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Ike Yard, “Night After Night” (Superior Viaduct, 2020)

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Superior Viaduct’s Ike Yard reissue campaign continues (and presumably ends) with this, the band’s woefully underheard debut EP. Night After Night was recorded shortly after the band formed and was originally released on Belgium’s Crépuscule back in 1981. It has never been reissued before now, which means that it was never actually available domestically (except as an import) during Ike Yard’s brief initial lifespan. That is unfortunate, as it is objectively one of the better releases to emerge from NYC’s No Wave scene, even if it was completely eclipsed by Ike Yard’s classic full-length a year later. 

The difference between the two releases is quite an interesting and significant one, as Night After Night feels like the work of an actual human band with recognizable instruments rather than an audacious feat of stark, alienating production. On one level, the transformation between the two releases calls to mind pre-Martin Hannett Warsaw versus the iconic post-Hannett Joy Division, but the aesthetic itself is closer to a Public Image Ltd. homage by people who thought Jah Wobble and Keith Levene’s parts were the only bits worth saving.

It is fitting that I already mentioned Joy Division, as Peter Hook once saved an Ike Yard show at the Ukrainian National Home by stepping in as a replacement soundman (the venue’s own soundman was completely ruining the simmering subtlety of their sound). According to Stuart Argabright, the soundman had made it clear that he hated their band, yet I can easily imagine that achieving Ike Yard’s aesthetic of thick bass, buried vocals, hallucinatory guitar and synth textures, and austere, dub-inspired drumming in a live setting would be an exasperating challenge for anyone (particularly for someone unfamiliar with the band’s vision). Without the right balance of clarity, space, and visceral bass rumble, it is not hard to imagine Ike Yard’s unconventional songs falling completely flat, as they are more of a thoughtful, precarious architecture of complementary textures than anything that would pass for conventional music (melodies and hooks were very much anathema to the Ike Yard vision). 

Predictably, bassist Kenny Compton was already the star of the show even at this early stage, as his propulsive riffing is the bedrock of everything on Night After Night, though Argabright’s unusual, minimalist percussion played quite a significant role in shaping these songs too. That is especially true on the opening title piece, which is essentially just a driving bass line, a thumping kick drum groove, and a deadpan monologue from Argabright. That said, the contributions of guitarist Michael Diekmann and Fred Szymanski (synth) are considerably more prominent on this EP than they are the full-length. Admittedly, neither quite brings a unique voice to the opening salvo, but their playing gets significantly more compelling as the EP unfolds.

Obviously, I cannot fault Ike Yard for evolving into a considerably more distinctive and minimalist entity by the time they recorded their album for Factory, but it is worth noting that Night After Night‘s “Sense of Male” could easily have been the inspiration for a similarly great alternate direction. In it, the focus is shifted away from Compton’s bass line and onto snarls of guitar noise and eruptions of warped, siren-like synths. As such, it feels significantly more colorful and explosive than the seething, monochromatic fare to come, though Argabright’s austere, off-kilter percussion remains as unconventional as ever. 

Similarly stellar is “Motiv,” which marries a thick, biting bass groove with burbling synth tones that call to mind a hallucinatory jungle scene. Admittedly, “Motiv” lacks vocals, so it perhaps does not qualify as a fully formed song, but it is nevertheless an extremely appealing vamp. Argabright returns to the microphone for a strong closer though, as “Cherish” combines his bloodless, elliptical vocals with an insistent bass groove, slashes of guitar noise, and a chirping tour de force of unusual synth flourishes. That makes for a collision of aesthetics not commonly found elsewhere, approximating some sort of deep, fragmented psychedelia equally informed by industrial music and Jamaican dub. 

While I am not sure it quite scales the same impressive heights as the earlier “Sense of Male,” “Cherish” is an illustrative example of Ike Yard was such a singular entity: they were obviously listening to much cooler music than most of their peers and had an uncanny knack for assimilating disparate influences in appealing new ways. I suspect they probably had some very cool non-musical inspirations as well, given how dramatically and quickly they evolved.

