F Kinetik - Day 1.

While Alex and Bruce were off in Montreal drinking boxed wine in open parking lots and stuffing themselves with real poutine, I held down the fort here in Vancouver. Keeping it real.

There was recently a bloggy rant posted about how people need to stop complaining about how modern industrial sucks. And then a bunch of other people were like "Yeah! You're all haters!"

In the interest of journalistic integrity, I say that you're all hypocrites! And not in the awesome Peter Tagtgren way.

First of all, before we call the kettle neon black, let me first say that the entire IEI enjoys talking trash. Even Bruce. That's right. The guy that pretends to walk some kind of path of righteousness, yet if you mention Unter Null he kicks his mother in the face. Then spills beer on her. Again. Alex and I are no better. There's no shortage of bands we've spoken poorly of.

The crux of the matter is that it's not because we think it's the elite thing to do. Afterall, at the last get together we had we started singing "Careless Whisper" and R Kelly's modern masterpiece "Real Talk." That's right. We weren't singing Front 242, we were talk-singing an argument with Kells' lady friend.

That said, we would never say that the entire genre sucks. Even if we don't have many industrial records primed for our top 10 this year.

I think most people are in the same boat. No matter how supportive they want to say they are, I've heard pretty much all of them talk trash about a plethora of bands. So hopefully being the biggest battery cage supporter doesn't become the new "thing" because that's just as fake as saying the only CDs you own are Whitehouse albums.

Can anyone honestly tell me that the entire Alfa Matrix roster is awesome?

And at the same time, can you honestly say that Interlace, Run Level Zero, Celldweller, Keef Baker, Combichrist, Snog and Spectra Paris ALL SUCK?

In a perfect world, people would go up to a DJ request sheet and write down what they ACTUALLY want to hear. Not what will feed their facade. Not something as awesome and helpful as "Play something good."

A Perfect world where if you do play some old goth music, someone would actually dance to it.

Or where Alex is eating a Whopper in the back of a limo while R Kelly sings his order into a Burger King drive-thru box with his shirt off.

A Perfect World. And That's Real Talk.

Kinetik: Day Two

Headscan
Catching only the last two tracks of their set, we don’t necessarily feel qualified to pass judgment on the Canadian duo. We will however note that what we did hear was more or less what we expected, if maybe a touch less techno oriented. Perfectly serviceable atmospherics and beat oriented with hissed vocals.

Memmaker
Thus far, the unquestioned show stealers. An enthused hometown crowd were validated by a performance that would’ve quickly won over even the most staid and unfamiliar audience. The high-tempo, breakneck tracks guaranteed instant dancefloor mayhem, but also delivered plenty of rhythmic complexity for those with a yen for chin-stroking restraint. Much of their material uses classic techno song structures, but with a punishing, all-enveloping wash of noise indicative of Yann Faussurier and Guillaume Nadon’s pedigree. Copies of their debut LP “How To Enlist In A Robot Uprising” (Replete with BPM listings on the back cover! Old school!) were flying off merch tables afterwards, and hearing multiple cuts from this beast at the club this year is an absolute certainty. Get your ass to Mars.

Rabia Sorda
Balancing electro and acoustic elements is always difficult in a live context, and in Rabia Sorda’s case the keyboards were unfortunately buried in the mix, making it difficult to follow each song’s progression. In spite of that, the band delivered an energetic set, largely fuelled by live drums which lent the proceedings a more traditionally “rock” sound.

Funker Vogt
A metric fuckton of Funker shirts could be spotted over the course of Kinetik, and the reception the long-standing German band received spoke to their evident popularity. We’ll assume from the cheers that those stoked on seeing Funker got exactly what they were hoping for, but in our humble estimation that’s little more than the uninspired rehash of a single, relatively vapid and fluffy formula over, over, and over again. “This is German electronic body music!” declared lead singer Jens Kästel as the band started in on their set. If that’s the case, we can lay EBM to rest alongside the Weimar Republic and other long since deceased teutonic cultural movements. An improvised game of being able to sing the lyrics to “Tragic Hero” overtop of each song that was tossed out soon ceased to be a joke. We’d conservatively guess that two-thirds of their set follows roughly same chord progressions and general song structure, not to mention never straying from a range of four or five BPM.

Outside of the overarching modern military conflict theme, Funker’s ethos is a slightly muddled one. On one hand there’s the traditionally distorted vocals, on the other there’s the cheesiness of the horn voices that carry their song’s melodies. This schizophrenia carried over to their stage show and costuming. One dude thinks he’s in Covenant, another thinks he’s the DJ for Scooter, and another’s under the delusion that he’s playing paintball. We just don't get what's hip with the kids these days.

