SIOUXSIE AND THE BANSHEES - A KISS IN THE DREAMHOUSE @ 40

 

Turning 40 years old today is the fifth studio LP from Siouxsie and The Banshees, A Kiss in the Dreamhouse, which was released on November 5th, 1982. It was their most experimental and ambitious production to date and garnered universal praise from both fans and the music press.

After the success of their previous album, Juju, the group took some time to reassess their work and felt that, for the next release, they wanted to up the production values, particularly by introducing the use of real strings rather than synthesizers. Working on the non-album single, Fireworks, set the template for where they wanted to go. While John McGeoch was okay with the use of synths, Siouxsie and Steve Severin were adamant about going acoustic, with the former stating, “They give a real, earthy, rich sound. You could hear the strings spitting and breathing and wheezing.” Beyond that, producer Mike Hedges strongly encouraged the group to experiment with radical effects setups, tape loops, vocal layering and different instruments like recorder, tubular bells and chimes. The end result was a post-punk neo-psychedelic hybrid born of extensive drug use while working on the album. That tactic, while perhaps inspirational at the time, would sadly lead to a darkness which would prove fatal to more than one person in the long run.

The title of the album was conceived by Severin after watching a documentary about Hollywood prostitution. the “Dreamhouse” was an actual brothel in Hollywood which featured a number of prostitutes who had undergone cosmetic surgical alterations in order to make them appear more similar to the famous stars of the times. A good lookalike would be able to command a significantly higher price than the other girls.

A Kiss in the Dreamhouse was the final release in a triptych of albums, begun with Kaleidoscope and followed by Juju, which featured John McGeoch as a member of the band. His alcoholism would result in him leaving after Dreamhouse, replaced by Robert Smith of The Cure for a time. It’s a period for the band which saw them transform into sophisticated, adventurous trendsetters, moving well ahead of the pack when it came to pushing the boundaries after the initial wave of punk had subsided. With this album, they made it clear to everybody that they were a creative force to be reckoned with.

NEGATIVLAND - ESCAPE FROM NOISE @ 35

 

Marking it’s 35th anniversary today is the fourth studio album from Bay area sonic collage masters, Negativland, with Escape From Noise being issued on November 4th, 1987. For this album, the group took their penchant for cutups and assemblage and applied it to slightly more conventional song structures, utilizing shorter song lengths and occasionally recognizable musical arrangements. The results were still wildly surreal and bizarre, but also engaging in a way which hadn’t been achieved on earlier works. It was the first album I ever heard by the group and it left an immediate impact. It was certainly the funniest album I’d heard since I had encountered Nurse With Wound’s Sylvie and Babs a couple of years prior.

The album very nearly ended up in ashes as the band’s studio was destroyed by fire when the dry cleaning business below it on street level erupted into flames accelerated by toxic cleaning chemicals. Luckily, Don Joyce happened to notice flames licking up the bottom of the studio window and, after calling 911, grabbed all the masters to the album before evacuating. That didn’t save the band’s gear or masters from previous projects, but it did mean they were able to release Escape From Noise, which came out on SST, the most prominent label to feature the group’s work to date.

The album gained notoriety shortly after its release when the song, Christianity Is Stupid, became associated with a famous murder case where David Brom had killed his family, supposedly after listening to the song. This wasn’t actually true, but the group weren't averse to leveraging the misinformation as it did ignite a firestorm of media interest which became fodder for their next project, Helter Stupid. Since its release, the album has become perhaps the most notorious and recognized release in the group’s long history.

RAMONES - ROCKET TO RUSSIA @ 45

 

Released on November 4th, 1977, the Ramones third LP, Rocket to Russia, is celebrating its 45th anniversary today. The album continued the band’s quest for a commercial breakthrough, but despite improved production values, evolved songwriting skills and consistent critical praise, the album failed to generate significant sales and kept the group rutted in the “punk” gutter. Even though they were at the height of their powers and were knocking out songs which should have been taking the charts by storm, the "dog had a bad name" and the band squarely blamed the Sex Pistols for creating a hostile environment within the AM radio industry for anything often lazily labeled “punk”. Radio programmers tarred anyone associated with the genre with the same brush and simply weren’t willing to give the band the chance they so desperately deserved.

The album would be the last to feature original drummer Tommy (Erdelyi) on the skins, though he would return as producer for the next LP, Road To Ruin. His clashes with Johnny were enough that he felt that it was for the good of the band’s moral for him to focus on the production side. The label put up somewhere near $30K for the album and most of that was spent on production while recording was done as quickly as possible to minimize the cost of studio time. The production credits list Tony Bongiovi and Tommy Ramone as head producers, but in reality, the majority of the work landed in the lap of engineer Ed Stasium. Bongiovi, who is the cousin of Jon Bon Jovi, had a reputation for being difficult to work with and Johnny often insisted on only recording when he wasn’t in the studio. Johnny was also the main driver in pushing the production emphasis, going so far as to bring in a copy of the Sex Pistols single, God Save the Queen, at the start of production and stating that they’d ripped off the Ramones and their next album MUST exceed the production values of the Pistols.

