Tag Archives: Mute

Elevation – Can You Feel It / Spiral Trance (NovaMute single, 1992)

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single // Can You Feel It / Spiral Trance

novamute | 12″/cd nomu3 | 1992

Ask any dance music fanatic what word they would associate with the year 1992 and the chances are they will reply, without hesitation, ‘hardcore’. Hardcore dance music was a fusion of sped-up breakbeats, thudding drums, speaker-wrecking dub bass, crowd noise, whistles and a synth effect that could only ever be described as sounding like a hoover; the effect was a sort of bludgeoning euphoria. Hardcore was, at times, ridiculous and the genre was ultimately short-lived, mutating quickly into a multitude of other genres, not least of which was the even more breakbeat-heavy jungle.

Elevation, a pseudonym of producer Shaun Imrei, has all the trademark hardcore traits listed above, plus housey piano and some gutsy, euphoric vocals courtesy of an unnamed contributor (she sounds a little like Sylvia Tella, who guested on Pop Will Eat Itself’s 92ºF) which rescues ‘Can You Feel It’ from the nihilistic quality of some other hardcore tunes, and also ensuring the track could work in a variety of DJ boxes. Okay, so the piano sounds a little weak and the whistles, bells and crowd noise may feel a bit contrived twenty odd years later, but there’s no denying the uplifting energy that ‘Can You Feel It’ possesses, marking the track out as a major highlight in a dance music style that rapidly went off the boil. And that manic ‘hoover’ sound still sounds as thrilling today, even if its potential as a rival to the TB303 was limited. The 12″ and CD released by NovaMute contains mixes taken from the tune’s original release on Creative Rhythm earlier in 1992, as well as a previously unreleased version (the Mutation Mix) which contains a breakdown filled with an excellent King Tubby-style dub passage.

For its NovaMute release, ‘Can You Feel It’ was backed by ‘Spiral Trance’ which was produced by Imrei and John O’Halloran. Starting with some ethereal vocals that sound like they belong on a Clannad record, ‘Spiral Trance’ retains only the barest trace elements of a hardcore aesthetic in some of its sounds, instead offering a deep, entrancing cut which doesn’t sound dissimilar to early Orbital or Juno Reactor. There’s not a heavy breakbeat in sight, Imrei and O’Halloran opting instead for a carefully-constructed 4/4 beat and a bass sound that could spill over into acid madness, but doesn’t, and for once this song is all the better for it.

12″/cd:
A1. / 1. Can You Feel It (Mutation Mix)
A2. / 2. Can You Feel It (Extended Mix)
B1. / 3. Spiral Trance (Into The Light Mix)
B2. / 4. Can You Feel It (Remix)

Originally posted 2012; re-posted 2015.

(c) 2015 Mat Smith / Documentary Evidence

Erasure – Snow Globe (Mute album, 2013)

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As its Christmas, I’ve found myself listening to Erasure‘s 2013 seasonal collection Snow Globe more than anything else over the last few weeks. I truly think it is one of the best Christmas albums ever made.

Here is the small review of the album that I wrote for Clash upon its release.

(c) 2015 Mat Smith / Documentary Evidence

The 7th Plain – Wishbone

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The 7th Plain was an alias that future NovaMute / Mute artist Luke Slater used for a brief time, the first album issued under the name being the brilliant My Wise Yellow Rug released in 1994 by General Production Recordings (GPR). The 7th Plain found Slater operating in a firmly ambient mode, complementing the more dancefloor-friendly tracks he issued under his Planetary Assault Systems alias.

‘Wishbone’ doesn’t appear on My Wise Yellow Rug, but it sounds like it should have been included there. Here Slater lays down a rich, slowly-developing tapestry of mostly pleasant sounds underpinned by a hissing rhythm that sits somewhere between skeletal electro and the factory-like drum pattern from Depeche Mode’s ‘Ice Machine’. Toward the end Slater introduces a bassline constructed from a somewhat darker synth sound while a repetitive arpeggio sequence takes on a queasy insistence as the track concludes.

