Laika - A Trip Among the Satellites

In a state of abandonment by every love and every certainty, dreams and hopes can fall away like leaves in a dry season. Bending down to gather them serves little purpose, except perhaps to be sucked into a vortex of blackness and rivers of blood. So instead, look up, and find yourself surprised by a dazzling moon caught zigzagging between the clouds with indifferent grace. Beyond the stars, nothing worth staring at. In hand, a snowglobe and a Can record.

The visceral tension at the heart of the atypical Moonshake experience was bound to detonate sooner or later. If the conflicted relationships between David Calahan, Margaret Fiedler and John Frenett were evident, albeit disguised within the balance of an album like “Eva Luna”, far more uncertain was the scenario that would unfold after the Fiedler-Frenett pair departed from the band's original core. Moonshake thus reinvented themselves with the still excellent “The Sound Your Eyes Can Follow”, while the two new partners plotted the development of a new and strongly distinctive sound: velvet in place of spikes, urban vomit giving way to a more sensual and at times painful introspection, without renouncing – indeed, building further on – the roots between old and new kraut. A brief excursus into the bittersweet orbit of Laika.

Menfolks just can’t even see

my fifty puppies and tits to my knees

stretch marks – hair like grease

just a bitch in heat

yeah i want it bad, so bad i’m howlin’

and all you dogs sniffin’ butts outside

don’t need it half as much as me…

(“Honey In Heat”)

They may have borrowed their name from the famous Russian dog Laika – the first four-legged creature launched into space – but already in the lyrics of “Honey In Heat”, the brave mascot seems to turn into a worn-out bitch in the grip of the most sordid heat. Can this metaphor help us illustrate the ambivalence of an album like Silver Apples Of The Moon? One eye turned toward the immensity of space and the other mired in the tragic human condition? Certainly, but only up to a point. Laika burst onto the English scene in the mid-90s with an eclectic, liquid line-up, and their music is a perpetual symptom of that fluidity. There's Guy Fixsen, multi-instrumentalist and sound engineer credited with having had a hand in (one of the many layers of) “Loveless“, American Margaret Fiedler, who takes care of vocals, guitars and various odds and ends (as well as being Fixsen's partner), and John Frenett, who plays bass with an eternal dub attitude. Completing the picture are Lou Ciccotelli on African percussion and Louise Elliott on flute and sax.

Drawing parallels is difficult, as well as reductive. One could talk about post-rock and trip-hop, about field recording, electronics and the radiophonic explorations of Delia Derbyshire. Luckily - intentionally or not - it seems to be Laika themselves who want to cut through all that. Starting from the title itself, in fact, Silver Apples Of The Moon carries some significant echoes: there's the nod to Yeats's poem (The Song Of Wandering Aengus), and to a 1968 work with the exact same title by electronic composer Morton Subotnick, dense with a visionary futurism of sound. And then, perhaps more pertinently, there's the self-titled album by Silver Apples, a celebrated work also from 1968, recorded with a layering of sound - and compositional flair - so avant-garde for its time that it still sounds modern today. But beyond that, Laika's debut is a crucible of the most disparate themes and sounds, where each member's contribution makes the soil so fertile that it gives birth to strange monsters.

Frothy, abrasive free-funk, feverish loops ("Sugar Daddy"), a samba strut straight out of Rio carnival ("Marimba Song"), flute flutters over the fractured relationship of "Let Me Sleep", a kind of proto-drum'n'bass ("Thomas") and, why not, even the playful acid-jazz interlude "Spider Happy Hour". It's an orgy.

Margaret's voice, more than singing, intones ethereally over the noise with the apparent delicacy of a Sarah Cracknell, but the attitude is certainly not the same. The already-mentioned lyrics of the raw "Honey In Heat" are just the tip of an iceberg of surreal, venomous little stories - the funk of "44 Robbers", for instance, deals with the frustrations of a woman who goes out alone and has to deal with the thugs lurking on her street (jokingly nicknamed Stallone, Capone, Arnie and Hulk Hogan); "can I remember my judo?" she asks herself, frightened, at one point.

