed several songs are given over to being uncompromisingly uncommercial. But while similar songs on earlier OMD albums sound like they come from a place of sincere expression, the experimental tracks on Junk Culture sound a lot like pissing about.
Crush begins with So in Love, another top shelf single. Oooh, so evocative! Great video too (though McCluskey walking around with a cane is a bit puzzling - the guy just can’t help being naff).
Secret is another single, a Humphreys number which leaves me in danger of falling into a diabetic coma. What I will say for him is his voice is at least pleasant and is a bit of respite from McCluskey’s.
So far you’d be excused for thinking OMD had finally gone full pop, but then Bloc Bloc Bloc lowers the tone by being a Carribean-Latin piece of nonsense. Then Women III: knife-edge poised between blandness and genius. And then the titular track: aside from McCluskey’s whispering (which sounds oddly like Robert Smith), this song could be on a Holger Czukay album. It’s really silly and fun.
88 Seconds in Greensboro, with its dirty guitar, is reminiscent of Echo and the Bunnymen. Then the Native Daughters of the Golden West, with Kashmirish strings and a wailing that’s, I dunno, the Mission, maybe? Then the too-twee-by-half single La Femme Accident. I mean, it’s not awful, but it’s less interesting than the preceding tracks. After that, Hold You, a sort of soft-rock nothing. Nice drum machine percussion though.
Then there’s Laurie Anderson-esque The Lights Are Going Out. What a weird way to end it all. Something the reader may care to note is that my track descriptions for Crush are all comparisons to tracks by other artists. By contrast, I was doing less of that with earlier OMD songs because they didn’t sound like anyone else. Is this telling?
Although my rapid run-through may suggest otherwise, Crush is an improvement on Junk Culture. But creatively there’s a sense the group was just going through the motions.
After Crush, the OMD song If You Leave was used in the John Hughes film Pretty in Pink and became a massive US hit, opening opportunities for the group in the US, while inevitably upsetting OMD’s European fanbase (not quite sure why, the fanbase by this stage must have been prepared for anything). Unfortunately, as with Dazzle Ships, this success meant the group’s US label wanted a new album quickly, and OMD were forced to record, release, and tour The Pacific Age. This process meant for a fairly dire album, but more crucially for the band, a growing level of ill feeling among its members.
Proceedings commence with Stay, which is best described as John Hughes-worthy. Then there’s the shimmering beauty of Forever Live and Die. It’s a Humphreys number of gentle transcendence. I loved it as an 11 year old; but now I’m in my late 40s I prefer the drier industrial pop sensibility of Einsturzende Neubauten’s Halber Mensch. Still, I think Forever Live and Die is a fundamentally decent song. There’s still a bit of that faux Calypso thing going on, but I reckon we can give it a pass.
The next - eponymous - song is relatively normal, albeit a regurgitation of earlier tunage. The next track is called The Dead Girls, and is plenty weird. “We haven’t fixed it yet,” sings Andy. Too right, you haven’t, mate! The result is a rare positive.
Shame, however, is John Hughesy. MOR without any element of redemption, sadly. I have to confess that for all that I quite like it.
Southern is a pretty strange instrumental: mellotron choir stabs with Martin Luther King samples. Sounds uncomfortably (in a legal peril kind of way) like My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. By contrast Flame of Hope isn’t too bad. Goddess of Love was going to be on Sixteen Candles, before John Hughes had a last minute change of heart. He had good instincts.
Then: We Love You. On the OMD Greatest Hits I found this one a bit ghastly, but - and I’m not entirely sure this is to The Pacific Age’s credit - it’s quite welcome when it turns up there. Finally there’s Watch Us Fall, which is ok. I mean, not really, but all things considered, it’s fine.
If Crush was an uptick in quality, The Pacific Age is a slide into “who cares any more?” territory. It’s the sort of result you’d expect for a band with nothing left in the tank.
After one further single (the If You Leaveish Dreaming) to promote OMD’s first Best Of in 1988, the band broke up. Humphreys and secondary band members Malcolm Holmes and Martin Cooper went off to form their own group, The Listening Pool, leaving McCluskey to continue with the OMD name. In the first half of the 90s OMD garnered decent chart success - well done Andy - and wall to wall critical contempt - boo Andy! In 1996 McCluskey finally wound down OMD activities to - wisely - continue pop production without being the front man. He had relatively swift success, helping Atomic Kitten to their first glories. In 2006 the old band got back together, presumably as a lucrative heritage act. Further albums were produced, presumably to keep themselves (and perhaps die-hard fans) interested.
I haven’t listened to anything OMD have produced from 1988 onwards, because I suspect none of it’s particularly essential. If it is, give me a shout.
Listening through OMD’s post-Dazzle Ships albums for the first time, I’ve discovered there’s more continuity through their earlier work than I’d imagined. Every OMD album after Organisation (and arguably before, too) has blended out-and-out pop singles with less accessible material, and that duality runs all the way through to The Pacific Age. But despite this greater-than-expected continuity, the results feature a marked decline. So what exactly changed?
As already mentioned, Andy and Paul felt creatively complete after Architecture and Morality, and I think the rest of their career through to their breaksup was an increasingly desperate search for meaning. Dazzle Ships pulled one out of the bag, but after that their lack of focus couldn’t be papered over. Album quality plunged, and eventually the flow of decent singles also dried up.
From a Greatest Hits perspective, the best of the “desperate era” OMD singles (Talking Loud and Clear, So in Love, If You Leave, Forever Live and Die) place the group on par with contemporary UK acts like, I dunno, ABC (sacrilege maybe?), Spandau Ballet, Paul Young, Nik Kershaw, etc. So actually a pretty handy result. If they’d dispensed with producing albums after Dazzle Ships, OMD’s legacy would probably be less tarnished. Still, you can forgive the group for doing what they had to while contracturally enslaved to Virgin.
What else to say? To my mind the group most like OMD, at least at inception, was Depeche Mode. Aside from OMD supporting Depeche for their famous 101 performance, the two groups weren’t really in competition, but comparing their trajectories highlights an interesting contrast. Depeche Mode managed to overcome the loss of their first songwriter (OMD fan Vince Clarke) and metamorphose gradually into a transatlantic beacon for angsty teenagers. McCluskey and Humphrey, however, never transcended their original motivation to emulate Kraftwerk.
So that’s the strange story of OMD, trying to have their cake and eat it as experimentalists and pop idols. Triumph or catastrophe? Ultimately, yes! Their early career of enthused technological bop is much better than their later dross suggests, and such are their early achievements, that (hopefully) their sort-of legend will live on… forever!
]]>Though I was aware of the early 80s synth pop boom to some degree (I certainly remember when Don’t You Want Me (1981) and Blue Monday (1983) came out, I was more focused on electronic musical cues from Doctor Who, or Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, or indeed from Vangelis’ ubiquitous 1981 synth hit Chariots of Fire. (I was especially impressed by how Vangelis’ studio setup had him besieged by keyboards.) But more than any of these things, my most vivid experience of this music was what played on TV whenever our local television transmitter lost its upstream feed (something that happened at that time more often than you’d think). This anonymous soundtrack featured a cascade of electronic sound which I found captivating and mysterious at the age of I dunno, somewhere between 6 and 8.
I don’t want to over-emphasise these experiences - children are fleetingly interested in lots of things. But there was something about it that persisted over time, even if in a minor way compared to say cricket or Asterix. Still, as the 80s rumbled on I really dug the Art of Noise’s Close to the Edit (1984), and Paul Hardcastle’s Nineteen (1985). (I wasn’t quite so taken by Yello’s Oh Yeah though.) Pump up the Volume (1987) was also a revelation (though possibly more for the royalty free Nasa footage used in the video than its pioneering house-in-the-charts sound).
In any event, it seems I was primed in some way when, in 1990, I saw a cheesy ad on TV for Synthesiser Greatest (volume 1), a collection of synth hits distributed in my homeland by the cheap and cheerful Dino Records. The ad featured a tune I recognised from the TV transmitter breakdown music. I had never bought music before, but I was sufficiently moved to buy this compilation. And so it was, on my 15th birthday, I acquired Synthesizer Greatest on cassette.
The album, as I discovered later, featured covers only (boo!) by a Dutchman going by the name Ed Starink. (I thought this name was an embarrassing pseudonym, but apparently it isn’t?!) The vibe of the enterprise was pretty cheap and cheesy, and I wouldn’t say it was the sort of thing I’d buy now (or even a year after I bought it). To be fair the quality of the covers was actually pretty solid, but the comp is more valuable as a starting point for further research. Here’s a list of some of the tracks:
Solid.
