All posts by edwardo

SF Gate- 11 things: The Legendary Pink Dots

On the eve of the Legendary Pink Dots’ two shows in San Francisco, we asked founding member Edward Ka-Spel to share 11 Things that stand out most about the band’s 28-year evolution.

1. Exotic machines: The biggest thing has been the Internet. When we first started, we considered fax machines to be exotic; now I can chat away with friends on the other side of the planet and not have a six-figure phone bill. Of course, it isn’t all good. People don’t buy music as much as they used to, which is very hard for small bands like the Dots.

2. Disappearing borders: One of our best shows in recent years was Moscow. The crowd loved the music (mostly distributed through pirate CDs). Such a show would’ve been unthinkable in, say, 1986. We now play (and thrive) in all corners of Central and Eastern Europe and are generally treated better there than in places closer to home.

3. Cherished formats: So much great music is still being made. … It’s just sad that we need to search for it harder these days as the record shops I always cherished are becoming fewer.

4. Turning tables: I have to smile at how turntables are being made again. It’s been great to see so many titles lovingly reproduced on vinyl. Big business failed to snuff it out, and I say amen to that.

5. Tolerated ignorance: The 2000s have been a time of intolerance and ignorance on a global level. Too many preachers, too many sheep, too many rules.

6. Ignoring intolerance: Now there’s a wonderful new president of the United States of America and many of us who’d secretly like to see him be president of the world. Can we stop being scared now?

7. Related relations: Saddest moment in the past 28 years was the death of second guitar player Bob Pistoor back in 1991. A lovely, gentle man and the finest musician we ever had.

8. Elated elations: Happiest moment is harder to pin down, there have been many. … Maybe that 1995 show in Mexico City when cEvin Key and Ryan Moore played drums and people came from everywhere. … Still, I have felt elated very often just this year.

9. Regenerated regenerations: I used to fear drying up, exhausting everything there was to say, exhausting all combinations of notes we found pleasing. I’m happy to say I still feel as though we hardly started yet.

10. Generated generations: Survival. We had a choice back in ’88. … Do we go on after four members left or do we end it there? The discussion with Phil (the Silverman) lasted maybe a minute.

11. And look at us now: The Legendary Pink Dots play Cafe Du Nord with Big City Orchestra. 9:30 p.m. Fri.-Sat. $17-$20 (21 and older). 2170 Market St. (415) 861-5016. www.cafedunord.com.

 

Legendary Pink Dots At Warehouse Live (HoustonPress Blogs)

It’s always amazing and refreshing to see an audience as fervent for its minstrels as Houston is for the Legendary Pink Dots. There are no hangers-back — as soon as the band quietly makes its way onto the stage, there is a Jonestown-like lemming march to the front, every set of eyes are turned up in rapture.

Sadly, the audience has steadily dwindled over the years, and seems only half of what it was five years ago. It would be a damn shame if Houston were to be marked off of the itinerary of one of the truly independent and original groups of musicians in the world.

The Dots’ stage presence alone is stirring, woodwind guru Niels Van Hoornblower in his stylish diamond suit, guitarist Martijn DeKleer in his hitchhiking-through-Europe uniform, keyboardist Silverman looking like an aging professional wrestler with his Pebbles Flintstone haircut and, of course, singer Edward Ka-Spel barefoot in his robe, scarf and sunglasses.

The band never asks if you’re ready to rock. You’re not ready, anyway. From the first moment Ka-Spel’s sinister pseudo-tenor waltzes out of the speakers, it becomes apparent just how unprepared an audience is for the forthcoming willing rape of the mind.

The four Dots’ interplay is highly enjoyable, reminiscent of live Doors footage and the shamanistic tradition of shared experience and rhythm. They are very careful, though, not to take it too seriously. Niels, the ultimate multi-instrumentalist playing flute, clarinet, and an electronic wind instrument that looks like God’s bong, shows his playfully attacked each member of the band and audience with his flashlight saxophone during “No Matter What You Do.”

That song, by the by, explores how Jesus loves the little woodland creatures and the children who occasionally set fire to them. After the song, Ka-Spel leans casually over the mike and wonders aloud whether the subject of the song will come up at Judgement Day. Well, Jesus may have walked on water, but I’ve seen Ka-Spel walk barefoot across a dirty street strewn with broken glass and discarded needles on the way to a Chinese buffet. Obviously, he’s some kind of prophet (or a lunatic, probably both).

