Oh the crossovers continue, as Mark Ellis, aka Flood, is another producer that has produced for bands that Steve Lillywhite, Martin Hannett, John Fryer and Daniel Miller have. The first being that initial notable release by post Joy Division, New Order on their album Movement, which although is credited to M. Hannett, Flood also contributed to. Flood to me, is pretty much the electronic producer of the larger bands to get popular in the later 80s, and give them that slicked over huge sound. The most notable effort being Depeche Mode's Violator album.

However he pretty much was also responsible for a whole bunch of post punk and indie acts as well, such as Gary Numan, PJ Harvey, The Charlatans, Soft Cell, Psychic TV, Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds, The Smashing Pumpkins, and Pop Will Eat Itself. One of the secondary largest credits he has is Nine Inch Nails' huge album breakthrough, The Downward Spiral.

My notice of Flood came when I got Violator, being a huge DM fan for years, and noting more-so the name Daniel Miller (Mr Mute), and then noting this new and strange name. Then I noticed it upon my Curve album and others. I think of Flood as the guy who makes things sound really studio produced without an inch of flaw, and by that I feel his production skills are really pristine. I think this is great for some bands, while at other times, there is a lack of a certain resonance of warmth because the clarity is that great, making the album feel cold and impersonal. However, I think with some bands, this works! I think for what he does though, he does it well. He has worked with Martin Hannett, and Steve Lillywhite collectively with New Order (M.H.) and U2(S.L.)

It is clear to see that pretty much my musical tastes rotate around these 5 men, with each of them producing albums that are near and dear to me. I will be thankful for that huge sound that happened between Music for The Masses and Violator.

Thanks!


For More Info on Flood, go here.
For an interview with Flood from March 29th 2006, read this.

THANK YOUR 4ADBANDS FOR USING THIS MAN! For had it not been for him a great many of the
legacy bands would not have had certain elements that they had that made them as wonderful as we revered. Just to name a few, Cocteau Twins, Clan of Xymox, This Mortal Coil, Xmal Deustchland, Lush, Colin Newman, Wolfgang Press, M/A/R/R/S, Minimal Compact, and Colourbox. Also not to to mention non-4ad artists, like Wire, Fad Gadget, Moev, Nine Inch Nails, Yazoo, Chapterhouse, and Depeche Mode, but we'll get to more on that DM thing when we hit Mr Daniel Miller and Flood(obviously.) But its no surprise that these awesome producers, have overlapped.

I feel that sometimes there is something lost in the reverence to these bands I adore by not giving the credit due to the production/engineers behind these albums. I am hugely grateful to this man, oh Mr Fryer, for those This Mortal Coil albums and his studio production work with thos early Cocteau Twins albums giving them the ever so slightly hollow and looming quality that I adored so much. If only there was a better budget for better recording equipment that allowed these albums to have had better clarity, however, there is nothing that deters me from listening and escaping all the same from the original recordings. (Treasure is the only one that I feel the need to listen to remastered, but Mr Fryer had no part in that album, therefore, he's still THE MAN!)

I have to say a huge deserved thanks to the man behind Clan of Xymox' albums as well, because this was really moreso when I became aware of who he was moreso, and was like, "his name seems to appear on a bunch of things I own." Those first two studio albums by CoX, are beyond amazing, and anything on Medusa is pure gold, which I also will give Mr Pieter Nooten and Ronny Moorings credit for too. It's simply one of the best albums out there.

Thanks!


For more general info on John Fryer, please Go Here.
For More info on these bands and others recorded, visit this site.

Suddenly

The moment is still. The moment is tense.
It is both sad and frightening.
There is a heart of joy and a heart on the verge of breaking.
Tears that stream from the face of one whom is so amazed by the other.
While inside the feelings don't feel allowable because they have been oppressed.

Dark room.
Afternoon falls to dusk falls to night.
There is nothing to provide but the sterile application of the wall switch.
This only sends an emotionless cold glow to the room.
You feel isolated and empty while you both stand in the room.
Later left with too many thoughts in your head.
You lay again brewing with hypothetical over hypothetical over mental anguish served hot to your stomach and mind.

The tears come again.
The glare of your light annoying you but all you can manage is a faint sigh.
You absorb your eyes and thoughts to the divots of the texture on your ceiling.
The molding is painted a color you find utterly miserable, fake wood tone.
A timeline of "supposed's" and "perhaps then's" form with future memories.

There is unrest beside some sides and
Certainly searching for a meaning
Clouds as they've floating past in the present
As much more thoughts part in the present days

Oh, keep calling... me,
Oh, keep calling... my name
Oh, keep calling... my name
Oh, keep calling


You wait in your mind further for that day when the joy will return
Your heart only lightly dusted with gray and can be cleansed without pain

Again the room.
Again the two of you.
Again a heart.
Again emotions that have a tendency to conflict.

There is a resolve.
It will allow this to never be your view upon this room again.
They will breathe out without a sigh of helplessness.
Presence will be more than the hypothetical.
The hypothetical will cease to be.

