B IS FOR BARBARELLA

Barbarella is a trance/ambient track and album (“The Art of Dance”), released on Rising High Records in 1993 at a time when RHR could do no wrong. Confusingly, it was also the name of the artist. And in the incestuous world of early 90s dance, it was a collaboration between Sven Vath (allegedly the inspiration for Moody DJ, if anyone remembers the cartoons) and Ralf Hildenbeutel.

The track itself is a trippy journey in space, full of tinkling pianos, whooshing sounds and that early trance drum pattern. I’ve no idea why they chose the Barbarella name.

Vath went on to set up respected trance labels Harthouse and Eye-Q. Whilst Vath and Hildenbeutel would go on to collaborate on Vath’s best-known album “An Accident In Paradise”. Vath is now owner of the Cocoon club in Frankfurt, one of Europe’s leading clubs.

Barbarella – Barbarella (My Name Is Barbarella – The Spaceship) Caspar Pound Remix

Barbarella – Barbarella (Irresistible Force Remix)

Barbarella – The Mission

The Barbarella stuff is pretty hard to get hold of these days. But it appears on Sven’s Retrospective 1990-1997 album.

Sven website

LIVE SUNDAY: AKUFEN 2007

Here's a recent mix from French-Canadian DJ and producer Marc Leclair, a.k.a. Akufen. The set was recorded live at Soundstream @ Club Rogue in Dublin, Ireland in December 2007.

Akufen is a Montreal Canadian who makes minimal house. His closest equivalent is the UK’s Matthew Herbert. This means moments of genius are interspersed with stuff that is either phenomenally dull or makes you want to stab your ears with a pencil. It is therefore appropriate that Leclair's pseudonym comes from the French word for tinnitus (ringing of the ears), acouphène. More details about Akufen in a previous post here.

I found this set at Filter 27.com. Filter27, founded by Pavol Sulek in 2006, is a blog devoted exclusively to electronic music, global dance culture and everything in between. It's a big file and so will stay up as long as my bandwidth will stand it.

Akufen - Live At Soundstream (188mb - 1h 30m)

Akufen website

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B IS FOR BANCO DE GAIA (PT 2)

Some early ambient dub from Banco de Gaia. Banco de Gaia was formed by Toby Marks (born 1964, South London) in 1991. Early history in yesterday’s post.

In late 2000, Marks returned with Igizeh through Six Degrees Records, a label with which he decided to stay for 2004's You Are Here and 2006's Farewell Ferengistan. Farewell Ferengistan captures the spirit and mood of Last Train To Lhasa but this time Banco de Gaia's concerns are much closer to home: what are we doing to ourselves? Where is our materialism taking us, would it not be wise to consider our position?

He says “I didn't start making electronic music with the intention of banging on about an agenda and changing the world. I just liked dance music. Because of things that are a concern to me, inevitably the music I write is just an expression of how I feel about stuff, and it gets reflected in the music.”

From a 2006 interview:

Why did you decide on the name Banco de Gaia ?

There are lots of versions of this! Do you want the honest version or the lies?! Okay … the honest version and the simplest is that in the late 80’s a friend of mine had just returned from Sudan where she had been working as a voluntary English teacher; she came back full of rage at how corrupt all of the international development organisations over there were simply dishing out money so that they could dictate how the resources of that country could then be used … and the worst was the World Bank; how it could be such a fantastic organisation but was in fact so corrupt … well, we had had the odd glass of wine … and I just visualised a bank full of worlds – the bank vault was full of planets … but it was very beautiful and of course the word Gaia is Greek for the Earth Goddess.

How did you start making music - who were your other early Influences?

I was into loads of other [than Pink Floyd] progressive and psychedelic stuff - like Hendrix, Gong, Hawkwind, Zappa and then gradually got into jazz….I had a friend who was a saxophonist and he kept playing me Miles Davis and John McLaughlin who had switched directions and had begun playing acoustic guitar and Indian music with his band Shakti. As a guitarist myself I thought wow how do they do that? – so I started to listen to a lot of Indian music and jazz and when I was 15 it never occurred to me there was anything very unusual about this and started expanding to other styles... percussion, electronic, techno….

Banco de Gaia - China (Follow The Red Brick Road) From the rare "Last Train" 3CD set

Banco de Gaia - Kincajou (Oliver Lieb Mix)

Banco de Gaia - Heliopolis (Redwood Mix)

Banco de Gaia - Gamelah (Dub 3)

Banco de Gaia website

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B IS FOR BANCO DE GAIA (PT 1)

Some early ambient dub from Banco de Gaia. In the early 1990s, UK dance music started to introduce elements from world music, particularly Asia and South East Asia. At the forefront was Banco de Gaia, whose music was a mainstay of the Megadog and Whirl-y-Gig clubs. Although the music would eventually be debased by too many Goa Trance albums, it was then a genuinely new departure from the louder, faster, bleepier rave that preceded it.

