Youth & Ben Watkins - The Empty Quarter

As referenced in my previous post, here is the first collaborative album by Martin "Youth" Glover and Ben "Juno Reactor" Watkins, The Empty Quarter. Released in 1983, it is an all-instrumental affair, and a more abstract album than their next one, Delirium, as befits its status as a soundtrack (for the play Street Captives by Jonathan Moore). It does have some of the more "foreground" musical elements that would play a greater part on Delirium, though. "Incompressible Megalasaurians" highlight's Youth's funk bass playing (which was also a staple of Brilliant's sound at the time), and "Repulsion" sounds more than a little like a Goblin soundtrack piece. Playing cello on the album is Adam Peters, who would subsequently team up with Watkins as The Flowerpot Men (later Sunsonic); "Three Go Down To Brighton" sounds like an early draft of the Flowerpots' B-side track "UG". Full performance credits are:

Youth: bass, percussion, keyboard
Ben Watkins: keyboards, drums, guitars
Adam Peters: cello
Kate St. John: oboe
Steve Irwin: percussion

Get it here or here.

Brilliant: indie label singles and LP tracks

Here are a bunch of tracks from Brilliant, Youth/Martin Glover's band between his first and second stint with Killing Joke. They started out as a ten-piece with a biting gothic funk sound; by the time they were signed to WEA (by Bill Drummond, soon to be half of the KLF) they were down to a three-piece: Youth, singer June Montana, and guitarist Jimi Cauty (soon to be the other half of the KLF). Their sound had also been whittled down to rather generic synth-funk, a rather pale imitation of Colour Box. Their disastrous album for WEA was produced by dance schlockmeisters Stock Aitken Waterman; talk about a long way down! But the early singles remain as some of the best beat-oriented gothic music of the time. Included here are:

That's What Good Friends Are For (the first single plus B-side, Push)
Colours (two mixes)
Scream Like an Angel (from The Whip LP)
Coming Up for the Downstroke (from the Bat Cave Young Limbs and Numb Hymns LP)
Soul Murder (two mixes plus B-side, The Growler)
Subtle Manoevres (from the Imminent One Food Records sampler LP)
Wait For It (two mixes plus B-side, Cut Price) (I know this is not technically an indie release, as it's after WEA took a stake in Food Ltd., but so what)

13 tracks, mp3@128, cover art in ID3 tags.


Get it here.