8Sided Blog

a zine about sound, culture, and the punk rock dream

Metal In Motion: The Story Of UK Industrial Pioneers Test Dept

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FACT:

Test Dept feel remarkably contemporary. This was a group that grappled with politics, but also recognised that such a message was meaningless if it didn’t come as part of a deeper and broader artistic vision. Test Dept didn’t preach: they provoked, agitated, challenged and sent up. Perhaps their approach feels resonant today because here is a group for whom music, politics, and life were tightly intertwined.



Formed in London’s New Cross in 1981, Test Dept developed a rhythmic industrial sound employing the cheapest materials they could get their hands on – oil drums, springs, canisters and piping, salvaged from local scrap yards. Despite this, they were hardly basic or primitive. Their visual iconography was striking, drawing on the bold geometries of Russian constructivist and suprematist art, while their live performances, often held in site-specific locations were theatrical and fully multimedia affairs.


I nabbed a copy of The Unacceptable Face Of Freedom at some point in the late ’80s (cool fold-out cover, btw) and listened to it quite a bit. But, as with most of the experimental industrial bands, I found Test Dept so much more interesting for their views and pronouncements expressed in interviews. This new interrogation by FACT with founding member Angus Farquhar is no exception.

I especially love the short bit about touring internationally … as the band couldn’t bring all their individually constructed metalworks with them across the ocean, apparently they’d have to arrive a few days early to scour scrapyards for road gear:

If you went to the States on tour, of course, you couldn’t bring anything – so you had to spend two or three days scrapping before starting a show. It piled on all this pressure, because sonically you never knew what you would be dealing with. But there were certain generic things you could always find. You could always find a water tank. You could always find springs on a juggernaut lorry, they had a very good sound. Gas bottles of different sizes would give you the high registers. And if were on a big stage, we could get hold of these three or four ton tanks – which would take 13 or 14 people to maneuver into position. Some of the bass we were getting off those – you could resonate an entire room.



FACT: So the scrap yard was your guitar store.



Exactly.

Tape A Penny To A Card Of Condolence For Columbia House

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The Verge:

Columbia House offered you Incredible Deals™ when you signed up: you’d get a bunch of free albums for a penny, and in turn you promised to buy a set number of albums over the coming year. (To make things easy for you, Columbia House would automatically send you some albums unless you told them not to.) Mail-order convenience was big back then, and the idea of a subscription music service that came to your door was pretty appealing. But times change and mediums mutate, and now Columbia House has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.



Columbia House, my nostalgic heart will miss you. You taught me how much fun it was to buy music, and you taught me to avoid mail-order offers at all costs. In a way, you were the good and the bad of capitalism, all wrapped up in one shiny TV Guide ad.


Columbia House was such a strange thing, and is there anyone out there over the age of 35 who didn’t try it (or try to scam it) at least once in your teenage years? Or who isn’t amazed that it was still around until just now?

Is it a coincidence that, after not entering our thoughts for years, Columbia House was a recent topic of social media conversation, when this excellent article came out exactly two months ago on The A.V. Club? :

Filmmaker Chris Wilcha captured what it was like working at Columbia House during this boom time in a low-key, first-person documentary called The Target Shoots First. Incredibly, few people seemed to bat an eye at the camera, which allowed Wilcha to capture the weird tension between the freewheeling creative department and responsibility-burdened marketing team, the old-guard music executives and the younger employees versed in the nascent alternative music culture, and a corporate environment not quite sure what to do with the next generation.



Twenty years after it was filmed, what’s incredible about Wilcha’s documentary is how the experience of working at Columbia House informs (and, at times, even parallels) the modern media landscape.


The article becomes a fascinating roundtable discussion between the filmmaker and three of his Columbia House co-workers. There’s a lot of talk about the culture at this red-headed stepchild of the music industry, as well as attempting to decipher the nuts-and-bolts of how “8 CDs for a penny” could actually be so profitable. It’s a long read but highly recommended.