All will be real.
As things that are meant to resolve become resolved and cleansed.
Eyes dreaming to never see another moment like this.
The future is of things to come and not filled with thoughts of "perhaps..."

For now there is rest.
There is thought.
There is energy to be saved...
For the future to live...

LINK : These Waves

Out in The Marketplace

A room full of trees and industry opens in front of your eyes, and the window that you are stuck behind seems slightly filmy, but clear enough to still see what is in front of you. A slight essence of tunnel vision begins and you dream of that window not being there. You close your eyes and drift off into dreams where you magically float through the window like billions of molecules, and are allowed to reform back to normal on the other side.

There you are amongst industry and all the elements that seem real and are pulsating about. However upon the glance backwards you see all that is provincial and residential glaring out louder than normal for it reminds you of the alternate that exists between the upwardly mobile and the desire to live pleasantly while working feverishly. You desire the two as well so you spin round a few thousand times staring to the sky that while that remains constant on both sides you can swing back and forth between the two worlds.

Oh isn't life great when you can dictate the perceptions of it all?!

A wicked grin draws itself upon your face, and you run to the urban side streets to feel the movement and energy of everything that is around you. Time itself seems like an innocent bystander to life, and motion is fluid and without any hesitation to the rules being broken.

Every motion and emotion is circling about allowing you to run backwards into comfort and forwards into chaos, and all of it perfect and unconfrontational. The glimmer of the anything at every moment, while spinning and spinning whenever you best see fit to stop the worlds from colliding and keeping what needs to be behind, behind and what needs to tunnel further in front, just in reach to be ever so slightly on the border of being out of reach.

Incentive. Curiosity. Prospect. The game of chance....

Just don't forget that you never have to wake up, because the dream is the life and it is the spinning that keeps us all in check. Because the sky and ground are always up above and down below. Unless you are on your head, but event hen the ground is below you as your feet are above...and there is the sky, just being how it always is. Passing over but protecting everywhere.

LINK : {Tokyoidaho}
VOYAGER ONE / MONSTER ZERO

Is It Just The Idea I Like or Is It For Real?

I pull a moderate sized bedsheet out of a bag and place it on the grass. The weather outside is fair, with a bit of a chill but the sun seems to be somewhere in the lurking of weather's knowledge. Its grey but not a depressing gray, a slight overcast, that white-ish tone. Some close friends are gathered with me and we are of a slightly sarcastic lot, but total lovers of life and all the things that we can grasp out of life's hand. I feel like quoting literature in a completely pompous manner, but instead I smile to myself that Im having these absurd thoughts to make myself seem far more intelligent than I am. My friends would pick up on it and most indefinitely laugh.

Time to pour some tea and share in some other quips and perhaps some cheese or fruit, although Im really up for some junk food...Perhaps a pastry with some gooey sugar icing upon it.

Have I been holding this dialogue all to myself so far. Always me sitting there amongst others with a long narrative going, creating this situation that doesn't entirely exist but could, if it was a slightly different universe. If my thoughts were always actualized, then everything would seem to be in a permanent state of absurd meets decadent meets mondane meets hallucinatory.

However it doesn't change that in realizing Im still sitting there talking to myself in my head, its time to realize that others are about me and I should open my mouth and say something. I know I will open it and not be able to shut it. But it would be rude to not say anything, and its simply not my style.

We all engage in some wonderfully ridiculous dialogue about things in our lives and continue to eat in this somewhat Camus-"come"-Fellini-esque picnic. Smiles are abound and smirks of a clever word and phrase uttered here and there.

Its a nice day. Even if the sun isn't completely out. There is a nice breeze rolling in from the shores a sligh distance away. I am feeling quite relaxed in the admiration I have for those I am in conjunction with and how its a really great thing to be a complete internal blabbering fool and not a single one of my friends seems to mind.

Its also of great comfort because when I export those blubberings to the air, it is always met with a pleased smile for my personality. I am fortunate this day to have those near and dear to me sitting and exchanging words with one another. Even though when I look around me there is but a beige wall, a pillow, some mild plum colored sateen curtains hanging in front of me, and the blinds behind me are of a dour sheer fabric of "blah"....I still feel this world continuing as if you weren't so far away from me.

Its just like when I stared at the beige walls with heavy beige curtains hanging, amongst antiques and photographs of my yesteryears...I still felt them all there, with me...being visible faces...

The faces that change. The people that interchange. Some stay constant. I remain as always....thinking of that which is near and dear to me, even when its out of close reach. The picnic invitations are soon to be.....

Just find me a nice bluff...



LINK : {Would It Be Too Much To Cry?}

INCENTIVES

I remember in passing, a friend telling me I might like this band called Disco Inferno...and while procrastinating some many years ago on Epitonic, in its earlier version, I came across them. I was trying to discover new music, for I was feeling a bit hopeless to the life I had being doomed to mass adoration of bands I would never see perform, because they were all defunkt! Surely, there has to be folks out there, whom are musically inclined and love the same stuff as me and have made bands that are reminiscent of all the good things that early post punk/indie was about.

To my surprise, while listening to the track on Epitonic, Emigre, I hit that very inspiration and satisfaction. It reminded me of The Chameleons, which I recall at this time I was listening to almost every day. There was something about the nature of this track that was just right on spot. I wasn't so utterly blown away by the other track on the site, but this one, this track indeed I listened to a bunch of times that day and fell more infatuated with it.

As the pattern often goes with dear Lorelle, the extremist nature of the leo kicked in and I couldn't fathom another day not owning the album, In Debt. I popped into every music store int he general Flatiron/Gramercy/Herald Square/West Village/Bleeker area and couldn't find it. I was so pissed off. However, fortune found its way to my grubby hands a few days later while out shopping with a friend in the East Village, and BAM! It was mine. I couldn't wait to take it home and play it and be taken into what I hoped would be the restored land of indie rock.

It did just this. I called the friend who recommended them, whom did not have the album but heard a description of them and thought it seemed on par for me, and just beamed with radiant reviews. I thought this album was greater than anything released in the 15 year space that the bulk of my records created to present day. I still think this album is great. I am listening to it right now.

Simply stated I think that Disco Inferno is a great band, with an albeit, horrible name, but I think there is a sense of humor to it all that I know is deliberate, and I can always appreciate sarcasm. Its completely a worthwhile listen and an enjoyable one...to me this album is the right way that a band can be inspired by the "right" post punk outfits, and make music in the current day...for I do feel that what has spiraled out of control these days, is relative to the decade that launched the influences..."This is what happens when the right things go wrong, very wrong!"

Im not saying that there has been nothing since the post punk decade, for shoegaze was a billsful affair of mine too, but there had to be something else in the 90s that made great indie dark tunes!

LINK : {I TRY TRY TRY}

BABY...

Baby by The Comsat Angels is one of the best penned songs ever written, and its not that lyrically I think it is beyond the many I have heard, although Mr Bacon writes a mean tune, but musically this song has such a nostalgic place for me. I remember the first time listening to it as it rolled off the lp one evening at night, and thinking, "OH MY GOD THIS IS SOOOOOO GOOD!"

Its the kind of song that you are so excited to have that you want to call everyone up and start repeating that phrase above, "The Comsat Angels track Baby, is soooo good! Oh gosh I have to copy this for you. You have to have it!" You want to dub it on tape and get it to everyone of your friends immediately. You also want your friend who turned you on to them to give you a ribbon for congratulating you on buying it. "Yes now I know why you own this and why you had to
put it on my tape and get me insanely hooked to them. I must own everything now!!!!"

As for Independence Day, its all about the 1:36 marker...that rip down the bass neck is so stomach clutching its a sigh of "FUCK YAH" every time. 1:36 is Independence Day, its all about 1:36.

I just had a hankering for this album and I only have it at home on lp so I cannot listen to it during the day at work, but fortunately LOST-In-TYME had it on their blog so I grabbed it to reminisce, and I had to blog my response, because once again its just that kind of an album. Its so good you have to rant about it.

The post punk era of The Comsat's wasn't familiar to me until about 1999, and while that makes it past the newness of its release, I still felt like I had stumbled upon one of the greatest new things. To me all these records I own that are some 20 to 30 years past their point of issuance, all were new to me and I considered them novelties.

This is a band that has truly carved its way past the others in my collection that I will always go back to when I want to listen to something really good that fits my mood. This album is that "I'm just a bit moody enough to not be taken over and put into a rut but if I feel like going there, this is the only thing I want to hear as I fall into it." Unless of course you truly want to go there, in which case, just go to Postcard, which is well, gut wrenching! If ever there is a desperation of animosity track written, by jove this is it.

There are times that I want to make a movie just to use some songs in it and create the best soundtrack that any movie has ever seen. On the Beach is a total credits song for this movie...can you think about that, you are just at the beginning of a movie experience you sit down and this starts?! Shit, you almost want to fall out of your chair....this film is going to be beyond intense...and as it settles at its end you can see the storyline just starting in some character of a disgruntled nature...ITS SOOO GOOD! I can't help it!

In closing on moments from this album I would be a fool to not comment on Real Story...this is probably my second favorite track on this album. The bass line and the bass drum seem to be in such a perfect harmony with each other that your gut once again feels all kinds of wonderful punches in it that you want to scoop up with a shovel and say, once more "FUCK YAH!" Feels good, feels damn! damn!! DAMN!!! GOOD!




Oh this album, this album is just to good to ever keep hidden as a treasure of your own, it must be shared. I want everyone to own it, I want to share it with everyone...If you can get on a plane and come to Oakland, I will have a celebrate the Comsat's night and we can all sit in my room and listen to their first three albums and just feel too lucky to know about it!


LINK : I THINK I'LL TELL YOU AGAIN