“I believe wholly in destiny”

The immortal words of the less immortal Edward Ka-Spel, leader and one of the few survivors of the Legendary Pink Dots; the incredibly difficult to describe but easier to understand now trio from Holland. Though English in thoughts, the Pink Dots have a tendency to speak in tongues, which many people have been either unable to able to comprehend.

Ka-Spel delivers the mass: “The whole idea behind the Pink Dots is the idea of the terminal kaleidoscope. It’s rather like a drowning man seeing his life flash before his eyes. If you look back a hundred years and a hundred years before that, you become aware that things are accelerating at an incredible degree. The whole speed of life is gathering momentum all the time. If you look at that as a process you must reach the conclusion that you’ll eventually reach saturation and overload, thus cataclysm as well. This is the idea of the Terminal Kaleidoscope. We just take the premise that ‘Be glad that you live now. You’re witnessing the most significant time in the history of the planet. Enjoy it. Sing while you may.'”

Not quite a eulogy but close enough. Through the past year, since the release of Any Day Now, their last project as a six piece band in 1988 [Alan’s note: huh? ADN is from 1987!], the LPDs have seen quite a number of near-cataclysms: the sudden departure of half the band, being kicked out of their Amsterdam squat after the city reclaimed the land and then having to live out of a caravan for six months in the country while recording their new album (entitled The Golden Age, due out on PIAS this month) in a farmhouse with poor heating. Yet, underneath it all, Ka-Spel is refreshed, “The whole spirit is positive and driving again.”

He refers to the new abridged lineup for the LPDs, now consisting of himself, other founder Phil Harmonix, and a new saxophonist. Though most of the original members left before the recording of the new album, only violinist and songwriter Patrick Q. remained to record, eventually writing one song, “The Month After.” On vinyl and stage, the LPDs sound tighter. More confined, but in a positive sense. All thoughts are completely agreed upon and there seems to be less conflict in the band. Ka-Spel admits, now living in Nijmegen, Holland, “We have space to breathe because it has always been a rather communistic/democratic band–lovely in principle, horrible in practice. The smallest things would end up having to through a band vote. You just can’t do that and move forward.”

Ka-Spel is the main source for electricity in the LPDs. It’s his enlightened visions of this world and the world that lies beyond the grasp of human touch that enables them to keep hidden. Sometimes almost too hidden. After 11 albums, numerous compilations and cassette releases, the LPDs are still only selling somewhere 10,000 copies of each release. Since their inception in 1980, they’ve continually been set up with unfortunate circumstances and events, culminating with their near breakup last year (their second chance at that in five years — their first being during the recording of their Asylum LP). “I’m realistic enough to know that the LPDs will never be selling millions of records. I think that general growth is fine. It’s a very satisfying way for a band to develop for we can do whatever we like. There are absolutely no pressures whatsoever.”

It could be blamed on his being an only child or the fact that from ages three to ten he underwent psychiatric treatment because they found him to have an IQ around 160 and thus, added some fine doses of phenobarbital to slow him down. “I think it succeeded,” he said once in a letter to me. He dropped out of the local university and played with odd jobs before ending up at a stonehenge festival in mid-summer of 1980. “It was like at three in the morning that these people watching this event throughout the whole night. Nowadays, they’re thrown out of there because it’s a tourist attraction. Back then, they (the Groups) were barely tolerated. That sort of toleration lasted maybe another year.”

With the inspiration sitll in his head, he and accompanying concert-goers Harmonix and friend April Lliff returned to their old victorian squat in London’s East End to practice endlessly for a band that they were to initially call One Day. Ka-Spel remembers: “We actually shared this house with a local rock and roll band who were the local heroes, one of whom happened to be April’s boyfriend. More often these people would pop their heads around the doors and start laughing — “Isn’t it cute? These people are trying to make music!” and walk away laughing still. We never noticed them popping their heads around the door, we just carried on practicing.” Eventually, through various casette networking connections, the LPDs were commissioned to release several tapes on Mirrordot, Chemical Playschool (1980), Klein Kreig (late-81). By 1983, through the help of Rough Trade’s Doug Pearce, the LPDs released Brighter Now, their first album, which only began them on their road to eventual familiarity.