Kiew
Oh Jesus. Following a band as popular as Funker and going onstage at 1 am’s an unenviable task (we’d guess that a full half of the crowd left as soon as the final beat of “Tragic Hero” was played), and Kiew were also the first band who had to deal with substantive technical problems. Neither of these factors provide enough cover to excuse what was not only hands down the worst set of Kinetik, but the worst set by an electronic band of any repute either of us had seen in years.

Acceptable glitchy shit out of frontman Thedi's rig, but his repeated yelling of inane slogans drowned out anything interesting that might've been going on. Factor in a guitarist and bassist apparently jamming out in an entirely random fashion and you've four elements heading out in entirely different directions and getting absolutely nowhere. We've no idea if Kiew takes an improv approach to live performance, but we've seen enough excellent improvised electronic sets and more than enough mediocre ones to know the difference. Any audience member could've been on stage wanging on a theremin for the duration of the set and it would neither have added nor subtracted a thing from this shoddy and embarrassing wankfest. Kiew have a sizeable following (having been active since 1990), but given that this was our first exposure to them, we certainly can't count ourselves amongst it (sorry, Richard).

Noisuf-X
Acceptable noise-EBM hybrid that got feet moving (no small feat this late in the evening) but didn't leave much of an impression. Good workrate. In all honesty, we were too tired by this point (not to mention zombified by Kiew) to really digest anything remotely complex or challenging, so this was a bit of a relief.

"Oh, it was gorgeosity and yummy yum yum."

I've been listening to loads of Rome over the past few days (which is fantastic and will likely be getting some coverage here soon), and I've been driven nearly bonkers trying to figure out whose voice Rome main man Jerome Reuter reminds me of. While making some late night tea, it finally struck me: Gavin Friday. The same earthen, leathery tone that some might mistake for world-weariness, but more likely simply comes from a lifetime of fine scotch appreciation. Fossil-goth Virgin Prunes fans should definitely seek out any of his three solo records if they haven't already done so.

Speaking of Gavin, I could've sworn I posted his recent oddball cover of "Singin' In The Rain" on IEI, but some quick scanning suggests otherwise. So: Gavin was contracted by Lemon, a fancy-pants design and culture mag, to record a cover of the standard in conjunction with a special issue dedicated to the work of Stanley Kubrick (on the million to one chance that there's anyone reading an industrial blog who hasn't seen "A Clockwork Orange", the song's used in a particularly harrowing scene in that film). Lemon released the song on, of all things, a flexidisc in the Kubrick issue. If I wasn't already plunking down $9 for the cover with Leelee Sobieski holding an axe, the sheer weirdness of a Gavin Friday flexi sold me on the mag. A copy once hosted on Lemon's site has since disappeared, but Your Humble Narrator retained and offers it now.

Gavin turns in a quirky version that places his voice front and center amidst softly cooed oohs and aahs, which somehow manages to quell menacing images of Alex DeLarge amidst the cooling spring drizzle. Pop a couple vellocets and enjoy.

Gavin Friday, "Singin' In The Rain"

Kinetik: Day One

Kinetik has come and gone. We've left Montreal with beer in our guts, CDs in our bags, and plenty of noise buzzing in our ears. We'll be offering a general write-up of the organization, mood and presentation of the festival as a whole, but first let's get run down the bands, day by day. First up, Phase One: Electro.

The Horrorist
Suprisingly more stark EBM than we would have expected. Aside from well worn hardcore classics like "One Night in NYC", most of the tracks featured a traditional, Belgian EBM sound, exemplified by his straight-forward cover of "Body to Body". Aside from adding occasional Atari Teenage Riot style vocals, The Horrorist’s assistant manned the backing tracks on an iBook (the official computer of, well, everyone at Kinetik), leaving Chessler free to roam the stage and crowd with a handheld halogen lamp and distract from the limitations of what was essentially a laptop set. Bonus points for playing "I Am A Sex Machine", as seen being demo'd by Chessler in the "where are they now" portion of Depeche Mode’s classic concert film "101". Even more bonus points for rocking a hairstyle so memorable, iconic and ridiculous in that film that someone in the crowd felt moved to sport it in tribute twenty years later.

Ascii.Disko
Not a disappointment, but certainly not a pleasant surprise either. One man behind a laptop, one track flowing into the next with no change in BPM doesn’t make for as much of a live experience as it does a DJ set. Fine, workmanlike electro that lacked the synthpop flourishes of his recorded output. The crowd seemed to enjoy it, but we could’ve used more vocals to break up the repetition.

Nitzer Ebb
Kicking off with "Getting Closer", Nitzer Ebb justified their status not only as the biggest name at Kinetik by far, but also one of the two quintessential EBM bands of all time. McCarthy was in fine form (and remarkably well-preserved to boot), bouncing back forth for the duration of the set, barking, goose-stepping and tanzing der Mussolini. No effort was made to retrofit their songs as some of their late 80s/early 90s contemporaries have done in recent years. The vitality of the material transcended its age and still sounded as brash, bombastic and relentless as the day it was released. Were an uninitiated party to take in their set, there’d be no indication that the bulk of these tracks dated back to the Thatcher administration. And yes, we joined in the chant and shouted golden shouts.

