Skinny Puppy HanDover

Briefly, as I've only listened to the new SP disc four times, it's growing on me. The opening track, Ovirt, is a terrific shudder of pixels that evokes early-90s gaming memories as wide connotation, not direct reference (far too concrete for the pups, that). Great lyrics, dramatic and exciting.

So far, the rest of HanDover is high quality electronic music, much like cEVIN Key's Download project (check out Helicopter or Wookie Wall EP for recent triumphs) or Mark Walk's work with Ohgr (for whom Ogre is vocalist). I've no problem with this, but it exposes a bias: I didn't mind when Download reflected Puppy (Eyes of Stanely Pain) but, well, now that Puppy has traces of recent Download it seems to muddy the legacy. SP have a very distinct sound, whereas it is easy to copy Frontline Assembly's sound and, actually, sound pretty close to them. Copy Puppy and you sound like a copy. Now, though, (and I'm avoiding canine metaphors as much as I can) the onslaught seems to lack teeth -and I know i'm making an assumption that SP should sound like an onslaught, but prior to the restart, it always had.

Take the dungeon clatter of Smothered Hope. For all it's icy synths, swirling (if sub-zero) melody and popping (if subterranean) beats, it was a punch of sound. Not an easy synth-pop listen. So, even from the beginning, Puppy had been very challenging, forcing you to think and react either due to stylistic shift (see Rabies to Too Dark Park shift) or sheer weight of sound (Last Rights).

This has no weight! Or, it has it craftily redistributed in the form of muscle. There is the occasional flex, a pumping beat, a nasty bassline or soul-draining vocal effect and a couple of wonderful other little glimpses of the creative power this band has.

However, some parts sound merely like Mark Walk has opened his e-mail, seen a track from cEVIN and popped one of his stock Ogre vocals onto it. Cruel, yes...but Ogre rarely seems overwhelmed by the music and the sounds seldom seems to be creating enough of a backdrop for his hysterics (with the exception of aforementioned Ovirt, a Smothered Hope cousin, and the excellent Brownstone).

Puppy no longer deploy their knack for texture and depth. By choice? To sound modern, and leave the suckers with their artificial tape-hiss and 'analogue sound, man' when the Pups are composing soundscapes on their sofas with laptops, not wrestling with chunky wires and 'valves'.

Anyway, I feel i'm being unkind to an unrelentingly superb group...
There isn't a shit track on it, I just have high standards.

Chris & Cosey again

Now spinning 'Trust' by these cute/grim pair, their 1989 album for Play It Again Sam. Apart from the quite splendid sleeve/typography of Steven Gilmour (forever and indelibly evoking Skinny Puppy), I'm struck by how C&C were a very sensual form of EBM; nothing new in terms of ideas, but then I considered other female fronted EBM acts from the mid-late 80s...and was stumped. The closest act I can grasp at is late period SPK, specifically Gold and Poison...but Graham 'Hollywood' Revell (well done to him) takes the limelight on the best tracks, either vocally (Sheer Naked Aggression) or with production duties on the instrumentals (most of which turned up in Zamia Lehmani). Anyone? I'm stuck. The odd feature doesn't count, nor do Gina X or Propaganda: not EBM, too synth-pop. I believe it wasn't until later that girls started fronting EBM groups...any New Beat groups? Let me know.

Chris and Cosey: ahead of the Hypnogogues

Yum -the track 'Moving Still' from Heartbeat (the post-TG duo's debut on Rough Trade) is pure Onehotrix Point Never. Slip it on Lopatin's 2010 'thank-for-releasing-all-this-stuff' wrap up album Rifts and no bugger'd notice. I'd figured C&C to be genetic dead end, just an overdue flex of the latent, sophisticated Kraftwerk muscle we all knew TG had under all that camo gear. The recent, not to mention welcome, reissue of their legacy has helped re-evaluate their place in electronic music. However, while they have been responsible for a whole clutch of nicely prescient pieces (like the aforementioned Moving Still), none were ever striking enough to leave a mark on the skin of UK dance. Influential, yes, but they lacked the revelatory glamour -the feeling of sonic/hedonistic epiphany -that acts as needle of change into music's vein. Not overground enough to disseminate widely, not coveted, cherished or jealously guarded enough to wield the aura of mystic, and, therefore, Catholic influence through awe and mystery a la Muslim Gauze/Coil etc. They just were. Thankfully, that's all we ever needed from them.

