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.

REMEMBERING ANTON SZANDOR LAVEY

 

Twenty five years ago today, on October 29th, 1997, the most influential occult figure since Aleister Crowley passed when Anton Szandor LaVey died at the age of 67. Born Howard Stanton Levey on April 11, 1930, he would be responsible for defining the religious and philosophical system now known as modern Satanism. Though his writings were extensively derivative of ideas espoused in the pages of Ragnar Redbeard’s 1896 book, Might Is Right, from which major tracts were lifted verbatim, LaVey’s Satanic Bible nevertheless became the cornerstone of a distinctive culture and lifestyle which has blossomed over the years to become a notable force in political discourse as has been seen with the activism of groups like The Satanic Temple.

LaVey’s history and background is largely in question as much of it has been mythologized and little evidence to support his claims is available to corroborate the colorful background described by himself and his biographers. His claims of being a lion tamer and police crime photographer may be spurious, but what is certain is that he was a notable scholar of the occult, an accomplished musician, an adept public speaker and entertainer and one of the most idiosyncratic philosophers to emerge from the 20th century. Alternately reviled and respected, depending on who you’re talking to, even his children can’t agree on his virtues or vices, with some denouncing him while others preserve his legacy.

After spending much of the 1960s conducting research and educational lectures on occult practices, complete with ritual demonstrations, in 1966 he founded the Church of Satan and, in 1969, published the infamous Satanic Bible in order to codify his system of beliefs and set them apart from popular preconceptions of so-called “Devil worship”, a practice which was never part of his methodology. Within his views, Satan was not a deity to be bowed down to, but rather a symbol of natural human traits feared by the Christian church which LaVey reasoned were humanity’s true virtues and which should be pursued and emulated. Satan was the symbol of individuality and self-determination, not a “ruler” to be followed blindly. His philosophy encouraged rationality, independence and personal creativity without recourse to gods, demons or faith based spirituality. His system of “magic” was essentially a theatrical expression of applied psychology where the drama of the event was used to focus one’s thoughts and desires in a manner which would help one achieve self-actualization through visualization.

The effect of his efforts has been widespread and profound in the years since the founding of the Church. Initially, it was something of a trendy celebrity indulgence as people like Sammy Davis Jr. and Jane Mansfield were seen in his company and he did the rounds on talk shows like Donahue and The Tonight Show. With the “Satanic Panic” of the 1980s, his students began to take up the task of defending their religion from the baseless accusations of Christian fanatics. It’s a tactic which continues to be used by right wing conspiracy-mongers to this day as we have seen with entities like QAnon laying accusations against leftists of eating babies to gain magical powers.

LaVey largely withdrew from public appearances in later years, but would still occasionally do interviews and continued to publish books and even released recordings of his music. After his death from respiratory failure, a small invitation only secret Satanic funeral was held in Colma and he was cremated afterwards. His infamous “Black House” in San Francisco was sold and subsequently demolished. Leadership of the Church of Satan went through some struggles until it was stabilized by Peter H. Gilmour, but the aftermath of that saw adherents splinter into factions, a process which had been happening beforehand with sects like the Temple of Set lead by former CoS high priest, Michael Aquino. Whereas the CoS was not known for political activism, The Satanic Temple has become a notable force when it comes to advocating for the separation of church and state and has gained major headlines for their activities, even prompting a documentary feature film which garnered significant viewership on Netflix.

Because of LaVey, the conception of Satanism as a legitimate recognized religious system, even acknowledged and accommodated by the US military, has gained a stable foothold within western societies throughout north America and Europe. Its mainstreaming can even be seen by the presence of a self proclaimed LaVeyian Satanist in the main cast of Mike Judge’s extremely popular HBO comedy series, Silicon Valley. It has become an antidote to the fascistic disposition of many Christian sects, especially the Evangelicals, who have subsumed the Republican party in the US. Satanism stands as a rare, reason based counterpoint to fundamentalist faith based attempts to subvert the freedoms of democracy.

I first encountered LaVey’s brand of Satanism when I heard the 1985 12” single, Je T'Aime, my Genesis P-Orridge & The Angels Of Light. The B-side, Supermale, featured a long electronic dance drone which contained two different voice samples mixed into it. On one side was Karol Wojtyla, the Pope Johannes Paules II, and on the other was Anton LaVey. The content of what LaVey was saying intrigued me and, eventually, enticed me to go out and pick up a copy of the Satanic Bible. I subsequently read pretty much every book he published and it was a key influence on my exploration of other occult systems and authors, including Crowley. I didn’t agree with everything he had to say and I never felt compelled to become a card carrying CoS member, but I could be seen sporting a tasteful Baphomet or inverted pentagram pendant when out and about for many years, throughout the 1990s and beyond. The basic principals of rational self-interest have remained a core part of my ethics throughout my life. I have embellished upon those theories and found different aspects to comprehend, but the core belief in the primacy of individual freedom sustained by intellectual integrity remains an unshakeable bedrock for me and LaVey has a lot to do with that. Those ideas were directly responsible for me finally coming out as gay at the ripe old age of 27. They gave me the courage to demand that I be able to live my life as the person I was and insist on taking the freedom to live as I saw fit.

