Bowery Electric - From drone music to the Bristol beat

Bowery Electric formed toward the end of 1993 in New York from the meeting of Martha Schwendener and Lawrence Chandler, the latter a collaborator of composer Philip Glass and a former student of LaMonte Young. Joining them in the early part of their career was also Michael Johngren on drums for live sessions and recordings, but Bowery Electric are essentially a duo.

In its initial intentions, the group set out to follow the musical coordinates being mapped out within the so-called "shoegazing" melting pot, which, following the benchmark set by My Bloody Valentine's "Loveless", was giving rise to a fertile and creative music scene that blended, at various levels, noise-rock, dream-pop, psychedelia and drone music (bringing together groups quite different from one another but united by certain aesthetic and sonic choices). Bowery Electric's first performance took place as early as January 1994, followed by several shows across the United States and the release of a few small, self-produced singles on their own independent label, Hi-Fidelity.

The American duo's adventure begins its first chapter with an EP titled Drop, which announces itself with a dark, dilated and ethereal noise/drone sound, seasoned with disorienting effects and hazy ambient touches,

The band's sound aligns itself with shoegazers like Seefeel, Spacemen 3 and Loop, with a touch of the lo-fi rock of Pavement. In terms of composition and arrangement, the material - mainly through the influence of Glass's work - is expanded and stretched out into long, alienating drones. Essentially, then, what we find are cascades of reverberated distortion, repetitive and obsessive structures, and a cadenced, repetitive drumbeat that keeps marking out the rough atmosphere of the tracks. The vocals are almost imperceptible, a sporadically whispered chant that slips in as an occasional backdrop to the songs, whose true core is the acidic repetition of thick, saturated walls of distortion. Both Chandler and Schwendener trade off on vocal lines, lending a barely perceptible touch of variation.

All of this shows interesting ideas on the debut EP, but it still struggles to find a personality of its own. If anything, the tracks come across mostly as monotonous (and, over time, tiresome) rehashes of the most characteristic clichés of the artists who inspire Bowery Electric. The guitar drones aim to build atmosphere, but unfortunately offer no original emotional insight or attempts at minimalist innovation.

The opening title track is a melancholic but irritatingly redundant unspooling of intermittent basslines, caustic riffs and distorted walls of sound, occasionally broken up by Martha's timid vocal interjections. "Let Me Down" carries on in the same vein with more conviction and fewer surprises; and "Head On Fire" recycles it repetitively. Predictably, "Only Sometimes" continues in the same vein, insisting on this litany of layered distortion for a full 7 agonizing minutes.

An still-unripe work, in short, that doesn't yet show the best of what Bowery Electric were capable of.

In the autumn of 1994, however, Kranky were pleasantly struck by the band's musical offering and gave them a contract to record a full-length.

And so, in 1995, the real debut arrived with the self-titled Bowery Electric. The album was widely praised by critics, but in truth the attempt, unfortunately, was only half successful and still wasn't a masterpiece. On one hand, it's a strongly dense and atmospheric work, minimalist in style but more ambitious in painting soundscapes with a tense mood streaked with spatial visions, chilling, anguished sensations, or hazy dreamlike fragments. From this point of view, the progress made since Drop is remarkable and already shows a more mature band, more aware of its own atmospheric capabilities. On the other hand, it's a work still weighed down by an excessive repetition of stylistic clichés in the tracks, whose compositions expand and repeat the duo's ideas and reverberated noise distortions a bit too much.

The template stays essentially stable for all fifty minutes, with extended walls of hypnotic guitar drones building hallucinatory scenarios, onto which are grafted a cadenced drumbeat, pulsing, shivering basslines, and decaying post-industrial urban panoramas.

As for the vocal contribution, generally lo-fi, Schwendener limits herself to sporadic, minimal interjections, almost a bleak chant, that stay in the background, just as Chandler, on backing vocals, also keeps to the sidelines - with the result that the singing is never put on display, but is always meant to catalyze the bleak aura of the tracks from a complementary position.

"Sounds In Motion" opens the album with a dark bassline, a legacy of shoegazers like Slowdive, laid over unsettling atmospheric drones in the background. "Next To Nothing" is a cadenced, exhausting celestial march between catchy rhythms with funky percussion and acid-dreamlike distortion; a blueprint restated on "Long Way Down", which keeps the traits of the previous tracks while making them slightly more restless. The vocals are almost completely absent, which highlights the buzzing guitars and the rhythm section that marks out the texture of each song, though over time it stumbles into a compositional monotony that dampens the positive factors found in the refined arrangements and the alienating, anguished melodies.

