In the unlikely event of the complete history of home recording ever being written, the Legendary Pink Dots should occupy a large chunk of the Eighties section. Still active after numerous line-up changes and disastrous label wranglings, their music has ranged from the tinny Bontempi-and-anguish songs of the early years to the more recent combination of Dub, Kosmische and Barret-esque electroacoustic songs and meta-Space Rock topped off by the emotional, poetic delivery of singer Edward Ka-Spel. Their combination of psychedelic sounds and apocalyptic SF imagery and fantasy (more Ballard or Ellison than Star Wars or Tolkien) have led to some irrelevant comparisons to Pink Floyd, but a closer relationship exists with contemporaries Current 93, Coil or Nurse With Wound. In common with those groups however, as ANTRON S. MEISTER reveals in this biography thinly disguised as a round-up of diverse recent releases, the Dots sound is wholly unique.

Under Triple Moons
(ROIR)
Stained Glass Soma Fountains
(Soleilmoon/Staalplaat)
Hallway Of The Gods
(Terminal Kaleidoscope/Soleilmoon)
Chemical Playschool 10
(Soleilmoon/Staalplaat)

Driven by a burning need to produce music against the odds of urban squat life under Thatcher, and with almost no money for studio time, the Dots were part of the early 80s’ experimental cassette underground. They have spent much of the last couple of years transferring their contributions to that vibrant post-Punk scene to CD, and there’s also been time for the production of a new full-length album. As if that wasn’t enough, a collection of otherwise placeless pieces surfaced as the latest in the Chemical Playschool series, alongside yet another collaboration with Vancouver’s Skinny Puppy/Download crew in the Tear Graden project. The two core members, Ka-Spel and Phil Knight (aka the Silverman) have also released substantial solo works over the years, with Ka-Spel’s output the most prolific at around ten albums and numerous singles to date.

The Dots have stuck it out for seventeen years in relative obscurity, certainly in their home country, and have become a European (now trans-Atlantic) band with a home and studio in Nijmegen from which they make forays across the continent, though rarely touching British venues. However, Ka-Spel’s views on his homeland are shifting in the light of the changes in British society during his twelve years of semi-exile. “I’m very fond of the old country these days and actually hope that it doesn’t take on the many irritating habits of its European sisters” he reflects. “Holland is a bureaucratic hell of state control to an advanced degree. Even so, I was a damn sight more impressed by old Labour and the likes of Ken Livingstone who actually bought a smile to the sour face of politics. New Labour simply seems like a slight lesser of evils.” Edward’s personal vision for Europe is both typically Utopian and engagingly unreal. “Still I have fantasies about redistributing all the wealth, throwing down all the borders and piping psychedelic and classical music through tannoys in the high streets with placards of rabbits beaming down at the populace from all angles.”

The almost total lack of interest in the UK (or at least the music press here) is not shared in places as diverse as Poland, France and the USA. In the latter, recent tours have lasted over a month, touching each coast and all points in between, the word spread increasingly by their Internet mailing list, Cloud Zero. Strangely, their biggest concert to date was in Mexico City in front of an audience of 2,500 at the end of 1995. The Dots have never given a damn about the production of marketable, safe music – despite the best efforts of their former label, Play It Again Sam. Ka-Spel’s memories of a decade with PIAS are not entirely happy. “It always has seemed like a roller-coaster ride,” he says. “We had a small taste of success first in 1987 when Any Day Now did rather well, but it wasn’t until 1991 when things really took off a little with The Maria Dimension. Alas it seemed we sank back into obscurity almost immediately as PIAS hated Shadow Weaver and neglected it (and all albums afterwards), finally causing us to run for the hills – though not before they’d got us to sign away that back catalogue as a 5 year licence ’til the year 2000. Things are building up again now… Even so, mistakes are part of life and you should learn from them. I hope I have.”

