I´m working in new stuff to be released after the summer .. Legendary pink dots and Instant automatons!
Abstrk 01 – LEGENDARY PINK DOTS “The Seismic Bleats of Quantum Sheep” LP
B.F.E.?? – INSTANT AUTOMATONS “Compilation” LP
Out in September
B.F.E.32 – BRONZE LP (European tour in October/November. Get in touch if you want to book any show (Looking for dates in Germany and Holland))
B.F.E.31 – COÀGUL “La Forja Centrípeta” LP
LEGENDARY PINK DOTS
http://thequietus.com/articles/13057-legendary-pink-dots-gethsemane-option-review
“Over 33 years and 40-plus albums,the Legendary Pink Dots have forged a unique, subterranean path through a cross-section of British, European and American musical subcultures. With roots in the same fertile soil of English 1980s post-punk, post-hippie, acid-informed occultism as Psychic TV, Coil, Current 93 and Nurse With Wound – equal parts Stonehenge Free Festival and Ballardian industrial estate dystopia – they’ve detoured through goth, industrial, ambient and dark folk along their journey, from lo-fi tape experiments to alternative dancefloor fillers, subversive pop to abrasive noise, often within the same song.
If anything, though, the Dots can be seen as a singular development of the underground psychedelia that first inspired main man Edward Ka-Spel (born 1954) as a teenager: Syd Barrett’s Pink Floyd, the alien visitations of early David Bowie, the art-rock of Henry Cow and the Residents, and of course the first wave of German kosmische music – Can, Faust, Neu! These early visions of artistic freedom have informed the band ever since, through changing incarnations built around Ka-Spel and founding keyboard player Phil Knight, aka The Silverman. Alongside a complex, somewhat tongue-in-cheek mythology constructed via their lyrics and presentation, this approach has seen the Dots filed away as the cult bands’ cult band – beloved of a hardcore few, quietly influential yet perpetually existing well beneath the media radar.
Since the mid-90s the band have been somewhat better known in America where, partly due to their association with Canadian pioneers Skinny Puppy, they’re considered a part of the industrial scene and embraced accordingly. They were even courted by Blondie producer Craig Leon and Van Halen producer Ted Templeman, opportunities they missed out on not due to any stubborn refusal to compromise their ideals, but due to an endearing absent-mindedness; they basically forgot to return their calls. So it is that the latest Dots release comes not courtesy of Time Warner but Pennsylvania’s more modest Metropolis Records. And for a band long based in the Netherlands, and focusing much of its activity in America, it is an inescapably English record, concerned with our heritage and history, our current dire predicament, our blinkered island outlook and, perhaps, our potential for change and liberation.
An accessible and ambitious album, The Gethsemane Option still retains the main stumbling block for any casual listener coming to the Legendary Pink Dots – Edward Ka-Spel’s voice. It’s a flat, nasal drone, part lisp and part sneer, high-pitched and slightly camp, and unapologetically emphasising an East London-Essex-Suffolk accent. It’s a voice not dissimilar to the vocals of Genesis P-Orridge, Current 93’s David Tibet, and Alternative TV’s Mark Perry, making it the default non-singing voice of the Southern English, Post-Punk Occult Underground. And, unfortunately, in the uninitiated it can easily evoke images of Peter Cook as EL Wisty, dressed in cloak and pointy hat, earnestly insisting that he’s been ‘aving a dabble in the black arts, and investigating the works of Aleister Crowley, and it’s all very interesting actually… But the strange thing is that, as you persevere, Ka-Spel’s initially comical vocals become the very glue that holds the album together, and grow in emotional power with every listen. Soon you wouldn’t have them any other way.
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INSTANT AUTOMATONS
Lo-fi Pioneers of the Great Northeast
http://www.dustedmagazine.com/reviews/891
When you think of the post-punk scene in Britain, northeastern towns named Grimsby and Scunthorpe might not immediately leap to mind as hotbeds of musical innovation. These are places whose very names send shivers down the spines of most English people living south of the Watford Gap. And besides, surely anything worth noticing in the North was happening in cities like Manchester, Leeds, Liverpool, and Sheffield. For the most part, yes, but Grimsby and Scunthorpe were the respective homes of Mark Lancaster and Martin Neish, otherwise known as the Instant Automatons.