Let’s give it up for Synthesizer Greatest. clap clap clap
I discoverd a track called Oxygene part IV was the music I recognised from the “broken transmitter soundtrack”, and the composer’s name was Jean Michel Jarre. I wanted to hear more, and over the next couple of years I obtained (new, second hand, or cough dubbed onto tape) around ten Jarre albums. This exploration was my first serious delving into electronic music (and into “pop” music, really), so was significant for developing my musical taste. In the years since I’ve broadened and deepened my understanding, obviously.
Before we get to the subject at hand, it’s worth pausing to wonder why I was off on this hunt for out-of-date music rather than, say, digging through crates of white label vinyl at the freshest record shop in town, like any self-respecting electronica-focussed teen would done? Or to put it another way, why the idiosyncratic exploration of sounds I’d heard 10 years earlier? Well, part of the answer is I wasn’t really aware of the contemporary electronic scene at the time. My immediate social circle was obsessed with goth and indie rock, of nearly the same vintage of Jarre’s heyday. Others were listening to Led Zeppelin with the same fervour as Nirvana… In any event I didn’t really interact with contemporary electronica until I reached university.
Slightly embarrassing to be sitting out the elecronic dance revolution in the early 90s? Well, maybe… but I guess cosmically speaking it probably isn’t that important. Right?
Well, with that expression of shame and regret out of the way, let’s move on to the works of Jean Michel Jarre!
Oxygene wasn’t the first Jarre album I heard, but it makes more sense to start here.
So, it’s the middle of 1991 and I’m interested in picking up Oxygene. It’s reasonably easy to find Oxygene in record shops, and I have two choices: obtain it on cassette tape for $19.95, or CD for around $33, $34. Or buy a classical music cassette for as low as $10 (synth music wasn’t the only thing I was into at the time). My financial resources at the time were feeble (taught me the value of money, so it did) so I was in a quite a quandry. Eventually curiosity got the better of me, and I resolved to buy Oxygene.
I still get misty eyed remembering that day in August 1991. It was a sunny Wednesday and I caught the lunch time train from school into town for an orthodontist appointment, and delayed my return to education by a few minutes in order to duck into the nearest music shop (of which there were many back then) and buy Oxygene. Braces tightened, teeth hurting, I executed my musical purchase and sprinted back to the station in time for the next train. Once safely onboard, I placed the tape into my budget Walkman (no Dolby B noise reduction, but it did have a three band equaliser), and listened through the first side. I remember being both mystically entranced and relieved I was enjoying it. Unfortunately class got in the way of listening all the way through; so I had to wait until I got home. Side two proved to be as captivating as side 1. Jarre got a fan for life that day.
Oxygene part 1 starts with a genial cyclical burble of synths through echoes. Eventually the bubbling subsides into a subdued, eerie thereminesque theme. The initial burble returns to facilitate the transition into Part II. Overall part I is a fairly straightforward mood piece, but it sets the scene well.
Part II commences with a repeating sequencer line that builds into a crescendo of urgency, before yielding to a dramatic melody, punctuated by echoed sine wobbles from a VCS3. I was delighted to hear this as it’s another tune I remember from TV transmitter breakdown interludes. After the first melody, the track shifts into another theme, which thunders away emphatically with a bit of noodly soloing, until the track fades away into a slow up-and-down sweep of white noise through a Small Stone phaser, perhaps the most iconic effect on Jarre’s first two albums. Part III is a more sedate, almost oriental-sounding piece, which ends with a field recording of birdsong. This brings side 1 to a serene conclusion.
Oxygene part IV I already knew from Synthesizer Greatest. I learned a lot later that in composing the Jarre just slowed down Hot Butter’s Popcorn, to contrive futuristic synth majesty. Oxygene V starts with what a slow refrain reminiscent of church music. The chords are slightly ponderous, and are eventually replaced with the same theme sped up, with a bit of moog brassy soloing that sounds reminiscent of Ravel’s Bolero. This slow then fast structure is suspiciously reminiscent of Kometenmelodie I and II from Kraftwerk’s Autobahn album which came out a couple of years earlier. Concidence?
The album’s finale is part VI, a track whose arrangement screams “cheesy French lounge music”, on a beach, with synth seagulls. Because it’s played minor-key straight, though, it works, weirdly enough. It’s an very open-ended, ambiguous conclusion to the album, and it’s a good choice.
Where to start? There are two primary sources of genius for Oxygene: the sound and the structure.
The sound is incredibly crisp and precise, and clear - despite being recorded in Jarre’s kitchen rather than in a professional studio. The relative gain levels between the instruments are expertly balanced both in gain and stereo space. Finally, as icing on the cake, there’s Jarre’s winning choice of Michel Granger’s surreal painting for the album cover.
From the beginning, the sound world of Oxygene has always been for me a crepuscular world of stone, sky, wood, and water, devoid of people. It’s the sound of the planet before humans evolved, or the planet that will exist after we’re gone. To continue the pseudo-poetic vein, it’s the sound you might hear if you could only strip away the overlying noise of human fuss.
Let’s move from flowery phrasery to the album’s structure. The album’s parts feel carefully constructed and balanced to enhance each other:
Not only does this sequence of trakcs provide a good variety of moods, each part serves to both contrast and build upon the preceding parts. The continuous mix (aside from the gap between side 1 and 2) only enhance this sense of continuity and wholeness. The album feels like a journey.
Now I’ll concede that a contemporary first time listener might not have such a vivid experience with the album. And at the time of its release there were plenty of critics who felt Jarre’s concoction was slight, facile, cold, and emotionless. I reckon they got it wrong; in fact I reckon that Oxygene is the most quintessential document of 70s electronica. There are other albums I think were more important and influential, but if you had to pick one that best utilises the range and techniques of 70s analogue hardware, Oxygene is my pick.
Before we go further, it’s worth dicussing just where Jarre appeared from. He was in his late 20s at the time of Oxygene, so what had happened before that? Well, he spent his youth first being the estranged but well-funded son of oscar-winning film composer Maurice Jarre. In the late 60s he studied electronic music under Pierre Schaffer. He migrated from the academic world to the more prosaic world of advertising jingles, accumulating gear. In 1973 he released two albums. One was a set of stock music, the other a film soundtrack.
I didn’t get to hear these albums until the 2010s. I can report they’re pretty average - standard electronic fare for the time, and not compelling enough for a second listen. Sort of “novelty” bleep bloop stuff. The banality of these albums only serve to enhance Jarre’s achievement with Oxygene. I’m curious to know what changed in Jarre’s compositional outlook between Les Granges Brûlées in 1973, and Oxygene three years later. Was Oxygene as intentional as it seems listening to it now, or was the result more of a happy accident, where the six tracks just happened to work together so well? What’s more, legend (or at least, Jarre) has it the album was self-produced by Jarre and recorded in his kitchen in six weeks on an 8 track recorder (not terrible for the time but not state of the art). How does it sound so good that upon original release it was regularly used by audio obsessives to test out hi fi systems? I’m inclined to believe it was a combination of talent, experience with the equipment, and a very careful and judicious arrangement.
Jarre’s videography is pretty eyewatering, and worth documenting here, for shits and giggles. Here’s his debut!
He began as he meant to go on.
Since Oxygene had proven an excellent purchase, I quickly resolved to buy Jarre’s followup, Equinoxe. I obtained it the afternoon before I went up country on a trip with my history class. While coach loudspeakers blared out Bob Marley, I cranked up my Walkman and witnessed Equinoxe for the first time. (Incidentally I’ve held a grudge against Marley fans and boycotted his music ever since - even though I realise it’s hardly his fault. But I’m sure you’ll agree that things that happen at high school really stay with you.)
Equinoxe Part I is a major key fanfare realised through frenzied arpeggiation. It is a more confident, emphatic, and bombastic start to an album than Oxygene’s part I. Part II, a haunted phased soundscape, is much more restrained. Part III kicks off as a rather lovely waltz, which soon decays into a some sonic brooding and bubbling, before Part IV kicks off with much sturm and drang. This part was the album’s most exciting discovery for me; in the early 80s it was used as the title music for a long-running nature documentary series in my country. Finding out this piece was by Jarre was definitely a eureka moment.
Side two begins with Part V, which I’d heard before on Synthesizer Greatest. It’s very much the album’s single: jaunty, cheerful, ushering us towards our Glorious Utopian Future. It’s decent, but doesn’t have the mysteriy of Oxygene IV, though. Part VI is a continuation of Part V’s tempo, and is charming in a burbly, techno futuristic sort of way.
Part VII starts off with a nice piece of sequenced synth bass work. (It’s worth mentioning that for Equinoxe Jarre collborated with engineer Michel Geiss, who built a custom digital sequencer for the project. As a result Equinoxe is definitely more rhythmically propulsive than Oxygene.) The piece develops into an lengthy and slightly underdeveloped workout that doesn’t quite justify its length. Eventually the rhythm, which hasn’t relented since Part V began, eases away. Part VIII starts out with synthetic rendering of an “oompah” band playing in a thunderstorm - quirky choice, that - before recapitulating Part V’s theme in a churchy kind of way. The album concludes with a kind of heavenly Amen.