Throughout, even as Slater drops in what feels like a organic, jazzy looseness at the very beginning via vaguely piano riffs, there’s an underlying mechanistic, robotic quality to ‘Wishbone’; that reminds me of a review of one of the tracks on My Wise Yellow Rug which compared the track in question to Vince Clarke covering Vangelis’s theme to Blade Runner. In the interests of full disclosure, I actually bought the album on the strength of that line alone. At the time it wasn’t apparent that Slater would go on to become a Mute artist, but I was pleased he ultimately signed to the label, though I can honestly say that his work as The 7th Plain was always more interesting to me than the output under his own name.

Equanimity was released as a double compilation by the GPR label in 1995 and features some really good tracks from Max 404, D:Fuse, Beaumont Hannant, Russ Gabriel and other artists from the imprint’s roster. It sits squarely alongside the Warp series of Artificial Intelligence / listening electronica albums but at times seems to have much more of a concrete, robust edge compared to some of the ambient noodling that Warp’s series tended towards. With Max 404 and a crunchy Bari-speed rave track from the absurdly-named Radioactive Lamb being two possible exceptions, it would have been slightly inconceivable to find any of the tracks here finding themselves sitting comfortably in a techno set of the time, but an adventurous DJ could have probably found a way. They usually could.

(c) 2015 Mat Smith / Documentary Evidence

Richard Hawley – Down In The Woods @ 33rpm (Mute / Parlophone single, 2012)

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single // Down In The Woods

One of the many loveable things about John Peel was his tendency, with alarming regularity, to play records at the wrong speed. For the masterful Peel, this was a natural consequence of packing his late-night shows with so much adventurous music that the odd RPM gaffe here and there was to be expected.

Somewhat less excusably, I did exactly the same with the 10” copy of this Richard Hawley single from his Singles Club series which left my music collection forever last week courtesy of a Discogs buyer. Long gone are the days of me sitting down and sticking on an LP in my lounge; in these time-pressed parental days, I often record the vinyl into my laptop with the volume set to mute (pun intended) and then listen to it back on the train to work the next day on my iPod. I know, I know; and to think I call myself a music writer. Don’t trust anything I say.

That’s exactly what I did with ‘Down In The Woods’ when I first received it three years ago, except that I either misread the label or the label didn’t say what the speed was, or I just figured the turntable was set to 45 when it was actually still set to 33, and I never went and recorded it again. As a result, this review is of ‘Down In The Woods’ and its B-side ‘Kindly Rain’ – at the Peel-friendly wrong speed. Read it faster if you want to guess what it really sounds like.

‘Down In The Woods’ is a long, sludgy piece of psychedelic blues wherein a gravel-voiced Hawley does his best impression of a robotic heavy metal vocalist whacked out on tranquillisers. The guitars fizz with astral aspirations and feedback drones reminiscent of something the Jesus And Mary Chain might have developed in a vague homage to The Velvet Underground. The whole thing has an epic, heavy density; a cloying, foggy, slightly threatening stew that Hawley’s demonic vocal does little to dispel, especially on his echoey delivery across the sparse and slowly rebuilding middle eight. This is possibly what it sounds like when you listen to ‘The End’ by The Doors within a lab-controlled LSD experiment.

‘Kindly Rain’ is pure angelic, ethereal texture, with lots of shimmering, mellow grandeur and atmospheric touches, at least until it tries, abortively, to push upwards into another lysergic jam; it just happens to be fronted by someone who sounds a lot like Iggy Pop does these days. Even at the wrong speed I can tell this is Hawley at his ballad-toting best.

(c) 2015 Mat Smith / Documentary Evidence

Kid Congo Powers & The Pink Monkey Birds – Conjure Man (In The Red single, 2012)

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single // Conjure Man / Lose Your Mind

in the red | 7″/dl itr239 | 2012

Kid Congo Powers, as well as being Nick Cave‘s guitarist in the Bad Seeds and a founder member of The Gun Club, used to be in The Cramps. If you ever needed validation of his involvement in the band formed by the late, great Lux Interior and Poison Ivy, ‘Conjure Man’ is probably it, albeit what The Cramps might have become if they’d studied Morricone. Powers, or Brian Tristan to immigration, has a particularly distinctive tremolo guitar style which manifests itself here as a sort of desert-washed, dramatic blues, with all the insistent bleakness of a spaghetti western soundtrack in ‘Conjure Man’s spacious tumbleweeds-in-dystopia arrangement. His vocal may lack the stuttering jerkiness of Lux and the music some of the obtuse angles that made The Cramps such a compelling unit, but his echo-drenched Californian drawl has the same appealing blank weirdness, whilst lyrically here also recalling the wonderful anarchic mysticism of Screaming Jay Hawkins’ ‘I Put A Spell On You’.

