Tuxedomoon - Chamber Paranoia

Among all the bands that emerged from the San Francisco scene in the mid-'70s, Tuxedomoon are without doubt the ones who managed to achieve the greatest audience response. Not because they championed a "popular" musical formula, but rather because they were marked by greater "visibility," due above all to their famous shows, in which they blended expressionist cabaret, romanticism with clear Mitteleuropean roots, and shreds of humanoid futurism. With them, the forms of classical music were bent to capture the psychological wreckage of the industrial age, forging a genre that was strongly distinctive and innovative.

Blaine L. Reininger (keyboards and violin) and Steve Brown (keyboards and assorted instruments), two electronic music students at San Francisco City College, founded Tuxedomoon in 1977, in the full ferment of (post-)punk. In the very early days, they were occasionally assisted by some figures from the local theater scene, such as Victoria Lowe, Gregory Cruikshank, and the Chinese-born mime-singer Winston Tong. They were not the usual bunch of improvised underground musicians: they had excellent training behind them and very clear musical ideas in mind, which quickly set them apart from the rest of the pack.

After the first single, released in 1978 (featuring the pop experiment of “Joe Boy” and the funk neurosis of “Pinheads On The Moon”), came the EP No Tears, which fused fragments of classical music, synthetic rhythms and the vocals of Winston Tong, delivering terrible yet abstract decadent landscapes. A kind of spleen sublimated by the menacing title track, which remains one of the absolute masterpieces of new wave: a sort of anthem for the creatures of the night who have no more tears left to shed (“No tears for the creatures of the night”), where a hammering beat is joined by sinuous, decadent electronic harmonies, pierced by Tong's neurasthenic vocalizations.

Meanwhile, their concerts increasingly resembled genuine multimedia spectacles. In an interview with the New Musical Express, Reininger would claim he'd met people who were literally terrified by their shows. That could hardly be surprising, given that some of their tracks were built using the so-called “tritone,” an augmented fourth interval banned by the medieval Church because it was believed to be “the Devil's music.” The band, however, used it exclusively to achieve a cathartic, liberating effect on the audience.
But this fascination with the “shadow zones” of music history wasn't the only thing that profoundly shaped the band's musical synthesis. Other key influences include William Burroughs, John Cage, Albert Camus, Giorgio Moroder, David Bowie and Brian Eno.

Meanwhile, guitarist Michael Belfer (previously of Sleepers) and drummer Paul Zahl (later with SVT and Flamin' Groovies) had joined the band. Belfer left shortly after, while Peter Principle — a multi-instrumentalist and avid devotee of avant-garde music — was brought on as a full member.

The following EP, Scream With A View (1979), is a glacial, somber work in which the existential core of their sound is filtered through an immaterial tension. “Nervous Guy” unspools a synthetic rhythm around which prowl repetitive guitar chords, a sinuous sax, electronically treated vocals, swirling synthesizer and spiraling moog lines. “Where Intersts Lie” follows the same path, a funereal litany wounded by the synth's despondent phrasing.
Experimentation becomes the voice of the unconscious on “(Special Treatment For The) Family Man,” arguably their first great avant-garde masterpiece. The moog's aseptic waves conjure up decaying landscapes, valleys stretching as far as the eye can see into a solitary “no man's land”; the sax's mournful declamation guides the listener toward the shadowy silence of their own fears. The track list closes with the stammering “Midnite Stroll,” all synth bubbles and subterranean sax.

