January 9, 2011

Variegated Menace

Portion Control, “Progress Report 1980-1983” septuple LP box set (VOD 73)
By Aram Yardumian

Electronic Dance Music (EDM) rarely finds itself reviewed critically alongside, say, Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini or Requiem in D Minor. It is often regarded as derivative of Kraftwerk at best, cold cut kitsch at worst, or merely functional for those who get off by shaking their endoskeletons. Entertaining? Yes. Fine art? No. But if EDM is the property of the discothèque, not the audio boutique, what must we do with Portion Control?—the band who has for thirty years dedicated itself to composing and occasionally performing music that is meticulous yet aggressive, elevated yet idiosyncratic, challenging yet lyrical, and altogether subtle. It also happens to be danceable.

Portion Control’s obscurity is, if you will, legendary. Admired and emulated as they have been by nearly everyone within EDM, they had numerous opportunities to achieve popularity, stiff their day jobs, pen radio hits a la Depeche Mode (with whom they have toured), and become household names. But they have always chosen (all but once, in fact) the left-handed path, viewing both rabid commercialism and rabid anti-commercialism with suspicion and disdain: they don’t release material or tour regularly, don’t have a manager or lawyer, and moreover refuse to embrace any public persona or genre. They rather prefer the descriptor “uncompromising electronic music”. But this is all social. The artistic purity of Portion Control springs not so much from the elements of refusal, but from a dedication to expression and mastery of the analog synthesizer.

Terror Leads to Better Days, from Surface and Be Seen EP, 1982

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Though the earliest analog synths actually date to the 1920s (Elisha Gray’s 19th century attempts notwithstanding), it was not until the 1970s that they were available to those without access to commercial audio laboratories and high-end studios. Modular synthesizer manufactured by companies such as Moog, and Electronic Music Studios, and ARP Instruments became part of the repertoire of both professionals and amateurs (Metal Urbain, Tubeway Army, Kraftwerk, Devo, George Harrison’s Electronic Sound); despite the availability, remarkably few synthesizer-based records were released during that decade.

1980-81 was an epochal year for DIY electronic maverickism in Europe. It was the year punk spirit and laboratory technology conjugated to form a new musical grammar. Old World and New World punks had discovered commercial synthesizers. Joy Division’s Closer and Cabaret Voltaire’s The Voice Of America, seminal synth records both, came out in 1980, as did Der Plan’s Geri Reig. SPK had moved to London and released Information Overload Unit in 1981, the same year that saw Lustmord’s debut LP, Nocturnal Emissions’ Tissue of Lies, Chris and Cosey’s Heartbeat, and Matt Johnson’s Burning Blue Soul, and on the continent Front 242’s “Principles” 7 inch and Esplendor Geometrico’s “Necrosis En La Poya” 7 inch.

In the autumn of 1980, three student chefs at Westminster College in London made for themselves a modest studio in a flat at 319 Kennington Road, South London, and set to work with an 8-bit Apple ][ and a sampling system called Greengate DS-3—one of the first of these to be made commercially available. John Whybrew, Dean Piavani and Ian Sharp, having named themselves Portion Control (after a chef school methodology) soon upgraded to an Akai S900, an S950, and finally the S1000, which would provide the aural backbone for their variegated menace. Sampling at the time was in its infancy, having been practiced only in live setting (e.g., DJ Kool Herc’s Bronx parties) and on a few early hip-hop and electronic releases (e.g., Dreamies’ Auralgraphic Entertainment from 1973 and Grandmaster Flash’s “The Adventures of” from 1981). So unknown was this form of music at the time that Portion Control were refused Musicians Union Membership because “none of us could play a conventional instrument”.

Mass Disorder, from I Staggered Mentally LP, 1982

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Given their prescience to the scene, it would be tempting to consider Portion Control a trio of uncelebrated pioneers, but they do not see themselves as pioneers, and prefer instead to situate themselves historically in a moment defined by the post-punk scene—by Wire and the Pop Group, and perpetual California outsiders Chrome—not by the birth of the English New Wave (Human League, Ultravox, Fad Gadget, Buggles, et al). Nevertheless, their influence on multiple genres (i.e., EBM, IDM, Industrial, Techno, Ambient) is evident in adulatory name-checks by more visible bands such as Skinny Puppy, Nine Inch Nails, Front Line Assembly, Orbital, and Depeche Mode.

