Showing posts with label Adventures in Reality. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Adventures in Reality. Show all posts

Saturday, 21 July 2018

Various Artists ‎– "Realities. Vol 1." (Adventures In Reality Recordings ‎– A.R.R. 001) 1982




The last Essex band to be featured are the criminally underexposed 86:Mix, from Westcliffe-on-Sea it seems?
They featured on "New Crimes Volume 1", but there seems to have been little else released;although i have been informed that they did self-release a couple of cassettes, and were considered as a possible for Namedrop records. They could have been Delta Six or an essex boy Fire Engines, but no-one was interested.
The only other tracks by 86:Mix i could find are on the debut Adventures In Reality compilation, "Realities Vol 1.", and rather excellently post-punky they are too.
Oh Yeah,....Attrition's on here too, and various other  Goth rockers, new poppers, and futurists mostly from the Coventry/Northampton area....in fact a classic compilation from a great era in Pop music.

Tracklist:

Red Side:
A1 –Trance -Instincts
A2 –Trance - Dawn Of The Dead
A3 –I Want-Myself Desired
A4 –I Want-99th Creation
A5 –By Product-You're Not One Of The Boys
A6 –Reviva Component-Black Forest Girl
A7 –Reviva Component-This Lunar Beauty
A8 –Send No Flowers-Wall Of Convention
A9 –Send No Flowers-Untitled


Blue Side:
B1 –Attrition-Hours & Hours
B2 –Attrition-Tomb
B3 –TSC - Untitled
B4 –86:Mix-Too Much The Barman
B5 –86:Mix-Custodian (Live)
B6 –The Aucadion -3 AM
B7 –The Aucadion -Closet Boys

Wednesday, 13 June 2018

Religious Overdose ‎– "Live" (Adventures In Reality Recordings ‎– ARR004) 1983


Northampton based Post Punk combo who sounded like most other decent bands of that ilk....everywhere had a cult musician called 'kevin' and everywhere had their own 'Rema-Rema's'......which can only be good.I've listened to 'Wheel In the Roses" far too many times, so here's a chance to hear some material they might have recorded before they changed their name to 'Mass'....a bit like the garage -psych bands on those 'nuggets' compilations; but instead of giving the generations of the future diferent versions of the Stones and The kinks, we are now discovering bands who give us different versions of the post Punk bands of our youth eg) rema-rema, Modern English, and their like.......we've had the 'Rubble' series for UK Psych, and Nuggets for US Psych, so how about "Grey Clouds" or "Raincoats" for a UK Post Punk compilation series?
Recorded live at The Black Lion, Northampton, England May 1982.


Tracklist:

A1 In This Century
A2 Push The Key
A3 I Said Go
A4 Control Addicts
B1 The Tower
B2 The Girl With The Disappearing Head
B3 Wild Cat


Tuesday, 9 February 2016

Stress ‎– "The Big Wheel" (Adventures In Reality Recordings ‎– ARR 014) 1985

In 1985, one of the worst years in pop music, Stress and Adventures In Reality goes plastic with a mini album. The title of which seems to mimic the atrocious Heaven 17's soul-synth atrocity "Crushed By The Wheels Of Industry". Stress obviously had chart ambitions, which is never a force for good in any medium. 
They had also invested in better equipment, used a proper recording studio,which results in a harder EBM influenced sound, and do I sense a sampler? Thankfully there's no Orchestral Stabs,or any "Oh Yeah!"'s;but a few Reagan samples and the 'Bagpuss wakes up' harp glissando. Anyone one who samples from "Bagpuss" deserves a medal in my book. I never listened to anything Reagan had to say at the time,and on the evidence of these samples the bloke was a complete prick! They (the USA) would have done a lot better having Bagpuss as president, a puppet with a heart who could tell a mean yarn.(Also 'Bagpuss' had a soundtrack that rivals 'The Wicker Man' for weird dark folkiness.)
On the subject of 1985 being one of thee worst years in pop music;......we now know this not to be true.At the time it was,but little did we realise that every year from 1989 to 2016 would be worse. 1973 used to be cited as the worst, but this is total crap; it was jam packed with prime prog rock (not including Yes or ELP of course), 1974-76 were markedly worse; even Can were shite then!
This album is very 1985 sounding,with sophisticated sequencing, car skidding and speech samples, thudding drum machine kick drums, and an amusing attempt to sing like the bloke from Front 242.
As a francophone, the tune "Slaves To Beat" never fails to amuse me, and the French in general, because in French the word 'Beat' refers to a male sexual appendage; written 'Bite' its pronounced phonetically as 'Beet', aka Beat (titter titter)......how amusing eh kids?

Tracklist:

A1 The Big Wheel
A2 Elizabeth Selwyn
A3 Get The Most
B1 Slaves To Beat
B2 No Sane Alternative
B3 The Price You Pay

DOWNLOAD and go down on the beat HERE!

Monday, 8 February 2016

Stress ‎– "Restraint" (Adventures In Reality Recordings ‎– ARR 010) 1984

Stress's next tape after their incredibly watery debut,was 'Restraint'.Which is ironic,because their sound before 1984 showed considerable restraint; especially vocally. There is a marked inprovement on this one.The vocals are marginally more confident,and the music marginally harder. Moving more towards the Belgian end of the minimal synth world rather than the camp English androgyny set. You could probably dance to some of this?

Tracklist:

A1 Engrave The Name
A2 Nothing New
A3 Raga
A4 Hide From View
A5 I Go To Pieces
A6 Semi-D Prison
B1 Down Through The Years
B2 Freespeak
B3 Enigma
B4 Rule Of Force
B5 The Pulse Thickens
B6 4th Dimension


DOWNLOAD without restraint or stress HERE!

Saturday, 6 February 2016

Stress ‎– "Help Comes Too Late" ( Adventures In Reality Recordings ‎– ARR 005) 1983

Stress,is appropriate,especially if you are a Manchester City fan today......losing 3-1 to low-budget rivals, the mighty Leicester.Just gotta dick Arsenal next week and its all over bar the shouting.
Of course Leicester is about 20 minutes down the M69 from Coventry,home of Adventures In Reality,but also guilty of Two Tone;the first in a long line of forcing white men to dance fad's!
Luckily, Adventures In reality never tried to do that to us.
One in a long tradition of 'synth duo's',Stress, was Alan Rider's, head honcho of Adventures In Reality fanzine/Label, foray into the pop world. I assume he is one of those shadowy figures on the insert.
If anyone's ever been to Coventry,they will know what a despondency inducing,concrete clad, architectural atrocity it is.....post WW2.Once a medieval treasure ,second only to York,it was bombed flat by the Luftwaffe;and then finished off by British modernist architecture of the 1950's.
This would explain this alienated and despondent synth pop outing.
Its kinda like Soft Cell with even wimpier vocals; a Softer Cell if you prefer?
Its fairly anemic stuff,which is all part of its charm; Front 242 it is not,and very English. 

Tracklist

A1 Help Comes Too Late
A2 Work Ethic
A3 Love Mafia
A4 I Stand Alone
A5 Saving Graces
A6 Perfection
A7 Distortion
B1 Hiroshima Blues
B2 Crying In The Wilderness
B3 Tribal Rite
B4 Tin Soldiers
B5 Glacial
B6 Help Comes Too Late Too


DOWNLOAD without stress HERE!


Tuesday, 2 February 2016

Attrition ‎– "Death House" (Adventures In Reality Recordings ‎– ARR 11) 1982


According to Discogs, this was the tape that invented "Dark Ambient",which is ,as usual, total crap.That accolade probably goes to Kluster,or  at the latest Lustmord?
I'll use more from Discogs' slushy superlatives, 'Rich Shadowy electronic soundscapes......interweaving the ephemeral with the operatic'...what?......'gloomy atmospheres mixed with prodding beats;classical bombast melded with ambient noise'......there's more!......'enveloping listeners in a dense nebula'.
Put that sick bucket aside now, as this isn't too far from the truth. I'd write something similar myself, if I wasn't listening to Leicester City beating Liverpool 2-0 on the radio.So I might as well snaffle somebody else's pretentious waffle.I'd watch it on TV but the rights have been bought up by the ruling elite to sell it back to us for a massive profit.
"Death House" tonight, means the death of the working classes right to the stuff they invented to entertain themselves. At least we're fighting back in the music world by taking down the record companies. There's more music around now than there has ever been,and it's mostly free or very cheap. Reclaim the streets, and come on yee Foxes to reclaim the Premier League for real football clubs.

Tracklist:

A - Crawling
B - Dead Of Night


DOWNLOAD some classical bombast in a dense nebula HERE!

Wednesday, 15 April 2015

Duotronic Synterror ‎– "Pech Und Schwefel" (Wartungsfrei ‎– wf003) 1981



Moving on swiftly from the cerebral end of early 1980's German Electronica, to what normal Germans were doing with their synthesisers at home of an evening.Gathering around the SH101 and drum box for a sing-a-long, donning unwashed lederhosen ,swinging a foaming flagon of strong continental lager to an efficient 4/4 beat.
The advent of DAF lead to a legion of similar bedroom synth bands, bestowing the virtues of a hard regular,dare I say, marching beat? Overlaid with minimal hard synth sounds,usually sequenced for maximum accuracy and efficiency. A musical version of the Volkswagen , economical,reliable, and robust. This stuff is the German successor to Om-pah musik, that unwittingly reflects German folk culture, kind of frightening,with a concealed aggression,but very efficient and practical,useful; Volksmusik.