Musically, the band went in a more surf & bubblegum pop direction, albeit with their patented buzz-saw edge. Thematically the lyrics focused on humour, often referencing mental disorders and psychiatry. The band were broadening their palette of styles as well, so it wasn’t all rapid-fire tempos all the time for this outing. Critics were enthusiastic for the variety and evolution in the band’s sound. The legacy of the album, like so much of the band’s output, particularly with the first half dozen LPs, is that they left behind an incalculably infectious canon of work which has succeeded in infiltrating popular culture over the ensuing decades, becoming touchstones for a generation and beyond. It’s only sad that they could never reach those heights while they were around to enjoy the success. As the Stranglers said, “everybody loves you when you’re dead”.

HARMONIA 76 - TRACKS & TRACES @ 25

 

Released 25 years ago today, on November 4th, 1997, the material for Harmonia & Eno’s “Tracks and Traces” album was originally recorded in 1976, but remained shelved for over 20 years before it was salvaged from oblivion and finally published.

After hearing Harmonia in the early 1970s, which was a collaboration between Cluster’s Dieter Moebius & Hans-Joachim Roedelius and NEU! guitarist Michael Rother, Brian Eno proclaimed them the “most important group in the world.” Eno promised to come work with them and finally kept that promise in 1976, though they’d already split up by then. Nonetheless, they agreed to reunite with Eno and began recording together. At the time, those recordings ended up being set aside as Eno moved on to his collaboration with David Bowie for what would become the “Berlin Trilogy” albums: Low, "Heroes" & Lodger.

In the 1990s, Roedelius retrieved the master tapes from Eno and did a bit of work on them to create the 1997 edition of the album. Further to this, Michael Rother contributed additional material from his cassette archives for the 2009 reissue. Those tracks could now be included because the digital restoration process was sophisticated enough that Rother’s tapes could be cleaned up to remove noise and enhance the sound quality. This resulted in three bonus tracks being added to the release.

Stylistically, the collaboration with Eno traded some of the flair of the previous Harmonia albums for a more muted ambience, but it was a fair trade-off and the results were a kind of music that was well ahead of its time, being produced by four creative masters who were in their prime. It's only frustrating that it took two decades for these recordings to finally find the light of day.

THE SECOND ANNUAL REPORT OF THROBBING GRISTLE @ 45

 

Forty five years ago this month, in November of 1977, The Second Annual Report of Throbbing Gristle hit the record shops in the UK in its first edition of exactly 785 copies. Independently released by the band’s own imprint, Industrial Records, the run was precisely how much they could afford to press with their limited, self financed budget. It was the first major release from Industrial Records and would become the cornerstone for an entirely new genre of popular music.

TG had been bubbling up from the basement of their “Death Factory” at 10 Martello Rd. in Hackney for about two years before the album was released, mutating out of the carcass of COUM Transmissions, a multimedia transgressive performance art collective which had been operating since 1969. After being essentially chased out of their home town of Hull by local authorities, Genesis P-Orridge and Cosey Fanni Tutti managed to pull in fellow pervert, Hipgnosis photographer/designer Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson, and electronics wizard, Chris Carter, to complete the TG lineup before the end of 1975. After spending endless hours reinventing sound in their makeshift studio, the group began to perform live in 1976, kicking off their notoriety with the infamous Prostitution show at the ICA, which triggered off debate in the British parliament regarding the use of public funds for the arts. This also garnered them the infamous “wreckers of civilization” condemnation from one of the MPs.

Prior to the release of the album, a few cassette compilations were hand copied and unofficially circulated among friends until the group felt they’d got something worthy of pressing on vinyl. Side one of the album would mostly consist of extracts from four of their recent live performances, which had been recorded on stereo cassette. These would be edited together on 2 track reel-to-reel and augmented by a couple of studio tidbits. The side would end with a DJ from one of the live shows scolding the audience for their bad behavior. The second side of the album would consist of a single composition, the soundtrack to the COUM film, After Cease to Exist, recorded on 4 track reel-to-reel. The overall sound of the album ended up being a bubbling cauldron of murky noise, news radio & surveillance sound fragments and distorted vocals from Gen about things like Manson family style murdering as exemplified by a graphic description of a pregnant woman having her baby cut out of her belly. It was the ambience of dead factories and deserted streets mixed with images of suburban nightmares and it was deliberately as far away from the influence of American style blues and jazz as you could possibly conceive. Despite this, the group, on stage, still affected a kind of “rock band” configuration, using heavily processed, ineptly played guitar and bass, though without a drummer and accompanied by home made synths & electronics. The whole shebang was further processed through Chris’ custom made sound processors, the “Gristleizer”, giving it all a distinctly garbled modulation.