Ek = A Buttload Of Angry Germans With Laptops

Two thirds of the IEI team will be forming like Voltron (albeit a heavily amputated Voltron) this week in Montreal for the much touted three night Kinetik festival. The line-up's been the talk of "this thing of ours" for months: Fiendflug, This Morn Omina, Displacer, Kiew, Xotox, Mono No Aware, Headscan, Terrorfakt... But let's face it: like the majority of the folks there, despite whichever obscure Finnish powernoise act we make like we're really excited to see, for us it's all about Nitzer Ebb. And, by Fulber's beard, the merch tables! Between Ant Zen, Industrial Shirts and Storming the Base all bringing swag to the shows, I fully expect to be reduced to a Wonderbread n' Kool-Aid diet for the subsequent couple of months.

This trip's been in the works for months, and we're both crazy stoked to be checking out what's sure to be a landmark event for live dark electronic shows in North America. Montreal's a city that promotes revelry, and by the end of the second night Alex and I plan to be three sheets to the wind and heckling Funker Vogt (who are, let's face it, Very Silly) and demanding that they play "Shaven" (to the unfamiliar: Google the lyrics at yr own risk).

Watch this space for our personal Kinetik highlights, lowlights and preferred fashion "don'ts" from the Unix Sysadmin Rivet Runway, featuring the gorgeous (and pasty) models of the Side-Line forums.

"A Painful Beauty"

Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, "Dazzle Ships"
When Alex told me that the reissue of Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark's fourth LP, "Dazzle Ships", was earning rave reviews from the likes of Popmatters and Pitchfork, I felt that odd mix of vindication and being usurped that comes when a cherished and coveted favourite record gets a public vetting. On one hand, the modern indie cognoscenti haven't had much time for OMD or much other classic synthpop, except to namecheck them while telling us why Ladytron are doing it so much better than any of the original innovators. On the other hand, "Dazzle Ships" was always OMD's forgotten masterpiece, derided mercilessly as indulgent experimentalism upon release, and it makes sense that it should be rediscovered by modern ears.

80s record authority Ned Ragget called "Dazzle Ships" "a 'Kid A' of it's time": a confounding and obtuse experiment released in the wake of a great band's defining album - the solemn and majestic "Architecture and Morality" in OMD's case. Listeners weren't sure what to do with a barrage of radio samples and discordant military sirens after the perkiness of "Enola Gay" or the lush, chart-friendly chiming of "Souvenir". While OMD had always been writing music about technology, "Dazzle Ships" pushed that agenda so far to the fore that it was impossible to listen to the record without dealing with that theme head-on. Furthermore, as the liner notes in this re-release argue, not dealing with political issues at the peak of the Cold War seemed impossible for a band obsessed with technology and culture. The end result? This is a record about globalization's affect on our psyches and technologies that came out a year before Fredric Jameson first published on "The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism", and a decade before Bill Clinton made globalization a household term on the campaign trail. Reaction to it was marked by same confusion and disorientation that its titular vessels sought to provoke.

"Dazzle Ships" remains as oblique, shimmering and inspired today as it did upon release. True, the bricolage of radio broadcasts and technoculture prophecy doesn't sound nearly as revolutionary as it did upon release - sampling and the acceptance of it by the general listening public have come a long way in twenty-five years. But what does still have an impact is the juxtaposition of the cacophony of the zeitgeist with the two modes of songwriting that OMD had perfected in their previous releases: chirpy, bubbling synthpop odes to technology, and epic, mournful ballads. By adding the Cold War/communications tech motif of "Dazzle Ships" to their palette, OMD managed to blend the personal and the political, the emotive and the austere until the subject of the song detaches from itself. Metaphor becomes a two-way street.

What's more, Andy McCluskey and Paul Humphreys brought some of their best compositions to the "Dazzle Ship" sessions, regardless of presentation or context. All of the three up-tempo synthpop numbers are crackers, but only "Radio Waves" ever gives itself over fully to the ecstasy of melody and the power of technology. The others, "Genetic Engineering" and "Telegraph" temper their joyous everything-and-the-kitchen-sink instrumentation with McClusky's wary lyrics. "Genetic Engineering" is particularly unsettling - a facile melody is accompanied by a Speak n' Spell voice intoning an eerie litany: "Babies, mother, hospital, scissors, creature, judgment, butcher, engineer". The instumental tracks, composed almost entirely of samples, help to frame the more developed tracks within "Dazzle Ships"' ethos - while you might not ever go out of your way to listen to "ABC Auto-Industry" or "Time Zones" on their own, they're essential to the album's overall effect. As for the ballads, they pack a punch. The processional, almost nautical heartache of "Joan Of Arc" is revisited in "The Romance of the Telescope" and "International", the former of which has been pointed to by McClusky and Humphreys as a band favourite. The record closes with "Of All The Things We've Made", a plaintive, mechanical farewell that sounds as though it's a hair's-width away from collapsing at any moment, while McClusky croons about the failure of our creations (Technology? Love? As always, there is no distinction.) - "Everything we've made/All the things we've said/They've always worked before today".