One of the evening’s true pleasures was Martijn DeKleer. I’ve never really focused on him before, but I’ve never seen “The Grain Kings” played live before, either. One of the most awesome tracks from one of the Dots’ most awesome albums (The Maria Dimension), the eight-minute song found DeKleer thoroughly thrashing his guitar in a way you just don’t seem to see at a Dots show very often.

Usually the most understated and laid-back band member onstage, he really comes alive when it’s his turn, and even the other three members of the band stared at him as he made the sound system beg for mercy. All of this without a single change of expression.

The evening drew to a close with the Dots’ encore, “Princess Coldheart,” and the band left the stage to the sounds of the audience picking up the song’s choir vocals at the end. If there is anything to be said about a Dots show, it’s that the people involved, both band and audience, are firm believers in the Legendary Pink Premise: Sing while we may

 

Legendary Pink Dots @ Knitting Factory (BRM)

Legendary Pink Dots proved themselves undeniably legendary last week at Knitting Factory. Not in need of an opening band to get the crowd pumped, darkly clad fans, of all ages, packed into the Main Space to eagerly await their beloved Dots, who formed twenty-eight years ago in 1980. In the same league as Syd Barrett, with whom he is often compared, Dots vocalist Edward Ka-Spel (also known as Prophet Qa-Spel, Qa’Sepel, Che Banana, and D’Archangel) guided his band’s spacey, goth-folkloric sound to concoct a neo-mythology, lulling the crowd into a hypnotic trance. Wearing a long black tunic, purple scarf, and round sunglasses, Ka-Spel performed like an avant-garde Ozzy Osbourne, uttering ghostly lyrics during moments of eerie calm, and emitting a scream or a whimper during those of wild intensity.

The band itself was furiously alive and entertaining, and together the five-piece created a sort of time warp⎯we were back in the artsy Liquid Sky eighties, or on a spaceship miles away, or inside of a surreal painting or new wave film, or in a cemetery awaking the dead, conducting a séance, or taking part in a Pagan ceremony à la Wickerman. But the show was not a total pre-Hallow’s Eve spookfest; it was also full of light-hearted fun! Niels Van Hoorn, who joined the band in 1988, performed all wind instruments (sax, flute, clarinet, some other gadgets) and was the most dynamic Dot. Wearing a funky diamond-patterned suit, he affixed a light beam onto his saxophone, which brightened as he blew into the instrument. He meandered through the crowd during two songs, aiming his sax at fans, illuminating faces, and getting the girls to seductively sway.

The Dots played for over two hours, performing two encores of older songs, and incorporating songs from the new album, Plutonium Blonde, into their main set. The highlight of the show was the performance of “Torchsong,” the first track on Plutonium, which they played as the last song before the encore. The extended live version of this 7-minute song was all the more mind-blowing; revolving noises, synths, and samples swelled into the small room, overwhelming the senses and divulging a dark psychedelic landscape, Ka-Spel half-whispering sinister lyrics and gesturing like Dr. Caligari. At the merch table, which offered an insanely large selection of CDs (they have released more than 40, not counting solo work), records, t-shirts, pins, and artwork, the Dots signed for free and mingled with fans. What could have been a distant experience fully turned into a friendly gathering, until it was time to button up and catch the subway.

words by Amy Dupcak

 

LA Weekly- Crushed Velvet Conceptualists

There comes a time in the life of a nascent fan of the Legendary Pink Dots when a simple interest in the British-Dutch band morphs into an obsession. Maybe it’s the way that abstract electronics meld with psychedelic rock to suggest 1970s Germany while hinting at industrial influences. Perhaps it’s the voice of Edward Ka-Spel, often likened to that of the late Syd Barrett, as he weaves together space rock love songs, sci-fi horror tales and absurdist fantasies. Or maybe it’s the knowledge that there is so much more of this bizarre, intoxicating music out there, so many recordings in existence that even the most thorough of discographies might contain a hole or two. Even Ka-Spel, who co-founded the band with fellow keyboardist Phil “The Silverman” Knight in 1980, cannot stop to fathom how much material he and his cohorts have released.