Up to part VII Equinoxe matched Oxygene in terms of quality; the only detracting point being that the album cleaves very closely to Oxygene’s template, and so isn’t as original. (That doesn’t particularly bother me; not every album has to be a significant development on the last.) Unfortunately, however, parts VII and VIII don’t quite see the album out with the same tight focus. In fact the album rather meanders to its conclusion. It’s not enough to derail the whole work, but it is a shame Jarre ran out of inspiration on the home strait.
As for my school trip, Equinoxe was the highlight - well, that and getting a chance to have a chat with a girl I fancied. To be fair the opportunity was wonderful, but I fear I squandered it by boasting about how much weetbix I could eat. Shame bro!
Oof. But credit where credit’s due, he’s wearing a hell of a cravat.
Magnetic Fields found Jarre at something of a crossroads. Equinoxe was a play-it-safe sequel to Oxygene, but by 1981 the electronic music landscape had changed a lot. Understandably, for his next album, Jarre looked to innovate by obtaining a Fairlight CMI, a fabulously expensive and very much way-of-the-future digital sampler. His collaboration with Michel Geiss continued, leading to even more complex arrangements.
The first side of Magnetic Fields is taken up by Magnetic Fields part I. In truth Part I is actually three tracks: an initial urgent introduction that gives an impression of relentless motion, followed by an interlude of floating music concrete, followed by another minor key gallop to the side’s conclusion. Unfortunately Part I is nowhere near as engaging as the first sides of Oxygene or Equinoxe.
Side two begins, as usual, with a single, the rambunctious Magnetic Fields part II. The track is the first Jarre number to feature percussion up loud in the mix. It’s not a bad track, but it lacks the majestic transcendance of Oxygene IV, or the cheery utopia of Equinoxe part V. Worryingly for Jarre, the version on Synthesizer Greatest is actually arranged better (shoutout to my man Ed Starink!).
For me the best track on the album is Magnetic Fields part III. It’s a relatively straightforward mix of spiralling arpeggios, water sploshing, slick synth bass and what could be a slowed thumb piano loop. It’s nice.
Part IV is a sort of limp anthem that plods away for a while, modulates into minor key for a further while, and kind of slinks away with a field recording of a train. A bit like Equinoxe part VII it’s not bad, but just not that interesting.
If Part IV is lacklustre, Part V (named on a later Jarre compilation as “The Last Rumba”) is, like Oxygene Part VI, a lounge music excursion. But while its predecessor has a contemplative, even melancholic tone, The Last Rumba is profoundly cheesy, and doesn’t bear repeated listening.
Well, how to sum all that up? Jarre clearly wanted to innovate, but it didn’t really work out. The complex layered sequences sound muddy compared to the clarity of Oxygene and Equinoxe. The Fairlight only recognisably appears on two tracks, and isn’t greatly utilised. Just to be cruel, compare Marnetic Fields another album released in 1981: Kraftwerk’s Computerworld. On Computerworld Kraftwerk invented techno. Magnetic Fields, however, proved to be a stylistic dead end.
Embarrassing, yes, but an improvement on before.
Zoolook was the first Jarre album I listened to, obtaining it on CD from my local library in early 1991. It’s perhaps not the most appropriate introduction to Jarre’s music, but in a way that makes it a more interesting starting point. Although on first listen it was very apparent to me “this ain’t no Oxygene IV!”, I was immediately captivated by the album.
Making Zoolook, Jarre had another crack reinventing his sound, including collaborating with muscians for the first time (collaborations as unexpected as Laurie Anderson and Adrian Belew). The Fairlight CMI, used somewhat timidly on Magnetic Fields, was front and centre on Zoolook. (Apparently the first version of the Fairlight didn’t have a sequencer, and this may account for its limited use on the earlier album, and greater prominence here.) Also in contrast to earlier albums, the primary musical medium of Zoolook is the human voice, sampled and processed.
The first track, Ethnicolor, is a psychedelic, Vangelistic (Vangelisian?) excursion quite unlike anything Jarre had produced before. The clarity of arrangement makes a welcome return, the digital sampling and recording technology used on the album providing a crisper frequency response than Magnetic Fields’ wall of low-pass-filtered arpeggiating synths. The sound palette is further expanded with live drums passed through gated reverb in classic mid-80s style. Slap bass even makes an appearance, and surprisingly it actually works. The only downside to the track is that the early melody is played through a vocal sample that sounds like “tit”, an embarrassing and obvious gaffe which schoolboy me found hard to take. 30 years later: shrug.
The next track, Diva, featured Laurie Anderson on vocals, and begins with a languorous introduction, followed by a more frenetic workout propped up by african-style drumming and guitar. Anderson’s voice outputs glossallalia that is by turns seductive and manic. The result is, once again, excellent.
There follows the title track, a piece of excellent synth funk(!), to my ears reminiscent (but legally distinct, you understand) of Herbie Hancock’s Rockit (cough even down to the music video).
Then there’s the atmospheric Dreamtime evocation of Woolloomooloo. I actually think it’s one of Jarre’s best tracks. Just really well realised.
After that comes Zoolookologie, a fizzing pop track which zings away happily, its only blemish being a recapitulation of that distracting “tit” sample from Ethnicolor.
Heading into the home straight, there’s Blah Blah Cafe, a stomping piece of silliness, that has a similar function to The Last Rumba on Magnetic Fields, only it isn’t fucking terrible.
The final track is the grave, contemplative Ethnicolor II, which is the perfect sendoff for the album.
Zoolook is - to me at least - Jarre’s second best album after Oxygene. What I admire most about it is that Jarre completely reinvented his sound and approach, and the gamble pays off.
Jarre studied at IRCAM in the late 1960s with Pierre Schaeffer, and I’d always assumed that Zoolook was the result of Jarre picking up that thread of his life again. But recently I had a listen through Talking Heads’ catalogue, and it suddenly occurred to me that perhaps another influence is David Byrne and Brian Eno’s 1981 album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. This splendidly innovative album is a blend of african rhythms, funk, found-sound recordings of human voices. Sound familiar?
The materials might be similar, but the style of the two albums are. My Life in the Book of Ghosts is skin-of-teeth experimental, a bewildering, kaleidoscopic maelstrom of sound. Zoolook is much cleaner - frosty almost - and much more mannered. But if you were looking for an explanation for Jarre’s change of direction between Magnetic Fields and Zoolook, it’s plausibly My Life in the Bush of Ghosts-shaped.
(I should say that Jarre is of course allowed to be influenced by anything he likes, and there’s absolutely nothing in Zoolook that plagiarises My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. And it’s also possible Jarre hadn’t heard the album, or that there were other, more direct influences on Zoolook. None of that’s going to stop me idly speculating, though.)
This is actually not too bad, so as a bonus, here’s one that’s much worse:
DID YOU KNOW THIS WAS MADE IN THE 1980s?
With Zoolook marking a much-needed fresh start to Jarre’s career, his next album capitalised on this by creating a remarkable fusion of jazz and ambient electronica which both looked back to Miles Davis’ In a Silent Way, and forward to the 90s ambient movement.
Well, that’s the album I’d like for him to have made. But he didn’t. In fact, what happened next (repeatedly, for 10 years!) was pretty dire.
Rendez-Vous has a bit of a backstory you need to understand before we can discuss it, so settle in! It all started when Jarre was invited to perform in Houston for a celebration of 25 years of Nasa and 150 years of Texas. In its final form, the performance was to be played in front of a massive audience, with a light show beamed across skyscrapers in the centre of Houston.
This scenario might seem a bit random for Jarre, but that’s because I’ve neglected to mention Jarre’s concert exploits. His first concert occurred on Bastille Day 1979, when he performed in Paris to an audience of 1 million, putting him into the Guinness Book of Records. Solid start… Then in 1981 he gave a series of concerts in China, notable for being the first western performances in China since the Cultural Revolution. These experiences made Jarre more than credible as a booking option for the Houston concert. Perhaps Houston natives ZZ Top would have been more appropriate, but for whatever reason, Jarre ended up with the gig.
For the concert, called Rendez-Vous Houston, Jarre went all-in, producing a new album (also called Rendez-Vous) specially for the event. He also worked with astronaut and saxonphonist Ron McNair to prepare a piece McNair would record while in orbit on the space shuttle. Tragically, McNair died in the Challenger disaster in January 1986. A desolated Jarre wanted to pull the plug on the project, but was persuaded to continue. As if that wasn’t enough trouble, the concert perparation and performance was plagued with problems. In the end though the concert was deemed a success, and Jarre was able to advance his personal concert attendance record from 1 to 1.3 million people.