As for the merits of this particular re-release, this listener could detect little to no distinction between the sound of the record with this "new" digital remaster and the original CD release, but given how many classic electronic 80s records have become victims of the loudness war, mayhaps I should be thankful. So, lets turn to the bonus tracks to see what this reissue offers to longtime OMD fans. The melodic elements of the 1981 version of "Telegraph" are more or less the same as the original, but a slightly slower and heavier beat and a more unhinged vocal performance by Andy McClusky makes the desperate tone of the song sound positively menacing. The "312mm" version of "Genetic Engineering" is simply an extended mix which, along with the "Telegraph" extended mix, doesn't bring anything new to the table. "4-Neu" and "66 And Fading" already had a recent outing on the B-sides compilation "Navigation" (which, in my humble opinion, is the most crucial OMD release to obtain after the first four LPs), but they're both gorgeous, cinematic bits of melancholy (think Vangelis' "Blade Runner" work) that show just how adept McCluskey and Humphreys were at crafting ambient soundscapes as well as pure pop. That leaves intended album closer "Swiss Radio International", which was initially meant as a counterpart to the "opening radio call sign" function that "Radio Prague" serves. According to OMD's website, Swiss Radio felt that allowing their call sign to appear on an album which heavily sampled communist radio broadcast would violate Switzerland's policy of cultural neutrality! Anyhow, it's a nice little lullaby, and I'm seriously considering appending it to the end of the original LP for future listens. The long and the short: if you've already got "Dazzle Ships" and "Navigation", there isn't a lot of revelatory new material here. But, if you're halfway as obsessed with OMD's music or Peter Saville's design as most of their fans are, the "gotta have it" factor will likely win out (as it did with me).

Speaking of Peter Saville, he intriguingly created three different designs for each of the formats "Dazzle Ships" was initially released on: vinyl, cassette and CD. Each of these designs seemed focused on presenting Saville's take on the dazzle ship camouflage (and vorticist Edward Wadsworth's painting, "Dazzle-ships In Drydock at Liverpool", shown here) within the frame that each format provided. So, instead of having to live with a rich composition that was meant to be shown at LP-size shrunk down to tape or CD size, we got individual cover art tailor-made for those smaller canvases (and more pieces for us Saville fan-boys to collect). The original LP sleeve used punched-out hole in the front (like Saville's magnum opus, "Blue Monday") in concert with the art on the slipcase in order to create a representation of travel and movement through time zones, one of the record's key images. Unfortunately, the reissue does just what Saville sought to avoid: shrinking the LP art to CD size, with none of the cool pull-out design. That being said, the (uncredited) essay in the liner notes is well-written and nicely situates the record in both the context of OMD's career and the pop climate of the time.

In the liner notes, McClusky recalls "Dazzle Ships" as "the lowest selling album that we ever released and yet I am inordinately proud of it. Maybe we did something that was commercial suicide, but we did that album for the right reasons. It has a painful beauty." McClusky didn't need the critical vindication the album's received in recent years in order to produce, release and stand by such a bizarre and unprecedented album (although whether it prompted OMD to retreat back into safe and pleasant territory with next year's "Junk Culture" is another story), but if recent hosannas prompt contemporary listeners to explore the depth and breadth of OMD's work which lies beyond well-worn radio fare like "If You Leave" and "So In Love", then this re-release will have served admirably.

Dessau - "Isolation"

Finding info on WaxTrax! affiliates Dessau proved difficult - maybe it's no coincidence that one of their few releases was titled "Details Sketchy". Their abandoned website's got a terminal case of webrot (Fortunecity's servers are still running?) and I can't find anything else resembling an official presence. In any event, the Nashville group intermittently released sludgy industrial rock between 1985 and 1995 that nicely anticipated coldwave. Throughout it all, their signature tune remained an inspired cover of Joy Division's "Isolation". Slowed down, the song's bassline remains as unnerving as ever, and Al Jourgensen's percussion and programming turns Ian Curtis' skittering panic attack into a pounding anthem of self-reckoning.

Dessau - "Isolation"

...And hey presto! There's a nicely dated late 80's video, replete with strobe light and VJ intro.