Label: Beta-lactam Ring Records(US)/Beta-lactam Ring Records(UK) Format: CD
If this recording of Edward Ka-Spel and Hero Wouters live in concert in Amsterdam’s noted/notorious Paradiso Club in May 1985 still sounds weird sixteen years later, just imagine what it must have sounded like then. Under a throbbing, scuttling digital percussion send off in post-Kosmische rhythm loops, surrounded by a whirl of effected keyboards and analogue lo-fi electronics, the contrast to the underground, let alone mainstream vocal synth music emerging at the time is still remarkable.
As Ka-Spel’s alternately disturbing and charismatic voice sweeps across the gamut of possibility the keyboard and drum machine offered in the mid-Eighties, several moods are proposed, offered, run through. Light and darkness of human emotions flow from the mournful optimism of “Even Now” to the duet with Bianca Wouters on “Hotel Blanc” where the misery of a lost and lonely man descends into spooked electronic treatments and babies crying. Low fidelity is not only a result of the relatively primitive technology, live sound and casette source, but is somehow redolent of an era at once so far away and seemingly close, when the echoes of Brecht, Dub, Minimalist electronic experiments and Situationism were a little fresher than the historical position in the post-Modern panoply they occupy today.
As a record of how the solo Ka-Spel material was performed live, Angelos Obscuros is a treasure trove of spot sound effects and crazy passages where the carnivalesque electonics and sampled song snippets collide in a manic tango or an immersive whispered existentialist story, roll over and unform themselves into a (sometimes even bouncy) song. There are moments of near Avant-Synth Poppery like “Spontaneous Human Combustion”, where the guest violin of Patrick Paganini floats in glory over strange pre-Housey keyboard stabs and in the distant echo-drenched arpeggiations of “Black Zone”. This is characteristic of his own material even more than of the Legendary Pink Dots performances at the time (and now) which tend to be relatively more song-oriented. At the end, before the bizarre string-led observation of techno-prurience of “Love In A Plain Brown Envelope”, Edward asks hoarsly “Where have I gone? Ah, there I am”, and then proceeds to scream and moan around the tale of sexual dispassion and more-than-a-little-bit-Moroder synth pusles as Paganini strikes down with his bow to accompany fetishes for grannies and the antelopes of Lapland in a track The Dots still play live from time to time.
With it’s long passages of hallucinatory collage and demented crooning, this session reeks of the atmosphere of how it was to be truly deviant in a Europe gone mad with the influences of free markets and dictatorial leaders; the escape from one cruise missile and privatisation nightmare into a personal paranoia of sound and despair banished by being made audible is almost tangible.
-Antron S. Meister-
