Tuxedomoon

Like aliens beamed in from the future, Tuxedomoon burned through the stages of their revolution at breakneck speed. Bursting out of the San Francisco underground melting pot – a land of freaks and wild experimenters, from the Residents to MX-80 Sound and Chrome – they quickly found themselves fish out of water. America, straddling the 70s and 80s, was hungry for rock passion and authenticity. Blaine L. Reininger and his bandmates, degenerate children of punk, were already a step ahead. With their grotesque cabaret, they rode artifice all the way to its extreme, exposing the false spontaneity of rock, with its stale rituals and clichés. What's more, they already sensed the electronics that would dominate the decade, and injected it in massive doses into their existentialist psychodramas. "Punk had fossilized into a puritanical dogma of guitars, bass, drums and a screaming singer," Steve Brown (keyboards, sax) would explain, "but when Blaine and I started performing live – a violin, a sax, a synth and a tape recorder – people would pelt us with bottles and shout 'Where's the drummer?' Programmed rhythm was an alien concept in America back then."

Their theatre of the absurd, then, was destined for exile, and the natural destination could only be the Old Continent.

In Europe, Tuxedomoon had already tasted the audience's enthusiasm during the tour for "Half-Mute", their formidable debut. Startled by such a reception, the former San Francisco freaks decided to pitch their tents right there in the Old Continent, setting up headquarters first in Amsterdam (Netherlands), then in Brussels (Belgium), where they would spend a long and prolific period. Meanwhile, in London, they recorded their second album, "Desire". Another revolution.

It's the artwork, first of all, that signals the change of course. In place of the geometric, abstract lines of "Half-Mute", the cover of "Desire" is dominated by a warmer, subtly erotic image, seemingly concealing some unspecified human anatomy. The edges are softened, then, with sounds that are smoother and rounder in place of the debut's ungainly angularity. And the spaces are filled in: where "Half Mute" erected monuments to emptiness (even "Fifth Column" appeared in its uncanny instrumental version), "Desire" comes across as denser and more epic, thanks also to a robust rhythm section and a more pronounced use of electronics.

But the real revolution lies in the forbidden embrace between the Californians' icy avant-garde and the synth-pop that, at the dawn of the 80s, was taking over the charts. It's a feat so audacious that perhaps only they could conceive it and pull it off successfully. Sure, Kraftwerk had already managed it with "Trans Europe Express", but their alchemy, equally outrageous, leaned more heavily towards pop. Tuxedomoon, on the other hand, manage to make two seemingly opposite languages converse using the same erudite, uncompromising approach of their early days. All the way to the ultimate provocation: chamber music landing on the dancefloor.

Take, for example, the opening suite, a fifteen-minute esoteric liturgy split into four parts: in the first, the hypnotic "East", it's Brown's lunar sax that embroiders over the bass's murky rumblings while Reininger's mephistophelian violin screeches in the distance; what follows, "Jinx", brings back the Devil's instrument to scar a mechanical dance of minor notes, embellished by a gypsy melody and the estranging vocalisations of Chinese-born mime-singer Winston Tong; the third segment ("• • •"), a brief dissonant interlude for strings and electronic effects, sets the stage for the cacophonous symphony of the closing "Music #1", a riot of unruly synths, found sounds and psychotic noise on the borders of musique concrète.

But right at the peak of their most glacial avant-garde climax, Reininger & co. veer toward the warmer shores of synth-pop to intone an ode to the ill-fated destiny of the goddess Cassandra, prophetess unheeded by divine curse: "Victims Of The Dance" sublimates their theater of cruelty into a grotesque litany, marked by the descending bass scale of the late Peter Principle and pierced by studio effects and spectral counter-vocals. Like a demon-possessed Roxy Music. It's effectively a new musical genre, a "chamber noir synth-pop", unashamed to contaminate its aristocratic lineage with the sweat of the dancefloor: hence the feat of "Incubus (Blue Suit)", where the hammering pulse of a drum machine bursts in, pumping out near-disco cadences, with a dizzying synth line worthy of Jarre and jarring guitar breaks. Counterbalancing the unleashed rhythm is a bleak, apocalyptic lyric evoking a man arrived from the future to hand a lethal weapon to a humanity now in its death throes: "The smell of molten metal permeates the scene, the music plays in empty rooms". Dance had never been so tragic.

Still with their foot pressed to the accelerator, Tuxedomoon paint the alienating title track, propelled by the bass's mutterings and by frenzied polyrhythms, with an icy, aseptic vocal that obsessively drills out programmatic slogans ("Desire/ Don't think/ Don't buy", almost an anthem against the wear and tear of consumer society), while Brown's schizophrenic sax scratches away freely. Then the doors of their decadent discotheque swing open again, and the most unpredictable of DJs greets us: the ineffable Winston Tong, who after a solemn intro of keyboards and sax announces: "What suffering, in the name of love", and the dancing begins: a guitar timidly peeks in, instantly swept away by the frantic pulsations of the rhythm section and by another prodigious synth line: it's the definitive snapshot of the coupling between new wave and dance. Epic, poignant, "In The Name Of Talent (Italian Western Two)" will remain one of the great underground anthems of the decade, complete with a parable-like lyric on the hapless fate of those who sacrifice their own talent.

Two seemingly minor episodes close the circle, though both are still pervaded by mad creativity: the jazzy ballad "Again", where the tempo slows down, making room for the twilight glow of the sax and Tong's oddball crooning, and the deranged farewell of "Holiday For Plywood", halfway between cabaret pantomime and Disney fairy tale, where the theme of consumerist paranoia returns, through the anguish stirred up by a dream house: "Don't sit on the sofa/ The plastic makes you sweat/ The bathroom's done in mirror tiles/ The toaster wants your blood".

With "Desire", Tuxedomoon scandalize the avant-garde diehards by flirting passionately with the trendiest phenomena of the era (synth-pop, dance), while at the same time terrifying the followers of those very genres with their dystopian visions of a chilling industrial future, alienated and dehumanizing.

Their eclecticism is hardly surprising, after all, considering that Reininger himself cited among the band's sonic sources "American muzak, the stuff that plays in supermarkets, Italian or Mexican songs, electronic standards, traditional music and things of that sort". And in this case there's also the not-inconsiderable support of a more professional production (it's their first record cut on twenty-four tracks).

Nocturnal, visionary, chilling, "Desire" is the second masterpiece churned out in little more than a year by the San Francisco ensemble. Don't trust anyone who plays it down. And don't miss the reissue with the bundled Ep "No Tears" (1978): no tears for the creatures of the night, today as then.

In memory of Peter "Principle" Dachert (New York, December 5, 1954 – Brussels, July 17, 2017)

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03/06/2018