Now in 1989, the LPDs still cling to some of that familiarity, despite the numerous opportunities to change. 11 different musicians have come and gone since their inception, each bringing their own level of continuity to the band. Informally, the LPDs “sound”, so to speak, still retains its mobility. One moment, it reaches the uppermost limits of psychedelia (chaotic, bizarre, moving, flowing), and the next moment it slips far beneath the covers to crawl in utter madness (asylum on a hot summer’s night – young men wrenching in corners of cells tied in jackets and talking to unseen fathers throughout the night about life). It contains but one scent of pure psychadelia: the delightment in evolution, something Ka-Spel doesn’t mind at all, despite the labeling. “I think the term psychadelic is very valid. I mean, it depends on your interpretation of the term. For me, it was the most interesting music that ever existed and that grew from everywhere and it was something that was meant to be expanded not revived. It definitely stopped somewhere at the start of the 70’s. Suddenly, when bands were playing so-called “psychadelic” music again, all they were doing was sort of reviving the earlier form of it in a much poorer way. It’s all about expansion and finding new areas, new lands. That’s what we intend to do. As much as some of the Syd Barrett comparisons that have been made to me, I don’t like the comparisons but I do like what that man did. I think he was great. I would never ever want to put that man down, but really the only comparisons that can be made is that we both have profound English accents and an English style of singing.”

He continues to elaborate: “In my personal life, I like to be optimistic, because being optimistic means staying happy. I don’t want to go around like, ‘Yeah, the end is near’ and things like that.”

Yet the darker side of the LPDs, sometimes confused with pure occult worshipping, is more likely to be found on the surface, or at least, on the edge of it. “I would like people to leave bodies. Not be completely on earth at all. I think it’s sort of what great music can do. Astroprojection and all that. I would like to make the soundtrack to make astroprojection possible.”

Ka-Spel and astroprojection: “I experienced it. Often enough, that is. It’s not something you say ‘Oh, when was it?’ It just happened. It’s not something I’ve ever planned. You’re supposed to do it at will. I cannot do that. Like know that it’s happening and know when it’s finished.

“The first time I did it, it was very shocking because when you realize that you’re doing it, the realization makes you sort of flash straight back into your body and you wake up screaming. The last time I sort of realized I did what you would call a belly-flop in the air and just glided back into my body. There was nothing spectacular. I didn’t go to Mexico or Mars or something like that. I was just like in my room. It’s just such an incredibly interesting experience. You can be anywhere. Our bass player (Jason, who has since left the band) did say that it happened to him on stage, which is really quite interesting for it’s quite easy for it to happen, for you whip to yourself into a trance”

Despite all this, the Pink Dots, as long as things continue in the good lane of things, are planning to finally make it to the States to tour sometime in April. Again, as long as things go as planned.

What happens if some night you have an out-of-body experience and for some reason you can’t get back into your body?

Ka-Spel pauses for a moment and then laughs, “Then there will be no more Pink Dots shows.”

For LPDs lead singer/songwriter Edward Ka-Spel, there’s a personal irony in the growing popularity in his band.

“It’s weird because I spent so much of my youth as a social outcast,” says Ka-Spel. Because of an IQ of 160 and precocious abilities, Ka-Spel was studied by psychiatrists in the first ten years as “Some kind of phenomenon.”

“I began speaking when I was six months old and it was as if I was able to read when I was eighteen months. But I wasn’t actually reading. I was memorizing things I saw on TV. I have a photographic memory.”

As Ka-Spel talks, he smokes. He holds the cigarette rather delicately between his fingers displaying his black nail polish. Lines remaining from his trademark black grease paint performance make-up scrawl across his neck and face. Outside New York City’s club, the Limelight, a former church that now serves as a popular concert club, the mercury stretches past 90 degrees on this summer day. Inside it’s not much cooler. Even so, Ka-Spel is wearing jeans and a long sleeve t-shirt wrapped in a full-length, black jacket that, except for the hood drooping off the back, resembles a terry cloth bathrobe.