Check out more from Duotronic Synterror and Andi Arroganti  ,  here and there.

Tracklist:

A1Liebe Auf Den Ersten Blick
A2Blutsturz
A3Flipperfieber
A4Wir Stehn Auf Sex
A5Arabische Nächte
A6Edelweiß
B1Metro A Move
B2Variotronic Synterror
B3Faules Fleisch
B4Klaatu Warara Nicto
B5Weltsicht
B6Fanfare
B7Live Mit Schnitt

DOWNLOAD some volksmusik HERE!

Monday, 17 February 2014

Various Artists - "The Last Supper" (Adventures in Reality ARR007) 1984








Fantastic, faultless Industrial cassette compilation, complete with fanzine, from 1984.Not a duff track on this,and a spectrum zx computer program to boot!......spectrum ZX programs themselves sounded not unlike some of the Drill'n'Bass stuff that appeared in the 90's from acts like Squarepusher and some left-field Aphex Twin.
The weakest tracks come from german group Gorilla Aktiv, but only because they are a carbon copy of early Deutsche Amerikanishe Freundschaft, but that's no bad thing 'cus by 1984 DAF were shite, and Gorilla Aktiv were excellent.
Best Track, probably the Smersh one; a distorted kind of House musick for an insane asylum.
Included with an 'Adventures in Reality' Fanzine, which was based in Coventry,and ran from 1980 to 1984.All these tracks were exclusive,and not to my knowledge released anywhere else!
Pro-printed cassette with j-card in snap case. Packaged together with a 16-page booklet, including a 3-page interview with SPK.

Satisfy yourself with the 3 sample tracks I have included below as a taster for more to come.

Track Listing:

Side 1:
SPK - Ich Klage An (Euthanasia)
SPK - Satori (mp3 sample track)
Gorilla Aktiv - Spiegelbild (Mp3 sample Track)
Gorilla Aktiv - Ottos Pornos
Autentisk Film - Polaroid
Smersh - X, X, X, Going On L (mp3 Sample Track)
Bourbonese Qualk - In The Flesh

Side 2:
Test Dept. - Forward
Audio Leter - A 'Lot' Of Time
Muslimgauze - Metropolis
Muslimgauze - Trans/Time
Tex Mirror H - Sister
Attrition - Mr. Toma (I Looked But It Was Gone)


Download your last supper HERE!

Sunday, 12 January 2014

Various Artists – "D.I.Y. Electronics for the iPad Generation (40 Minimal Classics from before the age of MIDI)" – ( a Die or DIY? Mixtape # 4) 2013