Meanwhile, the band's popularity kept growing, especially in Europe, where they became hugely famous with the release of the LP Half-Mute, out in 1980. A seminal, at times downright brilliant work, Half-Mute is the quintessential Tuxedomoon sound, as well as one of the most important records of the entire new wave movement. It's a work that leans closer to a certain strand of avant-garde music than to rock in the classic sense, and it does so in a way that is genuinely distinctive and anything but superficial.
The gorgeous theme of “Nazca” (a tribute to the Peruvian civilization behind the famous geometric figures depicting animals) makes the band's intentions clear from the outset: the music has grown even darker and more introspective, with Brown's dissonant sax repeating its obscure wanderings amid gravitational waves of synth. The icy rhythm of “59 To 1,” embellished by Principle's woody bass, sets the stage for the menacing soundscape of “Fifth Column,” while “Tritone (Musica Diablo)” (see above) glides between keyboard counterpoints and a reckless violin delirium.
Next comes the metallic paranoia of “Loneliness,” the bells and electronic noises of “James Whale” (a tribute to the director of “Frankenstein”) and the epic techno-pop of “What Use?”
“Volo Vivace,” on the other hand, revives their taste for classical inflections, here grafted onto a rock framework, while “7 Years” flows by amid synth laments and violin accents.
A harrowing sax again takes center stage on “KM,” weaving through assorted noises and a listless bass, before “Seeding The Clouds” lets Brown's declamation seal everything in an apparently relaxed mood.
With Half-Mute we're not faced with a work stitched together from darkness alone, but rather a reinvention of John Coltrane's free spiritualism recast in rock terms, with all the compelling consequences that entails. If Pere Ubu forced their tremors to fall in line with industrial cadences, if Tom Verlaine rerouted his circuitry through the guitar amp, Tuxedomoon take you straight into the screening room.

Tuxedomoon's theater of the absurd didn't go unnoticed: after opening for Devo, they caught the attention of Residents, who not only signed them to their own label (Ralph) but would go on to reference them several times throughout their career.
The tour following Half-Mute took them through Europe, where they received truly excellent reviews. Surprised by such acclaim, Tuxedomoon decided to relocate to the Old Continent itself, setting up their headquarters in Amsterdam, in the Netherlands. Six months later, they arrived in Brussels, where they spent a highly prolific period, as confirmed by the huge amount of material recorded in the studio.

Meanwhile, their second official album was released, Desire (1981), which proves to be another astonishing demonstration of their pioneering talent, even as it smooths out some of the debut's rough edges thanks to rounder sounds and a more inviting rhythm section. Even here, though, the blend of highbrow electronics, decadent post-punk and pop touches achieves genuinely compelling results, especially in the first half of the record, starting with the long opening suite: after digging into the darkest recesses of the soul with a sinister violin and a magnetic sax scraping over the bass's gloomy rumble on “East,” it opens up on “Jinx” into a kind of dramatic ballet for restless voices and minor-key notes, where sax and violin again set the rules.
The bizarre hymn of “Victims Of The Dance” is a study in decadent synth-pop done their own way, seasoned with studio effects and spectral counter-vocals, with Reininger and co.'s arrangements as creative and disorienting as ever. But another show-stopper is “Incubus (Blue Suit),” where a hammering drum-machine beat dictates near-disco cadences, with a dizzying synth pattern and shrill electronic tones evoking the cry of deranged sirens, for an overall effect of magical estrangement.
An icy, aseptic vocal over a dreamy bed of keyboards faintly rippled by violin embroidery defines the contours of the hallucinated title track, while the following ballad, “Again,” slows the tempo down, making room for the nocturnal glow of the sax.
The hypnotic gallop of “In The Name Of Talent (Italian Western Two)” restores a wild fervor to the record, along with another prodigious synthetic melody, shortly before the band bows out with the thoroughly disorienting closer “Holiday For Plywood,” somewhere between cabaret pantomime and orchestral noir-pop.
In these psychodramas, now solemn, now desperate, it's the voice of the returning Tong that lends the whole thing a surplus of emotion and visionary power, in an operation that refines the formula of their early work, nodding to the coolest and trendiest phenomenon of the moment (synth-pop) while bending it to the avant-garde, visionary bent of the San Francisco ensemble. Because, as Reininger revealed in an interview with Rockstar, among the band's sonic sources are “American muzak, the kind of things played in supermarkets, Italian or Mexican songs, electronic standards, traditional music and things of that sort.” And in this case there's also the considerable boost of a more professional production (it's their first record cut on twenty-four tracks).
Lunar, dreamlike, chilling, Desire is Tuxedomoon's “mature” masterpiece.

