Clock Dva - The painter of electric pictures

Clock Dva's musical beginnings, however, owe less to the electro-industrial acts that were proliferating at the time – and that partly inspired them – than to a sort of deviation of rock towards overlapping layers of free-jazz, acid psychedelia and informal noise-making. Sheffield, straddling the 70s and 80s, gave birth to landmark names of the new British scene, such as Cabaret Voltaire and In The Nursery; which explains the fertile amplification of Adi Newton's interests towards an experimentation that would not fully converge with easy trends. But his intentions spread across various fronts, and Clock Dva became the most intriguing and emotional experience, the most seminal and consequently the most emblematic of everything that was brewing at the outset of his career. Meanwhile, on the opposite and parallel side, the project The Anti Group represented the most programmatic and cryptic sonic laboratory (having conducted, for instance, musical research into the interaction between the body and sound waves).

After playing with various other musicians, including future Human League members Martyn Ware and Craig Marsh, Newton launched the Clock Dva project together with Stephen James "Judd" Turner, releasing a handful of limited-edition tapes distributed through alternative circuits, from which a single ("Brigade") was drawn in 1980. The project's name takes its cue from the vocabulary of Burgess's novel "A Clockwork Orange", and it came to light during a period when Sheffield was seeing an escalation of industrial sound and multimedia performances combining music, projections and installations. Clock Dva too, despite a fairly traditional line-up (voice, guitar, percussion), built their stage shows around lights and interactive atmospheres. The psychedelic suites typical of 60s rock form the backbone of the band's live performances, which led to their first official release in 1980 thanks to Genesis P-Orridge, already a prominent figure of the industrial movement (Throbbing Gristle).

The psychedelic legacy is enriched here both by the recovery of other traditions – twelve-tone technique, atonalism – and by projections of industrial philosophy. The first professional recording of their jams is titled White Souls In Black Suits and presents an almost Dadaist blend of extended rock improvisations, brushstrokes of jazz and hints of acid sonorities, following textures that are sometimes disorienting but already contain, in embryo, the aura of deviant allure that would characterize their later work.

The credited line-up, besides the two founders, also includes Roger Quail, Charlie Collins and David Hammond. Among the tracks worth mentioning are the dazzling, sprawling "Anti-chance", with bold arabesque horn interjections, the enigmatic "Still/Silent" and the art-cosmic echoes of "Non". This work would later be reissued several times in the years that followed.

In 1981 Newton and co. released the album Thirst, a work that is certainly more polished and the result of better production organization, which seems to distance itself further from the dictates of the industrial trend and to consolidate its own autonomy. The Clock Dva name picks up, with greater self-awareness, the path opened by the debut album, crafting an engaging series of expressionist ballads forever poised between jazz-rock and the unhealthy shadows of a new technological era, where sounds and voices appear like the lament (or the scream) of a conscious madness.

The album's artwork was entrusted to Neville Brody, already responsible for the graphics of Cabaret Voltaire and Fetish Records. Among the tracks worth noting are "Piano Pain", "Sensorium", the arcane "Impression Of African Winter" and finally the apocalyptic "4 Hours", which hints at the iconography of the future cyber-synthetic concept albums to come. At this point in their journey, the project's two co-founders, Newton and Turner, decided to refocus their energies and refound the Clock Dva collective, letting go of Quail and Collins.

But Turner's sudden death threw everything into question, and out of that tragic event came the EP Passion Still Aflame, dedicated to his memory.

After James Turner's death and the subsequent reshuffling of the line-up, which saw in particular a substantial addition of wind instruments, Adi Newton signed a contract with Polydor and began a new creative phase that further consolidated Clock Dva's layered style. The genre they were developing defies easy definition – hence deeply personal in its stylistic and tonal approach – and it led to the making of a third album, in which Paul Browse's collaborative role, as Newton's true right-hand man, became firmly established.

Advantage (1983) is a work conceived in the Parisian environment and recorded over several sessions with Hugh Jones producing, marked by a consistently nocturnal, decadent atmosphere and a musical dress that's decidedly more accessible than on previous records. So much so that the synergy between a major label like Polydor and this adjustment of "stylistic aim" allows the band to land a John Peel Session and put together a proper tour. "Tortured Heroine", "Resistance", "Breakdown", "Dark Encounters" and "Eternity In Paris" are the standout titles on a tracklist that blends jazz-funk reminiscences with vaguely tribal rhythmic weaves and gothic winks, twilight spleen with new-age echoes and classical-leaning arrangements ("Poem").

Adi Newton's trademark comes through clearly, starting with the abyssal incisiveness of his voice and the enigmatic references scattered through the lyrics.

Between 1984 and 1987 Newton moved to the Netherlands, where the project The Anti Group Communication Project took shape, putting into practice a far more esoteric and radical musical philosophy, further developing the sound-image integration and hypnotic component. So it wasn't until 1989 that Clock Dva once again put their name to an official album: that would be Buried Dreams, rightly regarded as one of their masterpieces and certainly the one most overtly tied to a new course of metaphysical-cybernetic implications.

