Monday 1 June 2015

Ian Boddy - "Elements Of Chance" (Mirage ‎– M602) 1981

Back in '81,while you and your mates were all listening to "cool" music, like Josef K,The Fall,and Cabaret Voltaire. There was always some introspective loner,with a ponytail , and a quietly expressed preference for Tangerine Dream, lurking in the corner of the Sixth-form common room. Just behind the middle class kids in denim jackets with Blue Oyster Cult patches and Genesis written in Biro on their copies of the collected poems of Philip Larkin.
This lot were 'Weird', sucked into the prog vacuum left by Punk Rock,totally oblivious to that rowdy phenomenon,due to their complete and utter mis-comprehension  of anything vaguely proletarian in origin. But the weirdest of the lot was the Tangerine Dream worshipping teenager.
Of course this kind of geek could also find himself a home in Industrial Music, like Chris Carter of Throbbing Gristle,or they could end up like Ian Boddy.
The DIY era gave these misfits a chance to get their electronic symphonies out to bother the public,and so they did.
This stuff can sound like anything from a pale shadow of Steve Reich, to a radio shack Klaus Schulz,to mid-eighties Testcard music. 
This album manages to fit in all of these category's into 45 minutes; but at least he uses a Boss Dr. Rhythm drum box,which was my first drum machine, and I wish i still had it.

Tracklist:

A1 Iaja 4:50
A2 Natural Motion 3:40
A3 Four Views 18:00
B1  Surface Touches 9:05
B2  Elements Of Chance


DOWNLOAD some extremely unfashionable progressive electronics from 1981 HERE!

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Ian, The Master!

Thanks!

Zeb

Anonymous said...

Monsieur Zchivago, plus que parfait! Merci!

Alan Burns said...

Brilliant tape - and one of your most evocative writeups ever, great stuff! That would've totally been the kids I'd have hung about with.

Tim 'Space Debris' said...

Loving this one.

Onya Jonny....oh and Ian

the saucer people said...

Ah, thanks for clearing up the origin of your nom de plume! I hang my counter-cultural head in shame. Jesus, I used to be able to quote whole chunks of dialogue from Kubrick's Clockwork Orange and now I have trouble remembering what month it is... at least that explains why every time I come to this blog, I spend the rest of the day humming Henry Purcell's Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary!

'Who you getten bratty, Goggly Gogol? Johnny Zhivago? The Heaven Seventeen?'

Actually, come to think of it, 'Boddy' is very a very 'Nadsat' word and on the wonderful Elements Of Chance track, just after it goes all Apocalypse Now helicopter, he shifts gears from Froese to Carlos. Really like the second track as well, Natural Motion, reminds me of the non-Going For Gold theme-side of Michael Rother, which I love - evocations of psychedelic pastoral whimsy (or at least that is what I would say if I were a 70s NME hack).

A pleasant change of pace and all the more admirable that Ian Boddy conjured all this up with a couple of synths and a Dr. Rhythm as opposed to TD's vast studio arsenal.


Jonny Zchivago said...

It shouldn't have happened, but all this has made me play back to back Tangerine Dream from 1970to80 while I work. And I raided my village library and watched "A Clockwork Orange",or "L'Orange Mechanique" as they say on the Cover of the French version....thankfully with sub-titles so as not to destroy the poetry of the dialogue.
What number was Johnny Zhivago in the chart? Number two i think,behind Googly Gogol?Dunno the name of the song though?