Portion Control’s early analog synth- and sample-based material (as documented on this box set) is more diverse, and more colorful, than it first appears. Especially on the earliest and most recent material, dynamic tones and hues float to the surface of their virile, driving presence—slowly, as on the canvases of Rouault. Each track is distinct from the one before it, and yet many are somehow the same by dint of conventional song structures with verses and choruses and seductive beats (usually a simple kick pattern followed by a one or two bar step-programmed bass line, followed by more drums). And yet the music is still “difficult” and playfully unyielding, like musique concrète; tracks continue to unfold after repeated listens. Sometimes the tracks go frenetic, oppressive, for stretches claustrophobic—their ambience wrapping around your head like tight foil, even as they unfold logically, but they are never over-embellished. Indeed, the spare muscularity of Wire and Gang of Four is often in evidence. Portion Control have created and maintain a pristine and specifically English form of vintage electro-punk, one that comprehends the veracity of the tape loop, and does not litter them; one which deliberately buries vocals, rife with disgust and estrangement, deep in the mix so as to come off as just another instrument; one which is, in fact, transcendent of forms and free of commercial veneer. They are a remarkable band for making a stasis of their own naïvete, and for seeming, for all their recourse to technology, strangers to the modern world.

Untitled (3), from unreleased video soundtrack, date unknown

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Portion Control yielded eight releases between the years 1980 and 83, and all of them are collected in this box set. The original band lasted until 1987, at which time they made the error of signing with a major label, and promptly vanished from the public eye. Barring a brief foray under the moniker Solar Enemy, they did not re-emerge until 2004. In much the same mood (though now having entirely forsaken hardware) as the day they disappeared, they proceeded to yield twelve more releases, both as CD and download from their website. This septuple LP box set, compiled and released by Frank Maier of Vinyl-on-Demand, is a retrospective of the early days, including over sixty unreleased treasures among its 138 total tracks. The seven LPs (subscribers receive an additional 7 inch), along with a spiral bound photo album, a DVD, and a t-shirt, come housed in a fitted, etched aluminum box.

What must we do with Portion Control? Danceable though it may be, it is too unfriendly for the disco. High art subtleties though it may have, the tides of acceptance have not come in. It doesn’t matter to John Whybrew and Dean Piavani what we do with them[1], for like all good things, Portion Control’s near thirty years of output is the product of an obsession, not a profitable concern. It is creation without expectation, without want for immediate reward. They are still active.

From privately circulated cassette, Private Illusions No. 1, Early 1980’s

White Cubes

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Go for the Throat

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[1] Ian Sharp did not rejoin in 2004

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May 28, 2010

Alain Neffe and the Home-Taped Electronic Music Revolution

The Insane Box
By Aram Yardumian

Alain Neffe launched his first tape label at home in Belgium in 1981. He called it Insane Music Contact and his first installment was called Insane Music for Insane People. Thus began a nearly thirty year foray into home-made, visionary and utterly unfashionable electronic music that has hardly made anyone involved a household name.

Insane Music released 55 titles in its most prolific years (1981-87). Five of these were vinyl records and the rest were cassettes tapes. Why cassettes tapes? Magnetic tape was the obvious solution to the problem facing many artists working without record contracts in those days. Cassettes could be recorded at home, produced at home, dubbed at home, and sold or traded by mail. No need for tasteless outside producers and marketing mojo—one needed only leave home to buy more tapes. Says Neffe, “I could copy the tapes on demand. Releasing an LP required that you print 500 copies and 1000 copies of the cover sleeve, and everything had to be paid up front … if the buyer didn’t like the music, he or she could wipe it out and record something else on it.”

Mr. Neffe was not the only one out there recording, selling and trading tapes by mail. On both sides of the Atlantic, home cassette technology was permitting the release of much groundbreaking and breathlessly beautiful work, as well as some noxious and otherwise self-indulgent wanking—that coat of many colors we call the DIY (do-it-yourself) Revolution. As early as 1974, Albrecht/d. self-released a cassette entitled Amsterdam Op De Dam in Germany. In 1976, Throbbing Gristle was distributing tapes of their infamous live recordings, and in 1977, the French electro-industrial unit Die Form began releasing tapes on their own Bain Total label. 1980 saw the release of two monumental self-released cassettes, The Storm Bugs’ A Safe Substitute and Colin Potter’s The Ghost Office. In Japan, 1980 saw the release of Merzbow’s first two cassettes, Remblandt Assemblage and Fuckexercise. And in the USA, 1981 saw John Bender’s Plaster: The Prototypes, a laconic and mysterious series of tone and vocal poems. Home taping was not limited to electronic music. R. Stevie Moore, one of the elder living ancestors of the lo-fi rock aesthetic, began releasing distributing home-made tapes via the R. Stevie Moore Cassette Club sometime in the 1970s. And tapes of live punk shows from the era continue to trade hands.

Soon, cassettes were coming from everywhere: mysterious PO boxes in the Midwest, to which you sent a blank tape and three dollars and received the tape back with something on it. The Tellus Audio Cassette Magazine was a Fluxus-inspired subscription audio-journal dedicated to music as well as poetry and drama and other forms of audio-art.  Zines like Factsheet Five and Unsound devoted entire columns to the material they received from bands on home-made cassette, and demo tapes began leaking to radio stations prior to official record release dates.  It was a grassroots movement that marched in association with the self-publication of zines, comics, chapbooks, and other media. The medium had begun to become the message.

