A New 90's

I’m stealing this title from journalist Neil Kulkarni for a series he did for the Quietus website in 2011. Similar ideas expressed but I wanted to give him credit as he was one of the first to recognize these artists.

This post dovetails somewhat with the big Twitter post about ambient techno. It relates because here i am discussing the same time period : the early 90's (well mostly anyway)

I was very committed to the idea of rock music at that time (frankly I still am...). When the shoegaze period hit, I was 100% all in. This was exactly what i was looking for. It had all the elements I loved : Lots of effects, loads of guitars, mostly British. When I look back at this time, even though I think of it fondly, I don’t think its as good as I recall it being while it was happening. Of course there are albums and tracks that stand up incredibly well now and have influenced so many important albums, but on the whole I think we forget or overlook a lot of important bands doing amazing music at the same time.

Both fans and makers of "rock" music were deeply suspicious of any music not 100% guitar centric. I feel that because of this divide, if you were to ask a lot of people the highlights of the 90's era, the answers will be remarkably different. A month of so back on Twitter there was a poll taken about the greatest records of the 90s. That list had no resemblance to one I would have put together. If you were American ( like me) you would have a much more indie rock centric list. This one of the reasons I immersed myself in the IDM/ambient techno realm because i was convinced it was the future and i think that turned out to be the case.

In this post, I wanted to list music that was important to me at the time. Some leans towards typical rock, some not. These are perhaps lesser known. I didn’t include people like My Bloody Valentine, Ride, Lush, Slowdive, Broadcast, etc. as I assume you know them. I also am throwing in one of two that aren’t quite in the typical IDM/Ambient cannon but have some similarities.

O'Rang - Fields & Waves

This record knocked me out when i heard it. I was (and still am) a big fan of Talk Talk. I was really sad that they didnt continue on making more albums. Bands like Bark Psychosis did a fantastic job tapping into a similar sound but there wasnt and isnt anything quite like Talk Talk. So when i found a promo of this album back then and i heard it was members of the band, i was all over it. You will find some of the same hallmarks..incredible musicianship, a real sense of dynamics, and a lushness that stood out. The bass and percussion are notable because its the rhythm section of Talk Talk who formed the group. There is also loads of "ethnic" instrumentation played at a very high level and it is done as an important part of the music rather than just ornamentation.

Blind Mr. Jones - Stereo Musicale

These guys really stood out at the time as being within the typical "shoegaze" template,.. loads of effects, wall of fuzz, beautiful melodies and engaging chordal shifts. I suppose they were like the Jethro Tull of gaze as they had a flautist on this album ad it added something that was different and honestly pretty welcome. I feel like they had all of the same ingredients that most of the gaze bands have, but they were more subtle about how they employed the elements. Along with the fact the songwriting was better than most of their contemporaries. Maybe because they were on Cherry Red ( a label that would have been the right one in 1982 but perhaps not 1992) rather than Creation is the reason they aren’t held up as high with todays listeners

Moonshake - First

For me, Moonshake were one of the best of the era. They made a huge impression on me. Named after a Can song, this group was fronted by David Callahan, who was in the C86 era band, The Wolfhounds. He pulled in an American guitarist, Margaret Fiedler who was the other driving force in the group. The drums at times had the kind of powerful breakbeat style that owed a lot to the Madchester bands slightly before them. I noticed at the time that depending on who was singing and writing the songs, the sound and feeling would be quite different. Wikipedia lays it out nicely when they say :

"Callahan and Fiedler alternated the lead vocal and songwriting duties for the band, both favouring very different approaches: Fiedler created surreal, ethereal and atmospheric material, while Callahan favoured harsher-sounding urban fables. Due to this factor, the performance style of the band alternated considerably depending on which songwriter's songs were being played. Initially, the band's diversity added to its strength - in 2009, Fiedler would recall "I really liked Dave Callahan's songs and his voice - obviously! That's why I wanted to be in a band with him... We were different people and wrote differently, but came from the same influences - Can, PIL, Kraftwerk, Eric B & Rakim, and MBV to name a few bands. Moonshake was a collision - it was supposed to be a collision."[2] Regardless of the divergence in approaches, all Moonshake songs made a strong use of textures, noise and sampler technology."

