1 - Back & Forth I (Jan 1984) [cassette]
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1 - Back & Forth I (Jan 1984) [cassette]
by Hobb Mon 12 Dec 2016 - 15:27
Chronology
![1 - Back & Forth I (Jan 1984) [cassette] B&f](http://home.earthlink.net/~coreygoldberg/b&f.jpg)
![1 - Back & Forth I (Jan 1984) [cassette] Backman](http://home.earthlink.net/~coreygoldberg/backman.jpg)
Illustrations are from the 1974 book UFOs Past, Present, and Future by Robert Emenegger
cEvin Key: "actual artists accounts of alien lifeforms who may have visited this planet and were sighted by many earthlings."
Linear Notes:
Recorded 11/83 - 1/84 Series #1
Engineered, mixed, and produced by cEVIN at Brainstorm Room
Except 1 [Sleeping Beast] engineered by Rave at Mush Room VBCC 21/1/84
Thanx to The Monk & Bear for their contributions,
N.E. & P.C., L.P.D.s for their influences and hello's
B.L. and Friends for the support.
TS for everything else.
Kontakt at 58-777 Burrard St.
The likely interpretation of the initials are:
N.E. & P.C., L.P.D.s = Nocturnal Emissions, Portion Control, Legendary Pink Dots
B.L = Bill Leeb
TS = ?
BACK
A1 Sleeping Beast
A2 K-9
A3 Quiet Solitude
FORTH
B1 The Pit
B2 Dead Of Winter
B3 A.M. / Meat Flavour
B4 Edge Of Insanity
- Summer to November 1983 - much of Back and Forth is recorded
- ??December 1983 - Skinny Puppy officially forms??
- Jan 21 1984 - 'Sleeping Beast' recorded in Mushroom Studios with Rave as producer
- Early 1984 - Back and Forth (Series 1) is released in an edition of 35 copies - 15 hand-dubbed, 20 high-speed dubbed.
- February 1984 - Skinny Puppy's first live performance at the Unovis art gallery. IIV's monitors are used as speakers.
Illustrations are from the 1974 book UFOs Past, Present, and Future by Robert Emenegger
cEvin Key: "actual artists accounts of alien lifeforms who may have visited this planet and were sighted by many earthlings."
Linear Notes:
Recorded 11/83 - 1/84 Series #1
Engineered, mixed, and produced by cEVIN at Brainstorm Room
Except 1 [Sleeping Beast] engineered by Rave at Mush Room VBCC 21/1/84
Thanx to The Monk & Bear for their contributions,
N.E. & P.C., L.P.D.s for their influences and hello's
B.L. and Friends for the support.
TS for everything else.
Kontakt at 58-777 Burrard St.
The likely interpretation of the initials are:
N.E. & P.C., L.P.D.s = Nocturnal Emissions, Portion Control, Legendary Pink Dots
B.L = Bill Leeb
TS = ?
BACK
A1 Sleeping Beast
A2 K-9
A3 Quiet Solitude
FORTH
B1 The Pit
B2 Dead Of Winter
B3 A.M. / Meat Flavour
B4 Edge Of Insanity
Last edited by Hobb on Tue 13 Dec 2016 - 23:03; edited 4 times in total
Hobb- Admin
- Posts : 1671
Join date : 2015-03-31
Age : 49
Re: 1 - Back & Forth I (Jan 1984) [cassette]
by Hobb Mon 12 Dec 2016 - 16:19
Origin of the band
cEVIN Key wrote:"We used to hang out in this one place, this guy had a couple of keyboards and a drum machine and we were all hanging out one day, and we were high. [...] We sat down and composed this little fast thing. I knew how to operate most of the stuff from helping out with another series of bands that were progressively using more and more keyboards and stuff. But I wasn't really finding that I was getting anything out of it [...] At the time I was working with a band that was a little too commercial for my own liking and I was just revolting with this sort of anti-music.
At the time Ogre was with us there and he started making some verbal noises along with us, I said, sounds great, lets put it down, then the next morning I sort of woke up and I looked at this tape and it had the name Skinny Puppy written on it already because the song we had done was life as seen through the eyes of a dog. That was the concept for the song, oh boy what a great concept, how dogs interpret life."