Obviously, plenty of merely good or somewhat unusual releases are hailed as newly crucial “lost classics” these days, but Night After Night is the rare exception that has arguably earned such high praise. There is an asterisk though, as this EP went largely unheard upon its release, then was rendered nearly irrelevant by the full-length that followed. If Night After Night had had been better distributed and reached more ears in the US and UK during that brief window, I suspect most post-punk fans would have been playing it in heavy rotation along with their Gang of Four, Cabaret Voltaire, and Joy Division records, as it features a strong batch of songs and the band’s stark, brutalist, and post-apocalyptic broken funk was (and is) unique and visceral. Night-era Ike Yard were still a bit ahead of their time, of course, but they nevertheless sounded more or less like a good post-punk band comfortably within the bounds of the zeitgeist (perhaps akin to a menacing, subversive mirror-world version of A Certain Ratio). 

It is hard to imagine how Ike Yard’s career might have unfolded if they had stayed on that track, but the exceptional thing about Ike Yard is that they almost immediately jumped onto an even more fascinating and almost post-human vision with their LP, leaving Night After Night in a strange no-man’s land in which it suddenly resembled the Peel Sessions for a better album by a better band rather than a great, stand-alone debut in its own right. It deserved a better fate than that. At least it will now find itself in heavy rotation in my life four decades later as a somewhat Pyrrhic example of delayed cosmic justice. Obviously, if I could only have one Ike Yard album, it would still be the self-titled LP, but it is damn nice to now be able to alternate that with its almost-as-good predecessor.

Samples can be found here.

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Ike Yard (Superior Viaduct, 2020)

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Originally released back in 1982 on Factory America, Ike Yard’s debut full-length has been one of those rare records which rightfully lingers in the cultural consciousness as a very cool influence to reference, yet somehow remains perplexingly underheard. That is a damn shame and I hope this latest reissue from Superior Viaduct wakes some more people up to Ike Yard’s incredibly forward-thinking moment of white-hot inspiration, as these NYC No Wavers deserve to be every bit as revered as their similarly out-of-step peers Suicide. 

Granted, Suicide definitely wrote better songs than Ike Yard, but Ike Yard were on an entirely different trip altogether and their aesthetic has aged beautifully in the ensuing four decades. In fact, if some Brooklyn band released this exact album today, I am positive that it would be all over “Best of 2020” lists and it would not be because of retro nostalgia: Ike Yard perfected their strain of tough yet arty minimalism so spectacularly that it still feels cutting edge today. Obviously, shades of this foursome’s stark, bass-driven grooves can be found all over the darker, heavier side of contemporary techno, but that is not why this album deserves to be heard: it deserves to be heard because it still holds up as an absolutely killer album today.

The first time I heard this album (alternately known as A Fact A Second due to the cryptic cover art), I had a very hard time wrapping my head around the fact that Ike Yard was a full band rather than just one or two guys with some pedals, a drum machine, and a primitive sampler. Part of that is obviously due to the aggressively minimal nature of the music, as these six songs are so single-mindedly focused on the groove that everything else seems like an afterthought (I like to imagine that guitarist Michael Diekmann spent the bulk of his time during shows expectantly waiting to contribute a single string scrape or similarly non-musical bit of texture). Beyond that, however, it simply seems wildly improbable that four separate people could have possibly been on this same futuristic wavelength at once. 

It seems safe to say that Ike Yard were probably influenced by their contemporaries in the No Wave milieu and pioneering industrialists like Cabaret Voltaire, but those other artists feel self-consciously experimental in a way that Ike Yard does not: this album feels like an almost supernaturally assured artistic statement by a band that knew exactly what they wanted to do and executed that vision with surgical precision. These songs all feel chiseled to diamond-like perfection and deftly avoid anything that might feel dated, clumsy, derivative, or indulgent by today’s standards (or any standard, really). 

Viewed uncharitably, one could argue that Ike Yard achieved that feat by simply excising just about everything that makes music feel like music. In particular, vocalist Stuart Argabright seems especially devoted to that approach, as his rare contributions consist entirely of a few lines of cryptic, deadpan spoken word. Somehow, however, that all suits the band’s weirdly lurching and blurting robot funk perfectly. While other bands on Factory were awkwardly figuring out how white people could be plausibly funky, Ike Yard were already imagining what dance music might sound like in an entirely post-human world (and nailing it).

The centerpiece of the album (and probably of Ike Yard’s career as well) is the tensely simmering second piece, “Loss.” Over a stumbling off-kilter beat, percussive-sounding guitar harmonics, and a dubwise bass line, Argabright blankly delivers a monologue that fades in and out of focus amidst fitful snare eruptions and chopped, sputtering squalls of sampled voices. I am especially fond of the chopped voices, as it sounds like a strangled radio transmission is constantly threatening to overpower the song, yet keeps disintegrating before it can succeed. 