Though the remastering work is by no means complete, two collections bringing together the best of the cassette material surfaced in 1997. Soleilmoon’s double CD set Stained Glass Soma Fountains catalogues the group’s earliest surviving recordings from 1980 (when they were called, somehwat less memorably, As One) to pieces from the mid-80s. Under Triple Moons (ROIR) is of similar vintage, and is essentially a companion release. Both contain instalments of the long-running ‘Premonitions’ series of tape-collage pieces, constucted from a combination of environmental sounds, backwards voices and thoughtful guitar and keyboard lines. As with many early 80s post-Industrialists, the ‘Premonitions’ display a boom-and-bust fatigue which led to the self-exile of Ka-Spel and The Silverman to Holland (appropriately enough) in 1984, and rank as the Dots’ most intriguing moments of disconcerting sonic manipulation.

The original recording quality varies from the clear to the murky, though the music itself shines through. The flanged guitars, rickety drum machines and the ever-favourite occasional vocoding of Ka-Spel’s vocals are at their best on the Space Invaders ditty ‘Dying For The Emperor’ and the surprisingly jaunty ‘Frosty’, which shows both the optimistic and twisted aspects of his lyrical concerns, as the subject finds sanctuary in a fridge as Europe fries in all-out nuclear war. Typical of the Dots’ approach of using musical quotations to jarring and disorienting effect, ‘Jungle 2’ suddenly breaks into ‘Ring A Roses’, while ‘Lust For Powder (Version Apocalypse)’ mashes up a live favourite, warping in fragments of Carl Orff and sound effects in a manner reminiscent of Adrian Sherwood’s more unsettling dubs of Mark Stewart.

The Dots have never given a damn about the production of marketable, safe music (despite the best efforts of their former label), and Under Triple Moons and SGSF skim the surface of a vast back-catalogue lurking in the Legendary Pink archives which may see the digital light of day soon. Despite some appaling packaging on both releases (Under Triple Moons bravely includes a group photo to rival those of Throbbing Gristle or Chris & Cosey in its capacity for embarrassing both their children and more recent fans), both show the development of the London line-up of the group as they experimented and innovated their way through a (self-)isolated sub-culture. Even now, the band’s independent releases continue through the production of bespoke CD-Rs (and cassettes for non-digital fans) of live and ancient material via mail order on their resurrected Terminal Kaleidoscope label. This is a technological advance which, along with the rise in home hard-disk recording and the imminent official homepages, has exponentially developed the DIY culture of some fifteen years ago into a way for those committed enough to bypass the wiles of the music industry.

Some ten years on, and apparently influenced by Flying Saucer Attack and Tortoise as well as the introspective re-appraisal of their own past brought on by the re-releases, the Dots’ latest studio album is Hallway Of The Gods . Described as ‘Sensurround in Eight Dimensions’, there’s the usual combination of Tarot and SF imagery, failed romance and an apocalyptic, existential concern with the repetitive cycles of history. The production levels are overly clean (and perhaps new guitarist Atwyn could have been asked to cut the solos down to more consistent size), but the work as a whole still retains the Dots inimitable capacity to surprise with their highly-developed ear for the subtle use of sampler, hard-disk and voice, albeit to a lesser degree than before.

The slow-burning epic ‘The Saucers Are Coming,’ an update of Well(e)s’ The War Of The Worlds (which nods more to Orson than HG), is a quaintly Fifties-style UFO invasion story set to a throbbing backbeat and analogue synths to rival Hawkwind’s. This is the centrepiece of an album which, on the opening ‘On High’, takes just enough from Drum ‘n’ Bass to show they’ve noticed, but not enough to compromise the consistency of the view down the Terminal Kaleidoscope, the Dots’ metaphorical device which points relentlessly towards an unknowable future. Ka-Spel’s view on the current upsurge of Electronica takes a long-term view. “I never really cared much for movements, they create a tendency for a lot of different artists and bands to be indistinguishable from one another,” he observes. “There again, some interesting music has come out of the Drum ‘n’ Bass stable and indeed the Triphop stable. However, give it 10 years, and probably people will only refer back to Tricky, a couple of Aphex Twin pieces and U2 or Bowie’s experiments with Drum And Bass.”