Banco de Gaia was formed by Toby Marks (born 1964, South London) in 1991. In 1978 Marks began his career, as a drummer in a heavy metal band. Marks moved to Portugal in 1986, and played music for tourists. He first delved into electronic music in 1989, when he bought a digital sampler. The first tune he recorded on it was called "Maxwell House". In 1997 Banco De Gaia put together a five piece band that included Ted Duggan (drums) and Ashley Hopkins (bass). The band reduced in number to just Marks, Duggan and Hopkins in 1999, and then just Marks and Duggan from 2000 until 2003; when Marks went back to being a solo artist. I think this potted bio is correct. I can’t be sure as the Banco site merely offers you an odd quiz about Toby, rather than a straight answer.

Marks began releasing cassette-only albums in the early '90s, distributed through a network of clubs and artists known as Planet Dog. When Planet Dog became a record label as well (later the home of Eat Static and Timeshard), Banco de Gaia debuted on disc with the Desert Wind EP, released in November 1993. Early the following year, Marks released his first album, Maya. He wrote his critically acclaimed 1995 album Last Train To Lhasa to highlight the plight of the Tibetan people (you can read his views on Tibet here). The following year brought Live at Glastonbury, with Big Men Cry appearing in 1997, followed by The Magical Sounds of Banco de Gaia two years later.

Banco de Gaia – Desert Wind (Sunset Mix)

Banco de Gaia – Last Train To Lhasa (Extended Ambient Mix) Highly recommended

Banco de Gaia – Qurna (Ali Haj’s Birthday Mix)

Banco de Gaia website

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B IS FOR BALIL

As Double K guessed, today it's some more IDM techno with Balil. Balil is Ed Handley, part of the complicated The Black Dog family tree. Handley was once part of the trio The Black Dog along with Andrew Turner & Ken Downie. Handley & Turner left to pursue their Plaid project, with Downie continuing on with different lineups of The Black Dog. Got that?

Balil has recorded on a plethora of electronic music’s foremost labels, from Rising High Records to Warp Records and Planet E in the 1991-1995 period. Since then, Ed has been principally operating with Andy Turner in Plaid (who should get a blog entry if/when I get to “P”).

And as to how he started (extract from a 2006 interview in Barcodezine):

From where does your love of electronic music derive? Who were you listening to as a youth? Well we did the usual thing for people of our generation, which was you were either into heavy metal or you got into hip-hop and B-Boying I suppose. And we [Andy Turner] both got into breaking and the associated music really, which at first was getting tapes of parties that had happened in New York, which would be people like Jazzy J and Chuck Chillout, all the usual DJs. Eventually people started releasing a bit more of it, so we used to go down to Groove Records and pick up the early hip hop releases, which were sort of early electro a lot of them.

Did you have any influences pre-mid-eighties, when the whole electronic scene exploded? They sort of entered as an influence from hip-hop really. The first time I heard Kraftwerk was when they’d been sampled or ripped off by everybody else. Obviously we’d been exposed to eighties electronic pop music, people like Depeche Mode and Heaven 17 and all that, but it was pretty uncool for us back then, we wanted something that was a bit more ghetto I suppose. But I’m sure it had its influence, I’m sure even Howard Jones had its influence (laughs).

And more generally, (extracts from an October 2006 interview with Lithuania’s Sutemos.net):

Everybody is saying that you are their teachers. Whom would you like to call being your teacher? The Detroit lot – Juan Atkins, Derrick May, Carl Craig, U.R. and others like 808 State, Gerald, Kraftwerk, YMO.

Is Warp Records more than just a records company? It has done good things for many years and helped keep the music and artists developing. It is certainly better than most other labels in its sincerity and devotion to music that has never really been that commercial.

Differently from other Warp artists you are really into remixing. What does that give to you? It gives us a chance to work on material by people and labels we like and as Aphex says, Cash.

A Live show that you would forget with pleasure? Italy just as the entire nation’s power went down.

What is that you hate most? Fear, Greed, Hypocrisy, Lies, Arrogance and Euro house music.

Balil – Parasight

Balil – Island

As One – Shambala (Balil Mix) re-post

Original Balil stuff is hard to find. Try ebay.

An easier way is to buy Plaid’s “Trainer” (2000) which has some early Balil tracks.

CHARITY SHOP CLASSICS (3)

A couple more tracks from the charity shop rummage. A well known artist and an unknown one.