In Belgium, after making contact with the local scene, Reininger and co. were commissioned to compose the soundtrack for a ballet by Maurice Béjart built around the mythic figure of Greta Garbo. The life of the “divine one” inspired the Californian group's ten dreamlike vignettes on Divine (1982), once again suspended between avant-garde and chamber music. Tuxedomoon play at reconstructing the atmospheres of old-time films, using layered voices (“Mata Hari”), or lines lifted straight from film dialogue (“Conquest”), paying tribute to one of Ernst Lubitsch's most celebrated romantic comedies with the Cossack dances of “Ninotchka,” or boldly employing loops and electronic effects (“Grand Hotel,” “Freudlose Gasse”). The violin claims its share on “Queen Christina,” while the icy scores of “Anne Christie” and the two movements of “Entracte” heighten the overall pathos of a work that connects directly back to what was offered on Half-Mute, without always managing to recapture its joyful creativity.

Better results came with Suite En Sous-Sol, released the same year. The eclectic, refined synthesis of their early work is here further scrambled by additional “micro-syntheses” that mechanically absorb and digest chamber music, psychedelia, folk music, disco, Arabic music and traces of funk.
The raga-as-jig of “L'Etranger,” the funk sludge with Arabic-tinged violin of “Courante Marocaine,” the stretched-out expressionism of “Allemande Blu” and the crooked, amorphous psychedelia of “Sarabande En Bas De L'Escalier” are the standout moments of a genuinely successful work.
The EP Time To Lose (featuring the lovely classical-leaning instrumental theme “Music #2”) likewise keeps the band's stock high.

Genuine mainstream success came, however, with the following album, Holy Wars (1985), on which the band made a radical choice that disappointed longtime fans: abandoning the anarchic rawness of their early work in favor of a more conventional, disciplined record, a collection of elegant, well-composed songs, still pervaded, though, by the typical decadent spleen of the San Francisco ensemble. Some fans took it badly. And yet their class hadn't faded, as confirmed by several tracks on the album, from a liquid, nostalgic “The Waltz” to a more rhythmic “St-John,” a sort of bonsai symphony condensing the group's entire bag of tricks, passing through drizzly Parisian boulevards (“Bonjour Tristesse”), Japan-style Oriental exoticism (“Some Guys”) and a far-from-reassuring Egyptian excursion (“Egypt”).
The band's more avant-garde leanings find an outlet in the electro-funk for clarinets, church organs and voices of “Hugging The Earth” and in the android ballet of “Watching The Blood Flow,” but the record's real (pseudo)hit is “In A Manner Of Speaking,” a wrenching litany from Tong, backed by Van Lieshout's warped guitar and Gedulging's icy flute gusts. With its touching lyrics, far simpler and more direct than the band's usual standard (“In a manner of speaking/ I don’t understand/ How love in silence becomes reprimand/ But the way that I feel about you/ Is beyond words”), it would become a Tuxedomoon classic, later covered several times, from Martin Gore of Depeche Mode (on his 1989 “Counterfeit”) to the French group Nouvelle Vague.
Undoubtedly less creative and original than its predecessors, Holy Wars nonetheless possesses a peculiar decadent charm, like an album of yellowed snapshots of good old Mitteleuropa.

The following mini-album, Ship Of Fools (1986), attempts to repeat the formula, navigating with mixed results between classical-leaning touches, ethnic spices and disco drifts. In the first part, the rhythm section steers the sound toward a skewed, disorienting funk, amid robotic world-music digressions (“Atlantis”), uncontrolled tribal spasms (the electro-jazz of “Break The Rules”) and more mechanical, alienating episodes (“Reeding, Righting, Rhythmatic”). In the second half of the record, by contrast, more subdued, jazzy atmospheres take over, with piano, horns and guitars taking the lead (complete with a piano concerto in four movements), right up to the disorienting, surreal epilogue of “The Train”: still jazz, but, fittingly enough, one that's completely derailed.
A work worth appreciating for its ability to fuse together such a heterogeneous jumble of sounds, though not always sharp enough to bring the band's best songwriting into focus.

A year later came You (1987), which consolidated the San Francisco band's new direction, pushing this increasingly composite, convoluted formula even further, oscillating between dancefloor-adjacent episodes (“Roman P,” the title track), languid, Oriental-flavored digressions (“Never Ending Story”) and noir atmospheres that aren't especially striking (the three movements of “Boxman”).
For the band, celebrating their tenth anniversary, it amounts to a damp squib, a step backward even from the relative popularity they'd gained with earlier work.