Fuck the post-punk snobs.

Listening to Cabaret Voltaire's Sound of Sheffield Vol. 1, I only own it because the tracklisting accurately reflects the sequence my early-Cabs 7" listening sessions take. To all you lazy writers who unthinkingly refer to the Crackdown as CV's "commercial"/"pop" or, unimaginatively of all, "compromise" watershed, listen again: Silent Command, without the Watson's-loft production (like early Scritti, in a way) is poppier than anything on Crackdown. That Stevo brokered LP is often confused with selling out -an easy way to explain away the shift in production philosophy, the uneasy way that claptraps carry house-music connotations so unpalatable to the modern day noise/industrial historian. There still exists among the open-eared music fan a dank Corp that retain the dour long-mac philosophy that was unable to process the re-adjustment, re-definition, of what it meant to be uncompromising and subversive that the Cabs went through. Their dancefloor epiphany -discotheque as Control stage/battlefield -was too close to the mainstream's assimilation of Synthetica, Human League going nuclear in 1981/Soft Cell/Architecture and Morality et al. Listen again!

Hype Williams Hype

Sat drinking wine next to an unplayed copy of the new Hype Williams LP. Just waiting for my wife's 3 LP opera to finish... just on Side 6! I'd wearily glanced over HW articles last year but suspected them of being a post-Crystal Castles electro group with a trippy, hip-hop beat. Then, somewhere, I read a review that reminded me of the many turn-of-the-80s Cabaret Voltaire cuttings I've amassed. The journalism seems to not quite understand -is the piss being taken? Or is this some disarmingly laid-back spurt of cultural significance, the validity-bestowing context such epochal events require still terra incognito for most listeners? As with early Cabs output, like the wonderfully itchy 'Baader-Meinhof' or 'Do the Mussolini (headlick)', brilliance must be interpreted out of an initial feeling of 'Have I been done?' Similarly well-acquainted with the reefer as the Sheffield android-muggers, Hype Williams' YouTube tracks (all of which are collected here) are seemingly either irreverent sound-pranks created to fuck with your preconceptions or studiously constructed sonic artefacts bordering on oblique propaganda to the exact same end. That instinct drove me to search for this LP. My impulse to buy the thing came from the group's Fact Mix. My two over-riding passions these last three years (musically) have been Grime (Butterz curated 'future Grime' and old-skool radio-legends like Trim) and Norwegian Black Metal, especially Burzum and the swooningly diabolical Mayhem (sigh...). Apparently irreconcilable in everything but sound quality, Burzum and the Tinchy-Stryder-spawning-but-still-jaw-dropping Ruff Sqwad both rear their hissy sonic heads on HW's Factmix, much to my surprise. I was reminded of Richard H Kirk's love for both Kraftwerk and Funk-fusion-era Miles Davies -two, seemingly, polar opposites that somehow share a place in the ideological grey-zone of 70s pre-punk (a difficulty in some ways reconciled in Roxy Music, another big Cabs influence). Fertile ground for innovation, methnks. I've been saving my ears: no Hype Williams all week. Now I'm revving up for my first, partially-blind, first listen. Afterwards, I'm going to slam on Sound of Sheffield Volume 1 to compare. HW's elusive debut already whiffs of the Cabs' first, super-limited issuance (rereleased as CV 1973-4)...let us see.

Patub-Zinteth - Agony of Antigone EP

The 'Agony of Antigone EP' is free to download. It contains two pieces of Electronic Noise and Musique Concrete. As usual, zipped into rar file. For CD-R edition, please email for details/pricing.

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1. Prophecy#1 11:45
2. Creon's Own Shame 6:54

Patub-Zinteth - Different Angles

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This freeform electro-noise session, five tracks and forty-nine minutes, was the result of sessions conducted between 18-20th of May. Track One, 'Hum', features Pachubatinath. The album is compressed into a .rar file. The 'Agony of Antigone EP', will be along shortly.
Different Angles

1. Hum (feat Pachubatinath) 10:48
2. Creoda Son of Icel 8:47
3. fara í raftæknilegur víking 16:47
4. Eadmon Ironside vs King Canute 6:01
5. Witan Decree 6:42

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