Insane Music for Insane People (which eventually reached 25 volumes) was a series compiling all home-made electronic music made by artists from across the globe. By including in the liner notes the contact address for each artist featured, Neffe helped pioneer a snail-mail network for those interested in more of what they heard. Artists from all over Europe and the USA, from Japan, New Zealand, and beyond contributed over the years. One could send a few dollars to Insane Music Contact, receive tapes in the mail, write to artists involved and receive more cassettes.

Insane Music Contact (now known as Insane Music) has always been a vehicle for Mr. Neffe’s own electronic music projects as well, many of which are periodically active to this day. Though he now makes liberal use of the CD format, Neffe’s artistic approach remains undiluted by years of underexposure. He expects very little acknowledgment of or remuneration for his efforts, which, for him, are emotional articulation, continued experimentation, and purity. It seems nothing but nothing could possibly catapult such heavily uncommercial sounds into the public consciousness–not even this thirty-year retrospective box-set entitled The Insane Box released (ironically, on vinyl) by the venerable Frank Maier of Vinyl-on-Demand Records, an outfit devoted to preserving the precious gems of cassette culture before the evidence disintegrates.

For this retrospective (4 LPs + a 7” 45), Mr. Neffe has reached into dusty attic boxes, wherein lay unreleased (or hardly available) material by five projects of which he has been a part: BeNe GeSSeRiT, Human Flesh, Pseudo Code, I Scream and Subject. Each has a unique cerebral orientation and emotional vibe made possible by the combined efforts of invited guests; each runs the high fever of a man very much committed to a personal vision of artistic purity without virtuosity, and each is distinctly French.

BeNe GeSSeRiT was not the first of Mr. Neffe’s projects to be recorded and distributed, but is, to my understanding, the genesis of his approach to music as “texts” or “photographs”, or as he puts it, “potlatch music”. On these early tracks we also detect a burgeoning interest in the endless expressive properties of the human voice, both explicitly human and as heavily-treated sound sculpture, both French and English At times, voices shout like besotted Celine parlor workers at each other from tenement windows; at other times a high-pitched female voice wails up and down like Catherine Ribeiro alone in her bathroom. In these tracks, one can also detect the half-digested influence of electro-rock luminaries Silver Apples, the avant-lashings a la Yoko Ono, and occasionally the thunder-beat of early Laibach. Primitive Casio electronics, stage whispers, delay echoes, tape loops, and a certain absurdist humor redolent of Erik Satie, neither dampen the fabric with melodrama, nor detract from the integrity of the grist, nor from the topical seriousness of the text’s subjects. BeNe GeSSeRiT is difficult music, even in the moments that risk elegy, yet it is still more accessible than some of the other Francophone avant-dada outfits of the day, such as DDAA and Étant Donnés, or Nurse with Wound in the UK.

Human Flesh is decidedly more structurally cohesive and song-oriented than BeNe GeSSeRiT, and its predecessors and influences are less clear. Still there is a clear interest in the human voice, its textures and timbers when removed of sign value by backwards-masking, and the new textures that emerge when disassembled and reassembled. Even rock-oriented at times, Human Flesh chases a more delirious climax, for the hounds of the carnival are snapping at their heels as they run. This is also a project of varied angles and pursuits, sliding as it does into poetic electro-pop (the supple and Chicago-accented voice of the late Lydia Tomkiw, of Algebra Suicide, appears on two tracks), and moments of Half Japanese-style primitivism. The side-long track “Langsam” is more reminiscent of Piper-era Pink Floyd and Brainticket, as well as other Krautrock, yet is still distinctly French. These early and rare tracks are, in contrast to the more ambitious Pseudo Code and the more intimate recordings by I Scream, more oblique for being a mix-down of materials sent to Neffe from artists around the globe. The track “Sons of God?” is also notable for what is perhaps the first recorded sample of the American fire-and-brimstone preacher Ferrell Griswold, whose voice has appeared in music by Front 242, Phallus Dei, Pragha Khan, et cetera.

The cassette medium, for all its benefits to individual artistic expression and culture, is for the selfsame reasons impermanent. Magnetic tape has a thirty year lifespan if properly archived, which means both that preserving their contents in other formats is important, and that paying hundreds of dollars for the original artifacts is a questionable collectors’ pursuit (nevertheless, you can watch it happen daily). With the advent of the mp3 and the efforts of Vinyl-on-Demand and other labels, Insane Music’s CD-r reissue program included, some of this exquisite material has been rescued from oblivion.

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