"Another Road" is sweeter and more dreamlike, with Schwendener almost reciting her words, still staying alongside Chandler in low, barely intelligible tones, with the voice acting only as an additional instrument, thus reinterpreting the shoegaze lesson. "Over And Over" is a short, slow instrumental with ambient touches that brings out intermittent, dream-pop/shoegaze-style basslines.

"Deep Sky Objects" is a dark, melancholic trip with an aftertaste of unease, in some ways recalling Joy Division, except for the dreamlike vocals and guitar noise, while the rhythm instruments pick up pace. The long and structurally cyclical "Slow Thrills" plays on an alienating psychedelic sense and on guitar reverb to keep the sound unsettling, framed by atmospheric layers and spectral basslines, while the rhythm section tries to vary the pattern in small doses (one of the rare times on the album, more noticeable given the track's length). "Out Of Phase" is one of the most claustrophobic and dark tracks of all, an unsettling funeral march looming over desperate, cold, apocalyptic soundscapes. It's arguably one of the best and most significant moments on the whole record. A more ambient, nostalgic close comes with "Drift Away".

In conclusion, this time the material is given more of its own personality by a dehumanizing attitude that heightens the atmosphere of each track, but even starting out with good intentions and the potential to follow through on them, the album suffers from a degree of stasis. The record's atmosphere quickly reaches intriguing climaxes, but then gradually fades away more and more, while the sonic evocativeness of each track, rather than growing ever richer or more disorienting, over time gradually loses intensity precisely because of excessive repetitiveness.

Still, there's enough melodic and atmospheric groundwork here to serve as a crucial foundation for the evolution of a more varied, incisive and creative style, one that would take shape on the following album.

Some critics, such as the celebrated Simon Reynolds writing in The Wire, hailed the promising talent shown on the record and singled out Bowery Electric as "a distinct example of American post-rock". An interesting historical note here is that the term "post-rock" was coined around that time by Reynolds himself, to describe a varied group of artists who rejected earlier genre categorizations in favor of blending different stylistic elements, focusing on timbre, effects, fine details in arrangement, and soundscapes. Although different from the bands now commonly associated with that label (and also from Bark Psychosis, for whom the term was coined), Bowery Electric are notably one of the earliest examples of its use, and it's especially with their second album that one can understand why Reynolds chose to use the term in such a broad sense.

In the period that followed, the duo toured North America and the UK, this time joined on drums by Wayne Magruder, who would record some material on the next album, albeit in a less prominent role. For their second full-length, titled Beat, Bowery Electric refined their sonic exploration, achieving more satisfying results than on their self-titled debut.

With Beat, the band's attention to atmospheric, dissonant shoegazer effects evolves and finds its fullest expression. The noise distortions and drone reverbs soften, lending greater depth to the dreamlike side of the music. The "ambient" element expands accordingly, occasionally veering into hypnotic space-rock peaks. The vocals remain secondary, functioning as a hushed accompanying murmur to the atmospheres, meant to heighten their evocative power. The basslines are highly incisive, ranging from dub to dream-pop in a constant whirl of sensations and moods.

At the same time, an electronic layer is added, expressed through the use of sampling and the drum machine that appears in several tracks (where hybrids are tested between shoegazing and genres like trip-hop, drum&bass and downtempo), as well as in small scattered bursts of effects and samples used as embellishment; even when paired with acoustic instruments, these become the expression of a sonic exploration and a constant stylistic updating, tending toward a symbiosis between digital and analog signals. The defining trait of the American group, at this point, is in fact the recourse to sampling and digitized sounds to reproduce the rhythm section (bass and drums). The sounds grow softer and hazier, more distinctive yet also more incisive, painting dark modern scenarios of enveloping expressiveness and a constant undertone of melancholy: a mood that pervades the tracks, alternately nocturnal and fascinating, depressive or unsettling.

Finally, the New York duo takes greater care over composition and arrangement, trying to minimize the problem that had dogged them before, namely stretching out the songs' components too far and falling into the rambling stasis that afflicted their previous debut album. All this gives Beat a fresher, more inspired feel, making it, up to this point, the Americans' personal masterpiece, even if it is above all an assemblage of various experiments. As mentioned earlier, even though the band bears little resemblance, in style and constituent elements, to the groups commonly cited as exponents of post-rock, in a certain sense one can understand why Bowery Electric's sonic explorations led critic Simon Reynolds to hail them as an example of the genre.