Layered cultural references leap out from both the lyrics and the artwork, emphasizing the conflicts and compromises facing humanity in the age of machines, on one hand showing the most common, mass-produced iconography of the era, on the other suggesting more complex links between art, politics and science across the centuries. The opening track draws on the bloodthirsty "Bathory", with a varied glow of classicism and eroticism with unsettling contours.

Then from the second track ("Hide") onward the sound turns metronomic, intensely electronic, dotted with vocal interventions charged with anxiety and prophetic pronouncements; even more pronounced on "Sound Mirror", which with its obsessive percussive textures paints a present already loaded with the phobias of the future. Standouts also include "The Reign", with an electric piano that humanizes Newton's alien voice, and "The Hacker", a hammering closer brimming with rhythmic interplay and orchestral percussion that leaves the listener annihilated. The album seems to become a summa of musical technologies, forging a kind of erudite, gothic techno-pop of great descriptive and narrative appeal.

Collective, from 1994, gathers the singles from the 1988-1993 period. In 1996 Adi Newton recorded Psychophysicist with Andrew McKenzie of Hafler Trio.

Sealing Adi Newton's artistic rebirth under the historic banner of Clock Dva, 2016 saw the release, on Anterior Research Media Comm, of the EP Neoteric. The release was a genuine epiphany, and not only for longtime fans of the Sheffield outfit. Three tracks in all, forged from a cold, standoffish electronics that linked directly back to the band's work from the late Eighties and early Nineties. Specifically "Buried Dreams", "Man-Amplified" and "Sign".

Particularly striking is the second track on "Neoteric", "Sentinel", a cosmic crescendo that brings to mind a Cluster reinterpreted by Clock DVA themselves, and the title track, five minutes of minimal techno driven by Newton's warm, razor-sharp vocal cuts.

Three years after its release, talk returns to "Neoteric", both the EP and the track. Pressed on white vinyl, following a concept devised by Ibtaba, one of Newton's new collaborators, together with Newton himself, this work consists of four remixes of the original track. The first remix, courtesy of Jack Dangers of Meat Beat Manifesto, plunges the minimal techno of "Neoteric" into a sludge of metallic beats, slowing its tempo and thereby heightening its sense of physicality. Boris Divider's version dissects its patterns and enriches them with autoptic glitch trinkets, while Wrangler (i.e. Stephen William Mallinder of Cabaret Voltaire) delivers a hypnotic, dub-oriented version.

I've always held a kind of reverential fear for the names of certain English bands who, in the Eighties, represented Sheffield's post-punk electronic scene. To me, Cabaret Voltaire was a name to be handled with care, evoking darkness and noise. But Clock Dva even more so: a name lifted from "A Clockwork Orange" that embodied the mystery of electronic music searching for a point of contact between man and machine, starting from Kraftwerk and reaching the ears of stunned listeners thanks to the primal industrial aesthetic of Throbbing Gristle. Adi Newton has always walked these sonic paths, from his 1980 debut with "White Souls In Black Suits" onward. The ocean Clock Dva were asking me to dive into was too deep for me at the time: I was deep in my electro-pop binge, drawn to the sounds of their "colleagues" Human League. But over the years, raid after raid, their message gradually won me over.

At a time when the word apocalypse keeps turning up in the statements of unscrupulous politicians, the Clock Dva project finds fresh vigor, and Adi (voice and electronics), joined by TeZ Maurizio Martinucci (electronics, sampling and wind instruments) and Gabriel Edvy (visuals), releases the new album Noesis (2023) on Mute Song, out on vinyl, CD and a limited-edition box set. An album that warns us that techno-negativity must be countered through the use of thought, the only tool that will save us from the apocalypse.

On the CD version, proceedings open with the industrial-techno rhythms of "Acceleration": the voice accuses us of having changed too quickly, and that no superficial change will last over time, while unsettling synthetic bass pulses trigger neural jolts seeking alignment with a hint of melody, as if to make the sound of the present day a little less jarring. Low frequencies also dominate the dark "The Engines Of Intimidation", in which the vocal is compressed under a shroud of suffering. The melodic line only slightly lightens a track with the power to make tangible the many forms of technological intimidation present in today's society. Only toward the end does it open up into symphonic notes that arrive to console the spirit.

“The Simulacra” is slow and built from layers of sound that take over from sparse synth textures, creating an atmosphere of anticipation that paves the way for noise-driven incursions with a Kraftwerk-like attitude. “Time Is A Flat Circle” is dark ambient, where metallic noises set up something unexpected and gradually give way to circular sequencer motifs. Enveloping and obsessive, it's a track that connects with the spirit of the Earth, and it's no coincidence that the sitar notes blend with the sound of our planet's innards while pagan choirs sway in search of direction. In “Syndrome” the metronomic pulses dig deep, triggering tectonic shocks fuelled by the stripped-back beat, while the voice urges us to wake up and break free from the thousand syndromes that plague us.

The echo of Noesis will predictably be minimal, in an era of playlists and music that circulates without ever settling into our subconscious. It's music for explorers, for those who occasionally want to step out of the loops of technology that numbs and dehumanizes, and surrender instead to technology that, guided by humans, becomes emotion, poetry, vibration.

Contributions by Luigi Zampi (“Noesis”)