The final album of 1997’s hectic release schedule, Chemical Playschool 10 , shows that even the off-cuts of the Dots are prime. Fragments of jams, doodles and sketches provide an insight into the obsessive recordings of this workaholic group, the CD packaging selected from the artwork of their equally dedicated fans. Like the tape collections, the pieces here are free to work outside the confines of the album format, and frequent moments of bizarre genius occur on what may actually be the most interesting of the recent releases. Ka-Spel describes the pair as “definitely both pre-millenium works; they begin a new phase of the accelerating soundtrack. Part Three is already recorded, a very intense album – quite an extreme beast!” As for their plans for the Millenium itself, there will be “Five albums in the last five days of 1999, to be consequent in creating the soundtrack for the Terminal Kaleidoscope.”

Quite whether this deluge of material will win the Dots new converts is an issue open to question. With their fans as obsessive as Fall enthusiasts, there’ll doubtless be takers for every recording they care to put out, though they don’t really need or desire the adulation of the MTV-fed masses. There’s the new CD awaiting release, plus the solo Blue Room album from Edward, with others by the Silverman and Ryan Moore’s Twilight Circus dub project upcoming for 1998. At last, there’s a sense that the Pink Dots may be finding the contemporary era of astonishing cross-cultural eclecticism (musically or otherwise) more accepting of their unique talents. “I couldn’t really do anything else now. All members have lived from the music we make for many years now,” reflects Ka-Spel. “What’s more , there’s still so much we haven’t tried – so many new places for the music to go.” The Millenium (no matter how artificial the concept), with its associated perils of future-shock and global change is only two years away, and the Dots will have marked its inevitable approach for two decades in appropriate style. Reflecting on the world’s headlong rush into the future with a mixture of fascination and dread, Ka-Spel coined a motto for the Legendary Pink Dots at their inception which expresses perfectly the group’s raison d’etre (and may well explain the size of their discography) – sing while you may!

-Antron S. Meister 1997
(Exact publication date unknown)

Edward Ka-Spel of The Legendary Pink Dots has finally managed to out-creep himself with the release of The Gethsemane Option. Over the years, LPD have made themselves notorious for their avant-garde (and sometimes, just plain whack) styles of sound and aesthetic. Ka-Spel, Phil Knight, Raymond Steeg, and Erik Drost have put together a very strong and cohesive work of art this time with The Gethsemane Option.

As the album’s title suggests, this is another statement about religion, psychology, and their dysfunctional relationship; something The Legendary Pink Dots have always loved to push. The melodies are as haunting as ever as The Gethsemane Option opens with “A Star Is Born“. The song is an eerie concoction of cello-esque keyboards, and the spoken word vocals of Ka-Spel at the bpm rate of a flat line. Doesn’t sound interesting? Somehow it is. The first few tracks, although minimalist, pack a surprising amount of climax without any sort of aggression.

I must say that there were moments when I was not so certain that I wasn’t listening to Gary Numan’s Jagged.  Songs like “Esher Everywhere” and “A Stretch in Time” create such a darkly rich atmosphere, that I found myself staring at the wall; which is a good thing. The fifth track “Pendulum“, however, is basically Ka-Spel’s version of a coffeehouse poetry night. I’m still not sure how I feel about that one, but I will say that it’s as boring as it is pretentious.

After recovering from “Pendulum“, The Gethsemane Option really regains its atmosphere, but the last few songs sound more reminiscent of old Skinny Puppy and a little bit of The Tear Garden (not shocking). There is enough musical variation within the album to stay tuned for more; and I usually have a little trouble with paying attention to experimental.  LPD’s signature creepy and unsettling aura is ever apparent here and I hope they continue to make 40 more albums of this weird shit. I’ll take any excuse to walk around barefoot wearing scarves and sunglasses.

source: http://bit.ly/1vstNEA

Thirty-three years in existence, working in and around the peripheries of electronics and psych experimentation it is truly remarkable how a band could make a record as utterly enthralling as this when you realise this is around their fortieth album (there are most probably more). The Legendary Pink Dots still consist of voice-extraordinaire Edward Ka-Spel and Phil Knight – both of whom create under numerous aliases as well – with the addition of Erik Drost on guitar and bass (boy does he tremble the room at one point) and Raymond Steeg’s engineering complexities.

