H.N.A.S. (Hirsche Nicht Aufs Sofa) was founded by Achim P. Li Khan and Christoph Heemann in 1983. H.N.A.S.'s sound experimentation started in 1984 with a series of limited cassettes made for demonstration purpose or personal use. Their first LP release was 'Abwassermusik' in 1985 (together with german experimental band Mieses Gegonge).
The group then recorded 'Melchior' with Steven Stapleton, released on the United Dairies label the following year. Subsequent H.N.A.S. releases were mainly on their own Dom label. All vinyl releases were reissued on CD in 2002. [SOURCE: DISCOGS]
In March 1980, band-less art student John Halvorsen (bass, guitar, vocals) was booked into a gig at the Hillsborough Tavern in Christchurch –before he’d even found some other blokes with instruments to be the band. A week later, he had his new bandmates Alister Parker (guitar, bass, vocals) and Brent McLachlan (drums), and together they designed their logo, pasted up their posters over the main act’s (The Whizz Kids), practiced four times, and played the gig.
Somehow smashing fully formed into their first show –just a couple of months after the release of the monumental 'AK79' compilation of NZ punk –the sheet-metal/stellar-core meltdown of The Gordons was a smack in the still-fresh face of post-punk. They had seven songs at that first gig, and the crowd was so into it that they played them all twice.
Keeping up their hasty pace, The Gordons immediately went on tour, and when the van broke down in Wellington, they couldn’t afford to get it fixed and found themselves stuck there for six weeks. Rather than slowing down or giving up, they recorded their infamously lost ‘Sausage Tapes’ at Wellington's Sausage Studios, only to have the masters (accidentally?) erased.
Famous for being the brutally loudest band in NZ at the time, sensitive souls complained of hearing loss while enthusiastic skinheads stuffed their skulls into the speaker boxes for an all-out audio assault.
Very expensive high-quality sound systems were brought in from elsewhere to augment a venue’s setup and “reinforce the resonances”; a gig at the Gladstone in Christchurch required hiring in the best PAs from Auckland and Wellington. The band insisted that this was not loudness-for-loudness' sake, but for quality of sound reproduction, so that listeners to The Gordons became full-on experiencers of their sound. The terrific thunders and squalls were not dependent on guitar pedals, odd tunings and production; the guitars plugged directly into the amps, with standard tunings.
Halvorsen and Parker both alternated between guitar and bass, depending on who wrote the song, and used loudness as their effect, overdriving their amps and letting sounds crash into each other.
With their first EP, 'Future Shock', wherein white city lights recede in zoom-lens reverb into blackest black background, The Gordons tore open a black-(vinyl)-hole, centred roundly on the South Island. The Christchurch scene in the 1980s was a powerful and multifarious amalgam which has traditionally been dismissed in favour of –or more insultingly umbrella’d under– the nebulous 'Dunedin Sound' tag.
The (initially, non-‘The…’) Gordons quickly sculpted 'Future Shock' in a cheap, midnight-to-dawn recording and mixing session on 8-track at Harlequin Studios in Auckland. The Gordons aimed for the best recordings they could afford.
Struggling just to pay the bills for the sound systems, when it came time to self-release their planned 7-inch, The Gordons managed to set up a credit account with Polygram (with a small deposit) to press the initial 500 copies of the record. By the end of that month they'd sold enough records to pay off the account and press a second run of 500.
This was an independent release on their own 'Gordonoid, Inc.' label in December 1980. Early copies were distributed via an indies network that included Propeller Records in Auckland and the band themselves.
Later in 1981, in a 50/50 deal with The Gordons, Flying Nun distributed, then re-pressed the 7-inch in 1982-83 with a Flying Nun centre label (rather than the spinning Gordon of the Gordonoid, Inc. release). 'Future Shock' (along with the first LP) was officially re-released on Flying Nun in the 12-inch EP format in 1988.
As for their punk cred, the sound was much more Stooges / MC5 era than rubber-stamp-simple Sex Pistols –there’s still a bit of boogie there. The astute listener can just about imagine some handclaps in these songs, particularly on "Adults and Children".
