808 State

Oh Manchester/ So much to answer for

Dear Manchester really does have so much to answer for. Sooner or later it owes us an explanation: what air do its inhabitants breathe, does its water have some peculiar quality, such that it produces such idiosyncratic music, instantly distinguishable from that of other cultural hubs of perfidious Albion? From the Hollies to the Bee Gees (yes, those Bee Gees!), from Herman's Hermits through 10cc and Barclay James Harvest, even before the advent of punk and new wave, the local scene had plenty to offer the cause of rock worldwide, right from its very beginnings. The Sex Pistols gig on 4 June 1976 at the Free Trade Hall, organised by Pete Shelley of Buzzcocks (other local legends), would shuffle the deck even further: only fifty people were in attendance, but most of them proved decisive for the development of Mancunian music - from Bernard Sumner to Morrissey, from Mark E. Smith to Mick Hucknall, an entire regiment of future British music stars was already present and correct, ready to take punk's lesson and carry it into the roaring Eighties. The scene, in short, was more than fertile ground for the emergence of homegrown talent, for Cottonopolis to become a doting mother to her most creative children. And she had not yet given birth to some of her most brilliant offspring.

Manchester in the second half of the '80s thus proves to be incredibly fertile ground, a place that is physical but above all a mental environment, a frothing cauldron where social pressures and sonic deeds bubble away and transfigure into a pop chaos as 'formless' as a Pollock canvas and with a strong 'acid' flavour. So we move from the bleached-out funk of post-punk Factory to the new smiley colours that the Haçienda club - a kind of musical-chocolate factory run by Mike Pickering, the Willy Wonka of the 'New Order' - dispensed to a generation disillusioned by Thatcherism and, for once, hopeful about the future. It's in this scenario that Graham Massey, as acidic in his words as in his music, allows himself the luxury of mocking the avant-experimental milieu he himself came from, claiming that mainstream clubs - where 'vulgar lads and vacuous girls dance to the strangest stuff' - are actually far more 'advanced and futuristic'.

It's within this distorted receiver, a miniaturised reflection of England as a whole, skilled at misreading and thus reshaping/redefining sounds from across the ocean (did somebody say northern soul?), that the personality of one of the key figures of British electronic music will find its space, in a Manchester that will answer the call (even if it's actually more of a whisper) of 'We are the Music Makers and we are the Dreamers of Dreams'.

By 1987, Graham Massey, Martin Price and Gerald Simpson had already been through a whole range of musical and semi-musical experiences. Previously, Massey (already a guitarist with the 'avant-funk' band Biting Tongues) and Simpson (a fusion and synth-pop enthusiast) had teamed up as a brit-rap duo called Hit Squad, before reinventing themselves as an acid-house outfit after meeting Martin Price. Price was co-owner of the Eastern Bloc record shop (a genuine point of reference for Mancunian youth into dance and indie-pop), whose basement the pair used as a rehearsal room.

The upgrade to a trio, with Price joining the line-up, marks the start of their greatest recording adventure, under the name 808 State, chosen as an act of devotion to the drum machine, the holy Roland TR-808. Humanoid organisms equipped with extremely powerful antennae, the three of them use those antennae to pick up the desperate SOS signals coming from Chicago; they metabolise them, in cahoots with a local scene especially receptive to both the lure of the dancefloor (besides the Haçienda, see clubs like Thunderdome and Konspiracy) and that of ecstasy; and finally they regurgitate them in the form of a sound that, within less than a year, will spread nationwide.

It would come to be defined as the 'Summer of Love' of 1988, almost a 'second coming' after the glories of '67, and would go down in history as the big bang from which rave culture and much of '90s electronica would spring.

Let's be clear: to downplay the scope of the acid epic by confining its genesis to the Mancunian nucleus alone would be a glaring inaccuracy. It would mean ignoring the collective scale of a phenomenon whose forerunners include not only the Manchester crew but also DJs returning from their Ibiza experience - Paul Oakenfold, Danny Rampling and Nicky Holloway (with Andrew Weatherall thrown in as a wild card) - from whom London clubs Shoom, Trip and Future sprang up as capillary nodes. That said, purists will forgive us for siding with Christian Zingales when, in his 2002 book "Electronica", he calls 808 State 'the first Anglo-Saxon techno outfit', as well as for agreeing that this is a key group for the evolution of dance music in the following decade. It's hard, after all, to dispute such a claim, given the peculiar backgrounds of the group's founding members and their very own working methods, years ahead of the rest of the pack. The divergent life experiences of the trio, the more eclectic nature of their aspirations, and the sheer breadth of their reference points led them, right from the start, to break away from the one-off, episodic character of early releases tied to the nascent rave epic, treating acid-house as genuine album material, detached from the actual needs of the dancefloor.