When I turned 17 I shelled out for a VHS tape of Jarre’s Houston performance (I think it was about $40 - oh the extravagance!). Now it may be a function of the video edit but what Jarre appeared to be doing on stage had no correlation to the music, and it left leaving me wondering if he was merely pretending. To be fair, the vid does suggest Jarre’s semi-circular keyboard controlled the lighting in some way, but the fact it was shaped like a keyboard with keys kind of implied it would make sound. Similarly, when Jarre was supposedly playing a “laser harp” - a way of triggering a synthesiser by interrupting a laser beam - his “performance” didn’t quite match the notes.
So what gives? Well, taken in its most negative light (a view held by the normally genial UK comedian Bill Bailey, Jean Michel Jarre “is a fraud” (as Bailey would have it). I don’t think this is quite the case. I don’t entirely let Jarre off the hook, but I think there are mitigating factors.
For starters it’s difficult to replicate a multitrack recording live, esp with the limitations of 80s synth hardware. There’s one strategy that could work: create a new mix from the original multitrack including some tracks but omit others, and have musicians perform those parts. A good example of this is Depeche Mode’s 101 concert, Fletch’s uncertain contributions not withstanding.) From the Rendez-vous concert it seems some performers were present, though it’s uncertain whether they were there for show. Finding the video a bit suspect because of its editing, I went to the trouble of listening to the FM simulcast of the Houston concert, and found that much of what is broadcast is tracks lifted verbatim from Jarre’s back catalogue. The most charitable interpretation one can make from this is that Jarre focussed on performing the Rendez-Vous tracks and faked it till he made it with older ones.
OK, so this evidence is fairly damning with regards to fraud, but there’s more than one way to evaluate the evidence. Consider, for example, the practicality of organising a performance with all the instrumentation needed to replicate Jarre’s back catalogue with live performers. It’s one thing for the Stones to jangle away with their rock instruments, another to assemble an orchestra of synths and their operators.
Jarre’s 1981 concerts in China provide evidence to back up my claim. The tracks were performed live (or at least with sufficiently different arrangements to their studio versions), and the sound is much less fleshed out, and that’s even with the overdubs Jarre felt compelled to add to the concert album. It’s possible that Jarre decided not to repeat this with Rendez-Vous Houston.
And there are other factors. Unlike the Concerts in China, Rendez-Vous Houston was a one off, so there was less incentive to be live for a single concert than there would be for multi-date tour. Also Jarre may also have simply not had the time or budget to organise a genuinely live performance. Finally, the reality of the Houston concert is that it was primarily about spectable, and music was very much secondary to the light show. Having an accompanying concert might have been important, but for an average punter, how the sound got generated (and especially who composed it) was probably of little or no interest.
But that’s middle aged me’s opinion. 17-year-old me was profoundly disapppointed by Jarre showboating when he wasn’t doing anything. How embarassing.
That puts paid to the Rendez-Vous Houston performance, but Jarre’s career moved on from there, and in the early 2000s he released Oxygene: Live in Your Living Room, a performance of Oxygene with the entire original arrangement recreated with multiple performers and innumerable synths. It’s a great idea and from what I’ve seen of it, seems entirely legit. I’m tempted to say that the project is a rebuttal to earlier suspicion and criticism, but I honestly don’t know. I’m not sure it’s entirely redemptive, but it’s good that he did it.
Finally we come Rendez-Vous the album. It’s a slight nod to the past (coming ten years after the release of Oxygene, it uses a new Michel Grainger painting on its cover, and features 6 parts like Oxygene does). But unlike the later Oxygene 7-13 album, the music and tone is unrelated to Oxygene, or to Zoolook. Instead of sample-based sound, Rendez-Vous relies on mid 80s digital synths, which have a fairly brittle sound. The airless arrangement is not helped by a new stylistic choice: bombast. Now ok, there had been somewhat operatic moments of drama in Jarre’s earlier work, but heretofore it had been reasonably well executed. The early parts of Rendez-Vous go truly over the top, and not in a good way. But the most egregious horror is the saccharine Fourth Rendez-Vous. I first heard this track on Synthesizer Greatest and I thought it a bit trite (or as trite as a 15 year old can find anything). The real version did not sound any better.
The only track on the album that I find reasonably decent is the closer, Final Rendez-Vous. This is the track that was to feature Ron McNair’s saxophone. In his honour the track is subtitled Ron’s Theme. It’s an effective track, if more lachrymose than I’d prefer; it’s difficult to tell whether this was the arrangement as orginally intended before McNair’s death, or if Jarre later amped up the misery.
Why is Rendez-vous so bad, and why did Jarre turn his back on the creatively rich sound world of Zoolook? There’s so many possible reasons: synth technology was evolving rapidly in the mid 80s, and perhaps Jarre wanted to tinker with new toys that, in retrospect, didn’t sound as good. Perhaps Zoolook had been costly to produce, and/or wasn’t as commericially successful as previous albums, forcing a stylistic rethink. Perhaps he was simply pushed for time producing Rendez-Vous for the Houston concert, and corners were cut with production. Regardless of what I might speculate, the album sold 3 million copies and - lamentably - set the tone for the three albums.
So bad.
Revolutions is something of a retread of Rendez-Vous. The concept this time is social, political, and technological revolutions. This seems like a rich starting point, and the album certainly tries to cover a lot of ground. The sound is a much more developed this time, with arguably the best percussion patterns (and sounds) of Jarre’s career.
So that’s all good. But he can’t let go of that bombast, and there’s clearly an eye to another concert (this time the comparatively under-attended 1988 Destination Docklands performance.
Revolutions is not great, but there is one unreservedly decent track: the uneasy and saxy Tokyo Kid. In keeping with the Japanese theme, I think this piece would be quite at home on the soundtrack of a dystopian anime like Akira or Ghost in the Shell - excessive praise, perhaps, but I think it’s justified.
But the rest of the album… ugh. The nadir is September, a tribute to an ANC activist assassinated in Paris in 1988. The tribute idea is of course perfectly decent, but the tune is so sugary (and features a children’s choir, ffs) it’s impossible to take.
Ugh.
A tribute to scuba-diving mariner Jacques Cousteau, side one features something no one asked for: Jarre’s take on Calypso music (quelle horreur!). Side 2 features the long, ambient title track, which is pretty decent, if derivative of Brian Eno’s dreary Thursday Afternoon-style ambience.
Music’s not great, but give it up for the animators!
Chronologie (a concept album about Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of time, apparently) is an improvement on Waiting for Cousteau, but nowhere near Jarre’s best. There’s a few half-hearted nods to contemporary electronic dance, but otherwise it’s all business-as-usual.
I have fonder feelings towards this album than perhaps I should, because I bought it in Australia on my first visit there, and hearing it reminds me of a happy holiday.
More boring than embarrassing, really, save for the moment where Jarre spins around to face the camera in a manner reminiscent of Garth Marenghi.
Jarre didn’t release any new material for four years and I largely moved on from him to other electronica pastures. But when I discovered Oxygene 7-13 in a record shop in 1997, I was sufficiently curious to obtain it.
Brought out for the 20th anniversary of Oxygene, the new instalment was a return to that sound world, with Jarre utilising (mostly) the same synthesizers.
The first track (part VII, continuing on from the six parts of the original album), is an absolute tour de force, one of the best tracks Jarre has produced. Listening to it the first time felt a bit like witnessing the return of the Prodigal Son (“Jesus, Jean Michel, where were you?”). Part VIII is the obligatory single in the vein of Oxygene part IV: it’s not terrible, but a bit arthritic for the age in which it was produced.
The rest of the album doesn’t have the same vitality, but isn’t bad by any means, and Oxygene 7 - 13 must overall be considered a return to genuine form. And yet, well, when you get down to it musical sequels are by definition creatively redundant, a bit self-indulgent, and maybe even a kind of lazy. Also, Jarre had already produced an Oxygene sequel in the form of Equinoxe, so why go back there in 1997, or again in 2016, with Oxygene 3? To use nostalgia to generate sales, I fear. Certainly worked on me!
No embarrassment in this video, but not much of anything else, either.
Perhaps five years ago I gave Jarre’s 2000s work a cursory listen through on Spotify. I both don’t remember and didn’t think very much of it. Then came the two-volume Electronica compilation: a series of collaborations with other electronic luminaries. If you’re feeling charitable, such a project is an admirable piece of outreach and limelight sharing; more cynically it could be viewed as a waning talent collaborating to maintain relevancy.
In recent years, however, Jarre has experienced a relative renaissance, largely nostaliga-powered: Equinoxe Infinity is actually pretty listenable, and Oxygene 3, while a bit dour, is decent enough. But for me the stand out album of the past three (nearly four) decades is the 2021 album Amazonia. Orignally constructed as background music for a photographic exhibition, it’s a vivid and revelatory piece of ambient music, featuring numerous field recordings from the Amazon basin. It’s a mix of Zoolook and Waiting for Cousteau; more understated than the former, and less rigid than the latter. To my mind it’s the most successful Jarre’s been at engaging with the minimal sensibility of the last 30 years of electronica. It gives me hope that something new of interest might come out in future, though Jarre is pushing 75.