As an only child whose father walked out when he was eighteen months old, he was raised by his mother. She thought his unusual progress was normal. It wasn’t until he started having nightmares at age two that she became concerned. “That’s when the psychiatrists came in,” says Ka-Spel. They hospitalized him, gave him doses of phenobarbital to calm him down and showed him “little pictures” to analyze.

“This made me a complete outcast all through my school years”, he says. “I had some mental breakdowns when I was about 16. It was horrible. I don’t think I had a psychiatric problem. I was just curious. I couldn’t understand why I wasn’t like the other kids. I wanted to be accepted. Unfortunately it shaped my entire life. The Pink Dots have been in large part an exorcism of those years.”

This exorcism via the Pink Dots began in 1980 in London’s East End when Ka-Spel and former group members Phil Harmonix and April Lliff created the band. Since then, the band has gone through more than a dozen different members, some of whom stayed for less than three weeks. The group nearly disintegrated completely in 1985 just before the album Asylum was made due to the tensions created when their money was stolen by a manager who left them stranded in Amsterdam following a tour– a real problem for a group who until four or five years ago, barely made enough money to live on. “It’s been a pitiful existence,” says Ka-Spel. I could have made more on social security.”

The group, which now consists of Phil Knight (The Silver Man) on keyboards, Neils van Hoornblower on saxes and woodwinds, and Martjin de Kleer on guitars, recently released The Maria Dimension, the band’s 10th album, which is another incarnation of the eerie, atmospheric vibes the band creates with “anything that will make a sound.” With it they are enjoying this welcome but puzzling success.

“America is getting scary because there are so many people who seem like they almost want to have a part of us. I’ve never experienced this before,” says Ka-Spel. “There have been much bigger crowds than ever and they all want to meet us. It sometimes makes me want to run away. I get quite frightened by it. They’re good people, but when it’s a mass coming towards you at once it gets very confusing.”

There’s a sad irony overshadowing their recent American tour. Legendary Pink Dots guitarist Bob Pistoor, who had desperately wanted to come to the States, died earlier this year from cancer. “His greatest wish was to come to America and they wouldn’t let him in,” Ka-Spel says, referring to the band’s visa application rejection (due to a lack of “artistic merit”) a year ago.

“We got in two years ago, but Bob had joined the band too late to fill out a visa application in time. Last year we were turned down for our visas. This year we must be of artistic merit because they let us in. I can just see them all in the immigration department bopping away under their headphones going, “Ah, those Pink Dots, they’ve redeemed themselves,” Ka-Spel snickers at the idea. “But it’s sad because this was the year Bob would have gotten in.” To help fill his void, the band is travelling with Bob’s widow Sabina, as tour manager. “It just feels right,” says Ka-Spel. Sabina’s given us a lot of strength.”

All this talk of Bob leads to a discussion of death and reincarnation, not surprising coming from Ka-Spel who seems to gravitate to things metaphysical. He’s been known to use tarot cards to come up with song and album titles and often talks about astral projection.

“I’m utterly convinced of survival after death. If you don’t think there’s a quarter of the world’s population that believes in reincarnation, you can’t just write off these people’s beliefs,” he says as he tries to formulate his own thoughts about Bob. “I’m not talking spooky. It’s a warming presence. It’s an unexplanable thing.

“I believe in a purpose to everything, that in some strange way there is a kind of guiding hand. The planet and the human race aren’t here for no reason. What would be the point unless God is truly a totally surreal artist. I don’t think he is. Yet there’s so little that is explained. We haven’t even successfully explained the flight of the bumble bee. It just shows how ignorant we actually are.

