Sunday, August 25, 2019

take a Bow



Claudia Brucken on her post-Propaganda, post-Act solo album  Love: And A Million Other Things

"When I was doing Love: And A Million Other Things with Pascal Gabriel, we were working in the studio on the last two songs of the album and the MD from Island suddenly left and all the people who worked on my album left as well. A new guy came in and already I could sense what would happen so Pascal and I decided to get really experimental and we did so on the song 'Surprise' with THE BOW GAMELAN ORCHESTRA who were using fire and huge pipes to create sound. We realised we'd have trouble selling this album now. It had nothing to do with the artist or the content of the album."

There's some kind of box set or reissue of Bow Gamelan recordings coming out, I heard.





Well there was always a metal-bashing element to Propaganda right (one of them was from Die Krupps if i recall)

on the subjects of the werks of Claudia...

I did like this Act single a lot and gave the album a fairly positive review in the New Statesman.




Never hugely convinced by Propaganda, apart from this which is magic.




The rest though...




Talk about Raiding the (early) 20th Century



It is an exquisite album cover that's for sure




With Propaganda, and ZZT generally, so much exquisite attention paid to the framing and the little details - like the witty subtitle of this 12 inch remix - but somehow (not always, but too often) the actual... i don't want to say "substance", but the thing at the core, the main event... was lacking






3 comments:

Ed said...

Fair comment on ZTT, I agree, but they had their moments. Er, Moment in Love, for one. And the Annihilation Mix of Two Tribes is one of the great artistic responses to the era of MAD, up there with Dr Strangelove. If I ever want to explain what it felt like being young in the early 80s, that is the place I would start.

Ed said...

*Moments* in Love, of course.

SIMON REYNOLDS said...

yeah my favorite stuff from ZTT is Art of Noise by a long way... Into Battle With, Beatbox, Moments etc etc.

At least until 808 State, but that's almost like a different label.

'Relax' and "Two Tribes' are colossal pop moments there's no getting around it. It was exciting to live through that.