'Newbuild', released in 1988 on Creed, thus becomes the first full-length in history to carry the jarring interlocking patterns of the acid scene into a work with a broader scope, despite the far-from-fluid, far-from-narrative nature of its tracks. It's, all things considered, a rudimentary project, given the group's gradual yet extremely rapid evolution, and yet it becomes a fundamental turning point, its surging drum-machine loops carrying the lesson of Phuture and the other Chicago pioneers into the homes of England's most enthusiastic ravers. Recorded in a basement, it stakes everything on pursuing an all-consuming, lysergic immediacy, and remains an essential document for understanding a pivotal era in the explosion of English electronic music - so much so that two heavyweight acts like Autechre and Aphex Twin don't hesitate to cite this album among their main inspirations. It was, however, only the prelude to a sound that matured immeasurably over the course of just three years, one that would finally find its full flowering on "ex:el", cementing a path already dotted with remarkable successes and bold expressive leaps.

Over the three years separating the debut from the third full-length - amid defections and new recruits, a rise to success well beyond expectations (their 'Pacific State' cracking the UK singles top 10), and intense recording activity that produced the essential 'Quadrastate' EP and the second album '90' - the group's efforts were clearly focused, not just on reaching a wider audience, but above all on shaping a language that could account for their extraordinary versatility. With the foundations laid, Massey and co. set about building their own house: not a simple block of flats, but a luxury villa, with every room bearing features different from those around it. A necessary leap in ambition, both to stay relevant in a landscape mutating at an impressively rapid pace, and above all to avoid getting trapped in the rigid patterns of a sound that, while compelling, was fairly static in its expressiveness.

There are at least two directions that reach full fruition on 'ex:el', the group's third studio album, released by ZTT in 1991, and which, backing up what's been said, make this record one of the era's most flamboyant/bizarre statements. The first is undoubtedly a deeper exploration of ties to fusion, exotica and space-age-pop atmospheres, piling on the ornamentation without ever undermining the 'cubic' impact of the rhythms or a certain minimalism in the compositions. The second, even more important for the future development of dance music's languages, is benefiting from vocal contributions by well-known names (Bernard Sumner of New Order) and - at the time - lesser-known but already cult figures (a certain Björk Guðmundsdóttir, here making her real solo debut after her stint with the Sugarcubes) in order to push more decisively into pop territory.

1) Beyond the obvious/founding acid-house imprinting, tributes to Weather Report and to "Bitches Brew" surface in the group's music as early as the already-mentioned 'Pacific State', which, soprano sax in hand and Detroit-style ecstatic progressions in its back pocket, established itself in 1989 as house music's entry point into the 'Fourth World' imaginary of Jon Hassell, as well as a model of formal elegance contemporary with ambient-house (did somebody say 'Sueño latino'?). Ironically, it's also the last 808 State track to feature a contribution from Gerald Simpson, who had already left the group the year before, right after recording 'Newbuild', following a dispute over royalties. He would, however, get his own 'revenge' on his former bandmates, both in the short term (the single 'Voodoo Ray', which reached number 13 on the charts in July '89) and over the long haul: in the mid-'90s he would rise from the ashes and establish himself as a jungle guru, under the moniker, prosaic as it may be, of A Guy Called Gerald.

In any case, on "ex:el" the fusion and exotica obsessions reach a peak of exuberance that would be hard to replicate. The diagram of 808 State's music at this stage of their journey is a jagged overlap of wavy, jagged lines, not unlike the vital signs of the Pulsar CP1919 star depicted on the cover of "Unknown Pleasures". But in our case the background wouldn't be pitch black, but rather a delectable kaleidoscope where tropical, urban and computer-generated textures fuse into a visionary, cold act of love. If we want to venture further into absurdist territory, with this record Massey and Price, now joined by Darren Partington and Andrew Barker (aka The Spinmasters), conjure up Les Baxter during an acid-house session, letting the poor man's ghost run wild over the structures and make them more malleable, more polyrhythmic.