“Not even to the nearest 20, I think,” Ka-Spel says over the phone from his home in the Netherlands. “I just had to stop counting a long time ago. I don’t even know if I did it with a great passion in the first place. It just keeps going, basically. They keep creeping out all over the place.”

To become a Dots completist is to embark upon a Grail quest through record stores, swap meets and eBay. It means accumulating a mass of side projects (the best known of which is Ka-Spel’s collaboration with cEvin Key of Skinny Puppy, the Tear Garden) and tracking down cassettes that every fan knows exist but few ever find, while still keeping up with the rapid succession of new studio albums. In October alone, Dots-related releases included reissues of two out-of-print albums, new and repressed solo work from Ka-Spel, The Silverman and guitarist Martijn de Kleer, a book of Ka-Spel’s lyrics and the band’s latest effort, Plutonium Blonde.

Plutonium Blonde, which took more than a year to record (seemingly forever for a group that has put out multiple albums in 12-month spans), nearly became the Dots’ lost album when, well into production, both the stand-alone hard disc recorder and its backup drive crashed on the same day.

“I was so shocked, I didn’t even make a note of what the day was,” says Ka-Spel. “If I had, that would be marked as a date in the future where I would definitely lock myself in and not go out anywhere. It was a very ill-fated day.”

Eventually, they were able to retrieve all but two tracks, which were scratched from Plutonium Blonde with the intention of re-creating the lost work for a future album.

The album itself reflects a 10-year evolution that began when bassist/drummer Ryan Moore left the group to pursue his then–side project, Twilight Dub Circus Sound System, full-time. It is, overall, a trance-inducing yet largely groove-free mélange of guitar noise, analog synthesizer swirls and eerie samples marked by Ka-Spel’s twisted tales of misadventures involving health insurance (“An Arm and a Leg”) and cell phones (“My First Zonee”).

“I think it’s never that calculated, unless a major member leaves, then something radical is needed,” Ka-Spel says of the band’s growth. “Otherwise, you hear the development — more noise, the collage, it’s an organic change.”

The Legendary Pink Dots developed against the post–Throbbing Gristle British musical landscape, a scene marked by cassette releases filled with the experiments of novice electronic artists. Much of the group’s early work reflects this, boasting a stark, synth-based template in line with contemporaries like Fad Gadget, Virgin Prunes and pre–Dare Human League, highlighted by the energetic violin work of Patrick Wright. During this time, the Dots laid down the conceptual groundwork that would continue to appear throughout the ensuing years: “Chemical Playschool” as a code name for its most experimental releases; metaphysical references; and the adventures of a recurring character named Lisa, who Ka-Spel acknowledges is his “mischievous” alter ego. At the start of the 1990s, though, the band went through the first of its two major sonic upheavals when Wright left the fold. In the aftermath of the departure, folk melodies and psychedelic elements began to surface, immediately resulting in two of the Dots’ fan-favorite albums, The Crushed Velvet Apocalypse and The Maria Dimension.

During their first decade, the band earned the support of the one network that would go on to play a major role in its stateside cult popularity, goth clubs. With songs like “Curious Guy” (1984), “Blacklist” (1989) and “Just a Lifetime” (1990), the Dots became staples of after-midnight playlists, not so much because the music was maudlin or overtly spooky but because, lyrically, it embraces the fantastical; and with its quirky time signatures and abrupt pauses, encourages dramatic motions and copious skirt-twirling on red-lit dance floors. At clubs like the now-defunct L.A. haunt Helter Skelter, velvet- and PVC-clad teenagers became hooked on the Dots, sticking with the band long after its sound had evolved into psychedelic jams more similar to Stereolab or Spiritualized. But, even today, one can still hear those 20-year-old club hits at local spots like Friday night party, Ruin.

“That’s the funny thing about America. Things don’t date so fast,” Ka-Spel says. For a band like the Dots, still relatively unknown in the country that hosts its largest fanbase, that can help. A healthy presence on iTunes allows fans to find albums that previously involved mail order and waiting lists, while the Dots’ reputation for mutating old material into new forms during live shows keeps audiences engaged. When it comes to The Legendary Pink Dots, it’s not simply a case of “What have you done lately?” It’s about following the course of 28 years of uninterrupted sonic madness.

The Legendary Pink Dots play the Knitting Factory on Thurs., November 13 2008.