Tag: Mute Records

Single Review by William Ruben Helms

New Audio: ADULT. Return with Techno-influenced Banger “I Am Nothing”

Throughout their 25 year history, acclaimed Detroit-based multimedia and electronic music production and artist duo ADULT. — the husband and wife team of Adam Lee Miller and Nicola Kuperus — have a sprawling catalog of material released through  Mute Records, Ghostly International, Thrill Jockey, Third Man Records and a list of other labels that has seen the duo obscure and blur lines between genres and styles in a cohesive fashion within the album format. 

“but for this we wanted something that’s falling apart.” Becoming Undone, ADULT.’s ninth album reportedly sees the duo explicitly aiming for that goal, while simultaneously rejecting and reflecting the planetary discord that inspired and informed it. Written between November 2020 and April 2021, Miller and Kuperus kickstarted the creative process through additions to the rig: a vocal loop pedal for Kuperus and Roland percussion pads for Miller. They also reconnected with some of their earliest influences including Test Department and Throbbing Gristle’s 20 Jazz Funk Greats, which helped spark a series of fruitful and frenetic sessions, centered on themes of impermanence and dissonance. “We weren’t interested in melody or harmony since we didn’t see the world having that,” ADULT.’s Miller bluntly reasons. 

While there are still plenty of the dance floor bangers the duo is known for, Becoming Undone is also informed by deep, personal loss: Kuperus’ father died during the height of the pandemic, just before the duo were about to start working on the album. As his hospice caretakers, she and Miller faced the banality of finality, surrounded by objects drained of meaning — “the joy of having a body, but also the drudgery of having one,” they say. 

The end result is an album that crackles with revulsion and dissent, and it seemingly equal parts exorcism and denunciation, centered around a breadth of vocal effects: Kuperus at times sounds alternately indignant and possessed, decrying the crimes, fears, and failings of a deluded, broken world. “Humans have always been pretty terrible,” Kuperus explains. “But every year the compromises of culture just accelerate.”

Late last year, I wrote about Becoming Undone single “Fools (We Are . . .)“, a glitchy and uneasy banger centered around stuttering beats, dense layers of arpeggiated synths paired with an unhinged and desperate vocal performance by Kuperus, who sings lyrics describing the sensation of being hopelessly stuck in a seemingly endless and foolish loop of the same ol’ banal, things while everything else around them collapses.

“I Am Nothing,” Becoming Undone‘s second and latest single is an abrasive yet accessible industrial techno banger, centered around arpeggiated synths, tweeter and woofer rattling thump, metallic clang and clatter paired with Kuperus’ desperate howls inspired by Detroit techno between 1992-1995, Suicide‘s Alan Vega, Swans‘ Micheal Gira and Malaria!‘s Gudrun Gut.

“The meaning of ‘nothing’ in the context of this song is not in regards to worthlessness, but of being lodged into something we can not understand and yet somehow accept it / or not accept it,” the acclaimed Detroit-based duo explain. “We are collectively living in liminality. And personally, we are more content currently to be in a state of nothingness.”

Single Review by William Ruben Helms

New Audio: Acclaimed Detroit Duo Adult. Releases an Anxious and Uneasy Club Banger

Over the course of their 23 year history together, Detroit-based multimedia and electronic music production and artist duo ADULT. — the husband and wife team of Adam Lee Miller and Nicola Kuperus — have developed a sprawling catalog of material that obscures and blurs defined genres and styles, while drawing from industrial electronic, house music, punk rock and visual art with releases through Mute Records, Ghostly International, Thrill Jockey, Third Man Records and a list of other labels. 

Slated for an April 10, 2020 release through Dais Records, the acclaimed Detroit-based electronic duo’s forthcoming album Perception is/as/of Deception was conceived, written and recorded in a temporary black hole they created: the duo painted their windowless basement entirely black, with the sole intention of sensory deprivation so that they could question their perceptions and witness the resulting ramifications. And as result, the album’s material may be the most introspective and punk-leaning they’ve written to date: the frustration and apprehension that has long been at the center of their work are heightened — but interestingly enough, the material was written with a much more head-on approach, making it forceful and strident. 

“Have I Started at the End,” Perception is/as/of Deception’s second and latest single is a club banger, centered around a classic electronic body music production featuring industrial clang and clatter, tweeter and woofer rocking beats, layers of shimmering synth arpeggios, an enormous hook and a repetitive mantra that questions the fragility and temporality  of life while expressing frustration and unease. Unsurprisingly, the song evokes the unease and uncertainty of our time. 

Single Review by William Ruben Helms

New Audio: Mute Records to Re-issue Series of Albums by Influential Cult Favorited Genre Bending British Post-Punk Band

Featuring a core lineup of Jeremy Kerr, Martin Moscrop and Donald Johnson with a rotating cast of members to full out the band, the Manchester-based post-punk band A Certain Ratio formed in 1978 — and naturally, while embracing the ethics and culture of the post-punk era, they had developed a reputation for being uncompromisingly difficult to pigeonhole, as their sound incorporated elements of funk, jazz, punk and rock while employing electronics, tape loops and early technology.

With the release of the critically applauded and commercially successful single “Shack Up,” on both sides of the Atlantic, the Manchester-based band became hailed as pioneers of a sound dubbed “punk funk,” and as a result that single and the rest of the work they’ve released together has managed to influence an incredible and impressive array of acts including Talking Heads, LCD Soundsystem, Happy Mondays, Franz Ferdinand, ESG, Factory Floor and Andrew Weatherall among others — all of which has led to an increased interest in the British post-punk act and their catalog; in fact, the members of A Certain Ratio and renowned indie label Mute Records announced the launch of a long-awaited series of re-issues, featuring a selection of the influential Manchester band’s albums and will continue into 2018 with a compilation, a rarities box set and further re-issues.

