FOTW Audio Productions

An introduction: Creating the sound of space…

The Russians might have launched the first satellite into space, and the Americans might have had the first moon landing — but the race for what space might sound like musically has been an ongoing group effort.

Englishman Gustav Holst helped to get the ball rolling in 1918 with his Planets suite — but it would be the science-fiction film epidemic of the 1950s that would truly give it some momentum: Bernard Herrmann using the Russian-invented ‘theremin’ with its ghostly whine for The Day the Earth Stood Still in 1951, and the husband and wife team Louis and Bebe Barron’s tone-generated score for the legendary Forbidden Planet in 1960.

With the invention of the Moog synthesizer, it was the keyboard that would take the lead in scoring space, with the synthesizer’s ability to sustain endless notes, and not run out of breath, and use a complex system of filters that could make tiny, imperceptible changes to the pitch and velocity of a note, over time, creating drones, and unusual sounds, making it perfect for long voyages through outer space and visitations to other planets.

For many of us, we became used to these sounds through watching shows like Dr Who, and American-European co-productions like The Case of the Ancient Astronauts.

Part 1: A love affair from afar . . . Signals to a Habitable Zone

Now that’s a long spiel to get started on a review of new music, but the latest addition to this canon of astronomical audio excursions comes from the Brooklyn group Long Distance Poison who released their first 12” Signals to a Habitable Zone last year.

Creating their music with analogue synthesizers, they have purposely avoided using MIDI, the technology allowing synthesizers to talk to each other and get “in sync” – but a technology that can also detract from the spontaneity of electronic music by having everything too closely timed and controlled. Sacrificing this means that the three members of Long Distance Poison are relying more on their ear, and listening to each other for their live performances and recordings.

The album is divided into two tracks, ‘Signal I’ and ‘Signal II’ which have both been performed live around Brooklyn. LDP’s droning, epic music is very much in the mold of the German group Tangerine Dream, which is the first connection a listener might make in their mind, but their style and sound is also unique in that they are putting an American stamp on their music. It’s not often acknowledged, but so many of the early synthesizers came from the West Coast of America – the Moog, the Arp, the Prophet 5 – even though it has been European groups, particularly German, that their sound has come to be associated with.

Also American is their interpretation of space. Long Distance Poison’s version of solar winds and flares are not the same as those of Jean Michel-Jarre and Vangelis, but rooted more in the American science tradition of the local planetarium where teenagers would take their ‘dates’ to in American movies. The look and design of the record sleeve, too, is like a page torn from Scientific American magazine circa 1950s, and to hold one of their records in your hands is to feel again the awe and mystery that space and astronomy held for most of last century, a mystery that in many ways has been overshadowed by the development of the internet and personal devices.

Signals to a Habitable Zone suits a vinyl release much more than I would say the majority of vinyl releases do, and the long single track on each side allows you to close your eyes and lie back, letting your mind drift into delta wave territory, ending at the right moment, and maybe letting you choose to go to sleep, or wake up slowly – and then repeat the journey again the following night with Side B.

Part 2: Gliese Translations

Following this first release is a remix album, Gliese Translations, that came out a few months ago. It’s another 12” with three interpretations of Signals to a Habitable Zone.

The first is a remix of ‘Signal I’ by Drew McDowell, a New York based musician, originally from England, who had been a part of the group Coil and the industrial/electronic UK music scene of the 80s and 90s.

The second remix of ‘Signal II’ is by Steve Moore, who has been building quite a reputation for himself as a remixer and as one half of the duo Zombi. He has a natural predisposition for this type of music, and has been digitally updating the sound of Tangerine Dream with tracks like ‘Ancient Shorelines‘ and ‘Tyken’s Rift’. Moore has also released Long Distance Poison on his own label, VCO.

The third remix is by Shawn Parke, who has composed music for horror films, as well as remixing the likes of Calvin Johnson and Mirah. Parke has zeroed in on the horror elements of Signal I and II, combining them, and drawing out what horror composer Alan Howarth would call the “darker aspects” of subtractive synthesis (the filtering process that analogue synthesizers use).

Part 3: The term analogue doesn’t just apply to music.

Video, too, once used analogue processing to create its visual effects; and this is the final interesting element to Long Distance Poison’s work.

There is a fourth, non-musical member of the group, Matthew Caron, a filmmaker and video artist who is responsible for creating and projecting live visuals at their gigs, sometimes on rather interesting surface areas.

He has also used their music on a couple of his experimental films which are packaged with Gliese Translations as a DVD – The Three Voices of Tawûsê Melek and A Passage Above, which Caron made with Rebecca Gaffney.