Not many people heard of the Instant Automatons during their lifetime (1977-1982) and fewer actually heard them. Even so, they were at the forefront of a then-radical DIY movement of artists who distributed their music on cassette, free of charge.
Lancaster and Neish’s first musical endeavors took the form of electronic experiments in their school physics laboratory, where they spent their time “emulating spaceship noises” under the spell of groups like Kraftwerk, Hawkwind, and Faust. Then 1976 rolled around and punk exploded.
Punk’s rejection of the rules and the received wisdom about making music resonated with the pair and, like everyone else back then, they decided to form a band. After a brief flirtation with the very dodgy moniker Abraxas, they chose to call themselves the Instant Automatons. Martin Neish assumed the name Protag and Mark Lancaster became Mark Automaton (for the sake of clarity, referred to here as Lancaster).
While “Do It Yourself” was punk’s liberating credo, the Instant Automatons pushed the DIY ethic further than many of their contemporaries, with regard to how they played their music, how they recorded it, and how they distributed it.
The term “lo-fi” was still years away from being used to describe a hip variant of indie rock, but the Instant Automatons were among the forerunners of that genre. Consider some of the weapons in their sonic arsenal – a number of them assembled by Protag, who was something of a whiz in the home-electronics department: rhythm boxes and effects pedals ordered as kits through the mail; a transistor radio; a home-built synth; a bass fashioned from a floorboard; an eight-string guitar from Woolworth’s; and so on.
Protag played bass, Lancaster took care of guitar, vocals, and occasional sax, and both fiddled around with synths. The results – often treated with a generous amount of echo – had a considerable amount in common with peers like Joy Division, Cabaret Voltaire, ATV, the Fall, and John Cooper Clarke. Indeed, as a lyricist, Lancaster often fell somewhere between Cooper Clarke and Mark E. Smith, although he was more subtle than the former and less obtuse than the latter.
What made the Instant Automatons unique, however, was their decision, at the outset, never to attempt to make a penny from their recordings. They felt that if they were to try to make a living off music, they would inevitably have to make commercially viable products, thereby compromising their interest in non-mainstream sounds or, in their words, “Weird Music.” In addition, they took the more radical position that it’s somehow wrong to make any money at all from creative work. So they kept their day jobs (Protag worked in a chemical factory and Lancaster was a meat inspector), formed their own label (Deleted Records – “The World’s Most Unprofitable Record Company”), and placed ads in the national music papers offering their wares to anyone inquisitive (or mad) enough send them a blank cassette and self-addressed, stamped envelope.
Between 1978 and 1981, Deleted put out four Instant Automatons albums: Radio Silence – The Art of Human Error, Eating People – Hints for the Housewife, Blues Masters of the Humber Delta, and Tape Transport. A fake compilation cassette, Magnitizdat – The Least Worst of Deleted Records, featured the band masquerading under an array of names (e.g., the Running Sores, Rene Alberto & the Balsams, the Bores, and the Dismals). They also made several forays into budget-priced vinyl, their Deleted EP Peter Paints His Fence earning airplay on BBC Radio 1’s John Peel show.
The Instant Automatons emerged as central figures in what became known as the “Bad Music” scene, as like-minded loons around the UK started doing the same thing – most notably the Door and the Window, Danny and the Dressmakers, and the 012 (London bands recording at Street Level Studios, the home of Fuck Off Records – Deleted’s southern counterpart). Other labels quickly sprung up and British music papers like the NME and Sounds began to devote weekly columns to cassette-only releases.
Lancaster and Protag (who went on to join Blyth Power and Alternative TV) laid the band to rest over two decades ago, but they’ve finally released a CD compilation, Not So Deep As a Well. Although it doesn’t include material from their earliest cassettes and focuses primarily on their vinyl appearances, this 73-minute/27-track release offers a more than generous sampling of the Instant Automatons’ work. Apparently, the band’s Peter Paints His Fence EP was originally to have been called A Legend in Their Own Lunchtime. This compilation ensures that the Instant Automatons legend will live on a little longer.
