By Jim Anderson on November 21, 2023:
Been listening to LPD for 29 years, ever since a kind Belgian freak posted me a mysterious unlabelled cassette.
I wrote this feature a few years later for the London magazine ‘Ape’. I think I wanted to express something of the sheer mystery – in those strange old pre-internet days – that surrounded this otherworldly band…
An expanded Come Out From The Shadows Volume 3 – The 80s as a CDR edition on The Legendary Pink Dots’ Bandcamp page
Songs of Solitude as a CDR available on both the Edward Ka-Spel and The Legendary Pink Dots’ Bandcamp pages.
A new Edward Ka-Spel solo (download only) is entitled ‘A Carrington Event’ can be found on Edward Ka-Spel’s Bandcamp page.
radio hypnosis, volume 1
This is a cd-r with block printed cover art, signed and limited to 40 copies.
Available on Orbit Service’s Bandcamp page.
This article is from 1986. Photos below are by Dirk Wahle.
If anyone would like to transcribe and/or translate this article to English, please contact lpd.website@yahoo.com. Thank you.
By Nicolette Shurba on Wed, Nov 2, 2022 at 1:00 am
Photo by Joep Hendrikx
Frontman and lyricist Edward Ka-Spel, of the long-standing post-punk, avant-garde and spell-binding music experience the Legendary Pink Dots, has no intention of slowing down lest life catch up with him.
For the band’s recent online “Hallowe’en Special,” Ka-Spel chronicled a close encounter with the fragility of life’s interconnectedness — a real and recent story of jaywalking as a vehicle dangerously shared the same lane — his quiet, ethereal voice hovering over lugubrious music with an impassioned reflection: “To pause is to realize how big the picture really is, and be overwhelmed.”
Indeed, there’s been no pause for Ka-Spel in the 41 years since the creation of the Pink Dots. And despite the world coming to a devastating halt in the spring of 2020, Ka-Spel has been as prolific as ever, releasing four solo albums in the first four months of this year, as well as the latest Pink Dots album, The Museum of Human Happiness on Metropolis Records.
Writing and recording The Museum of Human Happiness during the quarantine period of the pandemic, Ka-Spel was afforded the opportunity to obsess over sound and quality.
“I’m a very sort of finicky person when it comes to sound quality, and I’m very lucky I’m in a band full of professional sound engineers,” Ka-Spel says. “Not myself, but Erik [Drost], the guitar player, and Randall [Frazier], who is as well. They know all about getting the best sound out of anything, so [of] course that really helps.”
Separated physically from each other, the band members instead shared recordings of their individual parts through cyberspace. “We had the luxury of time, and it’s always good to have that time to be able to dot all the i’s and cross all the t’s,” says Ka-Spel.
Musing over the acceptance of human mortality, the cycle of artistic output, the horrors of a global pandemic and the crushing Russia-Ukraine war, Ka-Spel put pen to paper to process the world around him.
“It makes you want to scream, and the way I tend to scream is through what I write,” says Ka-Spel.
In an ever-more uncertain reality, Ka-Spel is sure of one thing, and that’s enough to keep him going: “This is what I do. It feels like a calling, and you have to answer that calling.”
With the recent retirement of longtime collaborator, creative foil and Pink Dots mainstay Phil Knight (aka the Silverman), Ka-Spel is the last standing founding member of the Pink Dots. The departure of Knight from the band doesn’t diminish the sense of family Ka-Spel feels with his current touring lineup, however.
Randall Frazier (also of openers Orbit Service), stepped in for Silverman and has been regularly touring with the Pink Dots for the last 25 years. Ka-Spel describes the band’s current lineup as “different variations of the same family every night.”
Orlandoans are in for a post-Halloween treat with the Dots coming to town on Thursday. It’s their first return to Florida in many years, and they’re bringing along rare solo LPs and other mouth-watering merch. Ka-Spel himself makes a habit of mingling with the crowd after the show. And as surreal as it is for audience to see the magus-like Ka-Spel wandering quietly amongst them, it’s in some ways just as odd for Ka-Spel these days.
During the pandemic, Ka-Spel wondered if this were the end of the longest and most enduring careers in alternative and post-punk music. “I won’t deny there were times when I thought, ‘That’s it,’” says Ka-Spel. “It felt really like now it’s as if life stops.”
Ka-Spel’s albums are not the only thing he brings an intensity to; his stage performance is a transcendental experience, up there with mystical worthies like Syd Barrett and David Tibet.
“It’s a very, very intense time. You want to go to the edge, and you want to at some point sort of step over that edge, so you feel like you are in a kind of … I call it the zone,” shares Ka-Spel.
“If I don’t reach that zone then that show has not worked. But it rarely happens that I don’t reach that zone because I make damn sure I do everything to get there.”
Ready to deliver and unable to stop, Ka-Spel wears his gratitude on the sleeve of his cloak.
“It is the fragility of life and the blessing of being able to do what I do,” says Ka-Spel. “I feel like an incredibly lucky person to be able to do this indeed, over 40 years down the line from when I began.”
Source: Orlando Weekly
The last two years have hardly been ideal for bands to ‘get things together in the country’, let alone gather in a room to write songs. This applies even more to groups like the experimental rock band The Legendary Pink Dots, who have two members based in The Netherlands and one in the UK. The collaborative elements of the songwriting and recording for ‘The Museum Of Human Happiness’, their upcoming new album, have of necessity therefore taken place in cyberspace.
Continue reading Frontview Magazine- The Legendary Pink Dots : ‘Hands Face Space’
The Legendary Pink Dots founder Edward Ka-Spel is well-known as one of the most prolific artists to emerge from the ‘80s post-punk underground but in his 40+ studio albums with the Dots, Ka-Spel has never done something quite as adventurous as this new single. “Midnight Caller” is one of the highlights from Badfinger’s smash hit album from 1970 No Dice, and this year Ka-Spel was given the opportunity to refresh this classic track, bringing his own prodigious production skills and immense talent for arrangement to the late great Pete Ham’s composition. Featuring vocals and bass by longtime Badfinger bandleader Joey Molland, “Midnight Caller” becomes in the hands of Ka-Spel simultaneously more lush and more sinister offering a dark psychedelic spin that seeps its way into almost everything The Dots touch.
Stream the single: https://orcd.co/badfinger_the_legendary_pink_dots
Source: Skylight Webzine