Complex The Gethsemane Option most certainly is… and sinister, definitely sinister. Not only through Ka-Spel’s wisdom words of societas gained through his mature eyes, but the all-absorbing hypnotism of its electrical journey. Electronica purists surely stand open-mouthed at its deep resonance, meaningful ambient washes, guitar-fed shimmers and those occasional body-endurance bass lines. BUT, it is the voice which sets The Dots apart from any scene, genre, or however art has to be tagged these days. Edward’s vocal approach nods a wink to Syd Barrett and quintessential English post-folk innovation and this tethers a rhythm to the seven song structures of The Gethsemane Option. ‘A Star Is Born’ hints dark magick with Boards Of Canada-style crushing sweeps while his voice leers through an “iridescent light” blinding this “cruel world” and that opening sets many a tone. ‘Pendulum’ slows, damning words crawling over gong-like, shaking synths before THAT bass line – a very very deep post rock bass line – rips through ‘One More Dimension’ taking centre stage for once with Ed’s disfigured voice vapour-trailing a blurred soundscape. ‘The Garden Of Ealing’ peels back more of England’s lost heritage and reveals the unseen political intent of some of Ka-Spel’s lyrics on this album. Swathes of guitar, electronics and glitches precision factory cut until ‘Grey Scale’ marches with sequential beats as Ed’s voice quite literally scares the shit out of you!

‘Esher Everywhere’ I’m pretty sure damns this country’s current wonderful, caring right-wing Government and its Surrey core of affluence and privilege. This anthemic Prom-stomp referencing the riots is a calling for a removal of the Tory party and their agenda of widespread social cleansing. “We’re all in this together” as Cameron has conned the British public lies only within his Esher borders. Powerful, so true and saddening. This track means so much to me personally that the final ‘A Stretch In Time’ could cease to exist but that would be very unwise as its seven-or-so minutes are a mesmeric slab of quivering electronics and crushing sound; “You always leave the gas on”.

Having risen from the decaying roots of East London Industrial their Terminal Kaleidoscope cast off through Holland, the open-minds of European mainland and now often drifting to American audiences via their audience-association with Skinny Puppy, this duo and collaborants over decades have managed that rare thing in creating a sound truly original and more importantly worthwhile. The Gethsemane Option is their first for the American Metropolis label and put in my own simple terms, is a fucking masterpiece. It reminds this constant listener of Coil’s finest (for me anyway) Musick To Play In The Dark Part 1 and just as these hands naturally gravitate toward that album now one hand will part and reach for The Gethsemane Option in unison. “Shining out like a platinum Pepsi can in a mountain of 33 year old grapefruits”, Ed, I’ve borrowed your own line, more or less, from a previous life encounter but it does describe pretty much how this album stands aloft over the deluged waste of digitalism and electronica.

I bow to thee, let the Infinity Waltz continue…

Source: http://bit.ly/1DdNQYD

This has got to be Edward Ka-Spel‘s most introspective album to date; some would say business as usual, another party political broadcast from the inside of Edward’s head. Words held in tea-stained sepia and dust-choked webs, hints of jaded melody creeping out of the inky gloom, like threadbare playthings that have seen better days. Yep — definitely business as usual, and I wouldn’t want it any other way.

“Limburgia” eases you in with the soft canter of bongos and a slip-disc of key strokes, all chip-wrapping a monologue concerning some mining accident that frays into festering unrealities that sound fatigued, stonewashed. To which “Red Highway” ups the anxiety in industrial tensiles and a visceral thrashing of cane against aluminium railings that gets you all unnecessary while Ka-Spel’s vocals start losing it in the ever-tightening mincer of calamity chased by the local police. Beautiful stuff that; “The Border of Beyond” follows on in a nursery-like afterburn, his slender drool accompanied by hand-cranked tinkering, shivers of glassy automata, doubles ingested purring inside their cages as your eyes are caught in the swing of a lightbulb’s shadow. A serpentine curve menacing the masonry as gentle musical spasms further highlight a troubled mind.