Silver Apples Of The Moon sounds harsh and unripe, but also soft and chill-out. It limps from one track to the next like a Pharaoh weakened by the limited bloodline circulating within his caste. It's not "nice" enough to serve as background music at a cocktail party. But it's undoubtedly a shining product of the grimy English underground scene of the mid-90s. An extremely fascinating, jagged and original album, written in a free form that only a debut record can allow. Laika's rise, however, was only just beginning.

Satellite retro-futurism

Three years pass since the brilliant insights of the "silver apples", and Laika resurface with the intent of refining the formula of their debut, this time with a clearer idea in mind and an unprecedented concession to the much-feared notion of compromise. The band sets off for even more distant orbits, delivering songs that sound like radio intercepts from beautiful, still-unexplored galaxies. An astute manager of her own career, Fiedler, increasingly taking on the role of the band's leader, refines the Laika brand so that it fits, at least on the surface, the trend of the moment - chill-out - and, with a simple pirouette, transforms into an elegant feline trip-hop outfit, as was fashionable in the Nineties. The reference to the Bristol sound, however, is far from being a convenient ploy to win over the specialist press without disturbing its sleep too much: Fiedler and Frennett had always championed trip-hop as the only genuinely worthwhile (non-)trend to come out of Albion in that decade, reaffirming their long-standing passion for jazz, dub and analogue sound. On several occasions, moreover, when questioned by journalists about Laika's original sound, Fiedler would laconically dismiss the band's recipe as "trip-hop... but much faster".

Having shaken and turned the snowglobe - a handy, highly allegorical souvenir we're happy to carry into orbit - Sounds Of The Satellites opens with a track whose crust is exquisitely trip-hop: with a stealthy gait somewhere between Portishead and Badalamenti, and animated by a sweltering Moog, "Prairie Dog" unwinds in paranoid, sinuous fashion through wordplay and sudden nihilistic jolts ("If I could pull the nerves from my skin/ I would"): a radical statement of what, from this point on, will increasingly become the band's defining expressive concern: the blues. Fiedler has completed her metamorphosis into the role of a sweet, discreet chanteuse, yet one constantly stirred by a shadow of repressed anxiety, wearily kept on a leash (just listen to the delicately pained ballad "Shut Up/Curl Off"). The blues of Bessie Smith, as an immediate and provisional reference point, but also, and above all, the contemporary, post-industrial blues of Beth Gibbons. A far cry, in any case, from the ethereal, dreamy guise that more than a few had tried to pin on her up to that point, forcing Laika into the techno-ambient cauldron.

The lunar disorientation of "Out Of Sight And Snowblind", then, opens a narrow passage into exploring the architecture favoured by this incarnation of Laika: a composition that proceeds through continuous layers of background, which rather than building up progressively, sways in a kind of circular flow, choosing to travel on highly refined polyrhythms instead of the customary 4/4 (another choice that places Laika well ahead of the trends of the time), ultimately estranging the result with further "ambient" synth phrases, alternated with equally alien organic incursions.

Dissected under a scalpel, each track thus reveals itself to be an impressive reservoir of ideas and stylistic solutions, carrying such a load of rhythms and melodies that an average musician would happily make an entire album out of it, while here they're instead woven together in dense knots within the space of a single song.

The gentle, hypnotic movements of "Almost Sleeping", complete with an exotica hallucination in its coda (as well as Fiedler at her most sensual), the incredible, Kubrickian, psychedelic odyssey of "Bedbugs", the jittery jungle-wave(?) drift of "Poor Gal" are the most admirable instances of all this industriousness put in service of compositions that are lean, enjoyable and, ultimately, "pop". A complexity born of roots never truly severed with everything that begins with kraut, with the Can of "Ege Bamyasi" (the intro of "Starry Night" is practically a tribute), but also with King Tubby, with Juan Garcia Esquivel, right up to the liquid-formed stars of Sun Ra.