The opening title track introduces brisk downtempo rhythms that clash with the alienating atmosphere generated by unsettling keyboard sounds in the background, accompanied by a repeated bassline. It's an unprecedented and captivating hybrid of trip-hop, breakbeat, ambient and drone, one that seems to chart a new experimental path to follow. The second song, "Empty Words," instead returns to more noise/shoegazing territory, where effected, reverb-laden guitars recreate dreamlike scenarios marked out by the drums along the familiar coordinates of bands like Seefeel or My Bloody Valentine. "Without Stopping" foregrounds a steady beat combined with a sense of unease lurking behind the notes, while the bass keeps the shoegazer connection intact, once again blending two different approaches and attitudes, though with more of a flavor of a technical exercise.

"Under The Sun" is a brief ambient/drone interlude in which a chilly but incisive repeated bassline emerges from the noisy background effects. "Fear Of Flying" brings back the drum machine used to create pressing, engaging synthetic beats, whose obsessive repetition heightens the estrangement of the psychedelic guitar drones, with a sinuous yet enveloping emotional flow. The result is one of the album's most hypnotic and captivating tracks, chosen, not coincidentally, as the first single. A further ambient digression follows, this time hazier, colder and more evanescent, with "Looped," before the dreamlike psychedelia of the delays and psychedelic stretches of "Black Light," which toward its end becomes more obsessive and distressing. "Inside Out" is a gentle interweaving of elastic basslines, light but brisk drums and dreamy reverbs, with a now-classic melancholic aftertaste, a sort of toned-down version of the debut's sound. "Coming Down" continues with the usual drone/noise reverbs shaped by shoegaze's effected, dissonant traits, set against a downtempo backdrop, with no surprises.

The closing "Postscript" is a long, minimalist track of "droned-out" ambient, where tenuous additional notes are slowly layered onto the repetitive main sound for a sort of claustrophobic, nihilistic soundscape; the track is effective at building desolate atmospheres but is undermined by excessive dragging-out that flattens the whole thing.

The final result is, in short, a very personal, refined and original album, only occasionally still afflicted by excessive repetitiveness, and enriched above all by a style that is ethereal yet solemn, mesmerizing yet direct, atmospherically "static" yet dynamic.

Beat is a far more varied, complex and layered album than its predecessor. It flows naturally, never losing an ounce of its appeal, even if the stretched-out atmospheres might bore those unaccustomed to this kind of sound. Part of the specialist press hailed it as an unprecedented meeting point between trip-hop and shoegaze, but that's an exaggeration: first of all, the downtempo elements, where present, stand out, but quantitatively they appear only in a few passages, while qualitatively they are grafts onto an ambient-drone base that remains the main thread, and the songs are not built around them; moreover, the album is mainly an experimental interlude in which new inserts and new approaches are tested, rather than a cohesive synthesis of different musical souls.

En passant, in 1997 Bowery Electric released, on Beggars Banquet, a remix album titled Vertigo, which offers a new dimension to the songs: the noise and psychedelic element is toned down in favor of hazier, more diluted and dreamlike qualities, with a strong expansion of the ambient component, a general electronification of the sound, and also a contamination with the hip-hop world (foreshadowing something of the evolution we'll see later on).

Vertigo thus proves to be an album of electro-ambient and/or ambient-hop tracks that doesn't shy away from pairing ambient drones with various forms of beat, alternating downtempo phrasing with more upbeat passages.

The album opens with "Fear Of Flying," present both in its original version and in the "Chasm mix," marked by a more muted, stretched-out atmosphere, intrinsically ambient-oriented, built mainly from keyboard sounds. The beats become more synthetic and manipulated, creating a robotic feel alongside the electronic samples, while the voice becomes a sacred murmur, relegated to the distance. Further along the tracklist, a nearly 9-minute reinterpretation by Third Eye Foundation also appears, making everything darker and more urban, with effects closer to hip-hop. "Black Light" too appears in two versions: the "Osymyso mix" is essentially a dark, monotonous ambient trip-hop, marked only by the slow march of downtempo beats, various electronic effects and scratching around the edges, and Martha Schwendener's murmur in the background; the "Dunderhead mix," on the other hand, is a concentrate of shrill, cacophonous sounds, unsettling keyboard beds in the background and bizarre, noisy electronic effects, oscillating between an amusing sonic game and an irritating experiment that goes nowhere.