Rhetorically at least, punk adopted a year-zero attitude, denouncing anything with a whiff of tradition or establishment about it. But while the Automatons embraced the possibilities opened up by punk’s liberating purge, they weren’t so quick to consign their record collections to the dustbin of musical history and their work shows unfashionable continuity with earlier artists and genres: they covered traditional English folk tunes and numbers by Fairport Convention, Leonard Cohen, and Janis Ian; they paid homage to American blues; and they reworked a rock anthem by Hendrix. And whereas some of their more extreme post-punk peers messed with the concept of the song itself, the Instant Automatons tended to blend the experimental with the conventional: underneath the weirdness and quirkiness – which was initially the result of their inability to play well or of their equipment being so poor – there were often relatively traditional song structures.
Occasionally, this resulted in avant-pop gems that wouldn’t have sounded completely out of place on Top of the Pops next to Tubeway Army and the Human League. Several of these are included here. The sing-along “People Laugh at Me (Cos I Like Weird Music)” is a Bad Music advocacy number, despite the fact that the song’s protagonist loses his girlfriend after playing her a Danny and the Dressmakers tape. The droning “New Muzak” sends up the more dour synth-poppers of the time, yet curiously enough it actually holds up as a decent synth-pop song. In a similar vein is “Catacomb,” with its austere Kraftwerkian synth and primitive electronic beats. And then there’s “John’s Vacuum Cleaner” – arguably the band’s greatest tune – a moving tale of love, betrayal, appliances, obsessive housework, and suicide, set to appropriately vacuum cleaner-esque churning and whirring.
While humor was a crucial ingredient in the Instant Automatons’ work, they weren’t a novelty band. Rather, they used humor as a means to a satirical end. Just as “New Muzak” was a musical and lyrical pastiche of late-’70s/early-’80s electronica, the deconstructed rockabilly paean to non-conformity, “Short Haired Man (In a Long Haired Town),” turns the traditional notion of the rock ‘n’ roll outlaw on its head, recasting the short-back-and-sides as a subversive, outsider haircut.
Lancaster’s trope of choice was irony, usually deployed to assail intolerant behaviors and attitudes. Listening to social-commentary tracks like the driving “Ignorance Is Bliss” (featuring “the world’s second-worst guitar solo” – the worst one was on the original version of the track) and the weirdly sci-fi sounding “Invertebrates,” it would seem that Lancaster doesn’t suffer fools gladly. Indeed, he comes across rather like the Philip Larkin of Bad Music. Sometimes, however, the irony is considerably darker, for instance on the anti-war number “Nice Job for the Lad.”
Another significant aspect of the Automatons’ eclectic sound was their primitive exploration of sampling. Snippets of newsreader voices punctuate the angst-ridden “Scared to be Alone,” which evokes Cabaret Voltaire’s “Nag Nag Nag” in terms of its abrasive drive. The fragmented “Drunk in Woolwich (On New Year’s Eve)” sounds much as its title suggests: the Automatons are gloriously shambolic in their cups (providing an answer to that famous Zen question, “what is the sound of one man vomiting?”) and sampled, plummy BBC types prattle on about how terrible young people are these days. (Actually, if you’ve had as much to drink when you listen to this as the Automatons obviously did the night they recorded it, the spoken samples recall 23 Skidoo’s “Porno Bass,” with its snatches of Britain’s favorite fascist Unity Mitford being her charming self.)
Further evidence of the Automatons’ tendency toward sonic exploration can be heard on their forays into dub production. Their dub experiments didn’t result in such startling sounds as those concocted by contemporaries like the Pop Group, but they still make for some of this compilation’s finest moments. Take, for example, “Peter Paints His Fence,” which might put a northeastern spin on Augustus Pablo’s Far East sound (albeit with a harmonica instead of a melodica), and Protag’s prescient two-word tirade against globalization, “Too Big!”
Not So Deep As a Well takes us back to a time just after the dinosaurs of rock became extinct and when music was free. Sure, you have to pay $5 for this CD (from www.instant-automatons.com) but Protag and Lancaster still haven’t sold out. This is a profit-free venture: your $5 covers the manufacturing costs and the postage/packaging, and no money is made.
By Wilson Neate