Electro-Industrial Band SYS MACHINE Reflects On Isolation & Moving Forward With New Album
Electro-industrial band, SYS MACHINE has just unleashed their new full-length album, Graceful Isolation.
Graceful Isolation's tracks address the feelings of isolation and coming to terms with new norms that the past year has brought. The title is derived from the fact that over the course of the album, none of the collaborators were ever in the same room. The result is an eclectic mix of dark gothic sounds in tracks such as "Poison In My Skin" and Miss Suicide's club mix of "All The Pieces".
Graceful Isolation is available on CD and digital formats NOW.
On this day, 44 years ago, Joy Division recorded their very first EP, 'An Ideal for Living'!
On this day, 14th December, it is exactly 44 ago that Joy Division recorded their very first EP An Ideal for Living (14.12.1977). In fact by the time of these recordings the band was still called Warsaw. It was released the year after on 3rd June 1978 by the band's own label, Enigma, shortly after the group changed its name from Warsaw to Joy Division. The EP was recorded at Pennine Studios in Oldham and self-financed by the band on a budget of £400 (+/-€ 450).
The original 7" version of An Ideal for Living (1000 copies) was sold out by September 1978 and was subsequently followed by a 12" version on 10th October on the band's own Anonymous Records label. All four tracks were re-released on the 1988 singles compilation, Substance.
The cover has a black-and-white picture of a Hitler Youth member beating a drum, which was drawn by guitarist Bernard Sumner. The cover design, coupled with the nature of the band's name (Joy Division was the name from the sexual slavery wing of a Nazi concentration camp mentioned in the 1955 novel House of Dolls) fuelled controversy over whether the band had Nazi sympathies. When the EP was re-released on 12-inch vinyl, the original cover was replaced by artwork featuring scaffolding.
The EP has an overall more punk-rock sound than towards the post-punk/new wave sound that their future releases would get. Founding members Hook and Sumner acknowledged forming the band inspired by and after witnessing a Sex Pistols concert.
An Ideal For Living (Track listing)
- "Warsaw" – 2:26
- "No Love Lost" – 3:42
- "Leaders of Men" – 2:34
- "Failures" – 3:44
Today, the original 7" pressing has become an expensive collectors' item and copies have been traded on the internet for over € 2,700!
On the fourteenth-of-December 1979 The Clash reached the pinnacle of their creativity with a release which still echoes not only in music but in society, a sprawling double-album which is still relevant as the band crossover the divide between Rock and Punk.
Joe Strummer channels the chaos of the apocalypse directly into the snarling opener, his venomous-vocal line, with a solid belief in every phrase he spits out;
“London calling, now don't look to us
Phony Beatlemania has bitten the dust”.
This is the perfect opener, the mindset and mood is laid out from the start, Strummer uses an almost clairvoyant warning to us of the decay that is coming;
“The ice age is coming, the sun is zooming in,
Meltdown expected, the wheat is growin' thin”.
Following this with the psycho-billy rampage of “Brand New Cadillac”, a cover of the Vince Taylor classic and used here as a two-minute bolt of energy.
The new-found reggae and dub sound The Clash started to experiment with found its way onto the album in “Rudie Can’t Fail”, whereas “Spanish Bombs” takes the bombing of hotels in the Costa Brava combined with echoes of the Spanish Civil War and in Strummers hands it becomes the setting for an all out rocker.
A very varying scope on society appears throughout the record, themes of consumerism and over-commercialism is attached on “Lost In The Supermarket”, the divide in social standings all come under appraisal, alienation and the effect on the human psyche. Similar to this is “Clampdown”, the effects of economic-capitalist ideas on the youth, The Clash never lost their punk-spirit, their ideals, all was very much intact even if the music became more refined:
“We will teach our twisted speech
To the young believers
We will train our blue-eyed men
To be young believers”.
Even the Paul Simonon composed and sung “The Guns Of Brixton” is a classic, the reggae-fused song pre-dated the Brixton Riots but already took its story from the movie ‘The Harder They Come’ which dealt with the Brixton-born son of Jamaican immigrants who gets gunned down by police.
There is a cut at the older generation of rock-stars in the incendiary “Death Or Glory”, those rockers who swore they’d rather die than get old, whereas the rock-steady based “Revolution Rock”, which was originally the albums closer is an exuberant number of pure adrenaline;
“Everybody smash up your seats
And rock to this brand new beat
This here music mash up the nation
This here music cause a sensation”.
The closing album-track “Train In Vain” after release as a single became the first Clsh song to break the U.S top-thirty, the Mick Jones sung track with a title which is slightly obscure, more to do with the rhythm sounding like a train, although it got the added on (Stand by me) title on that American single.
Across the ‘London Calling’ album there are nineteen-tracks of killer without filler, an accomplishment for an album of its length, with the instantly recognizable cover it became an instant success which still reverberates thirty-nine years later.
Tracklist
London Calling
Brand New Cadillac
Jimmy Jazz
Hateful
Rudie Can't Fail
Spanish Bombs
The Right Profile
Lost In The Supermarket
Clampdown
The Guns Of Brixton
Wrong 'Em Boyo
Death Or Glory
Koka Kola
The Card Cheat
Lover's Rock
Four Horsemen
I'm Not Down
Revolution Rock
Train In Vain
DISCOGS
Industrial Speedcore Band, SKAT INJECTOR Brings Anti-Human Propaganda To 'Bled Under A Burning Sky'
Bled Under A Burning Sky is the new record from SKAT INJECTOR. Grindcore-inspired speedcore and a diatribe of anti-human propaganda because that's what we deserve for what we've become.
Willful ignorance, habitat loss, animal abuse, global ecocide, global warming, environmental pollution, overpopulation and many other attributes of a leeching narcissistic race which needs to live within its bounds.
For fans of : Agoraphobic Nosebleed, The Berzerker & Whourkr
UK Industrial Act THE ROYAL RITUAL Interprets Erik Satie With The Haunting, “Gnossienne No. 1.”
UK Industrial act THE ROYAL RITUAL (David Lawrie) returns with a modern take on Erik Satie’s haunting solo piano composition, “Gnossienne No. 1.”
Officially forming the B-Side of “Empires”, this interpretation of Satie’s seminal work is in-keeping with the dissonance, space, and expressiveness of the A-Side.
The production was built around a live piano performance by Lawrie, showcasing his classical training.
About the decision to explore Satie:
“Erik Satie has been a staple in my pool of influences since I was a teenager. Whilst he was a paragon of parody and contrary, he was clearly a mad man. Even though much of his work was, indeed, nonsensical in its conception, there is such a strong sense of haunting loneliness – but also hope and irony – written through it, like a stick of Whitby Rock."
“I have always felt like I am on the fringes, looking in. As an Englishman in the USA, this sense of being “the outsider” was compounded further. My own feelings of affinity with artists like Satie has grown stronger over the years, and I wanted to see if I could inject some of my own expressiveness into the space between the notes"
About the video:
The accompanying video is simply a documentation of the live piano performance, as it was recorded late 2020, with no splices or editing.