“The Fifty Best Trip-Hop Albums”

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Metafilter, via FACT:

Writing for FACT, Laurent Fintoni and John Twells have compiled a list of the fifty best trip-hop albums. (Before you freak out, realize that particularly big artists all only get one entry, and the list is confined to the 1990s.) The list is reproduced inside, with links to entry pages, artist info, and (when available) YouTube streams.


Trip-hop is a maligned term but I never had a problem with it. It sort of sums up the sound perfectly … psychedelic hip hop, right? It’s there on the tin. This isn’t a bad list at all, serving to send me down the memory lane of my early DJ days when this was all I would play (I even had a 100 BPM speed limit for a while). The top two are appropriate: no other albums, to me, epitomize ‘trip-hop’ more than Tricky’s Maxinquaye and Portishead’s Dummy. But is Blue Lines really a trip-hop album? Of course I understand the influence of some of its songs on the genre, but, as an album, I don’t feel Massive Attack delved head-on into the sound until afterwards. Also, this list reminds me how much trip-hop was (is?) stronger as a singles / 12″ genre. UNKLE’s Psyence Fiction is an okay album, but it comes nowhere close to touching the trip-hop perfection that is their 1994 single “The Time Has Come” (in collaboration with Major Force). Cue a music break:

The Twisted History Of The Happy Birthday Song And The Copyright Shenanigans That Keep It Profitable

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Here’s more on “Happy Birthday”, via Boing Boing:

This suit was nearing its conclusion when a thrilling last-minute piece of evidence emerged from Warner/Chappell: an excerpt of a 1927 title called The Everyday Song Book produced by the piano-making firm, The Cable Company. The song, numbered 16, is called “Good Morning and Birthday Song” with the main lyrics under the score, and “optional” words below for “Happy Birthday.” The ostensible copyright notice was blurred in the version supplied by the music company.



Nelson’s lawyer noted it was not the first edition, and were able to get a library to dig up the 1922 version. The same version appears there without a legally required statement of copyright.



This would seem to be the end of the line for “Happy Birthday.” The (plaintiff) should prevail; fees collected starting in 2009, within the statute of limitations at the time the suit was filed, should be refunded; and a clear future would be established for public-domain use. But copyright is a crooked path.



It would be nice to close the book on “Happy Birthday,” but it doesn’t close the book on copyright absurdity. An abundance of material from 1923 is poised to enter the public domain in 2019 unless a further taking of the public interest occurs, as the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act did in 1998, adding an unnecessary 20 years to the existing 50 years’ protection past an authors’ death.


I’ve been following this convoluted case for a while, and the article on Boing Boing quoted above is perhaps the best summation of the whole thing that I’ve seen. It also includes background on the sisters who wrote “Happy Birthday” … their story, which I didn’t really know, is fascinating.

Flying Nun: The Untold Story Of A Trailblazing Indie Label

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The Vinyl Factory:

Flying Nun, based in Christchurch on the south island, turned out to be New Zealand’s Rough Trade, Mute, Factory, 4AD, Creation and Postcard labels all rolled into one, without any label competition. Its range embraced exquisite psych-pop, cantankerous quasi-goth, warped folk, experimental synth warfare – and such consistent quality, and this from a population of less than four million.



In its own quite, stealthy fashion, Flying Nun’s influence – especially in the US – has spread outward, and not just on bands like Pavement, but on indie labels such as Sub-Pop. And like the south island’s famous Jurassic reptile, the Tuatara, Flying Nun lives on today, having survived the growing pains that afflict every independent label trying to retain its autonomy in a changing marketplace, and even losing its founder, Roger Shepherd, not once but twice.


There was a point in my life (early ’90s) when this label’s output had me dreaming of running off to New Zealand. I did end up visiting a couple times and the place didn’t disappoint. By coincidence, I ran into an ex-manager at Flying Nun my first time there in the very early ’00s … he was astonished at this American fan’s knowledge of the label and its bands, and I was a little freaked out by how surprised he was.

It’s a bit of an obvious choice to those who also know of Flying Nun, but my favorite song from their catalog is — hands down — “Pink Frost”: