Nocturnal Illusion II: Quietus

It was just 'off the record' and that's how the title came, it just led to itself. The data was collated from a wide range of sources: DAT, Akai sampler floppy discs, even Betamax videos. That must have been quite a daunting task. I had the TV on all the time! I had to watch the TV and see the news while doing it. It felt like being an accountant. I transferred it from analogue to binary code. Once it's in the computer, it is so easy to manipulate the data, but I was too lazy before Gunther asked me to do it. Just passing by this shelf with loads of years of work on it, I just thought "oh, come on!

Well it is pieces, jottings and ideas. At the time, you had to record your ideas on to a tape recorder to evaluate them. There was no other way, no computer, no laptop. I had one drum machine and a sequencer. The way we were composing in the 70s, this machine kept on running and you did what I called the steady hand or slow hand, pressing the chord and playing a melody. But at the time you played for half an hour until the tape had run all the way through. I had so many ideas just running for half an hour through all the tape.

Changing slightly, transferring to another tonality by hitting another note on the Mini-Moog. And the sequence got transferred to another key, but the next key change was about 50 minutes ahead, so it was just improvising tapes. I have written all the lyrics recently. They all came to my mind during the production. They are still asking me to reissue the original tape. At a recent screening in Hamburg there was one place, one screen with the original recordings. And on headphones you hear the original concept of the song. I shortened them, of course. You just hear 1 minute and 30 seconds.

It is so boring to hear one melody and someone who cannot really play. I played them all by hand, of course. I left some mistakes in because it gives an impression of the time, there's no error-correct. I am not a keyboard player, [although] I play quite decently. Do you think that manifested itself in the song you eventually wrote?

There seems to be a certain amount of anxiety about how a performer interacts with their public. My sister married an Englishman. He brought me my first English records when I was a kid. And in our house, that is when my life changed. I was hypnotised by Beatles and Rolling Stones records.

It's that simple really.

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I just grabbed the guitar that was on the wall. It was gathering dust, I got rid of the dust and learnt how to tune it. I don't see a connection though between the biography of John Lennon and this track. Although you are right, it is about living your life in public. He [Lennon] is certainly a legend but this is about being somebody well-known and how this [influences] your personality. Most of the time it doesn't do you any good, to be honest. You shouldn't believe in the press idea of yourself.

It also gently counteracts the 'showroom dummies' image that Kraftwerk had. But at the same time, I guess it was almost easier to have a robot perform your role for you. That is why I wrote this song. It was an invention of the press after the concert. That is where this idea came from. They [the press] didn't take the piss, it was a good observation: They were like showroom dummies as well! Except we were looking stiff and German as well, of course. But that is the way we were and we didn't feel that they were taking the piss out of us.

It was just an observation. And it was like looking in a mirror. And Ralf came up with this lyric: And then the image got digitalised into the Music Non-Stop 3D wire frame people, who became computer binary code. But the surface image is misleading. I like the term 'sound biography'. We are what we hear, and we are what we hear throughout our life. What we have heard from the time of our adolescence will follow us all our life.

That is my theory. Everybody hears sound in a different way. And one song, say 'Strawberry Fields Forever', has a different meaning for you or for me. I am aware that there are some people around who really dislike the track. And feel uncomfortable hearing it.

It is so much about the British identity. The influences are wide-reaching. It is all in our sound biography. The most rich experience we can have on this planet is the music culture of these different eras, of these different ethnological eras. Chuck Berry invented it. And then it goes to Liverpool and then Germany. We bounced it back, giving it a little electronic ingredient. It came back to Liverpool and London and then back to Berlin.

I am really interested in the different ways music culture is evolving, not developing. You are renowned for your rhythms, the 'Numbers' pattern which Bambaataa emulated for 'Planet Rock' for example. But there's a strong sense of melody here, often sitting alongside more beat-heavy tracks, 'The Tuning Of The World', for instance. Do you feel overlooked as a melody maker? Well, I have got the copyright for it. I am not overlooked. You cannot protect your copyright for a beat, it's impossible. I just wanted to make it clear writing it down. One single day in the beginning of the 80s, I drummed this beat.

I never did this before, I never claimed this was my invention. But maybe I wanted to write it because I needed to, um, reconceive it? For me it needed to be reconceived. It is an homage to the Brussels Expo' 58 structure which represents an iron crystal magnified billion times. When you look at the top of [the crystal structure] you feel like you are at the centre of the universe.