A diachronically varied baggage, an unwitting precursor of so much retromania still to come, a background always proudly displayed, starting with the choice to call themselves a "band", rather than opting for the trendier, more creative monikers common to the electronic galaxy of the time. Sounds Of The Satellites thus stands as the most complete and fully realised snapshot of Laika's journey, a forward-looking position with its gaze dislocated into the past while at the same time lucidly fixed on the future, effectively shining as a system unto itself.

Laika thus sign one of the most representative works of an exciting era of transition.

Chill-blues melancholy

Despite gaining a notably larger following than their debut album, thanks in part to the softening of the formula towards shores closer to "pop", Sounds Of The Satellites is anything but a success, and will linger in the musical underbrush for quite some time before being subject to a partial reappraisal only in recent years.

Their recipe, however, far from any self-satisfied stasis, is enriched with new shades on the band's third chapter, released in 2000 once again by Too Pure. Good Looking Blues immediately establishes itself as a further step in Laika's move away from the trendier forms of the period's electronic music, something also evident, in some interviews, where they voiced growing dissatisfaction with the exclusive use of digital tools and once again asserted their identity as a "band".

As proof of this, the pace of Good Looking Blues feels closer to jazz timing and exotica than to trip-hop or idm geometries, contributing to a smokier, more nocturnal and ambiguous atmosphere. "Widows' Weed" is the most extreme and most successful example of this new dimension, built around free percussion and cool-jazz-scented sax, with Fiedler cast as an anxious vocalist straight out of a well-worn café con. Margaret is once again the protagonist of almost every track on the album, yet paradoxically relegates herself to a far more understated role than in the past. Her vocal lines increasingly take the form of whispered textures, at times bordering on spoken word, if not an icy kind of rap – just listen to "Black Cat Bone" and "Knowing Too Little" at either end of the collection.

While the link to the more ethereal solutions of Sounds Of The Satellites is preserved in tracks like "T Street" and the single "Uneasy" – albeit marked by a more sparing, "minimalist" use of the elements – the ideal setting for Good Looking Blues lies elsewhere entirely: a retro-futurist tragicomedy, or a surreal inter-galactic glamour party reserved for a chosen few spirits plucked from the earthly rabble – Don Cherry, Holger Czukay, Piero Umiliani, Laub, Tarwater, Bowery Electric. Never has the blues been so cross-genre and so seductive.

Lost In Space

Crowning almost a decade of honorable activity comes the double compilation Lost In Space – Volume 1 (1993-2002), released again on Too Pure in 2003. Naturally, since Laika have always been an atypical band, the compilation format here is anything but a conventional best of. For an outfit that always operated under the radar (their peak of visibility came supporting Radiohead on the tour for "Ok Computer"), this is the chance to gather on record a few singles, but also b-sides, curiosities, alternate versions and the odd live recording – an aspect that perhaps has been somewhat lost today, since in the social-media era everything is more accessible, but back then was a way to proudly display every facet of one's work (think of all the Belle And Sebastian EPs, or the Suede b-sides, later gathered into thoroughly enjoyable compilations).

The first disc offers a selection of tracks already featured on previous studio albums, with the exception of the introspective "Lower Than Stars", and a dreamlike alternate version of "If You Miss (Laika Virgin Mix)", which originally appeared on Silver Apples Of The Moon.

The second disc, on the other hand, gathers the most varied curiosities. Three tracks recorded for the famous Peel Sessions (including "Looking For The Jackalope", which, curiously, also reappears in a spacey "Jack Dangers' 236 Mix" version – over nine minutes of lunar exploration). There's also a lovely live version of "Red River", with Margaret, before introducing the song, reminding the audience that after the show they can buy both the band's CD and yo-yos (?). The remix of "Marimba Song (Boo Boo's Gone Mambo)" is simply hypnotic, while from Sounds Of The Satellites comes "Prairie Dog (Maxwell House Mix)", a halting, almost acoustic version leaning toward acid-jazz compared to the original. Among the b-sides, standouts include the dirty acidity of "Beestinger" (a spot-on title), the proto-house beat of "Squeaky" and a cover of "German Shepherds" by Wire.