“‘A Space Between’ [from The Maria Dimension] is a song that says anything is possible. I believe the world is as likely to come to its conclusion through some great ecological catastrophie within the next few years as it is to turn into a cornflake within the next few seconds. That’s how unstable the fabric of existence actually is. We’re just sort of existing and trying to comprehend something that is way beyond our comprehension.

“I don’t want to be misinterpreted as being religious. Religion is one of these things I detest. I think it’s a way of formulating spirituality and putting it in a box, giving it convenient little man-made rules so that basically all it does is divide people.”

The final irony then is the LPDs’ performance that night in a church. Ka-Spel emerges in his robe and hovers over his keyboards like a high priest over an altar. His backdrop is an enormous three-story stained glass window of Jesus Christ. With lighted candles dotting the stage, it is as if Ka-Spel is conducting his own service.

While ironic, the setting seems appropriate. The LPDs’ music can be almost spritual in the way that qawwali, the devotional music of the Sufis, is spiritual. Qawwali is intended to elevate the sprit and bring both performer and listener into a heightened experience, a trance, through repetition of a sentence or phrase. The LPDs’ music, while it is most often categorized as psychadelic, conveys that same sort of emotional frenzy that builds on itself and is more heightening than any drug.

Of course, most listeners and critics of the LPDs have attributed this quality to drugs. Ka-Spel for one is tired of his music being described as “acid-influenced.”

I’ve heard so many times about how much acid I’ve done. It’s bullshit. I’ve done it twice in my life and not for years. I don’t know why people make up these stories about me. I’m supposed to have committed suicide three times now. Once we tried to book a show in Austria and the guy in the club thought it was a hoax because I had committed suicide and the band split up.”

Ka-Spel likes the qawwali comparison because it’s close to how he feels about his music. “There certainly is an exorcism going on especially when we perform live. I have sometimes come off the stage in sort of a trance. That’s when it’s really successful.”

The essence of The Legendary Pink Dots, those hard to pin down, quasi-political day-glo anarchistic psychedelic punkeroos with more albums to their name than tour dates and more ex-members than an amputator’s refrigerator, can be distilled down to two main characters, vocalist and keyboard player Edward Ka-spel (sometimes a.k.a. Qa-Sepel} and keyboard maestro Phil Knight (a.k.a. The Silver Man). We spoke to them both at length in an attempt to find out more about this fascinating band who were once an integral part of the burgeoning English underground scene, fled in a shock wave of horror and apathy to Holland got themselves onto a Belgian record label and then toured the world triumphantly poking two fingers in the faces of the Establishment.

The Legendary Pink Dots got kissed into life at Stonehenge in 1980, or so the legend goes. Edward, Phil and April, the lost founder member. were crashed out in their tents one night when they were woken up by the sound of a mysterious band playing. The three of them walked down to a misty field where a band was playing complete with a full light show, and stood there alone gaping at the dreamscape in front of them. Quite how that led to the inception of the Legendary Pink Dots wasn’t made clear, but if you understood that alright you shouldn’t have too many problems with the rest of this article.

Edward: “We still don’t know what the name of the band was that we saw. When we got back to our squat, I bought myself a cheap synthesiser and we already had a drum machine and piano, so we decided to give it a go ourselves. We just jammed away, sometimes right through the night. Then a fourth member joined, Nick, on guitars, but it was still totally improvised right down to the lyrics.’

So here we have an embryonic Legendary Pink Dots, sometime in late 198O, jamming away in a well appointed squat in Ilford (I mean, how many squats have you come across with a piano in?). What was it though that helped them make the transition from just jamming to something more serious?