It is such a 3D event to see through it. It is super huge. And always since those days I had wanted to incorporate an odd meter into a song. If you do it the right way, it is seven fours but you don't recognise it. It feels so natural but it gives a certain twist to the music. Because it's something you haven't heard before. It is missing that motorik feel, but not really. I was always fond of Igor Stravinsky. How he atomised the metric consistency of the music, changing the meter every single bar. Especially in his famous work, Le Sacre Du Printemps. So I took this famous tutti beats and I wanted to bring it to my music.

So this was one idea I kept and found, along with this strange melody.

So there's this sort of melodic movement and the perfect fourths in the strings. This melodic movement you hear a lot by Stravinsky. The relationship between the music and film on this project is a very strong one, isn't it? And my subject was Auditory Media Design. I was the only musician and I thought: Because nobody knew, so I had to do it.

And here I made the conjunction with what this man was doing in front of the orchestra, waving in the air. What is it all about? I ended up comparing what he does with the strokes with the timeline of a computer. Because I thought there had been a lot of intelligence going into film-making since the 70s. This is where Gnod stride gloriously ahead of many of their contemporaries. Read our review of Mirror here. The Ship is the work of someone who fully believes in the power of art as an empathic tool, as a means to invoke a particular viewpoint, an unconsidered perspective.

Read our review of The Ship here. Read an interview with Sex Swing here. Buy Sex Swing from Norman Records. Mutated beats and overbearing percussive noise point to the body's rebellion against annihilation in some kind of post-human, post-body futurist utopia in which we will upload our minds and float off into cyberspace.

Read our review of Color here. Read our review of Skeleton Tree here. With a kick like a Cyberman drunk on shore leave and acidic bass synths that would melt your shoes, this is a total keeper and I insist that you buy it from Opal Tapes' Bandcamp immediately. Read our review of Hardcore Sounds From Tehran here. Read our review of Strangers here. Sometimes Mannerfelt sets his sights on the dancefloor as on 'Her Move' while elsewhere, on tracks such as 'BZ Reaction', he settles for a gorgeous, maximalist take on dub techno.

Read our review of Devotional Songs here.

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It's not Venom or Watain or Darkthrone, but rather the likes of Swans and Neurosis and perhaps the recently released double album from Ulver that naturally spring to mind as contemporaries to this music. Leyland James Kirby is finally calling time on his musical alias, The Caretaker, which he began in Inspired by the final seconds of The Shining and the soundtrack to Pennies From Heaven he took pre-WWII big band swing music and processed it to create a "haunted dancehall" ambiance. The project took on a different tone in when he released the track collection, Theoretically Pure Anterograde Amnesia and began to explore different concepts of memory loss via his music.

This is the first stage, which he has described as "an old person daydreaming" and is relatively upbeat. Read an interview with Leyland James Kirby here.

This is his warcry. Read our review of Konnichiwa here. Klara excels at recording the real world, deconstructing it, abstracting it and then reconstructing it in a way that reveals more about ourselves. The world she creates is both familiar and alien, real and interpreted. As with Ett and Msuic , Too is a great display of musicianship and self-control. Read our review of Too here. Read our review of Ultimate Care II here.

Again, bird metaphors abound, but one can just as easily drink in this music without any context. Read our review of Simultaneous Flight Movement here. While these explorations may teeter on the brink of being detrimental to the flow of the album, Ocean just about manages to keep his indulgences in check when things threaten to get repetitive or dull. Read our review of Blond e here. They are part of a porous palette, rather than a collection of connatively dense symbols with things to teach us, like when saints hold stuff in cathedral friezes.

Read our review of Blood Bitch here. Read our review of Redemption here. Read our interview with Ian William Craig here. Whether or not this is the best thing since Let's Dance you're with me on this now aren't you? And rejoice, because David Bowie hasn't sounded this relevant in an age. Read our review of Blackstar here. First of all, it sounds incredible. Imagine a wilder version of Broadcast's 'Pendulum', echoed crashes and guitar skree like meteors imperilling and sharpening your high. Its ingenious conceit sets the tone for the album's often hair-raising lyrics: Read our review of Songs For Our Mothers here.