The B-side is a cover of The Seeds’ ‘Lose Your Mind’ (misspelled, perhaps deliberately, as ‘Loose Your Mind’ on the 7″ label). That’s right, an ex-Bad Seed covering The Seeds. Powers captures the garagey rock ‘n’ roll blues of the original with ease, adding a lysergic, psychedelic quality to the arrangement via some sky-scouring synths and captivatingly frazzled, whining guitar trickery. It’s effortlessly cool, much like Kid Congo Powers himself.

The single was released in both red and black vinyl editions (100 and 400 copy editions), with both editions enclosed in a screen-printed sleeve printed onto cardboard cut from a Pabst Blue Ribbon box. If that doesn’t scream ‘carefully-produced lo-fi’ then I don’t know what else does.

First posted 2013; re-edited 2015

(c) 2015 Mat Smith / Documentary Evidence

Various Artists – Artificial Intelligence (Warp compilation, 1992)

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compilation // Artificial Intelligence

Warp’s groundbreaking Artificial Intelligence compilation did what so many other seminal compilations did and effectively made a scene concrete. Like Eno’s No New York did for post-punk in the US, it could be argued confidently that Warp did the same for the particular brand of electronica over which the Sheffield label presided, spawning a series of intriguing albums by the label that gave voice to many of the artists that were showcased on the compilation.

Artificial Intelligence arrived in 1992, the same year that hardcore had rudely woken the listening public from their slumber, and on many of the tracks included here there’s still a whiff of detuned breakbeats as opposed to the haphazard glitch beats that the likes of Autechre would come to represent over the next two decades. In fact, Autechre’s ‘Crystel’, one of two tracks by Sean Booth and Rob Brown included here, sounds positively like a conventional instrumental synthpop track compared to the jagged rhythms and icy melodies they would become poster children for. Tracks like Musicology’s ‘Preminition’ are not exactly the bedroom listening we came to expect from the AI series, and instead sound like straightforward rave tracks, complete with menacing basslines and euphoric soul samples.

Of interest to Mute / NovaMute fans are three tracks from Speedy J and Richie Hawtin, here operating under his short-lived UP! alias. Hawtin’s ‘Spiritual High’ was originally released on a 12” song on Hawtin’s Probe label, and later released as one side of NovaMute’s Probe Mission 2 12” as part of a tentative partnership between the UK and Canadian labels (the other track on that 12” was by Public Energy, an alias of Speedy J). For a track taken from a relatively early part of Hawtin’s career, the format of his later work is immediately recognisable in the thudding snare-heavy beats, acid squelches and the way his track repeats endlessly but still builds toward several peaks over the course of its six minute duration.

‘Fill 3’ by Speedy J forms part of a series of tracks with that title, but as far as I can tell, was an exclusive to Artificial Intelligence. By the time Jochem Paap had arrived at NovaMute his music had undergone many changes, and ‘Fill 3’ sounds positively naïve in comparison with his later work, though with its synth pads and shimmering textures it is undoubtedly one of the most pleasantly ambient tracks on the whole collection. Given the momentum implied by its bubbling patterns and fragile melodies, it feels like it’s crying out for a beat sequence of some form, but to J’s credit he resisted the temptation of adding one. The other Speedy J track on Artificial Intelligence, ‘De-Orbit’, was featured on his Warp album Ginger and is a slowed-down, chilled-out affair with hip-hops breaks, wherein the languid pace allows for intricate details to emerge through the greater sense of space.

Alongside Autechre, Artificial Intelligence showcased Warp stalwart Aphex Twin, here in his Dice Man guise but with a track from his Polygon Window album for the label, as well as B12 (Musicology) and The Black Dog under the name I.A.O. The album also included Orb’s Alex Paterson with a live version of the classic ‘Loving You’, though it’s not immediately apparent what makes this a Paterson solo effort rather than an Orb performance.