Vancouver 'zine Convulsion [April 1991]
https://www.waste.org/~skumm/convulsion.html
Key wrote:"We originally started doing it as anti-music because we were just really sick of everything else that we were exposed to," Key explains. "We were hanging out in art galleries late at night and wanted something more intense to listen to, so we had to sort of make our own stuff."
"Skinny Puppy: Still Defying Definition." Scene, 28 May 1992
http://www.litany.net/interviews/scene92.html
"It started out in 1983 as a joke [...] especially compared to the kind of stuff we were listening to [but it] couldn't have been much worse [than the European underground noise bands that influenced them]. It was "just for the noises with no song structure."
SKINNY PUPPY - CANINE CATERWAULING By Perry Stern
https://www.waste.org/~skumm/Canine.html
Ogre wrote:"[cEVIN] was looking for something to break out of [IIV], and maybe I was it"
Assimilate: A Critical History of Industrial Music, p. 172
"The band started out in December of 1983. It sort of started out as an accident, we did our first song and the audience in Vancouver was very supportive. It started out as a result too similar tastes, we were friends a few years before that. Similar aspirations to continue to do something different and to become more or less what we have, the accident sort of created something, a spot of energy that made us want to continue on."
Power For Living, 17 December 1985
http://www.litany.net/interviews/pfl85.html
First Live Show
KEY wrote:cEvin Key explains, "It was at a speakeasy art gallery without any art, just a bunch of party people. It was at a place called Unovis. Our friend who had the key to the place went away that day, so we broke in and set up. We went to see Alien Sex Fiend play, and then at three a.m. we played to about 300 people, including Alien Sex Fiend. It was the birth of the live SP."
http://exclaim.ca/music/article/skinny_puppy-every_dog_has_its_day
Reed's History of Industrial Music continues "as they took the makeshift stage they were peaking on MDA, a hallucinogenic amphetamine."
MDA is 3,4-methylenedioxy-N-ethylamphetamine. Erowid lists it as 'Euphoric Empathogen; Stimulant; Phenethylamine', it was was first synthesized in 1910 and appeared on the recreational drug scene in the 1960s. MDA both releases and inhibits the reuptake of serotonin, norepinephrine and dopamine.
The name UNOVIS refers to an avant-garde Soviet art collective who the appeared right after WWI. They wrote Futurist opera and signed paintings with a black square. I cannot find out anymore information about the venue.
![1 - Back & Forth I (Jan 1984) [cassette] 250px-Kazimir_Malevich%2C_1915%2C_Black_Suprematic_Square%2C_oil_on_linen_canvas%2C_79.5_x_79.5_cm%2C_Tretyakov_Gallery%2C_Moscow](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/dc/Kazimir_Malevich%2C_1915%2C_Black_Suprematic_Square%2C_oil_on_linen_canvas%2C_79.5_x_79.5_cm%2C_Tretyakov_Gallery%2C_Moscow.jpg/250px-Kazimir_Malevich%2C_1915%2C_Black_Suprematic_Square%2C_oil_on_linen_canvas%2C_79.5_x_79.5_cm%2C_Tretyakov_Gallery%2C_Moscow.jpg)
The Black Square (1915) by Malevich the director of the UNIVOS council during the early 1920s
'Univos on a stick' is a song on Back & Forth 2 that compiles Back & Forth 1 with other material from that era (1981 - 1984)
ASF wrote:Nik Fiend: When we went to the US the other bands that had preceded us were Sisters Of Mercy & New Order, both of those had a certain level of commercial success & positive exposure in the media.
Mrs Fiend: In a way, it's not surprising that it's all continued on from those days. We met up with Skinny Puppy at a festival in Germany & Ogre was saying how they'd seen us in 1984 & that influenced them to start up a band? So no doubt those American bands are picking up stuff from them, if not directly from us, & so it goes on, influences travel out.
http://www.clashmusic.com/features/nocturnal-emissions-alien-sex-fiend
I highly recommend that interview with Alien Sex Fiend. Alien Sex Fiend is England's Alice Cooper - and he wore this debt openly by covering and sampling Cooper's songs. The interview reveals Mr and Mrs Fiend as open, humourous grandparents of Goth.
- ASF QUOTES:
First are foremost, where did the inspiration for the horror imagery come from?