The other five songs could have probably benefited from a similar twist, but in general the grooves are muscular and alien enough to hold up without any kind of leftfield stab at a “hook.” The opening “M. Kurtz” fares especially well in that regard, as its shambling rhythm feels simultaneously ridiculous and brilliant, as it calls to mind a cartoon tuba jamming with a broken, disjointed drum machine pattern. Despite that unpromising foundation, the addition of Argabright’s mumbled vocals and Kenny Compton’s insistent bass line somehow transform those seemingly disparate parts into something that seems weirdly cool and purposeful. 

My other favorite piece on the album is “Kino,” but the only real difference between the better pieces on the album and the more forgettable ones is merely the degree to which the band flesh out their skittering and stumbling grooves. “Kino” features some moaning, atmospheric guitars; other songs are essentially just bass, drum machine, and mumbled vocals. To Ike Yard’s eternal credit, however, that machine-like repetition coupled with splashes of snare drum violence is usually enough to make a compelling song, even if the band seemed to have an almost willfully self-sabotaging approach to rhythm: aside from “NCR,” every single song feels like a deliberate attempt to conjure up a groove so erratic, bizarre, and awkward that non-spasmodic dancing is nearly impossible.

Lamentably, Ike Yard broke up in 1983 before they got a chance to record a second album, which actually seems entirely appropriate to me: after distilling post-punk to its most muscular and stark extreme, it is hard to imagine where they could have gone next. Also of note: being this crazily far ahead of the curve tends to be financially ruinous, though the band must have had a significant enough following to attract the attention of Factory (Ike Yard was their first American signing). 

There is a happy ending though, as more than two decades later, three-fourths of the original band reformed for a considerably more prolific second act (including several remix EPs featuring fans like Regis and Tropic of Cancer). Nevertheless, this original full-length still calls to mind the famous Brian Eno quote about The Velvet Underground & Nico (not many people bought that album, but the few who did all started bands of their own). It also improbably reminds me of a review I once read of Prong’s impressively ugly Beg to Differ that proclaimed that it sounded like a scarier version of Metallica that got into beer bottle-eating contests with skinheads. 

Thankfully, Ike Yard sounds nothing like any era of Metallica, but this album begs a similar analogy: this is what Jamaican dub would probably sound like if it had emerged from a bombed-out, post-apocalyptic squat in Berlin rather than sunny Kingston. It may not be a perfect album, as its hookless monochromatic minimalism inherently makes all the songs sound similar to one another, but none of that matters because the aesthetic itself is so singular and wonderful. Few albums deserve a high-profile reissue and a chance at a second life as much as this one.

Samples can be found here.

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Sarah Davachi, “Pale Bloom” (Superior Viaduct/W. 25th, 2019)

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Sarah Davachi’s tireless campaign to subvert expectations with each fresh release shows no signs of slowing down, as the label-hopping composer’s latest opus partially revisits her formative years as an aspiring pianist. While it would be fair to characterize Pale Bloom as “neo-classical” and a logical progression from 2018’s Gave in Rest, Davachi has never been content with pastiche, reverent homage, or returning to previously covered territory. 

Instead, she seems like an artist increasingly unfixed in time, drawing from the past to give her forward-thinking experiments in harmonies and overtones a foundation that feels temporally ambiguous and self-assuredly independent of contemporary music trends. While there is not any particular piece on Pale Bloom that makes it tower above any of its predecessors, it is unquestionably a uniformly strong collection of new work that studiously avoids the familiar and hints at intriguing new directions to come.

I sometimes feel like I bring up Erik Satie too much, as his work is an enticingly easy and effective reference point for simple, melodic piano miniatures. To be fair, however, he definitely cast quite a large and long-lasting shadow, as his style was accessibly anti-virtuosic and has aged extremely well. Consequently, it yielded a hell of a lot of descendants and it is hopeless to pretend otherwise. Davachi is not a particularly pure example of those spiritual children here, as the mood of the opening “Perfumes I” is a bit more elegiac and loosely structured than classic Satie fare, but she certainly shares the Parisian iconoclast’s penchant for elegant simplicity, space, and unhurried languor. 