"Without Stopping," in the "Witchman mix," starts as a minimal ambient track, then gradually lets the other instruments take over, briefly turning it into a stretched-out, terrifying trip-hop; but then the rhythm section completely changes register, becoming a pressing breakbeat that contrasts with the celestial voice and the cosmic, unsettling atmospheres. It carries on like this for many minutes until the ending, left to purely ambient textures, for a total of over 14 minutes of ethereal journeying. "Coming Down," in the "Immersion mix," is a hip-hop track smudged with drum & bass and the usual dark, sidereal ambient fillers.

The record for length on the album goes to "Empty Words," in its "Twisted Science mix" version, which breaks past 16 minutes of ambient beds, reverb-soaked guitar cascades receding into the distance, a cold mechanical beat, heavily distorted noise drones as a sonic climax, assorted samples, and finally an atmospheric release seasoned with slowed-down hip-hop beats in the background. Finally, the previously unreleased "Elementary Particles," at a mere 5:07 minutes, is the shortest track and also the only one presented as pure ambient with no other contaminations — urban and futuristic, steeped in an at times aching gloom, but also capable of more hopeful openings toward the end.

What keeps this release from reaching excellence, however, is the already prolonged and repetitive nature of the music itself, which in these remixes becomes even more pronounced, especially on account of the underlying ambient component.

After releasing Beat, however, Bowery Electric entered a four-year hiatus before giving birth to a new album (aside from the aforementioned remix compilation Vertigo).

During these years the duo became literally mesmerized by trip-hop, to the point of converting their own style to embrace the genre's main characteristics: the result is the nocturnal, smoky Lushlife, released in 2000, which marks a deep break with their beginnings, and sounds different from Beat too, in timbre, arrangements and approach.

So: a dark, slowed-down beat forms the backbone of the tracks, with gloomy urban atmospheres, dub basslines and acidified samples enriching the aching, largely minimalist sonic fabric. The record is steeped in an underlying psychological unease that recalls Portishead, and in dark tones close to the Massive Attack of “Mezzanine”, but above all it recalls a Swiss band, Swandive, who in 1997 released “Intuition”, a dark, melancholic trip-hop work that anticipates much of Lushlife. The sound is essentially very electronic, particularly because of the drum machine, never so prominent: rather than being grafted onto tracks driven by walls of sound, this time it takes the reins and sets the direction to follow.

Some elements close to trip-hop by convergence had already been introduced in a few tracks on the previous Beat, but this time Bowery Electric undergo a genuine transformation, one that makes them seem almost like a different band, at least compared to their self-titled debut. Another notable change is that Schwendener (and only her) now sings proper, fully fledged lyrics, like a real singer front and centre, whereas before she limited herself to atmospheric contributions functional to the layering of sound. Her performance has been compared to that of Beth Gibbons, but in reality it's much more hushed and detached: the pained timbre is replaced by depressive, partly ethereal elegies.

Lushlife sometimes betrays a somewhat mannerist flavour. Still, Bowery Electric bring their own personal mood, evanescent atmospheres, in part the vocal lines, and also the “obsessive” flow of the songs. The result is a record built with meticulous care in the assembly of the backing tracks and the writing of the melodies, endowed with its own elegance and with very effective, refined atmospheres.

“Floating World” opens the record with its mesmerizing cadence and enveloping smoky atmospheres. Martha Schwendener's voice is low and aggrieved, in keeping with the record's dark soul, while the background keyboard strings create a mix of spectrality and melancholy; the pulsing basslines stand out, driving the listening experience with firmness, while sporadic scratches season the whole thing.

The title track “Lushlife” opens with atmospheres that seem lifted straight from the cinematic fabric of Portishead. As soon as the brisk beats kick in, the background sonorities blend a hushed, Massive Attack-like emotion (strings, lounge piano) with an evanescence that veers toward the dream-pop of the Cocteau Twins and the ambient-techno/downtempo of Stereo Nova, but the whole thing is stretched out to almost 8 minutes, following the pattern Bowery Electric have carried with them since their inception. Schwendener's vocal performance stays at a high level, and more or less the same goes for the whole record, while the bass lines offer up an elastic, obsessive dub.