QUEEN - NEWS OF THE WORLD @ 45

 

Celebrating 45 years on the racks today is the 6th studio album by Queen, News of the World, which was released this day on October 28th, 1977. After hitting the heights with Bohemian Rhapsody in 1975 and its parent album, A Night At the Opera, 1976’s A Day at the Races was met with some ambivalence, a situation which put the band against the wall and “under pressure” (wink) to prove they were yet to hit their high water mark. Not that …Races wasn’t a success, but it was not quite as successful as …Opera and, in the fickle minds of the music press, any hint of weakness was enough to start sharpening knives for the feast. Critics were merciless with ...Races, calling it “boring” and dismissing it as a rehash of what had come before. No one loves to tear down idols more than those who put them on their pedestals to being with. 

 

With the previous album, the band had continued along the path of studio excess established with Rhapsody and pushed the embellishments even further in some cases. But by 1977, the punk aesthetic was challenging the “dinosaurs” of rock and their indulgences and Queen were looking a little bloated by the standards of leaner and meaner bands like the Sex Pistols. There’s even an infamous anecdote about Freddie Mercury having a run-in with Sid Vicious during the recording of NotW when both bands happened to be working in the same studio. Sid popped his head in the room Mercury was in and quipped, “Still trying to spread ballet to the masses?” Not that it ruffled Mercury’s feathers at all, but the zeitgeist of the day was all about simplifying and going for something much more minimal. Queen weren’t averse to this, however, as they’d begun to feel like they’d exhausted themselves on overproduction and were more than ready to get back to something primal. 

 

The album opens with a 1-2 punch of songs which would be released as a double A-side single, We Will Rock You and We Are the Champions. The first track, a May composition, was intended as something which could be used during live shows to encourage audience participation. May sussed out what he thought an audience could do in unison at a show and came up with the “stomp-stomp-clap” rhythm, which defined the track and required no more than the feet and hands of the fans. The rest of it was all Mercury’s vocal with a ripping great guitar solo to wrap it up. We Are the Champions, on the other hand, was Mercury’s baby. It comes off, at first, like a bit of braggadocio, but the reality of it is that the spirit evoked by Mercury is inclusive, not exclusive. Freddie doesn’t sing “I am the Champion”. It’s that “we” part that encompasses the band’s fans and stands as a statement of mutual support within that collective against the ridicule and dismissal of those who questioned the group’s abilities and the dedication of their admirers. 

 

The remainder of the album offers a wide variety of styles and moods, though with a determinedly restrained, edgier feel, especially with the more rocking songs. Sheer Heart Attack, a Taylor song, was a holdover from the LP of the same name, but it got dropped back then in favor of other songs. It seems to have been for the best as the version on NotW couldn’t be more perfectly timed to be a response to the “punk” sensibilities of the times. It’s simply one of the most ripping, ferocious rockers the band ever put on record. 

 

The final iconic element of this album is the cover, something that has scared more than one impressionable child over the years. It was inspired by an old 1953 anthology book of science fiction short stories. Roger suggested it and the group managed to track down the original artist to do a variation, which included the band. I remember my little cousin being particularly disturbed by it and me having to tell her that it was just ketchup on that dead-eyed robot's finger. Years later, when Family Guy would do an episode where Stewie is totally freaked out by the image, I knew that this was something which must have happened to a lot of kids after the album was released. 

 

The album and lead single would prove to be the perfect response to critics who were ready to write the band off, though this pattern would repeat itself throughout the bands career. Still, News of the World would bring the band to new heights of success, especially in the US. I'd only discovered Queen a little more than a year earlier when I saw a video of them on the Midnight Special performing Tie Your Mother Down from A Day at the Races. In that brief time I'd backtracked to pick up all their previous LPs and was at the peak of my obsession with the band when NotW landed in the shops. It served to bolster my commitment to them and had me buying posters, T-shirts, badges, belt buckles and fan club memberships for the next couple of years. I guess it was kinda ironic for a deeply closeted gay kid to be running around his high school covered in Queen paraphernalia! HELLO!!!

NEVER MIND THE BOLLOCKS, HERE'S THE SEX PISTOLS @ 45

 

Marking its 45th anniversary today is the debut album from the Sex Pistols, Never Mind the Bollocks, which was released on October 27th, 1977. After spending the previous year creating havoc within the British youth scene and terrorizing government authorities with their bad behavior on the TV screen and stage, the Sex Pistols finally got themselves in a studio and created one of the most influential LPs in rock & roll history, albeit with Johnny Rotten intending it to be the end of rock & roll, full stop!