Edward again: ‘They were interesting times, there were a lot of bands making cassettes and then selling them the next day. I was interested in finding out about new music, especially the weird stuff: the first bands I’d been into were Faust and Can, for instance. To be honest, most of the cassettes I got were terrible, people banging dustbin lids and screaming. We thought that even what we were doing was better than that, so we considered doing cassettes ourselves and just exchanging them with other bands. We did our first one, ‘Only Dreaming’, which had a hand-made pop-up cover. and sent it to different bands and suddenly we were getting offers to release it. Dave Barker was doing his ‘Wonderful World Of Glass’ compilation and heard one of our cassettes which he liked and wanted a track to go on there, but it came at the same time as an offer from another label that wanted to sign us – Car Crash International. They disappeared without trace. Then InPhase signed us (and ripped us off badly) – the result being that we had a record label before we’d even started properly. We had only done a few live appearances at folk clubs and at a CND festival, our first real gig was in Cologne in 1983. We were terribly nervous, we’d never rehearsed for playing live and there we were – top of the bill in front of 400 people.’

The Pink Dots’ first album was ‘Brighter Now’ (TKOO1 LP & CD, 1982), based on recordings which were originally released as a cassette by the band. Douglas Peet (from Death In June/Current 93) was working for Rough Trade: he heard the tape and liked it, and was willing to pay the pressing costs on behalf of InPhase who were in a distinctly dodgy state at the time. 1000 copies were made, and enough interest was shown for InPhase to press a second album (‘Curse’, TK002 LP & CD, 1983) – the recordings for which were originally intended to be the band’s first album, had the cassette not been vinylised the year before.

The following year saw a further two albums released, ‘The Tower’ (TK003 LP & CD, 1984) and ‘Faces In The Fire’ (BIAS 1, LP & CD, 1984), the latter of which was the first release on the highly regarded Play It Again Sam label in Belgium.

Edward: ”The Tower’ was an interesting one, a political future-shock album – the Tories had just got back into power and I was screaming with outrage, wrote a whole album about the political trends in England. I put my heart and soul into that one, it got really acclaimed in Holland and France – but not in the country it was written for’. What prompted the move abroad? ‘I had a Dutch girlfriend, and I finally left England and went to Holland to live’.

An event which would have spelled the end for many a band, with their mentor moving away to live in another country. A further year was to pass before Phil and other members of the band were to emigrate, although violinist Patrick found it impossible and effectively retired.

Welcoming them with open arms, Dutch State Radio promoted an album by the band called ‘The Lovers’ (Torso 33007, 1985), and the following year the Pink Dots released ‘Asylum’ (BIAS 12, LP & CD, 1985) which is generally considered to be a milestone in the band’s career. The first album to be recorded with Edward living in Holland and the rest of the band in England however, was ‘Island Of Jewels’ (BIAS 41, LP & CD, 1986), which is a strange and sometimes difficult album to get into. Were they pleased with the results themselves?

Edward: ‘It was a strange album ‘Island of Jewels’. I find it very difficult to listen to it now. Any track taken in isolation doesn’t sound so bad, but put together as an album it sounds so schizophrenic. Some of our best and worst moments are on that album We got it together the following year, ‘Any Day Now’ is one of our best in many ways. We’d also begun doing tours across Europe by then.’

‘Any Day Now’ (BIAS 80, LP & CD, 1987) was their eighth album and their most successful, selling around 15,000 copies, mostly in Europe. Those European tours mentioned above took in Greece, Italy, France, Belgium, Holland, Germany and Scandinavia, and an American tour was lined up for immediately after which was cancelled as the band splintered into fragments once again. The remnants recorded a bleak and emotional album called ‘The Golden Age’ (BIAS 103, LP & CD, 1988) and some songs which were to become a mini-album called ‘Greetings 9’ (MASO 70009, 1988). A fair old mixture of record labels – but wouldn’t the Dots rather be on a major lab el, with all the distribution power that would bring?

Edward: ‘Basically, we just want to survive at what we do. If you love what you’re doing and can live on it, then that’s tremendous, we’re not millionaires, but we can live off it. We actually earn far less than we could get on the dole in Holland! But I’m not against big labels particularly, if you look at all the great records of the past they were all on big labels. It’s just that we don’t stand on any artistic interference whatsoever. Besides, we’re with a good label, Play It Again Sam. We’ve grown together over the years.’