Perhaps aware of this creative stalemate, Tuxedomoon's activity came to a halt. Brown, Reininger and Principle devoted themselves full-time to their respective solo careers, each achieving mixed results on their own.

Only four years passed, though, before the temptation to reunite became irresistible.
The occasion for the reunion — with the original lineup — was the album The Ghost Sonata, which dusted off the more classical-leaning sounds of their repertoire, forgoing the danceable rhythms of their most recent work, and also recovered a certain theatrical flair, from the melancholy-soaked polka of “An Affair At The Soiree” to the piano theme “Music #2,” revisited from an earlier EP (“Time To Lose”).
The Ghost Sonata really does come across as a musical for ghosts, with a series of disorienting, spectral scores salvaged from a multimedia show that had been touring since 1982, blending rigorous chamber scores, loops and electronic effects, musique concrète, jazz digressions and minimalism.
It was, however, only a fleeting reunion, since Tuxedomoon's activity would effectively grind to a halt again for a long stretch. In 1998, there would be another, ill-fated reunion attempt with Joeboy In Mexico, a record that would go almost entirely unnoticed.

In 2000, Tuxedomoon, following yet another reunion, embarked on a European tour, with Dj Hell behind the scenes handling remixes of What Use (2002) and No Tears (2003).
Then, in 2005, came the long-awaited return to the studio for a new album: Cabin In The Sky. The original lineup of Steven Brown, Blaine Reininger and Peter Principle, plus two familiar faces in Luc Van Lieshout and Bruce Geduldig, with contributions from, among others, Tarwater and John McEntire. Thirteen tracks in all.
“A Home Away” opens with an all-too-typical bass line for the band, after which the vocals travel in measured steps amid swirling sax. Tuxedomoon are back home. “Baron Brown” rides the same wavelength but is more intricate, with lovely clarinet and violin openings, and is fairly catchy — as far as that term can be applied to this band. They seem to have left behind the chamber-music leanings of their most recent period; these are, for the moment, decent tracks, though the emotion is somewhat lacking. A late flourish comes with “Annuncialto,” five instrumental minutes with a liquid, Harold Budd-style piano floating indolently in a pond of electronic noise, anchored to the ground by an inescapable bass line, with melancholy openings of clarinet and accordion (probably a keyboard patch).
No sooner do we get to say “nice” than “Diario di un egoista” kicks in, a sampled base and a flimsy melody, in a track of embarrassing ugliness, and not only because of Reininger's ridiculous vocals. We move on to the touching “La più bella,” which later gets a reprise. On the instrumental “Cagli Five-O” they try their hand at an atmospheric space-jazz that's inoffensive but hardly memorable. On the following “Here 'Till X-Mas,” DJ Hell contributes, but it's a pointless track, sung in a cabaret tone and wrecked by the usual synthetic rhythm. Then “Chinese Mike,” a nu-jazz instrumental with a lovely finale featuring an unexpected acoustic guitar accompanying a brooding sax, lifts things back up, as does “La Più Bella (Reprise)” right after it. “The Island” is essentially an ambient intro to “Misty Blue,” with Steven Brown singing almost like a crooner on a track that, while not terribly intense, is very pleasant in its easygoing nature. Toward the end, “Luther Blisset,” with John McEntire on the mix (sigh!), is an unworthy, dance-oriented mess, barely redeemed by a few refined instrumental touches. It closes with a reprise of “Annuncialto.” What to make of it? Ups and downs. The attempt to make a record that highlighted new elements within the band's typical formal context is undoubtedly successful, and there are some genuinely good tracks; moreover, the sound is anything but dated, so in that sense Tuxedomoon can be considered a band that has aged well. But one can't help noting a few mediocre tracks, and others saved more by craft than by inspiration. In between, a handful of highlights. Ups and downs, indeed.

