Skin & Bones
ALL STYLES OF ELECTRO
GOTHIC MAGAZINE #63 - Feb 2009
What was the main reason for you to get started with and in electronic music actively on your own?
We grew up during a time when music was becoming Psychedelic, a rich time indeed for experimenting with sound. We were too young to be in a band but the seed was sown. Sci-fi TV shows like Space Patrol, Fireball XL5 and Stingray, shows that featured tape generated electronic noises added to our fascination with musique concrete (although we’d never heard of that particular term at the time…that came later). During the 70’s we put together two or three different bands, breaking them up when they fell into the inevitable blues/rock format. Nervous Surgeons, the last band we put together before Click Click, changed everything. Tim, the bass player, had a Wasp synthesiser and a reel-reel tape deck and all of a sudden we saw the opportunity to make something different. We’d been experimenting with tapes and home-made noise generators for years; looped rhythms and evil sounding slabs of noise, background stuff for the band to improvise with, but having a synthesizer – they were extremely expensive at the time – gave us a completely new pallet of colour to work with. We threw out the entire Surgeons live set and started again. The Surgeons came apart shortly after and we put Click Click together as a three-piece funk/rock/electronic band. The funk and the rock (and the guitarist) lasted about six months. The electronics lasted for twenty years.
Where do you derive most of your inspiration and influences from nowadays?
The back catalogue (sampling our own work and rebuilding it), the state of the planet (fucked up?) and the technology, although the technology is real hard to keep up with these days. The developers don’t allow enough time to pull things apart before they come up with another version of the same thing. We always have to re-learn how to use things which is why Adrian’s mobile phone is so old. He still hasn’t worked out how to turn off predictive text yet.
We’ve recently started re-working an old album, something we originally recorded onto cassette tape back in 82. We’ll be using the same influences as we had back then: discordance, oppression and the incoming police state. A dark tale written at the time of the last economic depression. We had no money then either.
What is your opinion on the more than ever ongoing pigeonholing in the very heterogeneous Electro-scene?
We had to look heterogeneous up in the Oxford English dictionary but we’re okay now. You’re talking about compartmentalizing stuff, putting things into little boxes and sticking great big labels on them. It’s been like that for years. We were once told that our music wouldn’t sell because it couldn’t be labeled. PIAS gave the music the EBM label but it’s never sat right with us. We’re not EBM. Play an EBM compilation CD with a Click Click song on it and our contribution just does not fit. We don’t use sequencers and Adrian doesn’t scream enough to be EBM but we’re still known as an EBM group. If we have to have a label we’d probably prefer Industrial. Most people think we come from Sheffield anyway – which we don’t.
Anyone can load tracker software onto their personal computer and start writing music and most people start with factory produced samples and something like Acid or Reason. Thousands of people are writing what is essentially electronic music, techno, trance, drum n bass (labels, pigeonholing) but how many of those people are creating music that defies description? A lot of them are. There’s a hell of a lot of totally unique computer generated music on MySpace or LastFM that simply cannot be stamped with any kind of label. So to answer your question; our opinion is that labels, pigeonholes and other forms of identification are irrelevant and should not be allowed to denigrate from or hinder the progress of any kind of music.
Which kind of tools do you prefer while composing your music? What's your take on the debate of soft- vs. hardware?
Musical instruments are a good start.
Software didn’t really exist when we started out. There are no sequences or samples on Sweet Stuff, Skripglow or Party Hate. All of the effects were generated by hand or with the assistance of tape recorders, microphones, radio’s and TV sets. The only way to achieve a sound like ours was to play everything and process it with reverb, delay and whatever rack-mounted effects units were available at the time. A lot of the sounds you hear on Mercy for example came from a box of children’s toys. Damage had to be recorded on a stairwell because samples of breaking glass and dropped steel bars didn’t exist and the reverb machine couldn’t produce the sound we had in mind. There was no looping, no cut and paste; it was all played live – most of it in one take. If you want to remain unique you have to do it yourself. Found sounds were just that – they were found and processed and re-recorded.
We use samples now of course, but most of them are built from scratch – if you don’t do it that way you’ll just sound like everyone else and that’s never been our intention. We don’t want to sound like just another electro band – what would be the point?
For composing purposes we still use AcidPro, SoundForge and Cubase because we’re too lazy and too fucking old to learn anything else.
Which three albums have left the biggest impression on you/have influenced and inspired you the most (please give us a short review of four or five sentences per record)?
To name three albums that inspired us is like asking a gourmet to name his three favourite deserts. When you love music (or food) it’s hard to understand why a certain something rises above the rest, but if we really have to nail three different parts (each) of the same equation those parts would probably be:
Captain Beefhearts “Trout Mask Replica” because on first listening it sounded like the band and all of its instruments being thrown down an endless flight of stairs. It was only after repeated listening that the idea of all music being played in 4/4 with a verse/chorus/verse structure was not the only way music could be written. This was music that challenged its audience. Beefheart threw down his multi-coloured gauntlet and said: “Fuck you. This is ME.”