Having listened to a lot of other electronic music since I was a teenager, (mostly in the period 1970 - 2000), I will say that at his best, Jarre is a genuine giant. At his worst he’s a Eurotrash producer of Cirque du Soleil background music. Now I suppose Jarre’s commitment to demotic electronica is admirably of-the-people, but that doesn’t detract from the resulting music being shallow and embarrassing. It seems to me that Jarre really wanted to be a rock star, and I don’t think that instinct rather detracts from his achievements.
It’s interesting to compare Jarre with other electronica producers of his generation. But who exactly are his peers? Growing up, Vangelis seemed to be his most obvious one, but with greater familiarity of the Greek master’s work, I’m not sure they really travelled on the same road (aspects of Zoolook make me wonder if Jarre enjoyed Vangelis’ Bladerunner soundtrack though…). So who else? It seems an odd choice, but I’m going to pick Edgar Froese of Tangerine Dream, because they’re roughly the same age and span the same period. The difference in temperament between the two is amusingly stereotypical: Jarre with his Gallic flair contrasting strikingly with the phlemagtically earnest German Froese. I’d say Jarre is more musically talented, but Froese was the greater artist, if that makes sense. (To be a bit clearer, I believe Froese had an enduring motivation vision for Tangerine Dream, whereas - the ecological themes of Oxygene excepted - Jarre’s career seems to have been an endless and only occasionally fruitful search for a raison d’etre.)
A less contemporaenous but more similar composer might be American electronica producer Moby, who has had great success and similar lapses in taste. And like Jarre he seems to desperately want to be a star. This time Jarre comes off rather better for the comparison; flawed as he is, he’s never been as undignified as Moby.
As much as I put the boot into Jean Michel, though, he’s one of life’s winners, really. So you know, French shrug.
]]>For those who haven’t (as I have) made Tangerine Dream their personal religion, they were (at least for the period in which I am interested in them) an electronic rock group. Founded and principally organised by Edgar Froese, Tangerine Dream were stalwarts of the so-called (but not by the participants) Krautrock movement. They formed in Berlin in the late 1960s, and are still a going concern today. In all Tangerine Dream has released in excess of a hundred of studio and concert albums, as well as numerous film soundtracks.
My obsession with Tangerine Dream dates back to my teens, when I heard their earliest 1970s albums, an era which I’m labelling their “classic period”. This survey discusses those albums and Tangerine Dream’s somewhat overlooked place in electronic music history.
For whatever reason I always found electronic sound interesting, and started actively investigating it from the age of 15. I can’t remember how I learned of Tangerine Dream’s existence. Maybe it was because their CDs frequently turned up in the library category “electronic”. Whatever the reason, I started listening to the group when I was 16, way back in 1992.
In the age of Spotify I can find and listen to Tangerine Dream’s albums in seconds, and consume the albums under discussion in an afternoon, but in the early 90s it wasn’t easy finding relatively obscure German electronica in a small city on the s arse-end of the world. I was also budgetarily constrained, so I couldn’t just order what I wanted on import.
The upshot is that I had to be patient. One thing to be said about this scenario is that it made me continually hungry for music in a way I am not today. It built character, too!
Before Phaedra I’d heard a Tangerine Dream album called Melrose, which came out in 1990, and was sort of pleasant New Age jazz. I liked it enough to dub it, and to seek out. Up to that point electronic music I’d listened to (Vangelis, Jean Michel Jarre), which was orderly and reasonably pleasant. When I got out Tangerine Dream’s 1974 album, Phaedra, I was introduced to electronic music as a stage for examining and experiencing cosmic terror.
Phaedra’s eponymous track dribbles in uneasily out of silence, with a sinister repeating cascade of notes soon dominating. This melodic tumble gradually evolves, becoming faster and losing its tuning (voltage-controlled synthesizers were notorious for this), before expiring into a bleak soundscape haunted by demented howlings.
The rest of the album’s tracks aren’t quite as hypnotically terrifying, but just as impactful. The unsnappily named “Mysterious Semblance at the Strand of Nightmares” sounds like an organist warming up to play at my funeral, while “Movements of a Visionary” is a wondeful meditation that seems to be about both movement and stasis. The short finale, “Sequent C” ends the album on a desolate and cheerless note. The album instantly made a powerful impact on me.
I pored over album’s liner notes. The group’s three members (Chris Franke, Peter Baumann, and founder Froese) all seemed to be playing something called a VCS3, and a device with a name straight out of science fiction: “mellotron”. Finally, Franke played an instrument called a Moog synthesizer. None of this meant anything to me, but it all seemed so obscure and esoteric to me that once more I was deeply impressed.
Phaedra was uncompromising but I over time I grew increasingly attached to it. It might have helped that I was suffering from (in my unprofessional estimation) clinical depression; I was certainly finding the latter half of my teen years quite difficult. I don’t want to over-stress this, as I think most teenagers are on the edge of some mental crisis or another; it’s a pretty trying time for everyone. But I think my personal gloom does explain my attraction to Phaedra: the baleful mood of the album provided me with a kind of solace. (At that time, other kids were deriving the same sort of consolation from Nirvana; oddly, I find Nevermind a much more depressing album than Phaedra. I think it’s because cosmic gloom and alienation is kind of interesting, to me, whereas Cobain’s lyrics and music were so nihilistic it made me miserable to think he could be so closed off from positive emotion. That said I found Robert Smith adorkable, and Morrissey hilarious…)
Four months later in August ‘92 that I hit my next Tangerine Dream paydirt: the 1972 double album Zeit on glorious single cassette. (Just in case you weren’t aware, Zeit in German means time). Playing the tape revealed (rather hissily) 70 minutes of stygian mystery, or, as the group pretentiously subtitled it, “a largo in four movements”.
I listened to Zeit for the first time in my bedroom on a winter’s afternoon. Outside it was sunny, clear, bright, but inside my room the tension was building. As the first cello drones of the first track (“Birth of the Liquid Pleiades”, is the un-understated title), my mood was so hyperbolically neurotic that I was convinced the music was going to drive me mad. But I persisted, and the searing battle between four cellos and a Moog synthesizer eventually subsided into a more peaceful organ interlude. The next track, “Nebulous Dawn” was a more straightforward alien soundscape: a bit like the Barrons’ soundtrack to Forbidden Planet. It conveyed what its title suggests, but I found it a little static for its length, and I think it’s the weakest of the four “movements”.
Turning the tape over, the third track, “Origin of Supernatural Probabilities”, has much more propulsion, with hypnotic synth burbling dominating proceedings, bookended by mysterious guitar chords. It is the most dynamic track on the album. Finally, there’s the title track, a cold interstellar shimmer, occasionally pierced by the plaintive squeals of what sounded to me like a dying cat. Then the track faded away, like the dying light of universe’s final stars. I felt strangely triumphant. I’d survived the encounter, and felt transformed by the journey.
Zeit has become for me a sort of Desert Island Disc. It’s not necessarily better than Phaedra, but it had a greater emotional impact on me. It’s the sort of album that I’d hope would be playing me out as I shuffle off into eternity.
The next Tangerine Dream album I caught up with was the band’s first, Electronic Meditation, from 1970. From the title I was expecting to hear a Zeit-like ambient exploration, but what I heard was fairly middling stoner rock, with not a single bloop in earshot. Conrad Schnitzler’s manic cello sawing is admirable, but there’s just too much hippie flutework. (It’s not I dislike rock flutes - mad respect for Ian Anderson - it’s just that in this case it wasn’t up to much.)
In Tangerine Dream’s defence, I’ve discovered since that the album title was supplied by their label boss, and the recordings were demos not intended by the band for release.
In ~November 1992 I accessed Atem through my friend Mike Lindley. He played it through to me and embarrassed me a bit by pointing out at one point a fizz of white noises sounded like someone having a shower (he was right, it did). The album kicks off with thunderous drumming and organwork which reaches a crescendo before falling away. The rest of the track is a Zeit-like eerie reverie. Splendid stuff! The second track, Fauni Gena, was sort of a Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune but with actual nature recordings and rather more sinister undertones. “Circulation of Events” is a further droney meditation, while the finale, Wahn, is a short burst of tribal drumming and shouting that brings proceedings to a dramatic close.
Rather strangely Atem became for me a summer soundtrack for the summer of 1992-1993. I feel something more appropriate would have been the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Bloodsugarsexmagic, but there you go.
It was another year before I found my next classic Tangerine Dream album. Alpha Centauri (1971) predates the group’s wholesale taking up of synthesisers. There’s still rather too much flute action and listless rock jamming, but the band has least ascended into outer space, and the album is mor deliberate than its predecessor, Electronic Meditation. All up it’s a transitional album: not quite top tier but still a lot of fun.