While that aesthetic is a fundamentally likable one, the true beauty of “Perfumes I” unexpectedly blossoms forth around its midpoint, as Davachi’s melancholy sonata plunges into considerably more compelling harmonic territory when backwards melodies start swelling and streaking through the piece. The two other parts of the “Perfumes” trilogy that follow are similarly grounded in a meditative, loosely structured procession of minor chords, yet each offers its own particular twist on that theme. 

The more ambitious and unexpected of the two is definitely “Perfumes II,” as intertwining and overlapping classical vocals twist and float over the piece in a kind of sensual lament. It is a hauntingly melancholy piece, but the mood lightens a bit for the more modest third act, as the tender somberness of the piano is warmed by some rich organ drones. Sadly, Davachi did not have a third rabbit to unexpectedly pull out of her hat, but “Perfumes III” is quite lovely nonetheless, as the sustained organ tones blur together into some gorgeously shifting harmonies.

The album’s second half continues that neo-classical bent, but takes it in quite a different direction, as the epic “If It Pleased Me To Appear To You Wrapped In This Drapery” is built from a shifting bed of sustained tones. It recalls some of the more experimental and abstract fare from Gave in Rest, but it is a considerably more expansive and sophisticated iteration of that aesthetic, as a slow-motion flow of differing timbres smears and bleeds together to yield a host of oscillations and uncomfortable dissonances. The album’s description curiously mentions Eliane Radigue and La Monte Young as touchstones, which makes some sense given that “Drapery” is a longform minimalist drone piece. 

However, the overarching mood is a very far cry from the work of either, as Davachi uses a battery of strings and other instruments to weave something uniquely timeless, impressionistic, and uncomfortably queasy. The overall effect seems akin to experiencing a visionary glimpse of transcendence at a medieval mass, then having it quickly curdle into a sickly and nightmarish grotesquerie. As such, it is quite an interesting (if difficult) piece that is far darker than what I have grown to expect from Davachi. I suspect it is entirely possible that future occult historians will point to “Drapery” as the first hint that she had begun to fall prey to an unusually evil and tenacious bout of demonic possession.

Of Pale Bloom‘s four pieces, I am most fond of the comparatively modest “Perfumes I,” as it is a masterfully understated triumph of elegant simplicity and ingenious symmetry. However, it is definitely the more ambitious “Perfumes II” and “Drapery” that make this album a memorably singular entry in Davachi’s discography. While the latter could perhaps portend the dawning of a new phase of malevolent minimalism, it is the former that offers the most intriguing possibilities, particularly since Eduard Artemiev’s score for Solaris is name-checked as one of the album’s inspirations. I do not particularly see much overt similarity to that myself, though Pale Bloom certainly shares some of the actual film’s sense of existential dread and ghostly unreality. 

That said, “Perfumes II” does seem like the kind of strange and striking work that an iconoclastic filmmaker might be drawn to (like Brady Corbet was to Scott Walker’s oeuvre), so it is quite possible that Davachi might have a bright future as a soundtrack auteur. Perhaps not though, as her career is increasingly characterized by restless flux and creative evolution. As such, it is difficult to imagine her staying in one place long enough for her vision to ever become a tightly defined and easily graspable one. Fortunately, the silver lining to that is that trend is a steady stream of inspired reinventions and bold stylistic experiments like this one.

Samples can be found here.

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Cindy Lee, “Act of Tenderness” (W. 25th/Maple Death (2018))

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A month ago, I had absolutely no idea who Patrick Flegel was, but the buzz surrounding Superior Viaduct’s Cindy Lee reissue series piqued my interest and Flegel quickly became one of my new favorite people. In a past life, Flegel was the frontman of Canadian indie-rock band Women, who famously imploded in a Halloween-costumed, guitar-smashing onstage meltdown in 2010. Soon afterwards, Flegel began dressing in drag and his “diva alter-ego” Cindy Lee was born. Sometimes a full band, sometimes a solo act, Cindy Lee has a strikingly guileless, idiosyncratic, and oft-disturbing aesthetic that almost feels like outsider art. On Act of Tenderness, Flegel’s vision focuses primarily on intimately and eerily channeling ’60s girl-group pop through a hissing and hallucinatory fog of melancholy. Some songs certainly work better than others, but when Cindy hits the mark, it feels like a memory-haunted chanteuse has stepped directly out of David Lynch’s imagination and become actual flesh and blood.