Within the year, The Gordons were back in the studio to record their first full-length album. The self-titled LP (aka 'Volume 1') is less immediate than 'Future Shock', loaded with artful noodling, krautrock-ish minimalisms, and psych-influenced timbres.
Amazingly, New Zealanders were ready for this stuff: No.1 hits on the NZ charts in 1981 included two Joy Division songs, as well as local New Wavers The Swingers and Screaming Meemees. RipItUp readers named 'Volume 1' the best album of 1981.
After two years of non-stop sonic onslaught, with an album, an EP, a mysterious lost recording, and a tour schedule that would fray anyone's nerves, The Gordons disintegrated. In the grand tradition of musicians taking their art to the edge and beyond, Parker had a religious experience. Unlike earlier fellow travellers Doug Jerebine and Harvey Mann, who found enlightenment through Krishna teaching, Parker found Christ and lost his music.
Two years later, The Gordons resurfaced, with new member Vince Pinker (ex-Proud Scum, ex-En Can Ma) taking over for Alister Parker, with a new album and a furious leg of touring.
Once described by writer Andrew Schmidt as "The Gordons that Dare Not Speak its Name", 'Volume 2' is blessed with the famous cover art, but mostly forgotten by Gordons fandom (and apparently the band as well). After the ecstatic first two releases, it was no longer ground-breaking. The ‘straight-into-the-amp’ aesthetic had gone, and now the vocals (and sometimes everything else) were flanged, compressed or drenched in reverb, and the lyrics were real thin. (The band would make much better use of effects and production techniques later on with Bailter Space). But there are a couple of serious classics on here: the snaky guitar and This Heat-style truncated funk-drums on second track "Reactor", as well as re-worked Gordons classic "Quality Control" make up for the remaining third of the LP which is more in the mould of 80s hard rock / metal: HüsGor Düns meets Gordörhead.
After this classic sophomore slump, the original line-up briefly reformed to re-record the songs from the Sausage sessions, for Jayrem Records. Like the original lost recordings, these were never released.
These two versions of The Gordons –popularly referred to as Mark I and Mark II– only lasted a few years, with a big chunk of time off in the middle and an unsatisfying finish. But they are probably as influential on the sound and attitude of New Zealand rock as The Enemy / Toy Love. And they put down roots, and tendrils that grew throughout NZ music, most significantly blooming into Bailter Space, who –after a couple of line-up changes– could almost be referred to as Gordons Mark III.
After Parker's brief but overwhelming religious conversion, he offered up an initial EP titled 'Nelsh Bailter Space' and some 7-inchers, which featured Hamish Kilgour (ex-The Clean) on drums, Ross Humphries (ex-Pin Group) on bass, and Glenda Bills (ex-Man Ray) on keyboards. Halvorsen and McLachlan had in the interim started Writhe Studios and joined The Skeptics (Brent producing, John guitar). Over the course of the next two years, the new band, now shortened to Bailter Space, attracted back the original Gordons line-up. The "New Gordons" Bailter Space combo continued for the next 10 years, and reformed in 2012 to release 'Strobosphere'. [SOURCE: AUDIO CULTURE. THE NOISY LIBRARY OF NEW ZEALAND MUSIC]
Formed late in 1980 as a spinoff from the sparking embers of NZ’s definitive art-punk band The Features, Fetus Productions initially comprised Jed Town, with new recruits Sarah "Serum" Fort and Mike Brookfield. The Features' Karel van Bergen and James Pinker would join the band within a few months to record their debut album. The original concept, as the name implies, included a production of sound and visuals, hence the group’s debut “exhibition” featuring Brookfield’s screen prints of human deformities.
The first show, without van Bergen and Pinker, was at Auckland University's Elam School of Art at the end of 1980. The group moved to Sydney in 1981, where they recorded and self-released their first album, which sounded like recordings from within a hellish insane asylum. When Pinker and van Bergen moved to Melbourne and then England to work with SPK and Dead Can Dance, Jed Town became the guiding force behind the more song-oriented Fetus Productions on the 1983 12-inch EP 'Fetalmania' and its startling alternative hit "What’s Going On". A further EP, 'Perfect Product', was to follow, and it contained another classic "Flicker"; and finally in 1985, the 'Luminous Trails' album.
