Tag Archives: Shriekback

220. my spine is the bassline

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“I remember getting into a rather intense argument with a fellow DJ at the end of 1983 who insisted that Shriekback’s Care was the album of the year. It wasn’t then, still isn’t now. Shriekback (even with their XTC / Gang of Four lineage) just weren’t that important, the notion of white guys committing full-on to the groove hardly being earth shattering by 1983. Which doesn’t mean Care wasn’t (and still isn’t) a damned fine album, underrated, overlooked, and heavy with all manner of dark and compelling moods and regions, because get the mix right (and perhaps the drugs) and sometimes one’s spine really does become the bassline.” (Philip Random)

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414. nemesis

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In which Shriekback give us airstrikes, poison kisses, Tinkerbell and Jack the Ripper, centaurs, monkeys, Greeks, Romans, big fat nemesis, parthenogenesis — there’s a lot going on here, even a little Joseph Conrad Heart of Darkness by way of  Apocalypse Now and Marlon Brando, his head shaved, gone mad in the primordial jungles of Cambodia, a man broken from himself (on the extended version anyway). So what’s it all mean other than we’re all gonna die, and asexual reproduction (which is what parthenogenesis means)? It’s a cool rhyme for nemesis. You gotta give it that. And otherwise, well, it’s from 1985. That’s how things were in those days. Full of looming horror and unlikely rhymes.

Shriekback-1985-promo

001. reSEARCH – this big program

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Installment #1 of what we’re calling The Research Series aired Sunday, March-10-2018.

The plan is for forty-nine movies, each forty-nine minutes long, featuring no particular artist, working no particular theme, pursuing no particular agenda beyond boldly going … who knows? Or as Werner Von Braun once put it, “Research is what I’m doing when I don’t know what I’m doing.” And we definitely have no idea where all this will take us.

reS-01-globe

001. reSEARCH – This Big Program

Mike Figgis – future strings
Eno + Byrne – the carrier
Jean-Michel Jarre – diva [excerpt]
Kraftwerk – radioland
Nitin Sawhney – Voices
Orb + Lee Scratch Perry – Congo
Brand X – Isis mourning
Windy + Carl – program
Harmonia – trace
OMD – Stanlow
Shriekback – this big hush

Further installments of the Research Stuff will air most Sundays at approximately 1am (Pacific time) c/o CiTR.FM.101.9, with streaming and download options usually available within twenty-four hours via our Facebook page.

653. this big hush

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Come the mid 1980s, Shriekback were doing two things very well. Dark and funky rave-ups that could seriously move a dancefloor, and dark and smooth little dreamscapes, that felt equal parts seductive and apocalyptic, rather like the world in general. Like looking your loved one in the eye and hearing a serpent hiss back. Creepy stuff.

shriekback-1985

800. everything that rises

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In their early days, Pop Will Eat Itself presented as dumbshit grebos, getting wasted, kerranging away in the garage with guitars and beatbox. And yet, their future genius was already hiding in plain in the guise of a cover of an obscure Shriekback groover turned sideways and rocked up into two-and-a-half minutes of full-on psychedelic revelation. Because it is true, everything that rises does converge … if you’re high enough.

PWEI-1987