Earwig : Under My Skin, I Am Laughing

This was a total revelation when i heard them. To this day, they are still a band that influences me. I never tire of hearing this album. They arrived at just the right time musically where they were able to move their ealier indie sound into the new relam of sampler based electronic music. They kept the more song based structures they started with on earlier recordings, but they added a new dimension with the sequenced loops. I marvel at how difficult this must have been back in the early 90s with the technology they had. So many bands who have Ableton at their disposal make music that is structurally similar but this has an organic quality and a freshness that i think is distinctive, even today. While the guitar isn’t overwhelming, its presence also sets it apart from some of their contemporaries in the purely electronic realm. A little later they did an album on a 4AD subsidiary called Guernica as "Insides". This was a very similar album to this Earwig one. It also never got the attention it deserved at the time. Thankfully people are discovering these albums and that’s fantastic. Once on Facebook, i described them as Rock music and one of the main forces behind the music, Julian Tando, took umbrage with that and said they were certainly not in any way rock music. I feel that fight against the conventions of rock music was what helped made them special. I just feel a bit bummed that the idea of rock music had become so passé that it needed to be disassociated with so forcefully. Here is an interview/overview of their Insides incarnation

https://thequietus.com/articles/07267-the-euphoria-of-insides

Disco Inferno - In Debt

Along with Seefeel & Insides, Disco Inferno were my personal holy trinity. Another band that showed up right as music was evolving towards an electronic idea. This album showcases a sound that had more of its roots in a more post punk sound than their later works. The little fame they achieved was through using the guitar as a means to trigger samples in a live context. This particular record i think, while maybe not as daring as the later works, just does it for me. They had a just fantastic grasp of how to use the digital delay with their guitar. Its super rhythmic and complex. Dare i say it owes a little bit to the style Edge pioneered with U2 but used in a different context. While its not structurally different than a lot of the indie rock music being made at the time, one listen will show they had something different going on. Something that hasn’t been easily repeated even today. I would love to find other bands that had this sound, but i am not aware of too many. Feel free to recommend of course. always open to new things! A nice interview here by Neil Kulkarni

https://thequietus.com/articles/07144-disco-inferno-interview

Spoonfed Hybrid - Self Titled

Like a lot of people my age, the 4AD label was a major part of our listening habits. I still love a lot of those bands to this day. The Pale Saints we a group i think all of us liked and when this album came out (also on the Guernica offshoot), i snapped it up. While similar to the Pale Saints because of the presence of former member Ian Masters, this was a little more persnal sounding and quite clever i think in how some of the songs were constructed. The track "Natually Occuring Anchors" is one that assembles different recorded versions of guitar to form the track in a really unusual way. you can hear it here. I have always been fond of this album and i would encourage you to seek it out

Revolutionary Army Of The Infant Jesus - Gift of Tears/The Mirror

Revolutionary Army Of The Infant Jesus - Gift of Tears/The Mirror

This group is a departure sonically from the ones i mention above. They dont sound like any of the previous groups and they sort of represent an aspect of my musical past that was very important to me. At one point of my life, i was a massive Current 93 fan. Collected everything i could get my hands on. I think i was facisnated by the mysterious vibe they presented. Always dark and elusive. Collecting this music was always a challenge because it wouldnt show up in even in very good indie record shops a lot of the time. In the late 70s up until the dawn of the internet, if you collected records, often times you would have to send away for mail order catalogs that would come out a few times of year by mail. The psych, prog, industrial scenes relied on these mail order lists. Often times the albums described in these catalogs would sound absolutely magical. You couldnt hear any of these records so you relied on the descriptions solely. A lot of the time, the reputation of these albums were really hyped up and once you got them from the mailman, you slapped them onto the turntable or the CD player, only to be letdown that you just spent your limited cash to get something that was often average at best. I subscribed to a catalog called "The Wild Places" . It was really cool because he did psych and prog but the person behind it was very open eared and he did some more dark folk and odd stuff like Current 93 and the like. I read about this band with a wild name and the way he described them meant i was absolutly forced to give him my cash and wait the 2 to 3 weeks before i got my stuff. Well in this case i struck paydirt. I will say that i dont listen to Current 93 anymore, but i still count RAIJ as a group i still listen to and admire. Doing research on this, i ran into the only interview i had ever read from them on Bandcamp daily that was given on the occasion of their new release. The first in 20 years or something. Well worth reading