Ooooh, nostalgia. One of my favorite topics.
_Code_ is still, to me, CV's finest hour, just barely surpassing the
extended "Sensoria," _The_Arm_Of_The_Lord_ and the "Drinking Gasoline"
EP. When this album came out (bought it used for $8 when it was still
in print in the US!), it completed my transition from being mostly into
rock to being mostly into electronic music. It was just so... damn...
cool. Funky, blippy, spacey... wow. "Commit yourself." Don't the
vocals sort-of remind you of what Underworld does nowadays? Adrian
Sherwood is truly a master. Everyone here should pick up the two
Tackhead CD compilations _Power_Inc._ (vols 1 and 2) and the two discs
(Mark Stewart and Ministry) that Jon mentioned, they are pure
brilliance. "The Wrong Name And The Wrong Number" still scares me to
death. :-)
That six-year transition started in 1982/3 when two of my all-time
favorite releases came out, the Art Of Noise's _(Who's_Afraid_Of?)_ and
Thomas Dolby's "Blinded By Science" EP (the long version of "Flying
North" still gives me shivers during that break in the middle; damn
shame this track has never been released on CD). The AON disc was
mind-blowing for a 13-year-old budding music lover. Then came New
Order's "Confusion," Depeche Mode's "People Are People" 12" (incuding
the On-USound remix in the US!), Yello's "Oh Yeah," Big Audio Dynamite's
_This_Is_BAD_, Ministry's _Twitch_, Front 242's _Official_Version_ and
Nitzer Ebb's "Murderous." By the time _Code_ came out, the transition
was complete.
My entries:
I think it's fair to say that the Art Of Noise album (with its preceding
EP "Into Battle") and the M|A|R|R|S single "Pump Up The Volume" deserve
a place in the family tree of IDM as well. They both succeeded in
making a very new music from very new technology that was both
accessible and abstract. The aggressive rhythms, the strange noises,
the head-snapping transitions, all things that we take for granted now.
Every time I have to start my car in the winter I think of "Close (To
The Edit)." :-) The otherworldy rhythm noises in the album's title
track (and the repeatedly interrupted "Can I say something?" sample) are
to die for, and the classic "Beat Box," with its truly huge drum track
and vocal-sample bass-line, really stretched the idea of what you could
do with a little ingenuity and a sampler. Five years later, the folks
from AR Kane and Colourbox meshed the rhythms of the street with the
technology of the day and came up with quite possibly the funkiest
machine-generated one-off pop song ever. The constant rhythm changes,
the incessant scratching, the other-worldly vox sample of Ofra Haza,
etc., just astonishing. (Yes, I know this came out *after* (and
borrowed ideas from) Coldcut's remix of "Paid In Full," but I think it
had more overall impact.)
NP: My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult - _Confessions_Of_A_Knife..._
--
Adam J Weitzman
Individual, Inc. "Are we here?"
weitzman@individual.com - Orbital
http://www.individual.com