Read our review of Lodestar here. Read our review of Oh No here.

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Read our review of III here. Now, the sludgy guitars and snarled lyrics are a minor component, not the driving force. There's tinkled ivories, rock-club air guitar moments, a genuine pop sensibility, camp theatre and high drama. Read our review of The Gospel here. Jenny Hval - blood bitch. Marissa Nadler - Strangers. Kemper Norton - Toll. Factory Floor - 25 Darren Hayman - Thankful Villages Vol. Kristoffer Lo - The Black Meat. Knifeworld - Bottled Out Of Eden.

John Cale - M: Stein Urheim - Strandebarm. If you enjoy The Quietus, please consider supporting what we do with a one-off or regular donation. If you love our features, news and reviews, please support what we do with a one-off or regular donation. Hit this link to find out more and keep on Black Sky Thinking.

As a wholly independent publication, we rely entirely on our ad bookings to keep The Quietus going. Please whitelist our site in order to continue to access The Quietus. Support The Quietus Make a Contribution. Info About The Quietus Facebook. It looks like you're using an adblocker. Bowie had looked into crowds across the world that bordered on hysteria. In Britain, there was structural damage done to several auditoria, and usually sedate Japanese audiences were whipped into a frenzy Angie Bowie narrowly escaped being arrested for inciting a near riot.

Bowie marvelled that English fans had copulated in the crowd. Bowie had relocated from a Haddon Hall that was increasingly besieged by fans to the more central 89 Oakley Street, a four-storey pleasure palace, with Burretti ensconced in the basement as his on-call tailor, a sunken living room, green-and-white eyeball chairs and countless hi-tech gadgets. But most of all he was raw material. It would be full of shameless quotes from the Stones canon. Bowie also befriended Ronnie Wood. Aladdin Sane wore its Stones influences overtly but it also pushed Bowie further into the avant garde: Diamond Dogs subsumed the Stones and Springsteen into dystopia, funk and increasingly electronic musical landscapes.

Electro-mechanical mellotrons had given 'Space Oddity' its disembodied ambience, and the song also featured the stylophone which Bowie advertised in the wake of its success. Bowie was now closer to Kensington High Street's Sombrero, aka Yours Or Mine, the gay discotheque with its perspex underlit multicolour dancefloor.

The Supremes dabbled with space-pop intros on 'Reflections'; southern soul auteurs like Swamp Dogg upholstered their recordings in novel musical settings. It also got conceptual. Soul was having a dialogue of sorts with rock, thanks to post-Beatles studio innovations and a vaguely conceptual flow from song to song. He was alert to its developments, some of which were mirroring his own — a hybridised musicality, an expansive, symphonic sweep with lush textures and concepts. And as Lester Bangs observed: Marc Bolan was inflecting T.

The endless socialising with rock royalty and the partying at the Sombrero gave the impression of total early s hedonism. From his own father Haywood Jones onwards, Bowie had always had a benign father figure guiding his music — Leslie Conn, Ralph Horton and, perhaps most of all, Kenneth Pitt. Bowie was almost banned from using Olympic Studios until unpaid Mainman bills were settled. Cocaine was then considered little more than music-biz fuel, vital for a workaholic like Bowie, but it quickly became a crutch.

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Unmoored from the Spiders, Bowie seized control of his music, producing the sessions, arranging the songs. Alan Parker helped out, beefing up 'Rebel Rebel', playing wah-wah on '', and bringing bassist Herbie Flowers from Blue Mink with him. The pair had also worked on Transformer , and Bowie had used them on flop single 'Holy Holy' the Spiders' superior remake cropped on the 'Diamond Dogs' single B-side in His playing gives the album much of its edge and character, an untutored template for all his post-Ronson guitarists: If Bowie was sinking into a depression, he retained a child's sense of wonder in the studio.

He had always thought about music in three dimensions. Now, armed with abandoned musical scraps and an interest in German expressionism, his music became even more visual, abetted by Mike Garson and his evocative keys. The German cinematic style could be one of Diamond Dogs ' deepest influences — heightened, heavily stylised, full of light and shadows, full of fractured characters.