The album was presented in a plain white sleeve with a printed b&w sheet glued to the back containing a small photograph of the band and an extensive text detailing the product and its purpose. It was presented like a dry, clinical research paper from a soulless corporation of no particular distinction. Inside was included a long questionnaire which encouraged purchasers of the LP to complete and return to Industrial Records by mail. It was a tactical ploy to help the group establish both a kind of “fan club” correspondence and to develop internal data regarding their followers. The entire operation was quite brilliantly conceived to both parody corporate methodologies while leveraging their practical value for the groups own purposes.

Surprisingly, the LP quickly sold out and garnered some very favorable reviews, which took the group by surprise and brought them a level of credibility they’d not anticipated. The funds from the sale of the album were returned directly back into Industrial Records and used to finance further productions of records and singles. The master tapes for the first album were turned over to the founders of Fetish Records to use as a means of establishing their label. Fetish reissued the LP in a few different editions, including one where the record was remastered backwards and side two included an inadvertent addition to the audio in the form of some barely audible chamber music, which had been on a tape used for the remastering, but which was not properly erased and bled through the After Cease To Exist audio.

That particular backwards/chamber music version of the LP ended up being the record by TG which caused me to have my “epiphany” in terms of recognizing the importance of this music. It was on a night in December of 1984 when a friend and I dropped blotter acid called “Flash” (complete with a lightning bolt print on the tab) and listened to that album. It was during that experience when I comprehended that TG had done something much more fundamental than gone “primitive” with their music. They’d actually gone back into the DNA of sound itself and recombined it into something entirely new. Not that there weren’t precedents to this music prior to TG. The German experimental scene of the early 1970s had produced similar sounding recordings, but TG had identified something additional in terms of both the means of performing and the conceptual potential inherent therein. TG had created an entire methodology of presentation and packaging, as well as the use of transgressive, “taboo” subject matter. They devised a system of delivery which was constantly able to re-calibrate itself and apply contradictory juxtapositions in order to avoid any sense of predictability. Whatever the tangent, as soon as it was perceived as becoming “expected”, they’d swap things around and deliver something which seemed to oppose what went before.

As a foundational document, The Second Annual Report of Throbbing Gristle stands as one of the most vitally revolutionary musical artifacts to come along in the latter half of the 20th century. It utterly changed the way I perceive sound and how I approach the creation and performance of “music”.

IGGY POP & JAMES WILLIAMSON - KILL CITY @ 45

 

Celebrating its 45th anniversary this month is Kill City by former Stooges band-mates, Iggy Pop and James Williamson, which was released in November of 1977. The material was originally recorded in 1975, after the Stooges split, as a demo to try to secure a new recording contract, but there were no takers at the time. Williamson subsequently managed to get funding and generate some interest for the material after the release of Iggy’s two Bowie produced solo LPs, The Idiot and Lust For Life, which were released earlier in 1977. With an advance from Bomp! Records, he went into the studio to remix the tracks and add some overdubs of guitars and sax. Pop’s vocals had been recorded in 1975 during day passes from the asylum he’d checked himself into while trying to kick his heroine addiction.

After the release of the original green vinyl version of the album, the master tapes were lost for many years and all subsequent reissues had to be mastered from a copy of that poorly pressed LP, which resulted in a rather murky sound for the material. However, in 2010, the masters would resurface and Williamson, along with engineer Ed Cherney, remixed the album once more for a cleaned up “restored” reissue.

Critically, the album has been widely praised and features some material which originated before the Stooges breakup. The original 1975 mix of the album has never been heard with the exception of three songs which have appeared on various compilation albums.

CAN - EGE BAMYASI @ 50

 

Marking half a century on the shelves this month is the third studio album from CAN, Ege Bamyasi, which was released in November of 1972. With the title and cover inspired by a can found by Jaki in a Turkish shop, Ege Bamyası translates as "Aegean okra”.

Prior to the release of the album, the song Spoon, was released as a single and became a German radio hit, reaching #6 on the charts by virtue of it being used as a the theme for a popular mini-series, Das Messer (The Knife). The success of the single helped to finance the lease of a large ex-cinema in Weilerswist near Cologne, which the band converted into part studio, part residence. The remainder of the album would be recorded there and the location would become their home base going forward, renamed “Inner Space”.

The album continued the group’s exploration of organic improvised jam sessions, with Holger Czukay handling the recording process. For this LP, vocalist Damo Suzuki remained as part of the band, though recording the album became somewhat sidetracked as Suzuki and keyboardist Irmin Schmidt became preoccupied by their obsessive chess games. This meant that recording became more frantic as time went on and the group ended up recording songs practically in real time. The single, Spoon, ended up being added to the album due to the shortfall of finished material in order to fill out the LP.

Despite the rushed nature of the album, critical reception was extremely enthusiastic and it has gone on to be recognized as one of the group’s finest LPs from this era. Over the last 50 years, it has become hugely influential in the realm of alternative rock music, inspiring artists around the world with its distinctive application of improvisation and rhythmic innovation.