Rubycon was Tangerine Dream’s followup to Phaedra, featuring two long sides of lushly produced sequencer-propelled astral travel. It’s a prototype for what is called (rather pompously to my mind) the ‘Berlin School’ style, popularised more by former Tangerine Dream member Klaus Schulze and Manuel Gottsching, Schulze’s bandmate in another great German band, Ash Ra Tempel.
When I first listened to Rubycon (parts 1 and 2) on my 20th birthday in 1995, I found the album a disappointing. The two sides have largely identical structures, and I found that sameness a little flat compared to the variety of tracks on Atem and Phaedra. Over time I’ve come to appreciate the album more, but I would say it’s the weakest of the ‘72 - ‘75 albums.
1976’s Stratosfear marked a stylistic change into what I dismiss as “synth prog”. Gone were the ambiguous drone washes and bloopy bits, and in came focused arrangements and guitar. Stratosfear acts as a kind of bookend in that it was with this album that “classic” Tangerine Dream abruptly ended.
Late one night in ‘93 I happened to be listening to my local student radio station and heard some groovy sounding ambientish music. Being a bit tired I decided to go to bed, but tape recorded the next 60 minutes so I could listen later. When I listened back the next day I heard a selection of interesting world music piece, followed by this one dramatic synth rock track. It began with a whooshing, skittering noise rhythm, soon followed by a propulsive, emphatic sequencer burble which cascaded urgently for about ten minutes. I thought “wow, this is great”.
The DJ didn’t announce what the track’s name was - it’s possible they had fallen asleep at the mixer - so I had no idea at the time what the music was and who it was by. I guessed it was contemporary, not really knowing what contemporary sounded like. Thereafter I’d play the recording back every so often, wondering whether I’d ever find out who made it.
Perhaps a year later, I stayed up late one night to watch Michael Mann’s Thief solely because I read it had a Tangerine Dream score. About halfway through I was astonished to hear the track I’d recorded off the radio, playing during a tense scene where safe-cracker James Caan is racing against time to break into a bank vault. I was astonished. Of course this track was by Tangerine Dream! How could I not have recognised it as Tangerine Dream straight away!?
The track’s very apt name is Thru Metamorphic Rock, and it originally appeared on the band’s 1979 Force Majeure album. The rest of the record is sort of synthy prog rock so the sequencer fury of the track proper is something of an outlier, hearking back to the Phaedra/Rubycon era. I include it here as being (stylistically and spiritually at least) part of the Classic Period.
Green Desert is an album released in 1986, based on tapes originally recorded in 1973 between the time of Atem and Phaedra. So is this album “classic”?
The answer is yes and no. The title track features a brooding synth drone, baleful mellotrons, and prowling drumming, which feels about right, but there’s also extensive Froese guitar licks, and the production quality is very clean and 80s. The rest of the album tracks are pleasant, but don’t bear any recognisable relationship to anything from the prior to 1976.
I’m reasonably certain that even if what’s heard is based on the original ideas behind Green Desert, the final product is distinct. I’d love to hear the originals; maybe they still exist?? Even so, I think the track Green Desert can still be considered classic, in the same way I consider Thru Metamorphic Rock to be: the spirit is there, even if the sound and style is a bit divergent.
I’ve rambled on about Tangerine Dream’s albums without really going into who they were and their historical context. Wikipedia will do a better job, but here also is my take.
Tangerine Dream were part of a wider movement of experimental German rock in the late 60s and early 70s, designated in UK English wiht the slightly perjorative (if memorable) term “Krautrock”. The Krautrock groups were influenced by a heady combination of Anglo-American psychedelic rock and the European avant-garde, but eventually developed their own original voices and a music that is both highly varied yet (to my thinking at least) imbued with a remarkably consistent spirit.
The early Tangerine Dream sound (Electronic Meditation and Alpha Centauri being the best examples) seem heavily influenced by Pink Floyd, and this influence persisted (if in a more subdued way) in Tangerine Dream’s classic albums. (I find Tangerine Dream to be much more interesting than Pink Floyd, or rather they’re the truly cosmic group Pink Floyd could have been, had ego and money not left the Floyd’s members stuck cranking out miserable middle class blues.)
Tangerine Dream’s second album, Alpha Centauri, was still identifiably rock, but the focus had changed to the cosmic, and you can hear hints of the sound to come. By 1972 and Zeit, all rock instrumentation had been dispensed with (save for some unconventional and sparingly used guitar) and the album’s sound was primarily built from long organ drones and synth wobbles. Double albums were a bit of early 70s prog indulgence, but I think Zeit was a statement that genuinely needed the extra run time. Given what had gone before, it was an audacious change of direction.
Atem was a return to more structured sound (and the return of drumming, if more tribal than rock), but Zeit had indelibly changed the group’s trajectory. Atem is a more straightforward album than Zeit, but still a world removed from Alpha Centauri. Both albums are equally good, in my view, but I would say Atem is perhaps a little more assured.
After many years operating in relative obscurity in the German underground scene, Tangerine Dream found success in the UK after being championed by influential DJ John Peel, who rated Atem his album of the year for 1973. Richard Branson signed them to his label Virgin Records, and, with improved studio access and a bigger range of equipment the band produced Phaedra, which gave the group a genuine hit (it reached number 15 in the UK album charts, which is a credit to the sonic open-mindedness of the music-buying public of the time). Successful European and (crucially) American tours followed. Tangerine Dream began composing Hollywood film soundtracks, starting with William Friedkin’s Sorcerer in 1977. Meanwhile, the group adapted to changes in technology and taste in the 1980s by templating a crystalline, new-Age-friendly musical style. Though the group’s commercial heyday was in the mid to late 1970s, they’ve remained a going concern into the 21st century, and beyond Edgar Froese’s death in 2015.
Back to my personal history with Tangerine Dream. After my early to mid 90s exploration of the group, there was a long period where I didn’t find any new material. More recently, however, I’ve periodically found more artefacts from the group’s classic period.
In the early 2000s many bootleggish recordings of Tangerine Dream concerts were collected and released gratis (with the band’s blessing). This project, called Tangerine Tree more reliably documents the band’s late 70s to 2000s era, but there are a handful of recordings from the classic period:
So what’s the pull of these gig recordings? Well, during this period Tangerine Dream’s music of the time was completely improvised, and each concert is relatively unique. At times you can hear elements of albums of the time (snatches of Zeit or Atem), but these recordings feel like wholly separate works. (The closest analogue I can think of is when Mozart or Beethoven reuse themes.) Better still, the artistic quality - if not the recording fidelity - is high, so these documents represent a significant expansion of Tangerine Dream’s recorded work. In 1995 I believed I had heard everything of Tangerine Dream that was relevant to me, so discovering the Tangerine Tree exapanded the world of the Classic Period considerably.
In addition to Tangerine Tree, there’s also Edgar Froese’s three mid-70s solo albums, which further expand the classic Tangerine Dream corpus.
Froese’s first solo album is 1974’s Aqua. I’d been aware of this record since the mid 90s, but didn’t take the time to check it out until 2010. I don’t know why I was so incurious about hearing it, but not seeking the album out was a mistake, as it’s a very solid collection. The first side contains the the swirly, enigmatic title track. Flipping over the disc, there’s the warm, robust, hypnotic burbles of the Berlin-soundy Panorphelia. After the suitably galactic NGC 891, the album is concluded with the pulsing Upland.
Aqua was recorded roughly around the time of Phaedra, which I find fascinating because the album has nothing of Phaedra’s bleak intensity.
1975’s Epsilon in Malaysian Pale contains two side-spanning tracks: the eponymous track and Maroubra Bay. This format is strikingly similar to Rubycon, which was released in the same year. But the albums differ in two respects: the arrangement and production of Epsilon in Malaysian Pale is more rudimentary. It’s tempting to wonder if the album was a sketch for Rubycon, or at very least a template the group followed when they needed to cobble together another release in short (I’ll explain this in more detail later).
The second difference is that despite Rubycon being considerably more polished, Epsilon in Malaysian Pale feels more emotionally dynamic and substantial, especially Maroubra Bay. Rubycon feels like motion, but the destination doesn’t feel much different than the starting point. This is a bit of a paradox, because Epsilon in Malaysian Pale is I don’t know exactly which album was recorded first, but Epsilon in Malaysian Pale feels like a sketch for Rubycon. If so, the sketch turned out better than the finished product.
Epsilon in Malaysian Pale was championed by no less than David Bowie, for whom the as being the soundtrack to his time in Berlin in the late 1970s, and I think the album’s cathartic mood maps well to Bowie’s Berlin rehabilitation after years of drug abuse and rock’n’roll chaos. (Supplemental factoid: Edgar Froese helped Bowie find a flat in Berlin).