Starting on November 24, 2017 the Mute Records-A Certain Ratio re-issue series will begin with the re-issue of the Manchester band’s debut, The Graveyard and The Ballroom, which was originally released through Factory Records in December 1979. The album will be available on limited edition vinyl with colored PVC sleeve, CD (and echoing its original release 38 years ago), cassette. Mute will also be re-issuing 1981’s To Each and 1986’s Force on colored vinyl and CD. While being superficially reminiscent of Entertainment! and Solid Gold-era Gang of Four, thanks in part to the angular guitar attack, The Graveyard and The Ballroom’s re-issue single “Do the Du,” possesses a disco-like bass line paired with vocalist, who sounds anxious and distracted in an all too post-modern fashion — and with a deeper, more attentive ear, you’l hear echoes of Talking Heads 77 and Fear of Music-era Talking Heads (think of “Psycho Killer,” and “I Zimbra”) with a hint of mod-era rock. 

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: The Gorgeously Cinematic and Expressive Visuals for Black Needle Noise and Jennie Vee’s “Heaven”

John Fryer is a London, UK-born, Los Angeles, CA-based multi-instrumentalist and producer, who is best known for his work as a producer, shaping the sound of Cocteau Twins, Depeche Mode, much of the Mute Records, 4AD and Beggars’ Banquet roster, as well as Nine Inch Nails, Love and Rockets, Cradle of Filth and countless others. Fryer is also known as one-half of the duo This Moral Coil with Ivo Watts-Russell. 

Fryer’s solo recording project Black Needle Noise continues his legacy for crafting lush and moody soundscapes as he collaborates wth a number of different vocalists; in fact, Lost in Reflections, the renowned producer and recording artist’s sophomore Black Needle Noise effort finds him working with Jennie Vee, Andrea Kerr, Chrysta Bell, Sivert Hoyem and others — and interestingly enough, it come-on the heels of Fryer’s collaboration with the aforementioned Chrysta Bell on a Twin Peaks-inspired cover of Julee Cruise, Angelo Badalamenti and David Lynch’s “Falling.” Anyway, album single “Heaven” is a strikingly cinematic track which pairs Jennie Vee’s sultry and achingly tender vocals with a lush yet atmospheric production featuring swirling electronics, shimming guitar chords and industrial clang and clatter. And although the track will further cement his legacy for crafting a sound that you would have grown up obsessed with as a child of the 80s, the song also reveals not just his generosity in working with up-and-coming and contemporary artists, but it also reflects the contemplative, introspective nature of the album’s title — while pairing a dark sensuality with an visceral sense of heartbreak. In fact, the song’s narrator is facing the ghosts of a dysfunctional and controlling relationship that has lingered, even as she’s 4,000 thousand miles away. 

Shot in a cinematic and creepy black an white, and directed by Talon McKee and Lloyd Galbraith, edited by Jennie Vee, featuring animation by Mark Francombe and choreographed by Caroline Haydon, the video starts its choreographer writhing and swooning in a combination of pleasure and heartache; but at its core is a protagonist, who expresses desire, vulnerability, and self-asurredness simultaneously. 

Single Review by William Ruben Helms

New Audio: Mute Records Celebrates the 50th Anniversary of Influential Krautrock Act CAN with a Compilation of Singles — Includes a Never Before Digital Re-Release

Initially, beginning his musical career as a pupil of avant garde composers Karlheinz Stockhausen and Gyorgy Ligeti, CAN’s founding member and primary composer/songwriter Irmin Schdmit (keyboard) had conducted a number of high-profile orchestrated pieces in his native Germany and aboard; however, a trip to New York where he encountered Andy Warhol and Hotel Chelsea, and heard the sounds of Jimi Hendrix and Frank Zappa had transformed his life. Along with the band’s other core members — Holger Czukay (bass), Michael Karoli (guitar) and Jaki Liebezei (drums) CAN officially formed in Cologne, Germany (then-West Germany) in 1967. With the release of 1969’s Monster Movie, 1971’s Tago Mago, 1972’s Ege Bamyasi and 1973’s Future Days the German experimental act collaborated with a number of vocalists including Malcolm Mooney (1968-1970), Damo Suzuki (1970-1973) and a rotating cast of musicians and wound up developing a reputation for an imitable sound that possessed elements of avant garde and modern classical composition, minimalism, electronica, world music, psych rock and funk, while being widely hailed as pioneers of the German krautrock movement. And because of their eclectic, genre-defying sound the band’s influence has been massive and can be traced in the work of acts like Joy Division, Primal Scream, Radiohead and avant-garde composer Bernhard Lang, among others.

Throughout the band’s history — the bulk being a continuous run from 1967 or so – 1979 with the members of the band reconvening periodically over the past 30 years — the band has released a number of singles, some which have appeared on the band’s albums and others that have not. And to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the band’s formation, Mute Records will be releasing CAN The Singles, a compilation featuring all the band’s single releases, including “Shikako Maru Ten,” a B side to the “Spoon,” a top ten hit in their native Germany back in 1972 and it’ll be available for the first time ever digitally. Interestingly, the single manages to possess a percussive and breezy arrangement that sounds as though it were influenced by Brazilian samba and Afro-Cuban/Afro-Caribbean jazz, further reminding listeners of the band’s reputation for being defiantly difficult to pigeonhole and being relentlessly, mischievously experimental with their sound and approach.