Forty Minutes Of Fearless And Vegas

I took this photo the other day by accident with my phone in my pocket. There were several and a couple of short videos too but this was the pick of the bunch- someone said, 'it's like you have a portal to another dimension in your pocket'. If only I'd known it was there all along. It looks very much like a record sleeve too, maybe one by The Cocteau Twins, definitely something on 4AD. Anyway, I like it but despite my best efforts haven't been able to recreate it. For now, the portal remains closed. 

How about some dystopian disco for your Sunday? Earlier this week Jesse questioned whether the new Ron Trent album is actually any good and rather than being the Balearic masterpiece it is being lauded as (not least here), it is actually more akin to the incidental music from 80s US cop shows, Miami Vice when it went soft or Magnum P.I. perhaps. I think with Balearic and ambient music there's always a danger of slipping over the line into bland New Age cocktail bar music but I guess everyone's line is in a different place. I've got a couple of Balearic compilations with songs and tracks where I can feel my younger self shaking his head and wondering what has happened. 

There's no danger of the music in today's mix being labelled soft focus, pastel anti- jazz. In recent years Richard Fearless, both solo and in his Death In Vegas guise, has made some very anxiety inducing, tense and dystopic ambient/ industrial/ minimal techno. Sheets of metal, cavernous reverb, subterranean synths, icily detached vocals from Sasha Grey, thick urban fog, night terrors, dancing in a damp deserted warehouse somewhere in East London with one lightbulb flickering on and off... it's all here. Plus Chris and Cosey, formerly of Throbbing Gristle, on remix duties and Richard's beautifully mournful piano house remix of Django Django. It's all very intense but also perfectly executed and very cathartic. 

Forty Minutes Of Richard Fearless And Death In Vegas

• Richard Fearless: Driving With Roedelius
• Richard Fearless: Earth Tapes
• Death In Vegas: Honey
• Death In Vegas: Consequences of Love (Chris And Cosey Remix)
• Death In Vegas: You Disco I Freak
• Django Django: Giant (Richard Fearless remix)
• Richard Fearless: Gamma Ray

The opening pair of tracks are from the recent Deep Rave Memory and Future Rave Memory albums. Consequences Of Love and You Disco I Freak were on 2016's Transmission album. Honey and Gamma Ray were standalone singles from 2018 and 2014 respectively. The Django Django remix dates from 2016 but was only released properly in 2020. 

Fearless

Sometimes albums from the recent past, the last year or so, are the ones that get forgotten about. One of 2019's albums that I've bene making time to go back to is Richard Fearless' Deep Rave Memory. Fearless has honed his sound in recent times, purifying everything down to a sleek, industrial blend of ambient acid techno. Death In Vegas moved in this direction in 2011 with the Trans- Love Energies album and then even moreso with 2016's Transmission, a double vinyl set of futuristic techno, Detroit via East London. His studio is a shipping container overlooking the Thames and London's Docklands area, a metal box filled with vinyl, computers and vintage gear. There's an article with pictures here. If environment and psychogeography affect the production of art- and I think they do- then this combination of shipping container, East London and the river must have played a role in the increasingly purified sound that has come out of Richard's imagination. Deep Rave Memory, the title track, is an eleven minute trip, a kick drum leading us in and and a discordant synth sound, two notes up and down, a wobbly siren sound behind it. An acidic topline comes to the fore. Four minutes in it all shifts, a siren synth refrain taking over before most of the elements drop out and then build again for an increasingly intense, sweetly melodic second half. 

In 2018 Richard put out Honey, a one off single with Sasha Grey, a song I've raved about before. You can find it at Bandcamp. The year before he released Sweet Venus, a limited 12" only release that seems to be coming from the same place. Sweet Venus starts with an erratic dancing synth line and a spray can hiss of percussion before a long, ghostly, distant chord comes into play. It came out on Fearless' own label, Drone. Label name and sound perfectly aligned. It all goes off just before three minutes, the drums accelerating, the track suddenly gathering momentum, a techno bullet train.