I believe that rock & roll music essentially has 3 epochs and they are hinged upon the appearances of its “holy trinity”: Elvis Presley, The Beatles and the Sex Pistols. When you look back across the history of the genre, it’s those tent-poles which most define the major shifts in its nature and cultural potential. Elvis introduced it to the mainstream, The Beatles turned it into a fine art and the Sex Pistols weaponized it. I say that because the Pistols were the last rock band to wield any legitimate sense of threat to the status quo. Sure, there have been controversial trends and popular movements, but the Pistols were the last band to seem dangerous and to make the establishment quake in their boots. Anyone who’s come along since then has been no more than an irritant to the powers that be. The Pistols were actually debated in Parliament and the government sought to crush them and stop them from spreading their message of revolt, going so far as to actively ban them from performing. It’s an unprecedented reaction which simply hasn’t happened since then.

Their one and only proper studio album now stands as a memorial to a scant few years when outrage seemed to have some import in the world. It’s also a damn good set of songs, well written both musically and lyrically. It says something about its time and the society that tried to silence it. Those messages remain relevant today, perhaps even more so than at the time they were penned. The fact it’s been co-opted into crass commercialism since then still doesn’t take away from the fact that it drew a line in the sand and we still look back at that time as a moment of epiphany and realization. Perhaps it was all a "swindle" as Malcolm retroactively postulated, but it changed the way people thought and that change keeps resonating around the world to this day.

As trite as kids thrashing out a few chords and bellowing their angst can be, you can still see when a culture is coming of age by the point at which its youth twig to the methodology and iconography of “punk”. You can observe these scenes happen in places like the middle east, Asia or Russia and see that there’s still a spirit of rebellion struggling to find a voice. It may often fail to create a distinction from Ramones style thrash, but it does show a desire to expose the energy pent up during that time when a new generation demands to be heard.

A lot of people want to push the flashpoint for punk to New York with the Ramones & New York Dolls or Detroit with the Stooges & MC5 and, while the structural elements may have been coming together in those places, they were only so much fuel without a spark. Those bands and scenes, as legitimate and eventually influential as they became, were only known to a tiny clique of hipsters until the Sex Pistols came along and put a match to all that kindling. It wasn’t until Johnny Rotten snarled that he was an “antichrist” that the world perked up and took notice of that generation and its rage. Others may have come sooner, but no one else struck the spark that would ignite the world. There is most certainly an undeniable “BP - before Pistols” and “AP - after Pistols” demarcation within the lineage of rock ’n’ roll.

I remember being intimidated to even buy Bollocks at the time I was first crossing the threshold from mainstream music into the looming underground. I was just starting to delve into the punk and new wave scenes and had a mere handful of records by bands like The Clash, Ramones, Elvis Costello & DEVO. I thought it was the nastiest thing in the world to pick up a Sex Pistols record and almost felt like I had to smuggle it into the house without my mom spotting it. When I heard a song like Bodies with it’s litany of “fuck this and fuck that” in a lyric about abortion, well I felt it was about as controversial a record as I could possibly bring home. 45 years on and it still sounds as ferocious and confrontational as it did back then. Of course it’s all paper tigers now and nobody’s gonna be threatened by a rock star again, but for a special, precious moment, the danger did seem rather real.

BILL NELSON'S RED NOISE - ART/EMPIRE/INDUSTRY (THE COMPLETE RED NOISE)

 

I finally got the opportunity to explore the recently released box set, Art/Empire/Industry (The Complete Red Noise). This set takes the “one and done” Bill Nelson’s Red Noise album from 1979, Sound On Sound, and gives it the deluxe reissue treatment, which has previously been done with all the Be Bop Deluxe albums. Though I can’t afford a physical copy and therefore cannot comment on the packaging of this set, I can at lease enjoy the music and all the bonus material that’s been made available. In exploring this set, it has highlighted the singular creative spark which Nelson harnessed for this project and which still strikes up a flame over four decades after its release.

When this album was originally issued in February of 1979, it became my gateway into the world of Bill Nelson. I’d seen BBD performing Panic In the World from their final LP, Drastic Plastic, in 1978 when they appeared on The Midnight Special. That performance caught my attention with the band appearing in very conservative business suits, though with Bill having dark eye-shadow under his eyes to give him a slightly deadened appearance. It was the subtle subversion of that appearance which piqued my curiosity. However, it took a somewhat middling review of the Red Noise LP in CREEM magazine to inspire me to want to buy that record. Even though the reviewer was dismissive of the album, something about the way it was described made me feel like this album needed to be in my collection.