Like contemporaneous “industrial” groups in the vein of SPK and Severed Heads, Fetus Productions shows reveled in grisly autopsy footage, but the big difference was a unique duality: for every bludgeoning, churning horror show there was a contrasting twist of beauty in Town’s songs, no matter how oblique. And at a time when few NZ groups were availing themselves of the electronic hardware that had become common in England, Fetus Productions not only utilised samplers but they incorporated “field recordings” into their music, which gave them a startlingly different sonic signature. Just as much of an art project as a rock band, Fetus Productions worked all over the world during the mid to late 1980s, but Town’s discovery of acid techno on his arrival in England in 1987 ended the group for good. His next project would be his pumping techno persona, ICU. Returning to New Zealand in the late 1990s, Town has revived the Fetus Productions name several times for audio-visual retrospectives, and a series of anniversary performances in 2011. [SOURCE: AUDIO CULTURE, THE NOISY LIBRARY OF NEW ZEALAND MUSIC]
Combining West Coast-style surf pop, Velvet Underground-like urban rock, and the romanticism of French singer Françoise Hardy, Algerian-born singer/songwriter Etienne Daho has taken the European rock scene by storm. His albums have consistently qualified for gold or platinum status and his songs have been recorded by such artists as Mercedes Audras and Arnold Turboust. His résumé includes duets with Sarah Cracknell, Elli Medeiros, Lyn Byrd, Astrud Gilberto, and Chris Isaak. In 1989, he participated in an Arthur Baker-produced recording with Al Green and Jimmy Somerville.
The son of a French soldier father and a chemist mother, Daho was raised by grandparents who operated a semi-bar / semi-grocery during the War of Algeria. Recordings of Sylvie Vartan and Françoise Hardy, on a jukebox, inspired Daho to dream of becoming a singer. Settling with his family in Rennes, France, in 1965, Daho continued to broaden his musical scope to include the British rock of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and the art rock of David Bowie, Roxy Music, and the Velvet Underground. Visiting London for the first time in 1966, he became enamored of the British city's flourishing music scene.
Returning to Rennes, Daho worked as a dormitory monitor at the city's university. When he organized a concert at the school, featuring rock bands Stinky Toys and Marquis de Sade on December 20, 1978, Daho unknowingly took the first steps leading to his career in music. The Stinky Toys' Elli Medeiros and Jacno encouraged him to continue writing and singing, while Marquis de Sade lead guitarist Frank Darcel took him under his wing, helping him to learn the intricacies of musical professionalism. When Daho made his stage debut at the rock festival Transmusicales in June 1979, Darcel and other members of Marquis de Sade accompanied him. After releasing an independent single, "Cow-Boy", Daho signed with Virgin France. His 1980 debut album, 'Mythomane', produced by Jacno and featuring Marquis de Sade musicians, was certified gold a decade after its release.
Performing in Rennes clubs with French singer Arnold Turboust, Daho began to attract attention. Receiving some radio airplay with his singles "Le Grand Sommeil" and "Sortir Ce Soir", he released his second album, 'La Notte, La Notte', featuring the hit single "Week-End á Rome". Although it showed hints of a promising future, its sales paled next to those of Daho's 1988 release, 'Pour Nos Vies Martiennes', which was certified gold (with sales of more than 100,000 copies) on the day it was released. The success continued with 1989's 'Live ED', which sold more than 250,000 copies.
In 1991 he recorded his fifth album, 'Paris Ailleurs', a tribute to the Motown and Stax labels. Pre-release orders of the album were so strong that the album was certified gold before it was released and attained platinum status with sales of more than 500,000 copies. Four years later he was on the charts with a cover of Edith Piaf's "Mon Manège a Moi", while the U.K. pop group Saint Etienne were topping the British charts with "He's on the Phone", an English-language cover of "Week-End á Rome". While his 1994 release, 'Daholympia', sold half as many copies as 'Paris Ailleurs', Daho regained the momentum of his earlier albums with the release of 'Eden' in 1996. 'Corps et Armes' appeared in 2000 and was followed three years later by 'Reevolution'.
