Forty Minutes Of AR Kane

AR Kane formed after Rudy Tambala and Alex Ayuli saw Cocteau Twins on TV in 1985. Their albums 69 (1988) and i (1989) were much beloved by the late 80s music press, the blend of guitar pedal noise, dub and electronic dance pop hitting the mark with writers and fans as the late 80s music scene found common ground between guitar bands and dance music. The otherworldly nature of the Cocteau Twins music, the swirl of FX is evident in their music, the pair playing guitars and singing, with drums provided by tape and machines. Initially they were lumped in with the feedback indie of The Jesus And Mary Chain. Rudy commented that they'd never heard The Mary Chain and were more inspired by Joni Mitchell, Miles Davis, Arthur Russell and Lee Scratch Perry along with the Cocteaus (whose record label, 4AD, they were released their first record on). 

The AR Kane albums have been re- issued recently, a box set on Rocket Girl called ARKive containing 69, i and the EP Up Home as well as badges, art prints and a t- shirt. Rudy and Alex played in London in the summer. Their music is hugely influential if less widely heard than some of their contemporaries. Their feedback drenched, FX pedal guitar noise played a huge part in forming the early 90s shoegaze sound and their electronic dance- pop songs had a big impact on many including Andrew Weatherall (who covered A Love From Outer Space and named a long running mobile club night after the song). When they were put into a studio with Colourbox by 4AD boss Ivo Watts- Russell they created Pump Up The Volume, the M|A|R|R|S single that topped the charts and brought sampling to the masses and while the A-side was mainly Colourbox the B-side Anitina (The First Time I See She Dance) was mainly AR Kane. On 69 they created a sonic blueprint, blending dub, noise, jazz and pop. With Up Home! they'd brought electronic music and acid house into the sound. Just a year later 69 came out, a double album containing a headspinning rush of songs and sounds, some of them not much more than dream sketches, some of them woozy, off kilter pop, with bursts of jazz, drones and dub, bongos, percussion and cello, lullabies over ocean sized soundscapes. 

AR Kane described their music as dream pop, a phrase which has become a shorthand for 21st century guitar music, heavily reverbed chords strummed very slowly with breathy vocals. For Rudy Tambala dream pop was more about the 'dream mythology...and lucid dreaming. We both used to practice it... go into a semi- hypnotic trance just before falling asleep.... being awake inside a dream... What would happen was that we’d hear music in our dreams and wake ourselves up to write down melodies, lyrics or even just the atmosphere that we wanted to capture. Our music was literally dream pop'. 

The mix here switches between the different elements of AR Kane's sound, the wall of guitar FX and feedback, sweetly sung and murmured vocals, dub basslines and breakbeats and synths. 

Forty Minutes Of AR Kane

• Snow Joke
• Baby Milk Snatcher
• Sugarwings
• A Love From Outer Space 
• Miles Apart
• Up
• Crack Up (Space Mix)
• Spermwhale Trip Over
• Anitina (The First Time See She Dance)

Snow Joke, Miles Apart and Sugarwings are all from i, their 1989 album which came out on One Little Indian. A Love From Outer Space, delirious electronic pop, comes from the album too. 

Baby Milk Snatcher was a 1988 single for Rough Trade and then the lead song on the Up Home! EP, a longer version. Up was on the same EP, one of their finest moments. 

Crack Up was a 1990 single on Rough Trade. The Space Mix came out on a Rem'i'xes EP, remixed by Cocteau Robin Guthrie. 

Spermwhale Trip Over is from 69, a song which seemed to give birth to much of the shoegaze band's sound- My Bloody Valentine must have had a copy close by when they recorded Slow. Rudy has described 69 as 'a gem. We wanted to go as far out as we could, and in doing so we discovered the point where it stops being music'. The re- release of the albums in the ARKive box and recent return to live gigs is something to be welcomed. I hope they might make a trip up north at some point soon. 

Anitina (The First Time See She Dance) is the b-side to Pump Up The Volume by M|A|R|R|S, the AR Kane and Cooirbox collaboration. The two groups found out quickly that they weren't going to work together well, their outlook and working methods wildly different. Pump Up The Volume is largely Colourbox with some AR Kane guitar parts added in and the scratch mix DJ skills of CJ Mackintosh and Dave Dorrell. Anitina is predominantly AR Kane with some Colourbox drum machine programming and FX. Post- single disagreements meant that M|AR|R|S was a one off. 