Grown, true, although the band has been splitting at the seams. With so many different line-up changes, isn’t it inevitable that the sound will change? Who’s in the band at the moment anyway apart from Edward and Phil?

Edward: We’ve got a really good sitar/guitar player, Bob Pistoor (a.k.a. Father Pastorius). a real veteran who was playing psychedelic stuff in the early 7O’s. Joining the Pink Dots was like opening a Pandora’s box for him, it was exactly what he was looking for. The fourth member, Niels Van Hoornblower plays sax and flute and bass. There are no drums, we use loops or hand percussion on our new album.’

Phil: ‘We’ve only played with a drummer once or twice, and I guess it’s been our bad luck but we always seemed to hit upon bad ones. One stopped in the middle of a gig because he wanted to light a cigarette, told us to carry on without him. The other was a psychotic, he was supposed to be one of Holland’s top drummers but he couldn’t even keep time. It could have been because of the macrobiotic food he kept trying to cook in the back of the van… anyway, he didn’t last long either, maybe 3 weeks. Now we’re in a bit of a dilemma, because none of us like drum machines either, especially the new ones. The old ones that chug along and actually sound like a drum machine are alright. We still use a lot of the old technology, like ring modulators. We’ve always had two sides to us, we like good melodies – we write songs with good melodies – but we also like really weird sounds. That’s always been the essence of the Pink Dots, bringing those two opposites together. With the last album, Crushed Velvet Apocaly pse, we hit a new level where it almost becomes sound pictures.’

‘The Crushed Velvet Apocalypse (BIAS 149, LP & CD. 1990) is indeed a superb album, and was the one that for me instigated this article. The band have just released their new album ‘The Maria Dimension’ (BIAS 184. LP and CD) – see Steve Prescott’s review elsewhere – which closes with a corker of a track entitled ‘Evolution’ that certainly continues the trend described above. The CD version incidentally features an additional 5 tracks on a 3″ CD single with the first 3000 copies.

Let’s leave the last words to Edward and Phil:

‘There’s never been a master plan behind the Pink Dots – all our releases are part of one huge story, a spiralling tapestry without end.’

‘It’ll end only with Edward’s last breath . . .

The Legendary Pink Dots were interviewed by Nick in January 1991. This article was banged out by McMuff a month or so later … thanks go to all concerned.

The Legendary Pink Dots weave a rich tapestry of shimmering textures, staccato bursts, and haunting Eastern melodies. It’s musical mysticism, a tonal kaleidoscope. They concoct a mixture of power and delicacy, music which gives a sense of confinement and liberation at the same time. It isn’t about rebellion so much as transcendence, and it speaks less to the body and soul than to the mind and spirit. It has nothing to do with rock and roll.

It’s psychedelia, says Pink Dots founder and vocalist Edward Ka-Spel, “with the real meaning of it, the exploratory sense of psychedelia. I would have to place its roots in what started here [in San Francisco, where the interview took place] and in London– and all over the Western world in the ’60s. Of course, we don’t sound like anything from the ’60s because we’re continuing to explore. We’re just picking up the threads and going on, not going back. Something beautiful happened then, but somehow it stopped. We’d like to get it back on the right path.”

To that end, The Maria Dimension, their latest album for Play It Again Sam, uses sitar, lyre, glockenspiel, and teacups along with keyboards, horns, guitars, and drums. As a band who’ve abandoned their English home to put down roots in Europe, Pink Dots take their musical cues from German groups like Can and Faust, and from experimental composers like Stockhausen, Xenakis, and Ligeti. They take inspiration from these sculptors of noise, occasionally filtering the sounds through an English folk sensibility. The result is more truly psychedelic in the sense of mind-expansion or enlightenment than would be possible if the band were simply copying the Electric Prunes or even Pink Floyd. The Pink Dots play with the sounds available from every source and let the strands of noise intermingle to create intricate landscapes of the imagination. Drums aren’t used to keep a beat (there really isn’t one, although the music is quite rhythmic), but to punctuate the sound. Guitars build texture and contrast, not riffs and repetition.