Daho has always sought new avenues for his creativity. He appeared in Olivier Assayas' movie "Désordre", and received a European video award for his 1987 video "Epaule Tattoo". In addition to writing songs for other artists, Daho has produced recordings for Les Valentins and Sylvie Vartan. He performed in a stage production of Jean Genet's 'Le Condamné a Mort' at the Moliere Theater in Paris. [SOURCE: ALLMUSIC]
De Brassers is a belgian punkwave group from the early eighties, originating from Hamont in the Province of Limburg. Their "spleen-punk" made it to the final of the 1980 edition of the Rock Rally. Their single "En Toen Was Er Niets Meer" ("And Then There Was Nothing"), their main artifact, was a release without a record company. Although very low-budget and badly produced, the anger and the energy of the single made it a cult hit. Together with groups like Gruppenbild (with Stijn Meuris from Noordkaap), Struggler and Siglo XX, they formed the core of the doomy punk scene from Limburg for a while. Occasionally, De Brassers still perform on stage (for benefits etc. like the one for newspaper De Morgen in 1987, for Kom Op Tegen Kanker in 1995...). In 1998 they were featured in the lineup of the Euro-Rock festival in Neerpelt, together with their contemporaries Anne Clark, Red Zebra, Struggler, The Sisters of Mercy, The Bollock Brothers and The Stranglers. [SOURCE: THE BELGIAN POP & ROCK ARCHIVES]
Chakk were an industrial funk band from Sheffield, who existed from 1981 until 1987.Members were Alan Cross, Mark Brydon, Dee Boyle, Sim Lister, Jake Harries and Jon Stuart. The band never achieved commercial success, but have been noted for their wide influence on later British dance music, particularly via Fon Studios.
Their first single, "Out of the Flesh", produced by Richard H. Kirk, on Cabaret Voltaire's Doublevision label, reached number 3 on the independent charts in 1984. The band recorded a John Peel session on 17 October 1984 ("Cut The Dust", "Sedative Ends", "No. 3 Sound", "Mother Tongues"). Their second single "You", released in 1985, was also an indie hit, reaching No. 14. They then signed an album deal with MCA Records, who released '10 Days in an Elevator'. The initial version of the album was rejected and a rerecorded version was finally released in 1986; it did not sell well and the band was dropped later that year. They released a few more singles and split in 1987.
Non-MCA recordings from "You" onwards were released on their own Fon Records label ("Fuck Off Nazis" or "Fear of Nazis", from a piece of 1940s graffiti on a wall in Sheffield), which was started by the band with their manager, Amrik Rai (formerly a journalist for New Musical Express). Rai also ran a record shop of the same name for a time.
Brydon built Fon Studios with the MCA advance money (reportedly £100,000) in 1985 as it was cheaper to build a studio in Sheffield than to record in London. Fon Studios and the Fon Force production team became important to Sheffield music and paved the way for labels like Warp. Brydon did significant later work in production (including "House Arrest" by Krush) and started Moloko with Róisín Murphy. Chakk were featured in Eve Wood's documentary films on the Sheffield music scene, "Made in Sheffield" (2001) and "The Beat is the Law" (2010). [SOURCE: WIKIPEDIA]
After leaving Bel Canto, Geir Jenssen used the solo Bleep pseudonym to release a few singles and an album of electro-tinged, sample-laden techno. His early influences were from acid house and New Beat music. Released in 1989, 'The North Pole by Submarine' was the only album recorded as Bleep. Further singles followed in 1990 and 1991 before Jenssen abandoned the Bleep moniker and again changed musical direction. Shortly after 'North Pole' was released, Jenssen moved in a far more ambient direction with his music, and changed the name to Biosphere under which he released his new music to avoid any comparison with "bleep house". The album was released on SSR Records (sub-label of Crammed Discs) and Tokuma Japan Communications music labels. [SOURCE: WIKIPEDIA]