Froese’s 1976 album Macula Transfer is also worth checking out. It’s not as accomplished as Aqua or Epsilon in Malaysian Pale, and it’s slightly transitional, but it retains enough of the classic sound to be considered part of what I might call the “supporting” canon.
There’s one other Froese composition of interest: the title track from his 1979 album Stuntman. By this stage Froese had switched to a formal (as in structured), commercially-oriented style almost diametrically opposed to the freeform explorations of Zeit and Atem. But Stuntman’s title track is a winningly cheerful burble that is both sooo 70s but also from the glorious future that never was. (Oddly, I first heard the Stuntman track all the way back in 1987 when it was used as the theme music to the BBC Science Magazine radio programme. I didn’t know it was Edgar until 30 years later, but after the Thru Metamorphic Rock episode, I took this discovery more in my stride.)
Froese’s classic era solo works help us measure his contribution to the overall sound of the band. While the production on Aqua and Epsilon in Malaysian Pale is more stripped back, the mood is sufficiently similar to Tangerine Dream to suggest (in the absence of solo material from Franke and Baumann during the period) that Froese was the prime creative force in the group.
Finally, there’s a lost Tangerine Dream album: in 1974 the group recorded music for a performance of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex at the Chichester Festival. The 70 minute suite was originally intended to be released as an album, but was shelved. Some parts got circulated in bootleg format, and some was incorporated into Rubycon, but the music didn’t get a full release until 2019.
Listening to Oedipus Tyrannus is absolutely fascinating. The first track, Overture, contains elements hearkening back to Zeit, while “Act 1” and “Act 2: Battle” are more reminiscent of Phaedra. “Act 2: Baroque” simultaneously hints forward to Stratosfear and back to Atem. “Act 2: Zeus” is a throwback to Zeit again. The beginning of “Act 3” was used for the conclusion of Rubycon part 2, and later there’s some furious sequencer clatter (with resonant squelch reminiscent of acid house!).
So what to make of all that? As background misery for a Greek tragedy the music makes perfect sense, and there are plenty of great moments, but it just doesn’t quite make sense as an album.
With all that said, Oedipus Tyrannus remains intriguing for being a stylistic compendium Tangerine Dream’s work to that point, without having a distinct identity of its own. Despite that it’s still good to have it. It’s also easier to see now why the group underwent an abrupt style change with Stratosfear. Oedipus Tyrannus suggests the group had gone as far as they could go with their classic sound, and it was time to try something new.
This is a personal outline of why Tangerine Dream means so much to me. I should say at the outset that is my subjective viewpoint, and I don’t even expect hardcore Tangerine Dream fans to necessarily agree with me.
So to my mind classic period Tangerine Dream is the intersection of the following phenomena:
Point 1. we’ve already discussed. Point 2. is almost too obvious to mention, but I will point out that while I’ve never used psychedelics and wouldn’t dare presume to understand what it’s like to consume them, I do get a sense that Tangerine Dream’s classic era music is the result of some profound psychonautical experiences.
As for point 3., Tangerine Dream’s music evokes moods of grandeur and horror, which lines up well with the Romantic conception of the Sublime.
Classic Tangerine Dream is for me a companion for life. Much of that is perhaps tied to being 17 when I first heard them, but I feel the singular feature of the band is that they meant every note of what they did, not in adolescent, U2ish sort of way, but more like, I dunno, the Mercury 7. I can’t know precisely what Tangerine Dream were really about, but what I think their classic period was about is totally compelling. It’s waves thundering on a shore for a billion years, it’s the minute or so of the totality of an eclipse, it’s mountains rising and earthquakes toppling them down. It’s the formation of black holes and their eventual evaporation quadrillions of years hence.
I’ve spoken about religious devotion to Tangerine Dream, and that’s a bit of exaggeration for comic effect, but they are a group I take more seriously than any other.
Aside from their 1970s heyday Tangerine Dream have never been in vogue with the cogniscenti, mostly because the cogniscenti are increasingly less interested (or too terrified) to confront the cosmic drama that Tangerine Dream laid out. Of electronic music movements that have come since Phaedra, synthpop was pop, house and techno were about love and dancing, Ambient was more about tranquility and transcendence, IDM about a sort of digital nihilism, glitch was about glitch, and synthwave was about… actually I really don’t understand synthwave at all. By contrast the other two truly great Krautrock bands, Can, and Kraftwerk, have attained a measure of perpetual veneration. I suspect the difference is that Can were a rock group, and rock is still a thing despite being essentially complete in the 1990s, while Kraftwerk are lauded as a sort of tuneful Gilbert and George. I don’t begrudge these groups their recognition - they deserve it - but I don’t think Tangerine Dream is any less eligible.
Having said this I feel duty bound to point out that classic period albums are not without fault. Some of the bloops and bleeps are now dated and perhaps even quaint, and all of Tangerine Dream’s early albums were comparatively low-fi; Rubycon was the first to avoid loudness clipping, hiss on the master tape, obvious tape edits, or, in Zeit’s case, the sound of a creaking chair caught on microphone multiple times. I don’t find any of these features particularly detrimental, but younger listeners may be confounded.
Stylistically there are other problems: Zeit clearly has some debts to Ligeti (and Kubrick, for that matter). There’s also the lingering Pink Floyd influence, and the group’s willingness to push the boundaries of rock made them sufficiently Proj-adjacent to put them on the ideological outer with punk, new wave, synthpop, and indie bands. The 90’s ambient revival did swing back, with the old synth sequence returning to fashion, but TD itself was less in favour than acts that had been inspired by the general 70s synth sound, like The Orb.
If Tangerine Dream are not in vogue, there has nonetheless been a revival in Tangerine Dreamish things. The recent craze for DIY modular synthesizers represents a return to 1970s synth technology. (And it’s questionable though whether the resulting music represents any advance on what Tangerine Dream and other groups achieved 50 years ago.) More directly, Tangerine Dream’s work has been used in media like Grand Theft Auto and Stranger Things. Admittedly this influence is more from the group’s 1980s work, and with media being something of a blizzard these days, it’s hard to know whether these flickers of interest represent perpetuation of an enduring legacy, or just sparks from a dying ember. I do hope Tangerine Dream are not forgotten, however as I think they were one of the most true musical artists of the late 20th century.
]]>While viewing JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure MMD videos I stumbled across some JoJo dancings choreographed to songs by a group called K/DA. I was struck by the music and watched the original videos, discovering that K/DA is an animated “girl” group comprised of characters from a video game called League of Legends. I then watched a useful explainer about the group and learned that K/DA’s western producers intentionally wrote the songs to emulate the K-pop genre. Another JJBA MMD vid also got me into BlackPink, which has lead to this essay, a bunch of musings about K-pop.
Going waaay back in time to the late 2000s, my wife and I began watching K dramas. (We’d watched lots of HK dramas, and a J and T drama or two, so it’s not as random as it might seem.) K-dramas proved to be a gateway drug to K variety shows, specifically Running Man, which was very popular across asia in the early 2010s. Running Man frequently featured K-pop singers, but while we did take some interest K-pop singers who had both been in dramas and appeared on Running Man, it wasn’t until that epoch-defining revelation of PSY’s Gangnam Style in 2012 that I started taking it seriously.
(Look, I’ll readily concede that now ten years have passed, I might have gotten a bit too into Gangnam Style. But you know, it’s one of the few genuinely of-the-moment things I’ve been wholeheartedly into, so please… just let me have this.)
After Gangnam Style I decided to check out other K-pop acts, and after some exploration I found I was more interested in the girl groups. This is because the boy groups mostly pump out New Jack Swing singles like it’s 1988, and girl groups tend to have more varied material. I think this is because while all K pop tends to have a female (or gay, or, er, me…) audience, boy and girl groups have different functions. Boy idols are there to be unthreatening (if also frustratingly remote) love interests, while girl idols are friends to admire for their poise and skill and/or relatable feelings. Or to resent and endlessly hate follow, apparently. Humans are complicated…
Could this characterisation be too simplistic? Nah, fuck it, it’s completely accurate…
In 2012 the biggest girl group was SNSD, but I preferred more eccentric groups like Orange Caramel, and (later) Crayon Pop; or the more EDMish outfits like f(x) and 2NE1. On the boy group side the only one with toleratble tunes was Big Bang and its various solo members’ singles.
I kept an eye on the K-pop scene for a few years, but around 2016 I began to lose interest in all K phenomena. With K dramas I’d seen as many variations on “downtrodden but plucky female implausibly pursued by multiple chaebol heir suitors” as I could tolerate. With K variety, after a few hundred(!) episodes of Running man the formula got pretty stale for me - as I think it would for most people after that long. As for K-pop, the music was also beginning to feel a bit samey (and this is still true for me more than half a decade later). I was also put off by the petty (and not so petty) scandals continually bubbling up (I used to think Korean “netizens” were the most judgemental people on Earth, until Facebook and Twitter allowed Westerners to catch up). But I was most demoralised by the steady rate of K-pop suicides (Goo Hara of Kara and Sulli of f(x) affected me most). I began to feel that to keep listening was to be complicit in the harm K-pop caused its performers, so I stopped.