It is generally accepted that Rock, in its broadest term, finally died in 1984. The main culprits in this tragic demise have always been accepted as Capitalism, consumer brainwashing, and freely available easy to use technology. The almost criminal acceptance of MIDI as the tool for musical communication killed almost all relevant and exciting music stone dead overnight. Gone were the slightly mistimed notes that made music human, made by humans for humans. In came music made by machines for corporations’ banks, and therefore for the New World Order. This reached its zenith with the advent of post-acid, house music; which along with stuff like the neutron bomb, LSD as a mind control tool, assassinating dissenting public figures,- had its origins in a secret room in the Pentagon. Music, and I hesitate to call it music(program, or Pogrom, is more descriptive), for the Illuminatti, MK Ultra for the unwashed masses. This is the stuff that turned us all into the consumer monkeys that we are today; and the worst thing is that its STILL here, after 25 fucking years!
Lets go back to the BC (before good computers) of electronic music. When the only way instruments could talk to each other was with a rather unpredictable thing called “Controlled Voltage/gate” (CV/gate), or, by that even more unpredictable device called playing an instrument by hand!!!?? How primitive, or rather how good was that? We are now becoming in reality, a fleshed out version of that brit-flick non-classic “Morons From OuterSpace”. Technology has become so miniaturised and complex that we only know how to operate it, but are clueless as to how it works. There was never this problem with the original synthesisers, if a component failed it was merely a case of replacing a defective part, or more often a swift bang with the hammer and it functioned once more. Like 21st century cars, you can’t fix 21stcentury synthesisers yourself, you gotta pay the man, or buy a new one. That, and built –in-obsolescence, ensures the consumer treadmill of global doom keeps turning until we all starve to death.
This compilation celebrates the electronic world before MIDI removed mankind from the equation. When, shock-horror, musicians played synths “Live”with ….erm….“Hands”? Probably slightly out of sync with a human drummer, standing at two electronic drum pads. Yes, there were sequencers, but they were just as unreliable and unpredictable as those inefficient fools that made them, homo sapiens.
I suppose this is the start of the next generation of evolution, when man merges with machine. Cometh the Cyborg! But maybe worse, we could all just exist as computer programs, like modern music, and the incredibly shit modern cinema, which is nothing more than watching a computer game for two hours. CGI consumer monkeys being controlled by a CG new world order, in a fake self replicating digital universe, that will hopefully disappear up its own Computer generated black(arse) hole.
Track Listing:
Part One : “Arpeggiators agogo”
1 – “Voodoo” – Chris and Cosey
2 – “Happy Funeral” – Kitchen and the Plastic Spoons
3 – “Lost in Madagascar” – Anne Cessna and Essendon Airport
4 – “ Mechanical Breakdown” – Crash Course in Science
5 – “Sexuality” – We Be Echo
6 – “Ottos Pornos” – Gorilla Aktiv
7 – “R.A.M.” – The Klingons
8 – “High Pressure Days” – Units
9 – “So Obvious” – Absolute Body Control
10 – “One Little Soldier” – Patrik Fitzgerald
11 – “Robot” – The Plastics
12 – “Et Hop” – Phillipe Laurent
13 – “Contemplation” – Solid Space
14 – “Untitled” – Portion Control
15 – “Day Breaks, Night Heals” – Thomas Leer and Robert Rental
16 – “The Fashion Party” – The Neon Judgement
17 – “Fat Cow” – Nervous Gender
18 – “This Deception” – The Midnight Circus
19 – “Computer Bank” – Phillip Lawrence and Mark Phillips
20 – “It’ll Never Work” – The Sea of Wires
Part Two : “Bleeps,Burps and Buzzes”
1 – “Spiegelbild” – Gorilla Aktiv
2 – “Push me pull you” – Futurisk
3 – “Cardboard Lamb” – Crash Course in Science
4 – “Spinola(blotch)” – Portion Control
5 – “Its Very Simple” – Ampnoise
6 – “Fatima” – Inertia
7 – “The Goo” – Noyz toyz
8 – “Shrinkwrap” – Attrition
9 – “I Like Your Elbows” –Colin Potter
10 – “Touch” – 96 Eyes
11 – “Kortsluiting” – Störung
12 – “Herzlos” – Stratis
13 – “Saturday” – Schicksal
14 – “Before Breakfast” – Irsol
15 – “Information Therapy” – Richard H. Kirk
16 – “Under press of Sail” – Claire Thomas and Susan Vezey
17 – “Endorphin” – Third Door From The Left
18 – “Fascination” – PseudoCode
19 – “Forgotten Boys” – DZ Lectric and Anthon Shield
20 – “Outreach” – Chris Carter

Friday, 10 January 2014

Attrition - "Onslaught" (Third Mind Records TMT06) 1983



The first release,a C-30 Cassette, from Coventry's Attrition(as seen on the Last Supper compilation from Adventures in Reality).
An exercise in electronic industrial minimalism, with a couple of synth's and a wellused echo machine. There's even an industrial disco track,'Shrinkwrap', which was a popular direction for many formerly industrial groups; and generally one to be avoided. If you close your eyes you can just imagine a sparse gathering of Goths dancing jerkily to this on a dark dancefloor in some awful club called the spiderweb ,or something just as naff, back in '83.
But the rest of the tape is most acceptable,if a tad over reliant on echo's for weirdness.

Many thanks goes to Alan Rider of Adventures in Reality for this tape.

Track Listing:

A1 Vigil
A2 Onslaught
A3 Shrinkwrap
B1 Tones In Black
B2 First Onslaught

DOWNLOAD Onslaught HERE!

Friday, 20 December 2013

Irsol - "Half Life" - (Adventures In Reality ARR008) 1983



This collection by Irsol is a much more meaty and hard hitting Industrial electronic record than their debut tape "First Contact".
The title alludes to the fact that side one is a studio recording and side two was recorded live; the live side being the more brutal of the two. Some excellently raw electronics become more harsh thanks to the 'sports hall' acoustics of the venue.
A classic tape of phat industrial electronica released on the excellent Adventures In Reality label.

Track Listing:


A1
Raw

A2
Granular Spacetime

A3
Drill

A4
Sporting With Ameryllis In The Shade

A5
Blue Mist

A6
Suppress

B1
Junkyard I

B2
Leafspring

B3
Junkyard II

B4
Track One

B5
Reasoning

DOWNLOAD a Half Life HERE!