The textures are circular yet jagged (the hybrid freestyle of “Leo Leo”, the looming atmosphere of “In Yer Face”, the nightmare halfway between cyberpunk and T.S. Eliot that is “Nephatiti”), proof that, despite the anti-experimental outbursts, the Factory background counted for a great deal with Massey. The sonic space turns into a genuine ecosystem, thick with surreal vegetation and fauna (the solemn croaking of “Olympic”, the synthetic birdsong and Polynesian flutes closing out “Empire”), while the incorporation of breakbeats and vocal samples – no less than the pillars of British hardcore-techno – verges on the baroque (the urban vertigo of “San Francisco”, the unspeakable sensory assault of “Lambrusco Cowboy”, with its unrivalled compositional intricacy).

Every second of this music is in motion: just when you least expect it, new sounds peek out from around the corner. Instruments come and go, as restless as the melodic and timbral variations, when they're not simply swallowed up by a succession of self-contained compositional blocks (the magnum opus “Cubik”, amid shreds of electric guitars, elephantine basslines and synth motifs fluttering like feathers).

A landmark of mimetic skill is undoubtedly “Qmart”: here the dreamy Roland TB-303 phrasing and percussive carpet set the tone for a mini-bolero in 6/4 that updates the '50s bachelor-pad symphonic poem into futuristic muzak for the cocktail generation forty years on. Björk is a Yma Sumac of the rave era, theatricalising her alien, ancestral voice and stirring in the listener a similar sense of displacement, a longing for fantastical places untraceable on any map. Likewise, the thread connecting “Lift” to Dimitri From Paris and to a certain strand of french touch is sturdier than many might imagine. Just avoid getting locked into rigid schemas, and the contribution of 808 State to one of the key turning points of the decade's second half becomes obvious – a moment when terms like lounge and chill-out were about to become the order of the day.

2) Critics seem to agree in crediting “ex:el” as the first electronic dance album to feature vocalists from the alternative/indie rock world. However minor this detail may seem today, now that the divide between the two worlds looks more contrived than ever, at the time it was a giant leap, something unheard of. Sampling Lisa Gerrard's voice and dropping it into a context where vocal samples are just one sound source among many (“Papua New Guinea” by Future Sound Of London) was one thing; inviting singers to work on brand-new vocal parts, to interact with the musicians, to compose, to write lyrics, was quite another. Active involvement is what makes the difference, and in this case 808 State were taking the first steps toward eroding the wall – conceptual, aesthetic, ideological – that segregated the rock and dance worlds as though they belonged to irreconcilable dimensions. All this was happening at the same time as Primal Scream and Saint Etienne, but from the other side of the barricade: here it isn't rock or indie-pop immersing itself in club culture to regenerate, but electronica legitimately aspiring to become “pop”, to turn itself into a universal language, in every sense.

If the already mentioned “Qmart” delves deeper into the most unpredictable, uncompromising side of the collaboration with Björk, “Oooops” becomes its mirror image instead, its most concrete and intelligible manifestation, in a latin-ethno-jazz framework that uses acid influences as moody atmospheric commentary, almost anticipating by two years the recombinant, hybrid pop of “Debut”. “Spanish Heart”, with its melodic piano work and the greater docility (apparent, at least) of its synthetic component, becomes the first template for the crossover track, drawing on a vocal contribution from Bernard Sumner whose presence almost seals a kind of alliance between two generations of Mancunian music, effectively rebuilding the thread linking 808 State to the city's original wave nucleus. From Chemical Brothers onward, this formula would go on to become a standard setup in contemporary electronica, but the first brick thrown against the wall of ideological divergence had already been hurled a few years earlier.

Other departures, further reshuffles and more releases would follow, perpetuating this saga built around a Roland TR-808. But it was in that magical, frenetic, unpredictable three-year span, distilled into an hour of passionate, wildly acidic intuitions, that 808 State left their greatest legacy, opening up gateways through which to glimpse the future. “ex:el”, more than just a title, is an outright declaration of excellence.

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30/12/2018