We both chose Can’s “Tago Mago” because it includes just about everything we value in music on one album. It taught us how noise could be held together by a solid rhythm section and a one-note bassline. Invaluable. It turned out to be an important lesson for us as well. The sleeve notes of the original album mentioned someone we’d not heard of at the time, Karlheinz Stockhausen. He comes in at number three with “Kontakte”. Here’s a man whose musical arsenal consisted of filters, potentiometers, tapes, a sharp pair of scissors and a strange sense of spiritualism. Stockhausen opened the doors to some of the most intricate and inventive music on the planet and introduced us to Edgard Varese, Oskar Sala, Morton Subotnick and many other pioneers in the field of electronic and concrete music.
Jimi Hendrix Experience – “Electric Ladyland”. A man and a guitar and a unique vision of what he wanted to create. Still the best album of its kind. No competition.
The Residents – “Duck Stab”. We had the little black and red fold-out 7” EP version (still have it). The first time we heard this it was like, “Wait a minute, what’s going on here? Are they playing out of tune on purpose? Where does that voice come from? Who are these people?” Nothing’s changed. This is a different kind of music. It’s harsh, it’s unpredictable, it’s extremely strange and it contains songs you can sing along to. Wonderful.
History
Those Nervous Surgeons:
Tim Wilson (Bass)
Derek Smith (Drums)
Adrian K. Smith (Guitar/Wasp/Voice)
The Surgeons were formed during 1976, just as Punk was taking over the entire British music movement.
The Surgeons were occasionally augmented by Mark Turney or Dave Buckingham on guitar.
DS: We were in a band called Those Nervous Surgeons at the time, playing freeform improvised rock. Tim (the bass player) brought a WASP along to a rehearsal one night and Adrian spent the next couple of hours working out how to use it. After that things took a very interesting turn. We managed to find a Farfisa organ in a second hand shop, bought a Copycat echo-unit and took our improvisation's to another level. We were all influenced by Sun Ra and Stockhausen at the time. . .
Click Click #1
Derek Smith (Drums)
Adrian K. Smith (Bass/Voice)
Richard Camp (Guitar)
The band that recorded the 4 track silver single (aka Run Me Down) and various other tunes. Funk based guitar rock; bass, voice and drums anchoring the sporadic disjointed mind and guitar of Rick Camp.
AS: Rick and Derek were two massive ego's waiting to explode. Mostly these explosions happened during gigs and nobody in the audience noticed. I think now that some of the tension came from the fact that both guys really knew how to play and wouldn't tolerate mistakes. In the end something had to give and I'm ashamed to say it was me. I simply packed my gear up one night and walked away from a very tight and original rock band.
Run me down 7" ep 1982 - Lung Function: Sigh 001
Run me down
Sister's laughing
Reanimation
Africa
Click Click #2:
Derek Smith (Drums etc)
Adrian K. Smith (Voice/Wasp/Tapes/Melodica)
Various Floatin Members (Keyboards/Viola/Guitar/Drums)
AS: Nobody in England was doing anything remotely interesting in the field of electronics (okay, Cabaret Voltaire and the rest of the Sheffield scene were pulling their weight) Derek introduced me to Tago Mago (Can) and I went hunting for more Teutonic music(s). Faust and Neu were just breaking in the UK and I saw the possibilities of repetition in music (you can't fuck to pop music but you can fuck to funk!) Until that point I was listening to Weather Report, Miles Davis and Zappa and wondering if I would ever become a real musician. The answer turned out to be NO, but then I read an interview with Brian Eno and realised I didn't have to become a musician to produce good music. From then on it was only a matter of time (and a good selection of tape recorders) before I came up with something interesting.
Lung Function
Inside Lung Function
Click Click #2 took a long time to learn how to walk. Gone were the strings and the acoustics of the standard rock band, in were the keys, faders and sliders of the self-contained electronic unit. Tentative minimalist steps were taken with "Documents", "Round and Round", "Exit" and "Warfare" while longer strides into unknown analogue territory were taken with "It Doesn't Hurt" and "Hands Fall Backwards". Suddenly a new identity came to fruition, a combination of the free form doodlings of Those Nervous Surgeons and the metronomic regimentation of Krautrock. Drum machines, delay units, keyboards, tape decks, noise generators and drum kits had to be housed in a permanent base, a laboratory where everything would be available at the flick of a switch. A room within an industrial complex in the centre of Luton was discovered and became the base that would one day be known as Lung Function.