Nik Fiend: That's what I've always been into. I've always incorporated something of that nature into my musical excursions from the outset, even pre-Alien Sex Fiend with my punk bands like Demon Preacher & The Demons, we did a photo session in Highgate Cemetery way back in 1979. Since I was a kid I was fascinated by horror stuff. The film "Plague Of the Zombies" was on TV & I shouldn't have been watching it, I was only a tiny little fella, I sneaked down the stairs to look at it through the bannisters & suddenly these dead people started popping out of the ground. I was intrigued from that moment onwards! Later, as a teenager, I saw Christopher Lee's Dracula & other classic Hammer horrors, later on I got to see Bela Lugosi & Boris Karloff films, but anything of that nature interests me, the imagery & so on. And not just films, but comics too, I could be here for ages listing them all!
Mrs Fiend : Even before ASF, Nik & I would go to see late night films, & then when we discovered that The Scala in King's Cross (London) was running old black & white horror & science fiction movies like "Creature From the Black Lagoon", "Forbidden Planet", "Freaks", "Plan 9 From Outer Space", we went regularly.
Nik Fiend : & it wasn't too expensive to get in either! Cos TV was shit in those days. TV shut down by midnight, there was nothing like a horror TV channel, there was no DVD ...
Mrs Fiend : Amazing innit kids??!! Even video was fairly new in the early 80s, tapes were expensive & anyway a lot of that stuff wasn't available to buy. Later on we knew people who could get hold of pirate copies of the "Evil Dead" & "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" so we got to see those on well dodgy tapes before we could buy proper versions, which we still have now.
Would you say the Batcave was melting pot for the darker post-punk and industrial genres?
Mrs Fiend: Yes, but it was in the time well before the term "industrial" was in use.
Nik Fiend: It was certainly a melting pot of creative people of all sorts - artists, DJs, toasters (rappers), bands, photographers, fashion designers, artists, every type of creative person hung out there & everyone was looking for "something different".
Mrs Fiend: It's like punk was before it, there seemed to be "something in the air" in general & people were looking for what was going to happen next.
Nik Fiend: We linked up with various groups of people as we went around on tour in the UK, people who were disconnected like us, people who were into what we were doing. It was a gathering of misfits really, all with the same attitude. We got to know each other & it all spread out. A lot of punks & psychobilly people were into us as well, they liked The Cramps & us.
Aside from yourself what other groups do your personally feel used electronics and synths in the scene to really push the envelope?
Nik Fiend: There was no scene that sounded like ASF really, we were one band out of the Batcave bands, the other bands sounded different to us.
Although we were in it, in some respects we were apart from it. Some may have had a synth in their set up but they sounded more "rock" or "glam rock" to us, & although we love that stuff we sounded different! The only band at that time that sounded like us was us.
Mrs Fiend: I think it's the same now!
Nik Fiend : I think we were & are more akin to The Velvet Underground doing "Sister Ray", in that a song went on for ages, explored different areas & no-one was quite sure who was making what noise! (Laughing) Everything blended into everything else.
Mrs Fiend: The electronics side was very new back then, & there weren't that many contemporary bands to look at, maybe Bauhaus & Killing Joke, who had both sort of "made it" by then. But electronically Suicide were a bigger influence...
Nik Fiend: They were ground breakers, & they went against the grain. Tuxedo Moon's "Room With A View" & Cabaret Voltaire's "Nag, Nag, Nag" were 2 others that spring to mind..
Mrs Fiend: We were taking influences from a very wide range of stuff, we would listen to everything from classical to Iggy Pop & The Stooges. So we brought in a whole load of disparate elements into ASF. When we heard stuff like Depeche Mode it sounded very light weight, though I like their later stuff like "Personal Jesus" but that's way heavier than they were early on.
Nik Fiend: New Order, even Sisters Of Mercy were quite light ...
Mrs Fiend: Especially at the bottom end - ooh er missus! (Laughing) & though we liked some of their stuff we were heavier.
Nik Fiend: & we liked it that way. When we first went to New York in 1983 we found that a song like our "Lips Can't Go" was more akin to what was happening on the underground radio station - the original Kiss FM. They used to play mega-mixes by various DJs, we even heard early Run DMC & Grandmaster Flash & that sounded like what we were already doing.
Mrs Fiend: "Forbidden Planet" & other sci-fi movies or the original 60s Dr Who theme were influential. We weren't hearing anyone else doing what we were doing.
Hobb- Admin
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Age : 49
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