First up, Madonna. Conical bra, black Jesus, Guy Ritchie, Sex book, blah, blah blah... But today we have a William Orbit mix of her "Frozen" track, remixed from the Ray Of Light album. William is the man who gave us Guerilla Records and was instrumental in early progressive house. He produced much of Madonna's Ray of Light album.

Second up, Sainkho Namtchylak. She hails from the plains of the Republic of Tuva. This lies in a remote corner close to the Russian border between Southern Siberia and Mongolia and has become famous for its strange (to Western ears) throat singing. For this mix, 808 State's Graham Massey underpins her strangulated blues with a trip-hop beat.

Madonna - Frozen (Meltdown Mix - Long Version)

Sainkho Namtchylak - Let The Sunshine (Graham Massey's 808 state Slow Heat Mix)

No links to product today. Instead, if you download please give something to Cancer Research UK by donating here.

B IS FOR B12

In the mid-1990s I thought B12 was a duo. I was wrong and right. It is a duo but really a UK record label that releases really high quality techno, with a delicacy and precision reminiscent of Carl Craig at his best. They operated in the early 1990s and after a decade’s absence returned in 2005.

B12 Records was founded in 1990 by Mike Golding and Steve Rutter as a vehicle for themselves and others to release electronic music. Many thought the duo hailed from Detroit, as their sound fused many of the elements of Detroit techno. B12 are also (perhaps resultingly) one of the few British techno acts also hailed by Detroit’s aesthetic elite

Every record was hand-engraved in the run out grooves, with cryptic clues and messages, on recurring themes of futurism and science fiction. Releasing under a series of pseudonyms, such as Redcell, Cmetric, and Musicology, they have connections with Kirk DeGeorgio’s A.R.T. Records. The pair were signed to Warp Records (1992), featuring on the seminal Artificial Intelligence series and releasing two albums (“Electro Soma” and “Time Tourist”) and an EP on Warp under the umbrella name ‘B12’.

1993’s “Electro Soma” was really a collection of early works. If you are a lover of ambient, or even have a couple of Warp records in your collection, you should own this recording; no trip into deep space is complete without it.

1996’s “Time Tourist” drew as much from European electronica as it did from Detroit. It is often relegated to a footnote alongside “Electro Soma” but is easily its equal. Crystalline melodies reminiscent of Vangelis are pushed to the forefront, while a clattering background of percussion keeps time from a respectful distance.

Then in 1996, as they put it “…with test pressings of B1215 in their hands, they disappeared without warning or reason.”

In 2005, with interest in Detroit techno rising, Mike & Steve played a live show in London to a sell-out crowd (the bouncers had to stop queues inside the building). The applause at the end was so overwhelming that the following act was shouting at the crowd to shut up and stop cheering so he could begin his set.

They then announced there was new material to come. And so B12 Records was reborn. Now, they say “B12 Records has exactly the same goal it did in 1990, to provide quality electronic music for futuristic feet and forward thinking minds.”

Their new double CD “Last Days of Silence” is released on 26 May. You can order direct from their shop.

B12 – Scriptures (Volume Version)

B12 – Telefone 529

B12 Hall of Mirrors (Digitonal Strings In Space Remix)

As an extra, here’s a special B12 show from September 2006, broadcast by Sonic Sunset Radio. On the broadcast they said “B12 was a key first step for UK's clinical twist on soulful circuitry, we dug deep to play many of their originals we had."

Tracklisting:

B12 - Soundtrack of Space - Electro Soma (Warp) 1993

Cmetric - Tribeca (B1210) 1994

2001 - Rings of Saturn - Space Age EP (B1202) 1991

Musicology - Telefone 529 (B1201) 1991

Redcell - Paradroid - Redcell (B1205) 1992

Musicology - Bubbles - Outlook (B1204) 1992

Redcell - Phett - Time Tourist (Warp) 1996

Musicology - Boundaries - Hall of Mirrors (B1206) 1992

Redcell - Soundtrack Of A Strange Era - Retreat from Unpleasant Realities (B1207) 1992

Redcell - Interim (B1208) 1993

Musicology - Obsessed - Musicology (B1201) 1991

Stasis - The Point of No Return - The Point of No Return (B1211) 1993

Redcell - The City [Inhabited by Cmetric] - (A.R.T. / B1214.1) 1995

Redcell - Practopia (A.R.T. / B1214.2) 1995

Redcell - In Version - Virtual Sex (Buzz) 1993

Phenomyna - Travellor (Explained By Red Cell) (A.R.T. 5.1) 1994

Redcell - The Silicon Garden - Likethemes (Likemind 3) 1995

You can download an mp3 of the show here (78 mins, 90 megs)

B12 records

B12 MySpace

B12 shop