Until 2021. My K pop curiosity was reignited by K/DA and BlackPink, and also when I learned that boy group BTS had topped the charts in the US. In the mid 2010s I thought a girl group might have a chance of doing this, at some point, because their songs tended to be less dated and quaint, than those of boy groups. Curiouser still, the number one hit song in question, Dynamite, was the same old New Jack Swing I never thought would resonate with American listeners. Well, clearly I got that wrong! Despite not caring for their music much, the BTS chaps seem nice - at least when they interact with robots - and I wish them well.
I’ve been rather more impressed with Blackpink. This four member girl group are successors to YG Entertainment group’s 2NE1, who unceremoniously expired in 2015 when one of their members experienced a rather minor drug scandal (with two members in their 30s, I suspect the they might have reached the end of their lifespan anyway). Blackpink debuted in 2016, and have largely continued where 2NE1 left off, musically, though the members are considerably bit more circumspect (think Destiny’s Child compared to TLC). BlackPink is comprised of mostly-singers Ji Soo and Rose, and mostly-rappers Jennie and Lisa. Like many K-pop groups, Blackpink’s composition is cosmopolitan (probably with an eye to the international market): Lisa is Thai, while Jennie spent her formative years in New Zealand, and Rose was raised in Australia.
Since 2016 Blackpink have assembled numerous shock-and-awe singles. My favourites are Ddu-du Ddu-du (see below), How You Like that, and Whistle.
The general song template is as follows: commence with petulant rapping by Jennie and Lisa, before modulating to angsty singing by Ji Soo and Rose, and then onto the chorus. I confess I tend to spend the singing bits waiting for the next rap segments, but the songs are usually well-constructed, and there are numerous melodic excursions that have me going “whaaat!?” - in a good way. Generally they’re kaleidoscopic three minute operas, and who could ask for more.
That’s the music, and now we come to the videos. YG has produced some glitzy stuff in the past (take that!, and that!), but those vids seem minimalist in comparison to the almost baroque production value of recent Blackpink outings. Ddu-du Ddu-du has some particularly eye-poppingly odd moments:
During my investigations I discovered that Blackpink had a Netflix doco - unthinkable for a US-based media company to be producing a few years ago, but all too predictable now. “Blackpink: Light up the Sky” is a reasonably frank portrayal of life under the K-pop regime. (To give you a very brief idea of how the system works, aspiring adolescent K-Poppers are scouted - often in shopping malls - by a management agency, and then auditioned. Those who make the grade get to live in an agency dormitory for several years, being trained around the clock. Wages are slim, and chances of unceremonious disposal are high. Gradually the promising are corralled potential groups and forced to train together. At the other end one of these groups, tight-knit, loyal, success-hungry, perhaps a bit scarred, is Chosen.)
I was suspicious that the doco might be purely propaganda, and I imagine there was much that was glossed over, but I got the impression the group were able to recount their struggles with genuine candour. We may not have gotten the whole story, but if you aspired to K-pop glory you wouldn’t watch “Light up the Sky” and conclude that the path to glory is anything other than an absolute slog.
If being a K-pop trainee seems harsh, it’s nothing compared life after debut: 18 hour days, endless appearances at fan meets, lengthy video shoots, and trying to seem interesting but also down to earth in highly-scripted media appearences.
But wait, there’s more! Long international tours, the fear of physical attacks by obsessive fans or fending off unwanted sexual attention from sleazy entertainment figures, and the stress of attaining and retaining lucrative product endorsement contracts. Additionally your words and actions need to justify the loyalty of your fans, your family, your bandmates, your country, and those you work with in your agency. Furthermore, there’s constant risk of being ground down by excessive online opprobrium. Having a personal life is extremely difficult; a love life is forbidden, for you must remain in mint condition for the duration of your youth or else the crazy fans (and they are legion) with become furious.
With all that going on you can see why mental health crises, drug scandals, and suicides are quite common in the K-pop world.
So far Blackpink seem to have survived, but there will inevitably be a point when they will drift from being “it” to becoming “was”. In the doco the group’s members seemed to think that all the sacrifices have been worth it; I hope that’s true and continues to so. They can take comfort in knowing that at this point it’s going to be a hell of a group that surpasses them.
So I’ve spent a lot of time cataloguing some of the participants and many of the crimes of K-pop, but I should point out that manufactured pop groups, and indeed every popular musical combo at any time and place, has been subject to some level of exploitation. The difference, I would argue, is that western kids are less likely to put up with K-pop-style regimentation, and so aren’t subjected to those excesses, whereas the communal conformity of Korean culture tends to increase the likelihood of everybody going along with things until harm happens.
Actually, I’d like to thing that Western kids would be less susceptible, but I’m not sure they that’s actually true. Hmmm.
Now we’ve got a sense of the high-stakes tension of a real K-pop group, let us decompress somewhat and consider a virtual one. I vaguely heard of K/DA when they debuted in 2018, but this was during my “over it” K-pop dark age, and I wasn’t much exercised about a group made out of video game characters. But in late 2021, thanks to that tenuous JJBA MMD video connection, I was prepared to give it a whirl.
So K/DA is a virtual girl group conjured up by game publisher Riot Games. It four members are characters from the game League of Legends. The group’s music is produced in house by Riot Games, and a lot of work has gone into making K/DA sound super slick. I’ve never played League of Legends and have no idea who the group’s “members” actually are. I could spend two minutes looking them up, but I think it would be more humorous to simply characterise them as follows:
To underscore how out of depth I am in analysing K/DA, I should point out that my prior reference points for music made by animated entities are the following:
Wish me luck!
The first K/DA single was a song called Pop/Stars. Here’s the video:
The song features Korean and American singers, who all do an excellent job. The musical style broadly conforms to the EDM end of K-pop, plausibly like something from YG producer Teddy Park, the production powerhouse behind Blackpink, 2NE1, and Big Bang. It’s hard to quantify, but Pop/Stars feels a touch more westernised to me, but there’s enough K for the experience not to feel ersatz.
While musically the song’s well-constructed, and the production is immaculate, there’s not much going on lyrically - unless you’re a connoisseur of bog-standard hiphop “I’m much better than you” braggadocio. But since pop music isn’t supposed to be Milton, let’s give it a pass. All up I reckon Pop/stars is manufactured pop par excellence, and the hundreds of millions of Spotify plays and YouTube views suggests it has been very successful.
What of the video? Well, for me it’s a bravura display of motion, colour, and secondary sex characteristics. (Let me wag my finger at the vid’s restrained if palpable appeal to the male gaze. Naughty!) It doesn’t put a foot wrong.
One final thing to mention about Pop/stars: he song was performed in a bizarre ritual at the opening ceremony of the 2018 League of Legends world champs (presented by Mastercard!), held (appropriately) in Incheon, South Korea. The real singers of the song were present, accompanied virtually by their K/DA avatars. If I’ve got this correct, the virtual members could only be viewed by spectators via an augmented reality app on their smartphones. I have complex feelings about whether this is pioneering or silly, but I will say that if I’d tried to explain the scenario to my late grandfather, he’d have given me a look like I was a fucking idiot.
In 2020 K/DA released a second single, “More”, which is indeed more of the same:
Musically I think More has an edge over Pop/Stars (though again the lyrics still don’t have much going on), but the video is greatly inferior. The character design is more 3 dimensional, but only serves to send the viewer tumbling into the uncanny valley, and the result is vaguely repellant. So it’s a bit of a mixed bag. Great to listen to, less enjoyable to watch.
In my JoJo survey I jokingly suggested some MMD videos of JJBA characters dancing to More were superior to the original. That’s a bit unfair, but I will say this video of JoJo villains replicating More’s antics is pleasingly silly.
2020 also saw K/DA release All Out an EP which featured More plus four other songs. You’d expect the non-single songs to be filler, but they’re actually pretty decent. And all up I find myself hoping that K/DA will release, well, more material in future. Unfortunately, the unreality of the group means that this will depend on Riot Games’ balance sheet and corporate strategy rather than its non-existent members’ aspirations, so who knows what will happen?
Compared with the K-pop mill, K/DA feels comparatively less exploitative, in that the human vocalists are basically session performers, so outside of recording sessions (and at least one League of Legends stadium appearence), they’re free to live their lives as they want. K/DA may be an overly refined, nutrition-free corporate product, but it’s one I can enjoy without feeling guilty about it.
It’s hard to come to any conclusion from my dilletante dalliance with K-pop. If I was better informed I’d have more to say, but I don’t have much incentive to learn more. To all K-pop group members out there, I have a message: good luck to you!
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