Clock DVA - a name one associates with industrial music.
Well, they were actually on Industrial Records, weren't they? Put out a cassette via them, White Souls in Black Suits.
Then Clock DVA were on Fetish, an imprint started by TG associate and ultra-fan Rod Pearce (he rereleased Second Annual Report and various other Gristle records).
On Fetish, DVA were label mates with 23 Skidoo.
DVA singer Adi Newton was into Burroughs and Gysin - cut up, dream machines.
So all told, archetypally industrial. None more industrial.
However, if you listen to their best-known tune, "4 Hours", from 1981....
... beneath the shrill wail of the horn and the doom-boom baritone (Adi bridging the gap between Ian Curtis and Andrew Eldritch), the song sounds like the Cars or The Undertones, something of that ilk
It's got that damped-strings (or is the term palm-muted?) rhythm guitar chug.
The breakdown couldn't be more archetypally New Wave.
The lyrics, though, have something to do with the four hours of dream sleep, lucid dreaming, etc - i.e. typical industrial-style esoteric research. Sexual entanglements, stained sheets, etc.
After Thirst, Clock DVA actually briefly went New Pop, signing to Polydor for the album Advantage - an episode that seemed to embarrass Newton later.
The outcome somewhere between Lexicon Of Love and Floodland
After that Newton went back to the industrial left-field with The Anti Group
.... and then from 2011 a reformulated Clock DVA.
They are still going strong - indeed they put out an album this year.
Didn't they end up recording for Wax Trax? By chance, I searched for Cabaret Voltaire's RADIATION on YouTube yesterday and came across a channel there devoted to Clock DVA (and other early industrial artists.)
ReplyDeleteOne of my best friends is a dance music obsessive (I got him a copy of Energy Flash for his birthday, and helpfully corrected the passages where you maligned the Mondays). He calls it electronic music, yet declares that Kraftwerk and Jean-Michel Jarre (an unfortunately and bizarrely sidelined pioneer) as too retro for his tastes. Every touchstone I suggest between us (Throbbing Gristle, New Order, and of course the Mondays) just sparks an articulate rant from him. As a sample:
ReplyDelete"No but I do find it strange that, although your favourite band embraced electronic music in order to create something different to the already stagnant indie scene, you can't accept that it is obviously the more innovative, sonically advanced style of music.
And artists from all genres continue to turn to electronic music in order to create something different.
Remixes doing better than originals. Guest producers. Featuring on electronic artists work. Need I go on?"
I'd just appreciate your feedback.
I've taken to playing Merle Haggard and John Prine after we've had a night out.
DeleteThere's such a wide range of electronic music encompassing different approaches, attitudes, it's hard to generalize. Think of the gulf between Autechre and Masters At Work. There's people who are doing very musical, subtly inflected, soulful and jazz tinged etc stuff and others doing very abstract, posthuman, punishingly extreme stuff seemingly devoid of emotion.
DeleteEqually some rock can be more advanced and experimental than some dance music. And it all depends on the axis of value that you privilege.
Given how much of a history has build up behind electronic dance music, all these different strands of tradition and many kinds of throwback, retro-electronic styles, I'm not sure I could construct a clearcut argument that one area of music is inherently more advanced than other. It was more clearcut in the '90s when you did have all these surging into the unknown strands of electronic music - jungle, gabber, trance, minimal techno, IDM etc - which contrasted with a largely backward looking alternative rock / indie / Britpop. The dance music didn't have as much historical baggage and seemed to have far more places to go, this huge open horizon.
Of course "advance" itself is a somewhat narrow way of looking at things anyway. It's a very particular metric that not that matter people care about, I don't think.
Jeffrey Dahmer was listening to Clock DVA when he was arrested
ReplyDeleteFor real?
DeleteYes apparently! https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=2172592706211299&id=322112944592627&set=a.1240030796134166
DeleteWell aware of Clock DVA but I've never listened to them. They had a vague air of redundancy. Cabaret Voltaire were niche enough, and to have a second division entrant in that niche always seemed superfluous. And then there was Hula, the third division candidate. Being into them tended to have the same air as collecting jam jar lids, or being the kind of trainspotter who is only interest in shunters.
ReplyDeleteNot forgetting The Box, formed out of the ashes of the original Clock DVA - and actually good.
DeleteI remember the second-wave of avant-funk well - the point at which something that was surprising (with the Cabs, A Certain Ratio and Skidoo) became generic, and as you say, redundant. Hula, but also Chakk, Portion Control, 400 Blowsm Slab. The label Sweatbox. Not actively bad like say the equally derivative psychobilly - but adding to the dispiriting feeling of the time, the onset of the Bad Music Era.
I was quite into the second wave of avant-funk but then saw the Dazz Band doing 'Let It All Blow' on TOTP and thought that it looked like a lot more fun . . . .
ReplyDeleteHaha same, but with Cameo.
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