The Three Voices of Tawûsê Melek is a deep brain stunner, with its slow build up of overlaid images, and screen jumping (the way televisions used to roll, when the horizontal hold wasn’t tuned in properly) with the central image of the film being a peacock — a perfect metaphor for the film, which, with its brilliant use of colour, is at times like stretching your jumper over your eyes while lying in the sun and seeing how the light refracts into separate colours through the fabric.

Epilogue: Re-entry…

Long Distance Poison would be a great live act to catch, if you live in the US.

Besides their normal performances, they have also performed live rescorings of Santa Sangre and The Holy Mountain, both feature films by the mystical Brazilian director Alejandro Jodorowsky, who I think figures as a strong influence on their overall work.

You can find out info about upcoming gigs on the LDP website:  www.longdistancepoison.org

In the meantime, both Signals to a Habitable Zone and Gliese Translations are available through the Fin Records website.

It’s hard to get away from the fact that the soundtrack of a dystopian future, thanks to all the bio-disaster and post-apocalyptic epics of the seventies and eighties, has a pulsing, detuned, synthesizer involved: from The Andromeda Strain to Escape from New York, the synthesizer gives these films the hard, inhuman edge that’s needed, and is perfect for stories full of futuristic menace.

Drokk, composed by Geoff Barrow of Portishead, and Ben Salisbury, an Emmy-nominated film and TV composer, is one of these. With a mixture of well-known soundtracks, notably, Assault on Precinct-13 and Escape from New York, as well as Blade Runner, Drokk has all the key elements of a “dystopian-horror” synthesizer soundtrack: a heartbeat pulse, long sustained notes, drones, repetitive arpeggios, and sharp detuned stings.

The theme of the album is a tribute to Judge Dredd from the weekly British comic 2000AD.  “Drokk” was a curse-word frequently uttered by the comic’s staple character – a law enforcer and sentence-prescribing judge rolled into one, who would ride around the sprawling future American city, Mega-City One, on a hybrid motorcycle, dishing out penalties to lawbreakers everywhere.

Although 2000AD has never been as well-known internationally as the American comic-houses Marvel and DC, it is still a powerhouse of its own, creating a universe of vast worlds, distinctive stories, and memorable characters like Rogue Trooper, Strontium Dog, and Halo Jones.

Unfortunately the sore point for fans has always been the disappointing 1995 film Judge Dredd with Sylvester Stallone in the lead role, and the similarity, back in the day, of the movie Robocop to the much loved character of Judge Dredd. However, a new (and not a remake) film of Judge Dredd is due out September this year. Simply called Dredd, it has a screenplay by Alex Garland and a budget of 45 million dollars, according to IMDb.

In a meantime, Barrow and Salisbury are reinvigorating and reclaiming some of the mystique of the story, bringing it closer to its roots, with a soundtrack more of its time. There are also a few other influences on the album too: Barrow has acknowledged his love of the German Krautrock genre, and the track “Inhale” is very close to the sound of the band Neu!

The overall album has a few sharp-edged moments, where people will ask you what the hell you are listening to, and despite it sometimes sounding too much like John Carpenter (the heartbeat of the opening track is so close to The Thing) themes begin to emerge that stick with you, and the overall listening experience is pleasurable — in a dystopian kind of way.

Drokk: Music Inspired by Mega-City One is released through Invada.

As I mentioned in a previous post about Roland Sebastian Faber’s absence from the most recent Alba and Fred Ventura project, Without You, due to working on a new EP — this is just a quick post to say that it has finally been released.

Called Society, the new 12″ is three original tracks, the sounds of a motorik industrial dynamic, with melodic breaks washing off the grime and grease of nation building (think black and white footage of the early days of New York, men eating their lunch up on steel building girders, and you have the accompanying ”image-track”)

With artwork again by veteran Emil Schult, Society is a limited vinyl release available through the Aube shop. But it should also appear digitally through the usual musical outlets in the coming weeks.

Here’s a preview:

I initially set up this site to promote a radio documentary I have been working on (and off) for a number of years about the film composer and director, John Harrison, and his soundtrack for the Stephen King-George Romero team-up, Creepshow — but with the long view of this website becoming a home for audio stories made under the moniker of FOTW Audio Productions.

I recently completed the first of these, “E. A. Poe and the Krautrock Connection”, featuring the music of Carlos Péron (one of the two  founders of eighties band Yello) and the Seattle band, The Fascination Movement.

The inspiration for the story comes from an experience I’d had as a teenager while visiting a female friend. Having spent years reading  Stephen King and Clive Barker, I thought there could be no way I would like someone like Edgar Allan Poe: What could be scary about black cats and swinging pendulums?

But while she was out of the room, I started reading her collection of Edgar Allan Poe short stories she had sitting by her bed — and within moments I was completely and utterly drawn in. I couldn’t believe how quickly it had had an effect on me.