This was pop music should be. Here you found lots of guitars, a hammering rhythm machine, and lyrics about desolation, drugs, suicide but also "plopmusic", whatever that was. That was in 1982 and André de Saint-Obin played all of the music himself using "sound on sound": you play a bit, loop it and play something else on top. Besides the 'Sound On Sound' cassette, he released on Ding Dong Records and Tapes a 7″ single and delivered some pieces for compilation cassettes. Then he seemed to have disappeared as suddenly as he arrived. [SOURCE: DARK ENTRIES RECORDS]
P16.D4 was a German electronic noise music collective, active primarily from 1980 to 1988, whose work was inspired by the punk and Neue Deutsche Welle (German New Wave) scene of the early 1980s, which they ruthlessly mocked in their debut self-released 7", 'Brückenkopf Im Niemandsland'. The group began as the relatively more musical Permutative Distortion, then morphing into P.D. to record one LP, 'Inweglos', before finally settling on P16.D4. This final incarnation saw them abandon song form entirely, instead embracing tape cut-ups, musique concrète, endless recycling and transformation of previously published material, and many long-distance collaborations with like-minded artists such as DDAA, Vortex Campaign, Nurse With Wound, and Merzbow. The longest-term collaboration was with the installation and conceptual artist Achim Wollscheid, who used P16.D4 sounds as the basis for LPs he recorded under the name SBOTHI. Ralf Wehowsky, the only constant member of the group, later released solo material under the alias RLW. Members of P16.D4 were also involved with Selektion, a collective of people involved with sound as well as the visual arts. Selektion published LPs, CDs, books, visual art and design. [SOURCE: WIKIPEDIA]
One of the more important bands on the Australian post-punk scene of the 1980s, Melbourne's The Wreckery played dark, atmospheric music informed by the blues and the same sort of chemical and cultural obsessions as their contemporaries Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds -in fact, co-founder Hugo Race had been an early member of The Bad Seeds. Guitarist and vocalist Race formed The Wreckery with guitarist Ed Clayton-Jones in 1984; the group grew from an earlier project, Plays With Marionettes, which also featured multi-instrumentalist Robin Casinader, who had gone to school with Race. Plays With Marionettes began in 1980 and ended in 1983, when Nick Cave (who had recently left The Birthday Party) recruited Race and latter-day Plays With Marionettes drummer Mick Harvey (also a Birthday Party alumnus) to join his backing band The Bad Seeds after Plays With Marionettes opened for Cave. Race appeared on Cave's first album with The Bad Seeds, 1984's 'From Her to Eternity', and was a guest musician on 'Kicking Against the Pricks' and 'Tender Prey', but after completing his first tour with Cave, Race reconnected with Clayton-Jones and began writing songs; they decided to form a new group of their own, and took their name from one of their first new tunes, "In My Wreckery". Joining Race, Clayton-Jones, and Casinader in The Wreckery were Charles Todd on saxophones and Nick Barker on bass; the group released their first EP, 'I Think This Town Is Nervous', in 1985 on the tiny White / Hot Records label. The better-established Rampant Records signed The Wreckery in time to release their second EP, 'Yeh My People' which, like its precursor, did well on the Australian indie charts and helped the band become a frequent presence on the touring circuit. In 1987, The Wreckery released their first full-length album, 'Here at Pain's Insistence', with another EP, 'Ruling Energy', following in early 1988. Despite The Wreckery's success, Rampant Records was having financial problems, and after Rampant released a "Best-Of" set titled 'Collection', the band jumped ship for Citadel Records, who in late 1988 brought out 'Laying Down Law', regarded by many as the group's strongest work. However, tensions within the band, exaggerated by touring and health issues, came to a head, and by the time 'Laying Down Law' was released, The Wreckery had already chosen to split up after a brief tour, with guests standing in for Barker and Casinader. Nick Barker went on to a successful solo career, and Race, Clayton-Jones, and Casinader remain active in music with a variety of projects. In 2008, Memorandum Records issued 'Past Imperfect', a two-CD anthology drawn from the group's catalog, and The Wreckery reunited to play a handful of shows in support. [SOURCE: ALLMUSIC]