I was lured into Act of Tenderness by the tender and hauntingly lovely would-be single “Power and Possession” (as well as the deliciously weird cover art), but I was truly and wonderfully unprepared for the depth and intensity of Flegel’s commitment to his alternate persona. While there are a couple of other gorgeously eerie pop confections hidden amidst these twelve songs, the album as a whole resembles a fractured and lysergic series of glimpses into a complex, lonely, and darkness-shrouded life. As such, it is much more than an album. Flegel has essentially created an entire life and it is quite a complex and compelling one: Act of Tenderness feels like the disjointed audio diary of a tormented pop genius in a fog of pain-killers slowly losing her mind in a series of depressing motel rooms. 

Not every day is bad though, even if it seems like Cindy has been extremely unlucky in love. In her better moods, Cindy conjures up songs like the aforementioned “Power and Possession,” which is an understated and swooningly beautiful swirl of heartbreaking melodies, ghostly swathes of backing vocals, and a few simple chords. Also: plenty of hiss and reverb. Normally, I have a bit of a hostile attitude towards vocalists who always blur their vocals into oblivion with effects, but Flegel is a striking exception, as the hazy lo-fi aesthetic is pitch-perfect for this project: it feels like Lee is always singing her heavenly, heartfelt songs into a crappy tape deck alone in her room and all the veil of hiss and murk makes it all feel like a bleary half-dream.

That unsettling feeling of being inside a flickering and precarious dream is further heightened by some of the album’s distinctly non-pop moments, like “New Romance” and “Quit Doing Me Wrong,” both of which sound troublingly broken and wrong. “New Romance” in particular is especially unnerving, as it sounds like Cindy is blissfully and obliviously recording a sweet and sincere vocal track over blown-out, gnarled chaos and squalls of feedback, far too fucked-up to ever notice that all the levels are completely wrong and that the “song” is a flaming wreck.

As disturbed-sounding as it is, however, “New Romance” still has the ghost of a pop song at its core.The shrieking, strangled, and visceral nightmare of “Bonsai Garden,” on the other hand, sounds like a full-on psychotic meltdown that would feel confrontational even by Throbbing Gristle standards. “Miracle of the Rose” is similarly bananas, resembling a very cool and ritualistic Eastern-influenced psych-rock jam…but with all of the guitars cranked up and layered into an oceanic roar of grinding horror. Those two incredibly striking pieces also illustrate something else quite fascinating about Act of Tenderness: Cindy seems quite fond of The East and also seems to occasionally dissociate from her persona entirely (Cindy the diva would not be particularly into menacingly noisy psychedelia, nor would she ever sing in such a low, male-sounding voice). 

Some of the other notable tears in Cindy’s precarious, kimono-clad reality are considerably less hostile though, as “Operation” sounds like a hypnagogic New Wave hit, while the opening title piece songs like a ravaged 78 of an anachronistic torch song that could have been recorded in 1930s Singapore or Morocco. Even the poppiest moments can be quite bizarre, however, as “What I Need” sounds like girl-group pop played with gloopy analog synthesizers and somnambulantly sung through a malfunctioning microphone. One of Flegel’s truly inspired twists on Act of Tenderness is that almost everything is disorientingly “off” in some way or steeped in some kind of vague dread, yet he continually finds new ways for that wrongness to creep into his work. 

His greatest moment is probably the deeply sensuous and sexy “The Last Train’s Come and Gone,” which takes a wonderfully languorous groove and a gorgeous guitar hook and marries them to a vaguely Asian melody and an increasingly haunted-sounding backdrop (it sounds a ghoulishly pitch-shifted, spectral, and distressed tape of a Phil Spector-style wall of sound).

Notably, if I had written about this album a few weeks ago, I probably would have probably written a very different review: my initial impression was that Flegel had written a handful of achingly lovely pop songs, then padded out the rest of the album with noisy, lo-fi filler. After essentially living inside this album for the last week, however, I now grasp that the uglier and harsher moments are an absolutely integral part of a rather brilliant artistic vision. The pop songs are certainly great, but a full album of them would be a cavalcade of pretty pastiches rather than what Act of Tenderness actually is: a wildly experimental and disturbing plunge into an absorbing and fully formed world that is half dream and half deeply phantasmagoric nightmare (Flegel’s very own Mulholland Drive, if you will). I cannot think of anyone else who is so strikingly adept at both unleashing harrowing, noise-damaged weirdness and crafting sublime pop hooks. I think I want to write Patrick Flegel a gushing fan letter now. This was easily one of the best albums to come out in 2015 and now it is likely to be the single best reissue of 2018. I am properly floored.