1994’s follow-up compilation mined the same vein, with many of the same players, but branched out further, and also illustrated how much the electronic music could evolve in just two short years. For this reviewer, I bought Artificial Intelligence 2 before the first instalment, and listening in reverse made this first compilation sound decidedly tentative, but I nevertheless fully understood the importance of what Warp had assembled here.

(c) 2015 Mat Smith / Documentary Evidence

Maps – I Heard Them Say (Mute Artists single, 2013)

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single // I Heard Them Say

mute artists | 12″ mute499 | 14/04/2013

‘I Heard Them Say’, the first taster from the third Maps album Vicissitude, was released as an exclusive 100-copy, hand-stamped* 12″ in association with Manchester mail-order outlet Boomkat. Set to become a contributor to the pension plan of a select few record collectors** in the future, the 100 copies sold out pretty much straight away, creating a bit of a justified buzz for Vicissitude, which will be released in the summer of 2013.

James Chapman‘s music as Maps feel a lot like being subjected to hypnosis: his voice on ‘I Heard Them Say’ is whispered meditatively like a therapist as you involuntarily recall events and emotions locked well inside, while musically he offers a shifting, amorphous palette of sounds that feels hazy, lush and entrancing by turns. Sounds are layered in dense seams of locked-up feelings to create a sensibility that the kids would probably label chillwave (or hypnogogic pop if you’re one of those academic types over at The Wire). ‘I Heard Them Say’ is brutal, in a very subtle way – by the end, after you’ve been subjected to those enveloping synth tones, drones and pulses and Chapman’s quiet musings, you’re left with an uncomfortable feeling of unease (heightened by detached references to insanity) laced with something vague on the periphery that could be, but probably isn’t, optimism.

The 12″ comes with two mixes, one from Maps and one from Andy Stott. Chapman’s remix is sparse, fragile and dark, ultimately reaching the same emotional place, just more slowly and deploying judicious use of treacly reverb along the way. Man of the (underground) moment Stott’s mix is filled with crunchy percussion and beats between which whole universes reside, the bassline burbling gently to the surface every so often and Chapman’s rearranged voice washing in like a sonic wave. Toward the end the emergence of droning synths offers some respite from relentless slow-motion techno minimalism, becoming the soundtrack to a very dark sci-fi flick instead.

A digital version of ‘I Heard Them Say’ was initially available with album pre-orders via the Maps webstore.

* Sadly, the 12″ singles were not stamped by Chapman himself but by a friend in the Mute office. Talk about an illusion-shatterer…

** My pristine copy is currently available for purchase on Discogs

12″:
A1. I Heard Them Say
A2. I Heard Them Say (Maps Remix)
AA. I Heard Them Say (Andy Stott Remix)

First posted 2013; edited 2015.

(c) 2015 Mat Smith / Documentary Evidence

Will Gregory – Dolphins: Spy In The Pod (BBC, first aired 2014)

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Dolphins: Spy In The Pod soundtrack | BBC | first aired 2014

Continuing his parallel career as a soundtrack composer for innovative BBC nature documentaries, Goldfrapp‘s Will Gregory provided the music to Dolphins: Spy In The Pod, first broadcast in January 2014. Reflecting the playful scenes of dolphins interacting with each other and the cameras hidden in the likes of a robotic tuna and turtle, Gregory’s music occasionally sounds a lot like the calypso music made for Disney’s The Little Mermaid, so much so that you half expect Sebastian to start singing ‘Under The Sea’ at any moment. Elsewhere there’s a sort of dreamy, aquatic ambience filled with languid guitar lines and wave-like textures.

The music has never been released officialy to the best of my knowledge, but a DVD of the David Tennant-narrated documentary can be bought from Amazon etc.

First posted 2014; edited 2015

(c) 2015 Mat Smith / Documentary Evidence

Short Break Operator – Short Break Operator EP (Radiate single, 2003)

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single // Short Break Operator EP

radiate / virgin | cd rdt9 / 724354701320 | 2003

‘These songs they seem to write themselves,‘ sings James Chapman on the poignant, bittersweet ‘Glory Verse’, the towering ballad which rounds off the solitary EP from Short Break Operator and which some indie movie director really needs to snag for his next film’s soundtrack. That line, accompanied by a skittering drum pattern, organ chords and genteel guitar serves as a neat summary of how effortless, relaxed and casual the four songs on the EP feel, a distinct accomplishment for a debut release from an artist better known as Maps. The EP was released on Radiate, a subsidiary of Virgin / EMI and predates Chapman’s own Lost Space imprint, through which the first Maps singles were issued.