Krautrock, I discovered a few years ago, and thought that it would be a great leaping off point into the imagination, if you were that way inclined. The final element was meeting someone who I thought would be great to try and impress.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy it.

Over the last five years, Brighton group Soft Rocks have been unable to put a foot wrong. After releasing a number of 12 inches - the Disco Powerplay and Chocolate Love series - and last year remixing MGMT‘s Of Moons, Birds and Monsters, the news is that they are currently working on a full album, this time entirely comprised of original sounds. 

They have also just started doing a regular radio show “Live From the Bowels of Brighton” on Deep Frequency.

Below is the stunning Leave Your Earth Behind from the second Milky Disco compilation, which also came out as a 12″ and digital download on the Redux label. With synths in the style of Japanese group Kitaro, a tightly structured framework of rhythms and early-rave/deep-house repetitive dischords, Leave Your Earth Behind is a heavily-layered and complex track with a real driving-through-the-backstreets-at-night feel.

LINKS:

http://www.myspace.com/softrocksrecordings

From Private Image photo series c. 2007 Poser Graphics

Although the full length album “Sadistic Skatepark” by Japanese group COS/MES was released mid-2007, it never quite made it into Western countries and received the exposure it deserved.

It was released as part of an exhibition in Japan featuring the work of designers and artists closely aligned with the Japanese skating scene. The Sadistic Skatepark was a full-size ramp, installed in a clothing store in Tokyo, made from iron, and covered in dangerously protruding bolts (the ‘sadistic’ element of the ramp).

Many of the tracks on the album are interspersed with the sound of skateboards rolling on the iron ramp, and refer in name to features of the exhibition.

For example, the first track — which uses a forward slash for its name — is the Iron Stick symbol of the exhibition. Every Sadistic Skatepark CD was issued with a small iron bar inserted into the empty spine of the plastic casing. These bars were meticulously hand-made, and tie into the iron ramp and iron skateboard imagery.

Forging the Iron Stick: Members of COS/MES at Work

The majority of the tracks on the album are laid-back, jazz-infused grooves — the sort of music that goes well playing in the background of an exhibition — but there are a couple of stunners, like Fanfare Maniac, which has a mid-seventies Tangerine Dream style arpeggio, with timpani rolls and a strong melody. It’s epic journey music with a slightly manic edge; and Iron Deck, a deep house track, with a nodding 303 bass line, and deeply delayed clattering metal, giving it a soundtrack quality. A stuttering vox line comes in mid-track that paves the way for a fantastic melodic flourish.

There is an amazingly diverse range of sounds on this album; I’m not sure whether they are sampled or created from scratch, but they really fill out into an interesting album to listen to.  The raucous Slam is another good track, as well as Ramp, an upbeat rock number with an eighties feel.

The name COS/MES might be a play on the German word ‘kosmichë’ — as many of the sounds on this album have there origin in this vein of electronic music. The two artists behind the work are DJ Flatic and 5ive. Flatic regularly DJ’s in Japan, and has released a number of mixes on the Sound More label.

COS/MES are also part of a group in Japan known as iseneehihinee, which includes graffiti artist MUSTONE, design duo Haroshi and clothing line Friendick, VJ and video-artist Heartbomb, and a number of others, including Mixrooffice, which has staged events in Japan bringing out artists like Daniel Wang and Derrick May.

Build the Band and Fanfare Maniac were released last year on a 7” vinyl by Swedish label High Feelings, with the cover artwork featuring photos of the Sadistic Skatepark ramp. The track Build the Band is also on the Prins Thomas ‘Live at Robert Johnson’ mix CD, which was released in May this year. COS/MES also have a new track — Natural Lifespan — on the Mule Musiq/Endless Flight various artists compilation, ‘I’m Starting to Feel Okay’ Vol.3.

COS/MES are a really interesting group, with great sounds and wide musical tastes. ‘Sadistic Skatepark’ — as well as any of their future releases — are worth getting a hold of.

Tracklist:

01. /
02. xxx
03. slide show
04. 088 skate
05. poser, poser
06. he is rain man
07. slam
08. fanfare maniac
09. iron deck
10. like a virgin point
11. ramp / cos/mes
12. sadistic skatepark / cos/mes

Sadistic Skatepark is out on Sound Wave Construction (Japan)

Thanks to Jonny Nash for assistance.   

SADISTIC SKATEPARK EXHIBITION (MUSIC BY COS/MES):

LINKS

COS/MES:
http://www.myspace.com/cosmes

ISENEEHIHINEE:
http://x3x.tc/

POSER GRAPHICS:
http://friendick.jp/weblog/poser/