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Post by noise is a friend on Aug 16, 2011 20:31:56 GMT 1
I know this will be of interest to a few others here: eyeplug.net/magazine/?p=2404It's been a long time coming. I've currently got this on pre-order with Amazon, but I'm constantly looking for a better deal elsewhere.
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Post by rob strong on Aug 17, 2011 23:25:01 GMT 1
Great news, those eps deserve to be more widely heard. Fantastic, fantastic band. So far ahead of their time it beggars belief.
Wish I'd seen them play live, I'm curious to know how well the technology they were using would have stood up outside the studio. Maybe they'll reform and play to about 50 times as many people as they did first time round.
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Post by noise is a friend on Aug 18, 2011 14:26:23 GMT 1
It's a nice thought! Still just Amazon showing this for pre-order. The label has it listed as "out of stock".
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Post by noise is a friend on Aug 30, 2011 9:36:01 GMT 1
Eleven squids on Playdotcom
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Post by rob strong on Nov 20, 2011 15:03:36 GMT 1
The most comprehensive review I've read so far (Aquarius, obviously):
DISCO INFERNO "The 5 EPs" (One Little Indian) cd 15.98 Wow! Given the acrimonious break-up of Disco Inferno after their aesthetically fraught album Technicolour in 1996, we're a little shocked, yet totally stoked to see anything from Disco Inferno back in print, let along the rare EPs reissued here. This London trio formed in 1989, releasing three albums and seven eps that amounted to a brilliant mish-mash of sample-based technology, post-punk intensity, and a profoundly British mope that hangs throughout their catalogue. The first recorded forays by Disco Inferno found the group wearing their influences proudly on sonic sleeves - Joy Division, Wire, Durutti Column, and The Smiths - with the band twisting those influences into a narcotized torpour through an elliptical rhythm section that grounded the suitably delay-riddled, arppegiations and repititions from guitarist / vocalist Ian Crause. The band quickly took to MIDI technology, often sampling Crause's own guitar and alchemically rendering those into percolating satellites of effervsecent sound that orbit the song with peculiar trajectories and angles. Over time, the sampling became more and more of the focus in the band, appropriating sounds outside of their studio and fracturing all of those sounds into a more and more bizarrely splintered electronica that mutated into something grotesquely baroque, all the while hanging onto the core principles of the pop-art melody. This emphasis on sampling was an obsession for Crause after reading what David Stubbs and Simon Reynolds were championing in NME, as those two fixated on a technological thread that ran through My Bloody Valentine, Public Enemy, and The Young Gods. Crause was single-minded in his pursuit of figuring out how technology could be seemlessly integrated into the context of a British art-rock band, in frantic anticipation of what anybody might be doing elsewhere in the world. As such, Disco Inferno and Robert Hampson's post-Loop project Main were at the vangarde of ostensible pop bands disintegrating themselves before their audiences' eyes and ears. Where Hampson did achive escape velocity from rock's heavy gravitational pull with little to show for it after Motion Pool, Disco Inferno's internal disputes over where that technology needed to go caused so much strife as to destroy the band, with none of the members doing anything memorable since. The 5 EPs featured here showcase that transition from an artful post-punk project conjuring the ghost of Martin Hannett into a complicated electronica ensemble that predicted how Christian Fennesz would deconstruct the spirit of The Beach Boys, but without the benefit of granulating laptop tricknology. We mentioned above that the band released seven EPs, the first two of which were compiled with their first album on the anthology entitled In Debt. The first EP in this anthology is "Summer's Last Sound" from 1992 and features two tracks that sparkle with harsichord-like patterns from the sampedelica, pulled back down to the ground by the thickly strummed bass from Paul Willmot, not to mention Crause's wistful, unpretentious vocal delivery of his deeply sad lyrics. "A Rock To Cling To" from 1993 finds the band in more of a traditional rock mode with guitars, bass, and drums, whose repetitive groove is offset by soaring bursts of sampled vocals that stretch like vapor trails glowing in moonlight. The B-side to that EP, "The Devil And The Deep Blue Sea", introduces a sample that would become common place in the ever-abstracting repetoire of Disco Inferno, that of shattering glass whose tinkling fragments of sound lock into an elegant Terry Riley patterning of minimalist rhythms. "The Last Dance" (also from 1993) features two versions of the title track, where Ian Crause has penned a damn good song that could have fit neatly in with the Johnny Marr songbook of The Smiths, but with jittery electronics and melancholy appropriations of schoolyard song puncturing Crause's crisp guitar lines. The B-side of "D.I. Go Pop" (the name of their second record, which didn't feature this track, oddly enough) is a manic affair of tape-revving guitar noise, threatening to unravel and unhinge as a spastic dervish. "Scattered Showers" is the other B-side, a beautifully poetic abstraction of British melancholy through sampled motorcycle engines forming the patterned tension beneath Crause's rain-drenched guitar strum. This EP and the next, "Second Language" from 1994, stand as the best material in Disco Inferno's short-circuited career. The title track of the latter single finds the band recycling Crause's sparkling Vini Reilly guitar into enchanting, hypnotic echoes out of which Crause concludes the track with a triumphant Brit-rock riff obviously alluding to the comtemporary bombast of Oasis. "At The End Of The Line" follows the aforementioned "Scattered Showers" as Disco Inferno's penchant for beautiful miserablism cast through refracted guitar lines into shoegaze bliss. The final single "It's A Kids World" finds the band at odds with itself, creating a jubilant kaleidoscope out of the drum crash from Iggy Pop's "Lust For Life" with Umbrellas of Cherbourg-esque flute trills of baroque pop guiding this atypically uptempo number. The B-side "A Night On The Tiles" is a Felini-esque collage of vaudevillian records, screaming girls, and smashed glass coming across more like a diabolical Nurse With Wound track than anything else found in their catalogue. Whew! If you've just so much as glanced in the direction of Stereolab, Notwist, Fennesz, My Bloody Valentine, Spiritualized, and/ or Animal Collective, you really owe it to yourself to check out Disco Inferno. They really are that good! We can only hope that D.I. Go Pop and In Debt (both of which are long out of print) will see the light of day once again, given the inevitible interest that will come from this anthology from one of the pioneers of avant-rock.
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Post by noise is a friend on Nov 21, 2011 9:15:44 GMT 1
Ah, Aquarius. Comprehensive, thorough, and pretty darned accurate!
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Post by rob strong on Dec 15, 2011 20:43:16 GMT 1
Unbelievably, two DI live recordings have turned up on Dime today.
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