Half An Hour Of Liz Fraser

Liz Fraser's voice, whether with The Cocteau Twins or guest appearances with other artists, is a unique, almost miraculous thing. Trying to describe it is fairly pointless. It swoops and soars and has a magical, otherworldly quality. Sometimes it's gossamer thin, distant and a part of the shimmering, hazy swirl of the Cocteau Twins records, the lyrics difficult to work out and impressionistic. Sometimes it's much bolder and in the foreground, clear and insistent. Here's this week's half hour mix (actually thirty eight minutes) of Liz Fraser's voice, variously with Cocteau Twins, This Mortal Coil, Ian McCulloch, Massive Attack, Harold Budd and Felt. 

Half An Hour Of Liz Fraser

• Cocteau Twins: Pearly Dewdrops' Drop
• Cocteau Twins: The Spangle Maker
• Ian McCulloch: Candleland
• Massive Attack: Teardrop (Mad Professor Mazaruni Vocal Remix)
• This Mortal Coil: Song To The Siren
• This Mortal Coil: Edit To The Siren (In The Valley Re- edit)
• Cocteau Twins: Cherry- coloured Funk
• Felt: Primitive Painters
• Harold Budd, Simon Raymonde, Robin Guthrie, Liz Fraser: Ooze Out And Away, Onehow

Springtime

Former Cocteau Twin Robin Guthrie has a long solo back catalogue recorded since the Cocteaus split up, the guitarist keeping himself busy with EPs and albums of lighter than air guitar led instrumentals, songs full of atmospherics, ambience and reverb, FX pedals, a bit of piano, drums and the presence of the room they were recorded in. At the start of January he released a four track EP called Springtime, a bit premature perhaps but now as the blossom, the daffodils and the catkins start to appear, it's perfectly apt. 

With the Cocteau Twins gone and a reunion unlikely Robin has just kept going, playing the guitar, writing the music and putting it out, a one man cottage industry. His Bandcamp page is full of releases. Pick a point and dive in. This is Springtime's closing track, All For Nothing, for its first half the most ambient, most Eno- esque, song on the EP. Then the guitars kick in and it all swells and swirls around. 

All For Nothing

This is the whole thing as one piece, fifteen minutes of instrumental bliss for Wednesday morning in early Spring 2022. 

Distant

Back in 2007, longer ago than it seems, Harold Budd and Robin Guthrie released two albums on the same day- After The Night Falls and Before The Day Breaks. The former opened with this piece of music, four minutes of ambient electronica, sound to lose yourself in as it drifts over you- piano notes drenched in reverb, some plucked, treated guitar strings, washes of synth, a gentle drone. 

How Distant Your Heart

Yé Ké Yé Ké

I'm a little late with this but thought it was worth paying tribute to a star of African music, Mory Kante, a singer and musician who had a genuine late 80s/ early 90s crossover hit. Mory's death was on 22nd May, caused by underlying health issues which were complicated by being unable to travel to France for treatment due to Covid- 19 restrictions. Mory was born and raised in Guinea, West Africa, brought up in the Mandinka griot tradition (a griot is a hereditary role, a storyteller, musician, historian, poet). His song Yé Ké Yé Ké became a huge hit, the first African single to sell a million copies, and was a top end of the charts record in Belgium, The Netherlands, Germany and Switzerland. The album Akwaba Beach, his third, sold in large numbers as a result of the single. Yé Ké Yé Ké was also a major club song, being in tune with the expansive, open Balearic sounds of the late 80s and was remixed several times. The chanted vocal and pounding rhythms caused mayhem in clubs, an uplifting and intense experience when surrounded by like minded souls, dry ice and strobes.

This version came out in 1987, remixed by Martyn Young of Colourbox and MARRS (and engineered by Robin Guthrie of Cocteau Twins), the bassline and acid sounds perfectly married to the Mandinka vocals and West African rhythms.

Yé Ké Yé Ké (Afro Acid Mix)

In 1994 German duo Hardfloor remixed it and sent it out around the world's dancefloors again. A harder, more techno version.

Yé Ké Yé Ké (Hardfloor Remix)

R.I.P. Mory Kante.

Overrated

This piece of slow motion shoegaze comes from Malmo, Sweden, has been remixed by Robin Guthrie, is out on Sonic Cathedral in November and is four minutes of sugar-coated, off kilter bliss. It comes in like Lush and makes a stately procession through Cocteau's land, lost in a haze of FX pedals and echo-drenched vocals. I can chuck some more cliches in there for you if you'd like but it might be better if you just listen to it and then go to buy it at Bandcamp (only digitally I'm afraid, the 7" is sold out). There's an album from June this year called Pink Noise which I haven't had a chance to listen to yet but on the basis of this song I will be soon enough.