Gone Missing

As so often happens, though, at a certain point the band loses its cohesion. At the dawn of the new millennium, Margaret decides to join PJ Harvey's touring band, riding high after the success of "Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea". Frenett and Elliot leave the lineup, leaving Guy alone in the studio for a year working on the new album. He doesn't take it well: "She's out touring the world being a rockstar, while I do all the dirty work," he later recalled. It's a difficult period for the band, further strained by the fact that Margaret and Guy's romantic relationship reaches its natural end.

Perhaps it's also because of this tension that Wherever I Am, I Am What Is Missing remains by far the saddest and most "solitary" Laika album, as well as the most overlooked of their output. Only Lou Ciccotelli is in the studio with his percussion. Beyond that, there are just Margaret and Guy, by now set on diverging paths. They look at each other, know each other inside out, but no longer know what to say. On the CD sleeve, a poem by Mark Strand – "Keeping Things Whole" – seems almost pointedly to underline Laika's fate going forward.

Wherever I Am, I Am What Is Missing is certainly not a bad record, but compared to the past it's a modest sidestep. Margaret's lyrics turn cryptic, as if trying to evade the listener's understanding. Take the apparent relocation (?) described in "Falling Down", which might perhaps allude to the upheaval of touring life with Harvey, but could just as well be a sad metaphor for the end of a relationship. When she wants to, though, she can still deliver anything but subtle allusions; "All is said and done/ do I walk away or run", she states plainly in "Dirty Bird", or in the ethereal refrain of "Alphabet Soup" she laments: "You broke a heart a many a time/ but you'll never break this heart of mine".

Guy's work dominates the rest, but in the solitude of the studio, what's most sorely missing is that melting pot of sounds that had until now made the band's music so distinctive. The attention to detail is meticulous, but at times (deliberately?) wearying: it's like hearing a constant electronic haze, joined by the fluttering wingbeat of dream-pop percussion in the background, against which Margaret moans her lyrics, disconsolate, in barely more than a whisper. If heartbreak had a sound, this would probably be it.

The beautiful opener "Girl Without Hands" nonetheless retains the best of Laika, with a prominent bassline, celestial keyboards and vocals floating over a gorgeous melody.

Let me out I'm a cloud

I can’t live here anymore

(“Fish For Nails”)

The epilogue

Not that Laika had ever truly dominated the charts, but their last album was a significant failure even for an underground band. Margaret herself puts it bluntly: “(…) we'd sold better and better with each record, up until the last one, which didn't do well at all. And that coincided with the period when everyone started getting broadband at home and downloading music. And yet people still came to the shows…”

Forget about shows! We're at the dawn of a new geological era for the record industry. A tectonic shift of biblical proportions is taking hold, one that even today — more than a decade later — shows no sign of settling. This isn't a criticism. The new way of consuming music via the internet would go on to open unimaginable doors, but the gap between the old and new system inevitably claims a fair number of victims. According to Margaret herself, making music was no longer a viable way for Laika to make a living. Add to that the fact that what remained of the band was by now reduced to an ex-couple with plenty of cumbersome emotional baggage between them, and the writing was already on the wall.

Officially, the breakup was never announced — almost as if to ward off any possibility of a reunion — but from here on Fixsen would continue working in production and sound engineering, while Margaret would become a lawyer specializing in copyright (“hell hath no fury…”) and take up candle-making as a hobby. In 2008 she would join Wire on tour, confirming her unchanged talent as a superb multi-instrumentalist, even before being a vocalist.

Laika leave us this way, with a touch of bitterness, and the sad awareness that a band like this, so fragile and so “rare”, could only have existed in the undergrowth of the '90s. Were they starting out today, amid the confusion and bulimia reigning supreme in the internet bubble, they'd probably stay hidden on some little page in the Bandcamp Jungle, reaching the ears of a few dozen people at most. Once again, this isn't a criticism of the new system. But we're still grateful to the glorious '90s for giving Laika the chance to release the pieces of a discography as concise as it was immaculate, and an album to hand down to posterity like Sounds Of The Satellites.

Lower than the stars.

Stare

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