When I managed to snag a copy, it instantly became the dominant presence within my meager, yet burgeoning record collection. There was certainly a strong influence from DEVO in the music, but there was a poetry and humor apparent in the album that was decidedly all down to Nelson’s hand. What struck me about the album was the laser precision focus of the songs and the style of the music. Its single-mindedness and coherence all felt seamless and impenetrable. The songs were precision crafted and presented in a manner which was relentless and supercharged with electricity. This is perfectly encapsulated by the album’s opener, Don’t Touch Me (I’m Electric). One felt like you might catch a spark from the turntable if you attempted to touch it while the album was playing. And then there was Furniture Music, a song which became my anthem of teenage angst, perfectly reflecting that feeling of being an object in my own life. Every song had something to connect with and put me in a state of mind where I was saying internally, “Okay, 1984 is on the way, so bring it on!” I was ready to end the ‘70s and start the future, no matter how bleak it might be.

Thematically, the album bounced furiously from one vision of dystopian alienation to another. Each song touched on themes of political fascism, machine conformity, intellectual dysfunction, emotional dysphoria and more. Bill’s evocative lyrics were layered atop a relentless onslaught of rapid fire tempos and song arrangements which felt like they’d been bolted together by assembly line robots rather than composed by human hands. This was all perfectly encapsulated by the LP’s cover photo, a brilliant work of found object assemblage by Japanese photographer, Bishin Jumonji, which depicted a bed ridden robot about to phone in sick. It’s an absolutely iconic symbolic representation of futurist failure.

The road to this album began before Be Bop Deluxe were formally disbanded, when Bill was beginning the process of creating what would be their final LP, Drastic Plastic. In fact, Bill was ready to pull the plug on the band at that time, but was persuaded to give it another go by the band’s management. As such, you can hear Nelson striving for Red Noise throughout the songs on DP, which were intended to be for RN’s first album, but it’s all a bit muted in the context of that band and the razor sharp angularity of Sound On Sound is only hinted at by Drastic Plastic. After DP’s completion, Bill was determined that the only way to realize his vision was to do so in an entirely rebuilt form with clear authority for the composer from top to bottom. So Red Noise would be a band, but only to facilitate Nelson’s vision as exactly as he demanded. He’d retain BBD keyboardist, Andy Clark, and brought in brother Ian on sax & additional keyboards and bassist Rick Ford. Drums would be handled by Bill himself, in the studio for most tracks, and Dave Mattacks on stage and for whatever Bill didn’t do in the studio. While Bill was the creative head, he’d relegate his guitar to a more supporting role, rather than making it the lead instrument. It would work in concert with the synthesizers to create what one critic described as “DEVO given Phil Spector’s wall-of-sound treatment”.

At the time of its release, while it performed well in the UK, reaching #33 on the album charts, it left zero impression on the US market. Critically, opinions were split with some marveling at its visionary departure from Nelson’s prior work, and others lamenting it as a contrived attempt to get in on the “new wave” trend. Music fans were equally baffled as Bill sped off into the future, leaving the “guitar hero” prog-rock of his past in the dust. The band embarked on a tour to support the album, presenting themselves in Neo-fascist grey uniforms as a tongue-in-cheek joke, positioning themselves, not as victims of this dystopia, but as harbingers and agents-provocateurs. The conflict of it all with Nelson's past work and mixed responses were enough to cause both Bill’s US and UK record labels to ditch him. This put the realization of a second Red Noise album into shambles. Bill had already begun work on the album, but the contract termination left those master tapes in the ownership of EMI, preventing him from doing anything for nearly two years until he could rework that material and release it as his first fully solo album, Quit Dreaming and Get On the Beam. By that point, Bill had given up on trying to retain a position as “band leader” and, instead, he set on his path as a solo artist, a position he’s retained for the rest of his career.

Red Noise and its attendant idiosyncratic sound would ultimately end up constrained to the Sound On Sound album. Quit Dreaming…, while possessing echoes of SoS, would end up ever so slightly returning Bill to the more romantic disposition he’d established with BBD. Indeed, the stark, angry futurism of SoS remains isolated within Nelson’s musical canon to this day. While Nelson always maintained a sense of modernity coupled with vintage science fiction nostalgia, nothing he’d create before or since would strike so fiercely or with such manic intensity as Sound On Sound.

The new box set includes discs featuring non-album bonus tracks, live performances and home demo recordings of songs from the SoS album. Those serve to highlight how pure and imperturbable Nelson’s vision was throughout the project. Its sheer monomaniacal consistency is apparent throughout the process, from conception to realization to presentation on stage. The new mix of the album, as was the case with the BBD box sets, offers up a wonderful refresher for the songs, allowing the listener to see through some of the density of the original mix and into the details of the arrangements. As a set, these recordings all reinforce and highlight the purity of the creative execution which went into producing Sound on Sound. It certainly renewed my disposition in terms of considering it one of the most important LPs to ever come into my musical life.