Where Were You?

In 1989 Big Hard Excellent Fish, a duo of Josie Jones and Jake Walters, were asked to write a piece of music for the punk ballet dancer and choreographer Michael Clark. Josie asked her then boyfriend Pete Wylie to help out and they recorded Imperfect List, with Robin Guthrie of The Cocteau Twins producing. It was released in 1989 and then again a year later with remixes by Andrew Weatherall (subtitled Rimming Elvis The Andrew Weatherall Way). I've posted the Weatherall remixes before (or at least a couple of them, there are four on the 12" single). This is the original version.

Imperfect List

In Imperfect List Josie lists 64 things that her and Wylie hated starting with Adolf Hitler and taking in various other named or famous people from Terry and June to Bonnie Langford to 'fucking bastard Thatcher' to Stock, Aitken and Waterman, some unnamed people (macho dickhead, accusing ungrateful mate, weird British judges, tasteless A&R wanker and the dentist), some daily irritants (lost keys, neighbours- or is that Neighbours?), some entirely appropriate late 80s targets (the Tories, Hillsborough, Heysel, the poll tax, apartheid, acid rain, Clause 28, Nelson Mandela's imprisonment) and some universal hates (cancer, miscarriage, loneliness, hunger, murder, gut wrenching disappointment, the Sun newspaper) and plenty more besides.

'Where were you?' Josie asks at the end, leaving the question hanging and unanswered.

And The Question Is Answered

This is an updated version of Big Hard Excellent Fish's Imperfect List from a couple of years ago. The original came from the combined talents of Pete Wylie, Robin Guthrie and Josie Jones (and on the 1990 version Andrew Weatherall). The original list had range of targets from the late 80s and the re-worked list brings things up to date while also showing how little has changed.

Both versions mention Hillsborough. The justice the families of the 96 have been finally been given this week is truly right and proper. It also sadly confirms what many of us have known all along- that football fans in the late 80s were treated worse than cattle and seen as scum, that we were despised by an establishment that was engaged in something that was tantamount to class war and governed by a lying and corrupt government that colluded with a lying tabloid press that actually hated its readers, and that events were manipulated and covered up by at least one, probably two, corrupt police forces.

In 1989 I lived in Liverpool while at Liverpool University. I shared a house with a friend who was at Hillsborough, not the Leppings Lane End but another part of the ground. He returned home with both parts of his ticket- no one checked him into the ground. The Saturday after the disaster we were in Liverpool city centre. At six minutes past three the city centre stopped in absolute silence. Nothing moved and nobody spoke. It was one of the most moving, emotional minutes I've witnessed. As a Man United fan I've always felt deeply ashamed by the songs some of 'our' idiots sing and the heart of the matter is while it happened to be Liverpool fans who were unlawfully killed at Hillsborough in 1989, it could have been any of us, at another match, in another ground. Yes- this is justice for the 96 and for their families. But it is also justice for all of us.

Remember- don't buy The Sun.

Pete Wylie's Imperfect List

'Adolf Hitler, the dentist, Terry and June...'

In 1990 this 12" came out on One Little Indian, a list of bad stuff, credited to Big Hard Excellent Fish.

'...fucking bastard Thatcher, Scouse impersonator, silly pathetic girlies, macho dickhead...'

It was shrouded in mystery, the chewy Scouse vocal incorrectly said by some to be actress Margi Clarke. It came with four versions, produced and remixed by Andrew Weatherall (Rimming Elvis The Andrew Weatherall Way read the sleeve).

'...lost keys, Stock Aitken and Waterman, smiling Judas, heartbreaking lying friend...'

The voice belonged to Wylie's then girlfriend Josie Jones and the track was written and recorded by an uncredited Pete Wylie along with Cocteau Twin Robin Guthrie.

'...The Sun newspaper, acid rain, AIDS inventor, Leon Britton, weird British judges, the breakdown of the NHS, Heysel stadium, homelessness, John Lennon's murder, anyone's murder...'

In 2004 Morrissey used it to arrive on stage to.

'...tasteless A&R; wanker, the Jimmy Swaggart Show, Clause 28, Nelson Mandela's imprisonment, miscarriage...'

This is the lead version, seven minutes forty five seconds long.

'...where were you?'

The Imperfect List (Version 1)