After Bardo Hotel Soundtrack (2006), the soundtrack to George Kakanakis's film of the same name, born out of sessions built on the Burroughsian "cut-up" technique, the San Francisco outfit returned in 2007 with a new album, Vapour Trails, recorded in Greece, with tracks credited collectively to the whole band. The group boasts a truly impressive line-up: Steven Brown (vocals, saxophone, clarinet, keyboards), Blaine Reininger (vocals, violin, guitar, laptop), Peter Principle (bass, guitar) and Luc Van Lieshout (trumpet). And they craft another elegant essay in their chamber-rock style, blending acoustic instruments, electronic keyboards and voices with influences of every kind (such as the notorious Mexican muzak, which Reininger recycles in a somewhat improbable Spanish on the opening "Mucho Colores"). The influence of David Bowie is especially clear on the evocative "Still Small Voice", while "Kubrick" is a kind of ambient homage to the soundtrack of "2001: A Space Odyssey". The album's Greek roots, meanwhile, surface on "Big Olive", sung in Greek over a driving funky beat with piano breaks and guitar flourishes in the background. The jazz-funk tour de force of "Dark Temple" and the bewitching techno litany of "Epso Meth Lama", stuffed with effects and loops, are perhaps the boldest, most experimental moments on a curious album that arguably deserved a better reception.

In 2014, the bond between Reininger and co. and the world of cinema was renewed, an affinity by now well established and also attested by the band's long-standing artistic partnership with Bolognese director Roberto Nanni (author of "Conversazione con Derek Jarman" and "Fluxus"), with whom they reunited in the city of the Two Towers to bring to life the project "Voyage Around My Room".
Pink Narcissus (2014), on the other hand, was born with a slightly different aim: to give new musical clothing to the cult film directed by James Bidgood in 1971, centered on the story of a male prostitute. A film that had a rough ride, both because of the financial difficulties its production ran into and because of the director's chronic dissatisfaction with it.
The incipit is entrusted to Principle's unmistakable bass line, dark and lean, which together with Reininger's violin weaves the sensual threads of "Dorian". Without a break, in a dense, pyroclastic flow, the dubbed noir atmospheres of "Toreador del Amor" chase one another, with Brown's enchanting horns to the fore, followed by the surreal piano interlude of "Vanity". The banner of the East, inevitably streaked with jazz veins, unfurls its Arabesque drapes on "Bombay Tension", steeping itself in Badalamenti-esque mystery with the opiate fumes of "Body Parts" and with the distorted, dreamlike electricity of "Willie". But a change of course is just around the corner, marked by the proto-drum'n'bass rhythm of "Hassidic Pizza", a perfect counterpart to Brown's schizophrenic saxophone, and carried on in the nocturnal visions of "The Storm".
On Pink Narcissus, Tuxedomoon's renewed experimental drift seems to reunite in a ménage à trois with the avant-garde flourishes of the band's past (how can one not think of certain moments on Holy Wars?) and with the elegant gothic "pop" of Tones On Tail, the side project of Daniel Ash and Kevin Haskins of Bauhaus. In the closing stretch, the experiential drama of the pink Narcissus flares up again with the baroque theatricality of "Triumphant Procession", before finally fading out with the roar of "Reflection" and the strangled sobs of "Back To Nature", immersed in a reassuring bucolic soundscape. "Applause".

In 2016 Tuxedomoon toured Europe with the Half Mute Tour, bringing the classic line-up on stage to celebrate their debut album. That same year, though, they suffered a heavy loss: their longtime keyboardist and visual artist Bruce Geduldig died at the age of 63.
Finally, also in 2016, came the collaboration with the London electronic duo Cult With No Name (Erik Stein and Jon Boux) on another project with cinematic ties: the soundtrack for a documentary shot by German director Peter Braatz on the set of David Lynch's cult movie "Blue Velvet", which was later re-edited into a version packed with previously unseen footage. The album is titled Blue Velvet Revisited and evokes the magical noir atmospheres of the film, sublimated by Angelo Badalamenti's music.

The band was struck by another grave loss in 2017, with the passing of longtime bassist Peter Principle, who died suddenly in Brussels, where the group was preparing a new tour. The news was announced by his former bandmates in a brief post on their official blog, which ended with the words "We are all shocked. Words will come later". The circumstances of his death appear to be linked to a sudden collapse, "probably a heart attack or a stroke". Peter Dachert, his real name, was born in Queens on December 5, 1954. The distinctive sound of his bass was one of the trademarks of the elusive alchemy of the Californian band.

Contributions by Michele Chiusi ("Cabin In The Sky"), Davide Tucci ("Pink Narcissus"), Ossydiana Speri (death of Peter Principle)

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