album // Rhythmicon
If the liner notes for this
release are to be believed, 'John Came' 'lives
in North London and is married with two children, and presently
earns a living composing and teaching guitar'. Rhythmicon
was written and co-produced by Came and 'Nick Cope',
a member of the electronic group 'Pnin'.
I use inverted commas for the names above since
Rhythmicon is believed to be the work of David
Baker and Simon Leonard, better known
as I Start Counting, Fortran 5
and Komputer. If it wasn't for Rhythmicon being
listed among the releases by those other three Leonard / Baker guises
in the 2001 Mute Catalogue, I'd have probably been none
the wiser. The photos - of 'Came' - on the front and inlay is neither
Baker nor Leonard, so goodness knows who that is. And the meticulously
prepared biography is clearly phony also. I mean, Came riding a
Honda motorcycle across Australia after he left the mounted police?
Telling us about his sporting hobbies? This is clearly a piss-take
of these usually very dry sleeve comments.
Initially a rumour circulated that Rhythmicon was
the work of Erasure's Vince Clarke.
Others speculated that it might be a Renegade Soundwave
spin-off. Even now, listening to Rhythmicon, the I Start
Counting / Fortran 5 connection somehow seems remote; but Rhythmicon
was released in 1995, by which time Fortran 5 had evolved from dance-inflected
leftfield pop oddness to Avocado Suite's electronica experimentations
and Komputer's Kraftwerk-revering sound was still
a little way off into the future. If Rhythmicon were to
expressed as a mathematical formula it would be: Fortran 5's insousiance
+ Komputer's icy retro electronics = Rhythmicon. The CD
is packaged in a fairly uninteresting sleeve bearing the subtitle
'systems / atmospherics' which rather makes this appear like the
album is part of some sort of academic electronic music series.
The rhythmicon, an early electronic instrument designed
by Léon Theremin, was the first rhythm generator (the predecessor
to what would become the drum machine), and relied on a arithmetically-derived
system involving light being filtered through holes in a series
of spinning discs and photoreceptors. Theremin completed the first
rhythmicon in 1931, some fifty years before mainstream pop cottoned
on to the wonder of the electronic beat via influential albums by
Soft Cell, Human League and Depeche Mode. Sometimes
the pace of progress isn't as fast as we'd like to think.
All of which, while historically important in the
genesis of electronic music, is pretty irrelevant to this release.
Only three of Theremin's rhythmicon instruments were every made
and as well-connected as Leonard / Baker proved themselves to be
in Fortran 5, I doubt those connections could have feasibly led
to actually getting their mits on one of the three. No, this is
more of an hommage to the 'idea' of an instrument without which
electronic music wouldn't be quite what it is today.
The music itself could be described as pleasant,
consisting of warm analogue synth arpeggiations and layer upon layer
of rich tones. Melodies drift through, but only because of those
layers of burbling rhythms. It has an almost 'classical' sound,
befitting the nature of an instrument created during an era where
middle class concert hall tastes still veered toward the traditional.
(One of the pieces by principal user and co-designer of the instrument,
Henry Cowell, was titled Rhythmicana : Concerto For Rhythmicon
And Orchestra.) At times it reminds me of Synergy, aka New
Jersey's Larry Fast whose Seventies electronic releases, to me,
have a similar sound. Where the tracks don't rely on specific overlapping
arpeggios, such as the cute 'Transit Authority', what's revealed
is a delicate and mostly serene take on instrumental electronic
music. My personal favourite is the spacey, absorbing dark electronics
of 'Ink Tank', complete with robotic voices; perhaps I like it because
it sounds far darker than some of the other tracks here. Elsewhere
the John Carpenter sountrack-esque 'Coffin Filler' predates Zombie
Zombie's 'updating' of the likes of 'Escape From New York's paranoia
by nearly twenty years; likewise the urgent, edgy, cloying not-quite-thud
of 'Nitrogen Narcosis'.
As on those pieces, at times Leonard / Baker's more
expansive electronic reference points start to drift through. The
eleven-minute 'Yellow', with its simple melody, ambient atmospheres,
stop-start beat and glitchy sound wouldn't have sounded amiss on
Luke Slater's Seventh Plain's My Wise Yellow
Rug; meanwhile the bewildered voice intoning the word 'piano!'
and what sounds like children's voices in the distance link this
back to Fortran 5's leftfield humour.
'Yellow' is something of an exception, length-wise,
as most tracks clock in under three minute mark. With the exception
of some richly dark moments it's mostly an easy on the ear and pretty
polite strand of truly old-school electronica, relying more on the
richness of the tones themselves than the detuned beats and fractured
non-melodies that were becoming basic electronic music reference
points at around this time. Fans of Komputer will especially enjoy
this early foray into analogue-leaning retro-futurism by Leonard
/ Baker, as will anyone who yearns for the days of Proggy walls
of unwieldy modular synths. It's a beautiful oddity in the Leonard
/ Baker back catalogue.
If indeed it really was by them of course...
cd:
1. Root
2. Heavenly Clean
3. Yellow
4. Transit Authority
5. Hapsburg Chin
6. Mosaic
7. Ink Tank
8. Coffin Filler
9. On The Reef
10. Nitrogen Narcosis
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