Chapman himself calls these ‘lo-fi’ recordings, and in contrast to the fuller, more electronic production on the Maps releases, that isn’t a totally inappropriate way of describing them. What’s more evident is a restrained, almost folksy leaning, the four songs here generally consisting of plucked guitar, subtle electronics and percussion, with vocal harmonies that evoke a pastoral sense of longing and muted euphoria. It’s the kind of chilled-out, warm music you’d expect to hear in a tent on the fringes of a festival, a guy with a guitar sat hunched over a mic at the edge of a small stage accompanied by a miniscule box of tricks.

The songs here feel like raw outpourings of uncertain emotions, the harmonies and chords suggesting something uplifting while the lyrics hint at some monumental misery, interlaced with wintery imagery and plaintive pleadings. ‘This Transmission’, with its delicate string section and lyrics suggesting unrequited love captures that delicate balancing act perfectly, while ‘Some Winter Song’ has a beguiling, wide-eyed theme with circular lyrics referring to positive feelings, the source of which Chapman – somewhere between gleefully and spitefully – doesn’t divulge to whoever the song is being delivered to. Synths shimmer like reflections on ice, giving these songs a glacial, frozen beauty.

‘Take Route / Point Odinsve’ is probably the most overtly ‘electronic’ piece here, a sparsely populated soundscape undercut by a steady pulse and melodies from guitars, synths and strings that weave and glide like a light aircraft on the thermals above the Reykjavik ice-world alluded to in the second part of the song’s title. If Biosphere’s Geir Jenssen tried to cover Dave Angel’s In-Flight Entertainment EP with an orchestra, it might sound something like this. A processed ‘peaceful‘ uttered deep in the middle of the trip feels tranquil and still, comfortably isolated.

Chapman adopted the moniker Short Break Operator during a period of wanting to escape more or less everything, finding himself gazingly longingly at holiday brochures for short-haul destinations like Iceland but thwarted by prohibitive costs. One of those brochures claimed itself to be from ‘Your No. 1 Short Break Operator’, giving rise to the alias used on this EP, while the name Maps too fits with a sense of travelling. Chapman finally got to work in Rejyavik on the We Can Create album after signing to Mute.

Thanks to James.

cd:

1. Some Winter Song
2. This Transmission
3. Take Route / Point Odinsve
4. Glory Verse

First published 2013; edited 2015.

(c) 2015 Mat Smith / Documentary Evidence
  

Object – NovaMute DJ Record Bag (MuteBank merchandise, 1996)

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Sometime in 1996 I bought this NovaMute-branded DJ record bag from MuteBank. I think I’d been persuaded after seeing it advertised in the first MuteBank A4 catalogue, Statement #1. The bag in the catalogue has a white NovaMute logo on the front, but when mine arrived it was pure black, with a shiny black logo on the flap. Statement #1 lists the DJ bag with a catalogue reference of MBM31 – MuteBank Merchandise 31.

My plan had been to use this as the bag that I’d use to cart my university texts and papers around campus. Back then you could identify the guys who were into dance music by the record bags they’d lug around, as they’d always be branded up with some funky label or record shop. It was a signal of solidarity. I wanted to nail my colours to the NovaMute mast but when the bag arrived I decided to use it instead for its intended purpose, namely storing records.

The pure black, thick plastic record bag with its shiny ‘classic’ NovaMute logo did its job more than adequately, but I no longer need it. It’s in perfect condition and its age is only given away by the fact that a) NovaMute don’t exist any longer; b) they ditched this ‘classic’ logo in favour of plain text inside a rectangular box several years after I bought this (which was always a shame, I thought); and c) no-one makes bags like this anymore. I think it can hold about 30 12″ records and has pockets under the flap for the random stuff that DJs probably used to carry around to clubs back in the day. 

If anyone wants to buy it off me, get in touch. Otherwise you’ll find it on eBay at the weekend. Note that this is the start of a major decluttering initiative on my part, which will see me offloading lots of things, including (I suspect) the bulk of my Mute record collection.

(c) 2015 Mat Smith / Documentary Evidence