In a way, listening to a Pink Dots record is like watching the shifts of the landscape from the window of a train. The music is a constantly changing tableau of shapes and images. When asked to explain the songs’ inspiration, Ka-Spel replied, “In a way, it can be almost anything. It can be driving through absolutely flat land for miles and miles. I’m not a person who gets bored. I have the receptor up all the time. I’m taking in every kind of stimulus. Sometimes it’s fantasy as well. You’re imagining what’s behind a little hill that suddenly juts up. Your mind wanders…

“There are certain places that hit you very hard. The Tower (1984) is basically about England, but it wasn’t an English city that inspired it. (The Dots formed in London but now live in Holland.) It was Nuremburg, Germany, which is almost paradiselike, in its way. It’s an extremely beautiful city. You’re so aware of its history. It’s sort of got this scar that cannot be removed, and a melancholy amongst the young people and a defensiveness amongst a lot of the older people. You’re constantly feeling this as you’re walking the streets.”

The Maria Dimension, however, is pervaded throughout by Arabic touches which call to mind (for this listener, at least), images of ancient stone cities and the desolate grandeur of the desert colliding with machinery and the modern age.

Ka-Spel has a different take on it altogether. “It’s a strange thing,” he said. “It’s like I’m floating across a lake on a little cloud, like I’m looking into this immense, beautiful, blue twilight world. I like images like that, slightly hallucinatory….”

“We’ve just travelled through the desert,” he continued, “The desert’s a fascinating place. There’s something so ancient about it, something so powerful…

“It’s like another head space altogether. I’ve just been reading the biography of Jim Morrison, and I can see why he went into the desert so much, and what he drew from the feel of the desert.”

Like those of his psychedelic predecessors, Ka-Spel’s lyrics tend toward the hallucinatory, filled with elaborate images like “the melting red rungs of a ladder that leads high to a darkening moon.” There’s a sort of Druidic naturalism about songs like “The Grain Kings,” as Ka-spel sings, “We will sow the seeds together/We shall feed the fertile ground.” A Romanticism emerges in “Evolution,” a longing for the time before the desecration: “If time was never measured, only killed in pleasure gardens of our making. If we’d never taken anything, but only given… If we could forgive, forget and rearrange the patterns. If you’d never thrown that stone or split the atom.”

Indeed, much of what the Legendary Pink Dots are communicating is a sense of the immense possibilities for endlessly varied perceptions which exist for us all, if we open ourselves up.

The band has acquired a devoted but small following in the US (contrasting with their following in Europe: devoted and huge). During their recent performance at DNA Lounge in San Francisco, the audience was held rapt by a powerful, majestic set which balanced intricacy with strength. The musical structures loosened up to allow for improvisation and interplay between band members. Niels Van Hoorn’s clarinets and saxophones gained in prominence, revealing themselves as the dynamic centerpiece of the Pink Dots’ sound. The horns alternately drove the music and wafted overhead like the voice of an imam chanting from the minaret. The Eastern influences lent a calm, sensual allure, and the mood of the audience went with it. Legendary Pink Dots weren’t a band one went to see, but a band one went to listen to and absorb.

“I want to turn their inside outside, in a way,” Ka-Spel said. “I want them to cry with it, I want them to laugh with it. I want to strike them on such an emotional level, because all my emotions go into it, and I don’t want to hold anything back. I want them to experience much beauty, along with the darker side, as well. It’s all mixed, there’s all colors.”

At a recent show in Dallas, Texas, Legendary Pink Dots front man Edward Ka-Spel (a.k.a. the Prophet Qa’Sepel) was chased around by an unstable votary who hollered, “I know you’ve got the key to the tower!” This makes one wonder: Has anyone burrowed their way into his home, like David Letterman’s late stalker, claiming to be Mrs. Ka-Spel? Sitting downstairs at New York’s Wetlands, eyes behind tinted eyeglasses, a smile across his mug, he says, “We have a few loons like that, indeed–but they haven’t gone that far!