“Night Terrors”, with its talc-caked harpsichord and powdered wigs, oozes a decaying decadence you can almost smell as the candle wax’s wane holds audience over the narration… “‘What if the world stopped turning? What if the sun did not rise? If I sit here paralysed, night after night…” capturing a strong sense of the narrator swaying back and forth, easing in doubt like a dripping tap. “You say bad dreams, you say bad dreams”, he adds in a dimensionally-detached hush: “Bad, bad baaaaddddd“, he repeats, as the fear engines take control and an interlocking lushness of cutlery bounces off glass eyes, an apex finally sucked in a convulsion of treacly reverses.

The harpsichord vibe bleeds into “Victoria”, a purely instrumental interlude leaking its resonant betweens, whetting your appetite for “Shine and Bones” — a spectacular 14 minute journey that escalates the disquiet so far generated with a delicious obsessiveness of stuttering delay and swept symphonics. A factory-spurting monotony that becomes surprisingly danceworthy until it careers off psychedelically in filtrated scars of otherness, then ebbs and flows into an aviary of insectrial rubs, forest chirrups, declining into some sinister owl-like ambience, the odd piano note clinging to Ka-Spel’s concentrated wordplay like greasy spoons. A narration about killing rare bloffy birds, audibly honking from amongst the bulrushes and spannered electronics. “Dry Bones, the back bones, the funny bones and all the rest of the bones”, repeats a Fifties voice caught on a brief fervour of xylophonics, hooking into a more saturnalia perspective as our protagonist economically brews a notion of some atrocity from very little. “The 3 o’clock scream from somewhere“, he adds, giving out a vague precision to the chill he’s already generated.

Two tracks follow, both lengthy excursions gently prodding things with further curiosity, the first “I’ll Come to You _ Continuo” in splashy locomotives and vortexing vox, some whispering phantom in your subconsciousness: “May I be a grain of sand that rubs against your eye, as you’re lying on your sunbed, trying hard to sleep, counting all your money like you count those lousy sheep, I’ll come to yoooouuuuuu…” His words tongue-rolling the tempo beautifully, the pulsing rhythm held attentively to every passage, later adding the final coffin nail, “When you are feeling solemn, I’ll make sure you do not fake those tears…” The music nearing a station stop, piano macabra punching the tickets of blurring impressions, an artificial womb of criss-crossed choral keys, thrashed corn and a pleasing proliferation of fleeting sketchbook distractions. Something the final track “Conclusion” holds dear as its vascular thumps are transformed, specturised, thrown into a satisfying array of pleasures accompanying the pessimistic ponderence. A matter on which D’Archangelnever disappoints, swinging the aperture to the swirling exhales of cold January nights.

Source: http://freq.org.uk/reviews/edward-ka-spel-the-victoria-dimension/

Core members Edward Ka-Spel und Phil Knight are representing the LEGENDARY PINK DOTS first and foremost. They are from the United Kingdom, originally constituted the band, or project if you will, over there – however meanwhile having settled down in the Netherlands. Their musical legacy, since the early 1980’s up to now, is comprised of a huge amount of albums, which in general deliver experimental, avantgarde oriented psychedelic/space/kraut stuff. Now it was about time, ’10 To The Power Of 9′ – released on Italian label Rustblade Records – is my first attempt to review one of their recordings.

This album appears in three incarnations so to say. There’s a standard compact disc and vinyl release given with differing tracks, and additionally a CD deluxe version which includes another second disc. Who might expect rock music as such should be on the watch here, as the tracks are featuring more dark ambient and trancendental soundscapes all the way through. Well, what is required to get in touch? An open-minded approach as it is not easy getting access to. The tracks definitely need time and concentration, you should be in a good mood also, preferably have your headphones at hand …

… and then the PINK DOTS – who are truly legendary in the meanwhile – will send you on a gripping trip which is spiritual, weird, beautiful … eh, different at all events. Synths, minimalistic halting beats, guitars and Kaspels characteristic voice, that is needed to produce such a cinematic exploration when it comes to the ingredients. Just in order to name some extraordinary examples, the short new wave infected Your Humble Servant is nested by two amazing spacey trips named Primordial Soup and Freak Flag featuring synth loops, soaring guitars managed by Erik Drost. This is effectively designed overall, here and there reminds me of David Sylvian.