Working backwards in 2014 there were two 12" singles, Higher Electronic States and Gamma Ray. Gamma Ray is clearly part of this, an eight minute slice of tension and release, pattering drums, metallic hiss, more looping synth notes flitting about, bouncing around a shipping container above a river.  

Gamma Ray

Honey

Back in June I posted a new single from Death In Vegas. Honey is a slow burning, pulsing techno track graced by Sasha Grey's seductive vocals. I'm still playing it now, still finding it one of those songs that gets right into me and makes me feel alive. In September it gained a video, mainly close ups of Sasha's face while she coos that she would die for you.



The Los Angeles photographer Blake Little covered people in honey for a series of pictures and a book called Preservation. Being draped in honey might be rather nice but it must have taken ages to get clean afterwards. More here.

Honey is a bit of a theme in art and music- warm, sticky and sweet, an everyday luxury. More honey?

The Los Angeles photographer Blake Little covered people in honey for a series of pictures and a book called Preservation (including the one above). More here. Being draped in honey might be rather nice I would have thought but it must have taken ages to get clean afterwards.

Jim and William Reid's Honey, like their Candy and Cindy, was a love song to a girl or a drug (or both). Here they are on The Tube, introduced by Paula Yates on Friday night in 1985, still with Bobby Gillespie playing the snare drum. Black leather, pale skin, feedback.



Earlier this year I posted another Scottish band's tribute to Honey, The Pastels whose Baby Honey is a wonderfully shambolic B-side from 1984. 

Baby Honey

There are plenty of other honeys on my hard drive- not sure that's a sentence that is going to keep me out of trouble- Johnny Burnett's Honey Hush, Lee Hazelwood's Silk 'n' Honey, Orange Juice's Simply Thrilled Honey, Martha Reeves and The Vandellas (We've Got) Honey Love, Duke Reid's What Makes Honey? and Prince Fattie and Hollie Cook's Milk And Honey but this one seems to round this off the best. Spacemen 3 were into honey (of course they were). It was the opening song on their 1989 album Playing With Fire, an album I have revisited a lot earlier this year. Honey is a Pete Kember song that opens with a blast of wobble, some descending chords and plucked guitar notes. The whispered vocal arrives a minute in and everything is stretched and phased, pleasantly distorted. 'Honey won't you take me home tonight?' Pete asks, 'the night is warm and the stars are bright'. Pete's meditation drifts on, blissfully and before fading out just before three minutes. 'Surely there ain't nothing we can't do'.

Honey

Honey Effect

This is the new single from Death In Vegas, Honey, with the blissful vocals of Sasha Grey over throbbing, minimal, mind altering techno. 'I would die... for you' Sasha whispers.



Richard Fearless has more or less devoted his music making over the last few years to this sound, stripping it back and purifying it. In 2015 he put out this eight minute song, Overview Effect. It followed 2 singles form the year before, all in similar groove. When you've got a sound this good, why do anything other than refine it?

I don't know why some get released as Richard Fearless and some as Death In Vegas, where Fearless ends and Vegas begins? Or the other way round...

Consequences Of Love

A skip back to Friday for today's post. After writing about Death In Vegas' You Disco I Freak a friend on social media pointed me towards this which somehow I had missed. Consequences Of Love remixed by ex-Throbbing Gristlers Chris and Cosey. TG seem to be one of the influences on the Transmission album (and on vocalist Sasha Grey) so it's fitting that they remix one of the songs from it and it's a very good job done indeed- throbbing synths and nagging melodies.

Freaked

The world that seems to be going madder as each day goes by. Watching the news is an exercise in seeing how low one's jaw can drop before spluttering 'whatthefuck whatthefuckingfuck didhejustsay?' One day we'll look back and laugh.

Death In Vegas released an album last year, Transmission, a record that fused minimal techno with the late 70s and early 80s synths, industrial ambient, and the breathy vocals of Sasha Grey. It is an intense, nocturnal, somewhat freaked out collection of songs, that throb and drone and pulse. It draws you in. It is very self contained. This one is especially trippy.

You Disco I Freak