And those vocals were his most potent yet, displaying an unforced swagger when the material required it 'Rebel', the title track , pulling and stretching at every word operatically elsewhere 'Sweet Thing', most of the second side. But Diamond Dogs was the first Bowie album since The Man Who Sold The World that seemed to use the studio as a musical instrument; it was a return to the Sgt Pepper -esque mood of experimentation that the recording had been approached with and that time constraints had prevented them from fully exploring.

By Visconti was at the end of his working relationship with Bolan. Visconti did a rough mix of the Diamond Dawgs tapes working-title spelling for Bowie at the wrong speed, he claims and Bowie loved it. The next day a Conran lorry pulled up with furniture and kitchen utensils and most of the album was mixed there, at Visconti's home studio, over glasses of claret. Burroughs already had something of a rock pedigree — his books had inspired the names of both Soft Machine and Steely Dan. A Story of The Dead had inspired Ziggy.

Early Bowie songs had a clear narrative thread the kitchen-sink realism of 'London Boys', the mythology of 'Wild Eyed Boy From Freecloud' but over time his songs became cryptic and fractured. Cut-ups seemed to be the perfect device for a mind that was already thinking in a fragmentary way. Nico needed heroin to slow her mind down, she once said. Bowie required a method that would harness his perpetual motion. On a wider level, it was the perfect narrative technique for a world that seemed to have none, an anti-narrative for an atomised late 20th century.

Even Hollywood, the bastion of mainstream entertainment, produced a cinema of a centre that cannot hold: Vietnam-singed road movies like Easy Rider where characters never reach their destination, films made with new-wave techniques ending in European-style ambiguity. So cut-ups seemed the logical device for an illogical world.



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As a response to psychedelia and the shattered hippy dream, some recovered in Laurel Canyon, analysing personal relationships in forensic detail, others embraced the virile certainties of heavy and progressive rock. The presentation was self-conscious, heightened like a pop-art twist on a familiar theme.

Bowie wrestled with concepts that mirrored the Orwellian preoccupations of post- Dark Side Floyd. Sometimes it feels like the influence flowed the other way too. Black holes threatened to swallow Roxy on their early work, black-hole jumpers were going to eat Ziggy; these were the perils of glamour in an age of glum forecasts, the instability of decadence in a century of violence something Ferry and Bowie, both enamoured with interwar culture, were well aware of. Throughout its satin attire would fray and tear. And it became less popular. A few weeks before Ziggy retired, Eno was ousted from Roxy Music; the foil and leopard print and boas followed soon after.

Lou Reed quickly ditched glam, refuting it with buzzkill rock opera Berlin. Both signalled a slate wiped clean to welcome in punk. Even louder perhaps were the proto-boyband confections of Bay City Rollers and Showaddywaddy; glam showbiz divested of all artifice and irony. Amid this fallout, somehow soaking it all up like a sponge, crawling across the slimy thoroughfare came the Diamond Dogs. A brief prelude, 'Future Legend' compresses Bowie past and present with the future shock of the icy synths, offering a glimmer of his lates horizons.

Wipe the patina of schlocky imagery from 'Future Legend' and you have a glimpse of the generation that would shape punk. What follows is an act of creative theft as larcenous as the scavengers of Hunger City. And the sideshow rolls on. Diamond Dogs piles up, ending in textural carnage: It is the great lost single of the mid s, left languishing outside the Top 20, but its doomsday bonhomie is the spirit of the age, shimmying in the face of encroaching catastrophe.

Like Depression-era entertainment, it faces the music and dances. The next three selections are best taken as one piece of music. Backwards tapes a mellotron? An exquisitely layered, emphatically urban torch song begins. Bowie croons in basso profundo before gliding into a higher register, wringing every drop of emotion from each word. A glimmer of hope arises in the second verse: But it proves fleeting.

The music conjures details from a movie screen — saxes ooze, smoke rises. The mood of elegant refinement is evocative of the vintage romances of Tin Pan Alley, and Bowie comes on like a gothic Johnny Ray, but here the gutter is in full view that scuzzy guitar runs below the cascading wall of sound. A grand, trashy solo is unleashed, like the glitter-strewn casualty Bolan offered on 'Teenage Dream'.

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Perhaps the triptych is best seen through the prism of 'The Waste Land', where a series of voices offer a panoramic survey of a disenchanted world. Then the scene shifts to 'Candidate'. The lights dim in Olympic Studios as Bowie prepares for another character and that martial Reign of Terror drumming heralds dread.