“Shook Ones” probably has the most urgent beats on the whole album, backed by sketched-in guitars, minimalist string samples, disorienting keyboard carpets, over which the basslines lie, always acidic and alienating. “Psalms Of Survival” sticks to trip-hop standards, making it more caustic through the repetition of a few keyboard notes alongside the continuous addition of ethereal samples. The lovely instrumental “Soul City” is more subdued, thanks to softer keyboard layering and marked rhythms that nonetheless float lightly over the atmospheric expanses in the background.

“Freedom Fighter” is a track that stands out in particular: an accelerated, brisk beat with a very groovy feel, low and mournful vocal lines providing contrast, with soft keyboards and a highly catchy chorus, while the lyrics are a sharp critique of US foreign policy, along the lines of Portishead's “Cowboys”. Schwendener's ability to sound both compelling and melancholic at once is remarkable. There's a precedent for this sound in the aforementioned Swandive: their track “If I Scream” closely echoes the approach of “Freedom Fighter”, with unusually catchy music paired with aching vocals. These two tracks practically found a subgenre within trip-hop. The song thus turns out to be a delightful hit, decidedly in contrast with the darkness of other tracks, but with equally refined arrangements, further enriched by a light shoegazer-style effect on the guitars. “Saved” opens with one of trip-hop's signature traits, namely dub bass, followed by uptempo beats and the usual strings, while mournful samples and distorted drones increasingly ramp up the anguish and weight of the track, which turns out to be among the darkest and most expressive of the bunch. The track strongly recalls two songs, “Evdokia” by the Greek band Stereo Nova and “Nutopian Days” by Swandive, not only for the presence of the same sample (namely James Brown's “Funky Drummer”) but also for the atmospheres and the pervasive use of keyboards.

The following “Deep Blue” is a mournful nocturnal ballad between melodic-atmospheric constructions close to Crustation and small lysergic touches that wink at Portishead. “After Landing”, on the other hand, interestingly blends beats closer to hip-hop with acidic effects and sounds that seem like a more funereal, “filtered” version of dream-pop, sublimated by Schwendener's light, persuasive voice. The closing “Passages” is a smoky, enveloping piece of trip-hop with a strong ambient component in the keyboards that pervade the atmosphere, while different rhythms alternate with one another, showing a versatile use of the drum machine.

This album thus comes to a close, rich in potential and well devised in its songwriting, with the only drawback being that it appears, at times, like an exercise in style modelled on a language already established elsewhere (well executed nonetheless) rather than a wholly original reinterpretation of the genre along new lines.

The fine, full-bodied atmospheres, the excellent vocal performance and the great melodic ideas tied together by the American duo through elegant, effective arrangements come together to form a genuinely valuable whole.

Lushlife is worth listening to even if you're not a fan of this style, if only to witness the band's interesting sonic exploration and to savour its evolution by comparing the records with one another.

Across just three albums, Bowery Electric's journey straddled two different musical worlds, with all the potential to pave the way for a further refinement of the band's sound, projected toward new, fascinating alchemies. At the time, one could indeed have argued that Lushlife might be considered yet another transitional work, in which Bowery Electric simply experimented with new sonorities that had fascinated them, immersing themselves in them fully, with the future prospect of later creating a connecting link between this record and the previous, significant Beat. A genuine work of synthesis, then, that, unfortunately, never came to be: Bowery Electric disbanded shortly after, leaving a bitter sense of incompleteness to their arc.

Separately, Lawrence Chandler would go on to collaborate with various artists (including LaMonte Young and the Experimental Audio Research project with Sonic Boom, Kevin Shields and Eddie Prévost) before moving to London, where he currently works as an independent composer and remixer. Martha Schwendener, under the pseudonym Echostar, would record a trip-hop/ambient-techno album titled Sola, in 2003, on Shadow Records. The latter is the true follow-up to Lushlife, following many of its coordinates, but with less bite and less melodic richness. What stands out are the hushed vocal lines, while the electronic beat and the melodic synth warbling tend to come across as, if not repetitive, then too monotonous. Interesting ideas emerge frequently, but not enough to replicate the quality of the previous record. The best track is almost certainly the hushed, evocative “Presidio”, placed at the end, which fully reflects the spirit of Lushlife, but the rest of the record sounds decidedly less inspired. After that, Martha Schwendener would record nothing else.

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