While taking more than 17 minutes the broadly conceived The Elevator is finally closing this new LPD chapter. When listening to this I felt like being on sight and insight, relaxed without having fear at all, buried in a capsule spinning around traversing outer space with ease, offering a fantastic view on spiral galaxies aso, plus extraterrestrial voices repectively sounds coming from the aether. Wow, they obviously know how to give us space cadets a treat. So here we have an album with easy-going chill though not simple-minded approach at all, assuming a lot of experience to make it in this successful way.

source: http://www.progarchives.com/Review.asp?id=1325487

The Legendary Pink Dots’ discography is so expansive that it’s difficult to say something about their music with full authority. The Dots’ founding members—Edward Ka-Spel and Phil Knight—may not even know for themselves how many albums they have released by this point, although it’s safe to say the number of studio records exceeds 40. In 2014 alone, the band released one LP—10 to the Power of 9—two live albums and two compilations. One of those compilations, 12 Steps Off the Path, appeared in my inbox to review. Although there’s no knowing why 12 Steps Off the Path arose as the victor among the Legendary Pink Dots’ 2014 output, it does highlight the things that can be said about the band’s music—namely, it’s dark and filled with esoteric mystique, it’s loud, it’s psychedelic, it’s synthy, it’s gothy, and it’s still more thrilling today than many of the most hotly praised albums of the year.

12 Steps Off the Path was compiled and released in an effort to restore some of the Dots’ back catalogue that has, for one reason or another, disappeared over the years. As with many Legendary Pink Dots compilations, it proves that even the band’s rarities are better than studio releases from a number of bands that acquire similar themes and sounds and run mindlessly with them. Ka-Spel’s lyrics can be hard to grasp for the layman, but the overall feel of the music is forever giving a sense of looking under the carpet of this surface world and uncovering some ancient evil. Even a sing-songy number like “A Moustache on the Mona Lisa and Other Things You May Find in the Trash” has almost the same vaudeville-gone-nightmare feel as the “Singin’ in the Rain” scene in A Clockwork Orange.

Other songs raise the drama in unexpected ways. “Citadel”, originally appearing on 1995’s From Here You’ll Watch the World Go By and one of a number of live songs on this compilation, starts with a meandering synth line and easy brass. It is not long, though, until Ka-Spel’s vocals blast off from his standard pitch and run rampant through the second half of the song, erupting at song’s end in a ferocious “Come to Daddy daddy daddy” while the horns take a similarly chaotic turn.

If you haven’t already guessed, the Legendary Pink Dots’ music certainly doesn’t make for easy listening. Selections like “A Japanese Manual for a Broken Wheel” are customarily noisy. Quieter moments like “Goldilocks” will employ suspenseful pulses and throbs that work to cushion Ka Spel’s terrifying missives. “I confess I’ve never had a hobby / Except you / And me” has never sounded so threatening. Yet, there are also moments on 12 Steps Off the Path that showcase the beauty behind the Dots’ music, such as the almost tranquil Eastern-tinged closer “Out There Part 2”.

Seeing as press on the Legendary Pink Dots, in this day and age, is comparatively minimal to their output, it can be troubling to think of their music—compilation or not—lost among the clutter and clatter of Bandcamp and other online music distribution sites. Even one critic telling one curious music listener that something—anything—in the Legendary Pink Dots’ discography is worth their time is the most minuscule drop in a gigantic, ever-changing pond, but then again, enlightenment isn’t the easiest thing to find. Ultimately, there is actually too much to say about the Legendary Pink Dots, but most of it is still worth hearing out.

source: http://bit.ly/1G8l0MA