Legendary Pink Dots

Showbox, Wednesday, November 25

The Dots themselves are finally arriving, so to speak, from even recent days as an import-only, $3,000-a-year band to become a domestically distributed, reasonable-income-earning, successful tour phenomenon. Laughing, Ka-Spel acknowledges that the Dots have been “a band that went so long without having any success–that’s dogged persistence for you.”

Formed in 1980 in London, the Dots (of which the only remaining founding members are Ka-Spel and Phil “the Silverman” Knight) released a slew of mostly difficult-to-procure albums, spawned side projects aplenty (the Tear Garden most famously), relocated to Holland by 1985, and continue today with a decent American label (Soleilmoon) and an assortment of revolving members.

Sometimes abruptly detouring into completely different musical territory, Ka-Spel’s peculiar ditties aren’t traditional musical fodder. For one, his voice is more distinctive than Sporty Spice’s any day. A gentle, softly slurred affair (think a flattering version of Elmer Fudd), it glides from therapist-worthy serenade into strained, tortured croon.

As for the Legendary Pink Dots’ recorded catalog–circa 40 albums–songs vary from grating electronic jaunts laced with psychedelic, irreverent lyrics (“Jello man cuts corners/creeps unseen between the sheets/he’s laying eggs . . . you should see him play the organ”) to accessible pop tunes. “They’re not drug-induced rants,” Ka-Spel says of the noisier efforts, “because I really don’t touch the old chemicals anymore. They’re absolutely serious to me. I mean, some of them are rants off the top of my head, something I really like to do night by night–songs which are just open and go where they go.”

With their latest record, Nemesis Online (Soleilmoon), a well-produced menu, the Dots maintain enough typical Dots style to satisfy old-schoolers and create enough non-irritating numbers to ensnare newbies. Opener “Dissonance,” for instance, is a dubby trip, “Abracadabra” boasts nightmarish chanting over break beats, while “Zoo” ranks as a danceable zinger. And “Fate’s Faithful Punchline,” with its mellow horn solo, is damn beauteous.

“It’s a genre of our own,” insists Ka-Spel of the Dots’ hard-to-categorize work. “We’re trying to create our own all-encompassing little Pink Dots universe, which rather like the complexity of a human being is a very complex thing in itself. . . . I want people to laugh, cry, feel the little tingle of fear with it. Release with it, it should all be there. You say genre-hopping, but I think the Pink Dots is its own genre: ‘unclassifiable.'”

“The new album is very much fixated on this time we live in,” he explains, “and the significance of the computer on this planet. It seems a kind of analogy. Man’s relationship with the computer is little bit analogous to man’s relationship with the sun in that the computer is our big friend and the more it develops, the more we rely upon it, and it seems to almost run our lives. Then there’s this millennium bug. . . . What it could mean is technically a collapse on such an enormous scale it’s hard to conceive it. Like the nemesis behind the sun.”

As for his own relationship with online existence, Ka-Spel confesses: “To be honest, I have a real love/hate relationship with the computer. I tend to use it more for e-mail–my computer is very primitive. But I do notice that it can spark a kind of addictive tendency within me which I don’t like… The actual title of the album came from an e-mail from a guy who called himself ‘nemesis@aol.com,’ or something. I thought, whoa, I’ve got Nemesis online here!”

Considering that Seattle was the first US city Ka-Spel played (solo, in 1986), it’s close to his heart, and the Dots’ “Pre-Millennial Spectacular” tour should be a bit legendary itself. Dots bassist Ryan Moore’s solo offshoot, the Twilight Circus Dub System, kicks things off. Moore, whose infatuation with Jamaican dub is as subtle as, say, napalm, contorts his face into zany configurations while hopping from instrument to instrument.

During select shows, Ka-Spel follows with an hour of solo material, after which the entire band takes the stage for more than two hours of trippy delights. As Ka-Spel points out: “That’s almost three and a half hours, and that’s quite a ride.”