
Label: Fiction Records
…or else the ‘highlights’ of the music highlights of the next two months
This has been a worrisome summer for the world, with some war bells ‘polished’ and ready to ring and others ringing in another tune. Travelling by plane has become even more expensive and arriving at various popular destinations showed that things are not as idyllic as they seem in touristic advertising posters.
We are 3 days away from the official end of this summer, things will continue to change and art will continue to be one step ahead raising the alarm of awareness and pointing out the beautiful, the ugly, the hectic, the funny, the collective, the individual things that inspire for one reason or another, the hard-to-describe feelings and those things that we keep ‘hidden’ in our souls. This is what we should expect in terms of album releases and gigs for the following few months.
A tale of two music genres and many geographical regions
I guess there is no one that could tell the tale of punk and funk better than A Certain Ratio, the band that put these two seemingly opposing styles in dialogue since their very first album in 1979.
But let’s go back in the early 1980s or rather late 1970s, a bleak period in social terms but a great period for music and artistic experimentation. ACR took inspiration from a Brian Eno’s song ‘The True Wheel’ for their name and formed the band in 1977 in Manchester. One year later, Tony Wilson and Alan Erasmus would form
Factory Records and would sign ACR, releasing albums of the band until 1986. Unlike most of the bands of that period, ACR have been producing their own albums since they were formed with their debut album being produced by the legendary Martin Hannett.
If there was just one phrase that would uniquely describe both a band’s music and the reason why I personally adore them, it would be Ogre’s statement in an interview in 2013:
“…there is a very military side to Industrial music, and we are far more in the psychedelic side…”
Skinny Puppy founded by Kevin Crompton a.k.a cEvin Key in 1983, is one of the very important bands in the industrial music scene, with quite unique and clearly identifiable characteristics from the bands that preceded and inspired them. Kevin Ogilvie a.k.a Nivek Ogre has joined Key from the beginning until now and the two of them remain the only constant members of the band. The band has collaborated with many musicians including Bill Leed (bass, synth, backing vocals) and Dwayne Goettel and have been joined by various session musicians on their tours.