A discussion of the history of Lanfranchis/EBoM over at Focusing Incidents has me feeling all nostalgic about my stint with Clan Analogue. I think the next few podcasts will be of tracks that I produced in the mid to late 1990s, annotated with a bit of personal history, and culminating in an mp3 rerelease on Alias Frequencies of my album from that period, Minimal/Liminal.
I was an active member of Clan Analogue from late 1994 until early ’98, and the experience was very important in my development as an artist. I don’t remember exactly how I got involved in Clan – I think Brendan Palmer (one of Clan’s founders) sought me out, although I don’t remember why. I guess my radio show/band WUAL was fairly prominent in the Sydney electronic/experimental underground at the time (which was much smaller then than it is today) having played at What is Music, and gained a reputation for our live-to-air radio experiments.
Some of my local electronic music heroes, such as Garry Bradbury and Ian Andrews were involved with Clan at this time, as well as some people I’d gone to high school with (Kazumichi Grime, Seb Chan, Thom McIntyre) and so I decided to join, bringing WUAL with me (Adrian was more skeptical about Clan than I was).
One of the things that swayed me was a great gig at the Goethe Institut (in late-94?) that included Clan acts, such as Size (Garry Bradbury and Jason Gee) as well as non-Clan acts, such as my friend Rik Rue. Size’s video of Tommy Cooper moving in slow motion to the beautiful bleeps and buzzes of their track Stability is still clearly etched in my mind
It was an exciting time – it felt like a renaissance for electronic music in Sydney after several years in the wilderness, following the golden era of the 1980s and bands such as Severed Heads, SPK and Scattered Order, and I enjoyed getting to know both elder statesmen and some very bright young things. But there were also internal tensions, and within a couple of years it would be a very different organisation from the one I’d joined.
The main thing I brought to Clan was my experience with live experimental music and radio. I featured several Clan artists on my radio shows, and eventually gave Clan the time slot of my show Alias Frequencies on 2MBS-FM, which became Cognitive Dissonance, produced by Gordon Finlayson.
Throughout 1995 I helped run Clan’s weekly club night Electronic with Garry and Brendan, which was a great way to get to know other Clan members and their music. I remember an awesome performance by Convulse (a duo, before Richard Fox went solo, changing the name to Flux, and then Fluxx). Their track Skindustry is a lost classic of Australian industrial/EBM…
With Scot Art (formerly of the band Now Zero, and one of Clan’s leading figures – he ran the System-X server with Jason Gee) I organised the Sydney performances of Jon Rose‘s Technointerrupt (aka Techno mit Storungen) in March ’96. I still have the promo email:
Clan Analogue persents TECHNOINTERRUPT by internationally renowned performer and composer Jon Rose. There will be two only performances, the first is Monday 18th March at the Harbourside Brasserie, the second on Wednesday 20th March at the weekly Clan Analogue club night, “Electronic” (Blue Fox, cnr Victoria and Craigend Sts Darklinghurst / Kings X).
Entry on both nights is $8 or $5 concession. Starts 9pm Monday, 10pm Wednesday. See you there!
Technointterupt is a continuous evening of innovative techno provided by Wake Up and Listen (Shannon O’Neill and Adrian Bertram) and Sub Bass Snarl (Seb Chan and Luke Dearnley), ‘interrupted’ with improvised performances from members of a 12 piece ‘techno orchestra’;
Torben Tilly – megaphone/voice/noise
Lucas Abel – turntables
Rob Avenaim – drums & sampler
Oren Ambarchi – guitar
Michele Morgan – voice
Stevie Wishart – hurdy-gurdy
Rik Rue – tape manipulation
Louis Burdett – drums, trumpet
Liberty – mixer
Jon Rose – violin
Amanda Stewart – voice
Garry Bradbury – hyenasThis event is not to be missed!
And I remember performing at the Basement in May ’96 in a ‘supergroup’ with Scot Art and Kazumichi Grime at a Clan showcase gig that was presented by the Sydney Morning Herald (following a feature in their Metro section). There was an opportunity to play with Scot & Kazumichi again at The Metro (Sydney venue) for ‘Itchee & Scratchee’s farewell gig’ but I was also playing at the event with WUAL so declined, which was a pity in retrospect, as their excellent performance appeared (under the name Noosphere (live), by Nerve Agent) on the CD I’m about to tell you about.
One of the things Clan was most motivated to do was release recordings. By the time I’d joined they’d already produced four 12″s, some cassettes and a double CD, and there was much discussion about what should be done next.
This was all very new to me. To be honest, up until that point I’d had no interest in releasing music. I was very idealistic about my music being live and improvised, and I thought the ephemerality of the airwaves was vastly superior to recordings. (I had made a couple of cassettes of WUAL radio excerpts, but they were mainly for the enjoyment of myself, Adrian and our friends).
But I’d also started using a sampling keyboard as my main instrument, and was becoming increasingly interested in its sequencing capabilities – mainly layers of samples looping around which could be built up and sculpted into compositions, as well as used in more improvised, open-ended ways. I was also studying at film school and making short films and soundtracks, so was getting used to the idea of making ‘finished’ works.
Scot Art wanted to compile a CD of ambient/experimental music, reflecting the interests of a number of members (including myself) who were doing stuff that wasn’t dance music. That was the background for Vaguely Familial, which would become my first piece of music released on CD, in 1996, on Clan Analogue CA011 – Aphelion One – A gathering of slow beats and experimental soundscapes.
Vaguely Familial was originally called Lamb Chop, after the sample of a sheep being castrated (taken from the Vincent Ward film Vigil) which appears in the middle of the track, but I changed the title after finding out there was an American band by that name (and Vaguely Familial is much better anyway, don’tcha think?).
It was actually an exercise in using some of the cheesiest sounds available to me. Most of the sounds are from the demo floppy disks that came with the sampler. The wind is the classic ‘eerie wind’ sound effect from the Sound Ideas library – one of the most overused wind sounds ever (but still one of my favourites).
I was very interested in layered polyrhythms (I still am, but now it’s more subtle, or complex, or abstract, or something) – in this case 3/4 over 4/4. I don’t really know how to describe the style of this track – I guess it reflected my interest in ambient dub (especially the band Scorn, and Kevin Martin’s Isolationism and Macro Dub Infection compilations) as well as trip hop, industrial music, electro pop, and of course film sound design. At the launch party someone compared it New Order, which I don’t really get (but I’m no expert on New Order).
It was made with an Ensoniq ASR10 sampler and a Juno 106 synth and nothing else, not even a mixer. The Juno was controlled by MIDI from the ASR and the Juno’s audio output was fed back into the ASR’s inputs. The only effects used were the onboard effects of the ASR. It was recorded at Section 8 (my home studio) directly to a portable DAT recorder that I’d borrowed (either from 2MBS or film school, I can’t remember). The wind sound and fades were added later at film school, on a SADiE system.
Anyway, that was a long-winded introduction, but it’s interesting for me to revisit my past (even if it isn’t for anyone else! 
). I’ll continue the story soon when I talk about my contributions to the following Clan CD, Jaunt.
So, after all that, here is Vaguely Familial (mp3 128kpbs, 5.36MB).
The rest of the album is also well worth a listen although some tracks hold up better than others. My favourites include the ‘additional’ short tracks by Io (Kazumichi) and Dread King (Scot) which act as breaks and transitions between the longer tracks – a technique that would be repeated on Jaunt.
Along with the aforementioned Noosphere (live) by Nerve Agent, Kazumichi Grime’s Inside:out is one of the standout ‘proper’ tracks – a gorgeous mindfuck of mutant analogue sounds. Toby (Kazumichi) is one of my favourite local sound artists. He co-founded Clan with Brendan (and they collaborated for several years as Telharmoneom). He’s also one of Clan’s top graphic designers, and did the cover design for both Aphelion One and Jaunt. I’ve always felt that there’s a strong connection between his audio and visual work – a similar sense of texture.
Although we went to the same high school, Toby’s a couple of years older than me and so it wasn’t until I joined Clan that we got to know each other and discovered that we had a lot in common, including a shared love of that Sydney ’80s experimental sound, as well as other artists such as Zoviet France and Oval.
It’s a shame that we haven’t collaborated more. I remember giving him a cassette of my cutups to play with, in the hope that it might lead to further collaboration. It didn’t happen, but I’m pretty sure that cassette (or maybe a similar WUAL cassette) was where he got the Jimmy Swaggart sample “I have sinned against you” which appears on his Io track callisto on Aphelion One.
Anyway… for our next podcast, Dry Dub and the story of Jaunt.
Hi Shannon, thanks for the mention. I barely remember some of that that stuff. My most vivid memory of the basement gig is the lugging the equipment in the lane afterwards!
We really need to write a coherent history of this. I googled for example to see if anyone had written anything about the Gunnery for example, which was completely seminal in keeping the marginal musics scene alive in the late 80s by providing it with a good venue, but there is practically nothing, only a thing I wrote recently, just a long personal oral history of the place that I posted onto my blogspot blog – http://victorxray.blogspot.com/2005/01/warehouse-squatter-war-story.html (originally based on a post I posted to the Mono.net music site).
They are planning a Clan ‘greatest hits’ compilation, maybe it would be good if it includes a bit of a history of what we all did in the early days.
Hi Scot
I wish we had a recording of that Basement gig, and the stuff we were doing together at the time. I don’t think I have any recordings, although there may be something hidden amongst my boxes and drawers full of DATS and cassettes… Do you have any? I remember you had a DAT walkman at the time – we disagreed over where the levels should be set…
I remember Toby was using a 303 filtered through something else (Kawai?) and you were using a 202 and what else? I remember wanting a 202 after seeing how you used it. I also remember being really happy with myself for working out a way to get the ASR to pull random bits of radio from its memory in sync with the music that you & Toby were making. In some ways it was a precursor to the sort of algorithmic stuff I do these days with the laptop.
You’re right, there is a need for a written history of all this. The new generation of local electronic musicians seems to have very little knowledge of this history. Your blog post on the Gunnery was actually one of the inspirations for me to post about my time with Clan. I’d like to see a book, maybe like that Blunt book, but about the electronic music scene of the 90s. Or an even bigger project, covering the 70s to the present day. I’ve considered doing it myself, but it’s pretty daunting. Our blogs are a first step, at least.
It’s weird – not that long ago those Clan days still seemed just like yesterday. But now the memories are starting to get a bit fuzzy… all the more reason to write them down before they disappear completely. Fortunately I still have a lot of emails from that period to refer to.
Sadly I feel estranged from Clan these days. I notice that both my name and WUAL’s are missing from the otherwise comprehensive drop down list of past and present artists on the Clan web site. The last Clan release I appeared on (with WUAL) the Locked Groove record isn’t listed either.
Also, the follow up to Aphelion One (which was to have been called Aphelion Two but was later changed to Habitat) was to have included my track Let the Dead Bury the Dead – it’s one of my best tracks, and I’d held off from including it on other compilations for years. I was assured by the person in Melbourne who was compiling it that it would be on it, but when it finally came out in 2002, it hadn’t been included. I’ve had no dealings with Clan since.
Anyway, the music I’m making these days seems incompatible with where Clan is at, which seems increasingly anachronistic from my perspective – a long way from those heady days of the mid-90s when anything seemed possible. But I bear no ill will, so good on them for continuing to be active. I’m sure there’s still good stuff going on within Clan, but unfortunately I’m out of that loop these days.
“!’d like to see a book, maybe like that Blunt book, but about the electronic music scene of the 90s. Or an even bigger project, covering the 70s to the present day. I’ve considered doing it myself, but it’s pretty daunting. Our blogs are a first step, at least.”
This would be amazing… There are some resources… like Phil Turnbull’s site..
An option to make it happen might be the NMA/22 CAC approach, where you get a whole bunch of artists involved in the scene to write to a word limit about their work. You then give that to a really good editor, who can clean up the style, and make it consistent. You could then ask some people to contribute some essays on key scenes, focussing on trying to link things together. There are enough people around who can write well enough (and who are on blogs, lists, private mail etc…) to get a decent standard happening.
Anyway, its one way of approaching an enormous task with via a distributed effort, which could make it happen relatively quickly.
Anyway… back to my Elliott Smith….
Another resource that I remember being pretty good (I last saw it in the mid-90s) is:
which used to be on Soundsite but I just looked for it and it seems to have disappeared. Scot if yr reading this, do you know what happened to it and if it’s available anywhere else?
22 Contemporary Australian Composers was like a bible to me! Definitely an inspiration in trying to document the local scene.
I’ve discussed this project with Nat Bates in Melbourne, with the idea of co-authoring something, but I agree that a distributed approach would be a good way to go – something between an edited collection of essays, and an encyclopedia. It’d be good to get a few people on board – are you volunteering?
I’d be prepared to coordinate it.
Maybe a wiki would be helpful? At least for the editors to contribute to (perhaps along with other interested persons) before compiling it into book form.
haha.. yeah, i’d be happy to work on such a project and/or be a contributing/co-editor if required. I think there are enough decent writers among the scene to make it happen (is this a study leave project perhaps?). 22 Contemporary Australian Composers was a bible for me too… But, there have been a couple of generations of artists since then and, as far as I am aware, there is very little documentation. It may be overly ambitious, but it would be good if such a reference included a DVD or a couple of CDs, so people could hear and see the work they were reading about.
A Wiki is a good idea because it would allow people to supplement each other’s resources. One major decision is whether to go for a hard copy book or build a site such as ubuweb… Being hard nosed academics, we’d have to consider that the former attracts research points.. the latter would not.
It could take both forms ie book (with the advantage of going to libraries etc) and an ongoing online version that could be continually updated…
Let’s discuss this more when we next meet. If anyone else is keen to be involved, please let me know.
‘It’s a shame that we haven’t collaborated more. I remember giving him a cassette of my cutups to play with, in the hope that it might lead to further collaboration. ‘
—
hey shannon,
been reading your blog… i think i still have that cassette. i never tossed it, its somewhere… it was called ‘Shannon’s cut up for Toby’ – I remember it, i think it was a grey cassette… i will check if its in my cassette box.
been enjoying the blog!
best
T
Thanks Tobz – I’d be curious to hear that cassette again – I can’t remember what was on it. If yr looking for it, it’s probably a TDK SA-X 90 – that was my standard cassette throughout the 90s – I went through hundreds of them.
I’d love for you to be involved in this remix project I’m sloowly getting together. Let me know if yr interested.
Sorry I didn’t make it to yr Uber Lingua gig the other day – I really wanted to go but was so exhausted post-Liquid Architecture Sydney that I could barely move. I hope it went well.
cheer.s
Vaguely familial
Shannon O’Neill posts on his blog about his track “Vaguely Familial” which appeared on a compilation that I co-produced …
[...] well futile » Blog Archive » Podcast #3 – Vaguely Familial Says: May 13th, 2005 at 10:07 pm [...]