shoe3 (dreampoptronica)

Cardrossmaniac chips in to the shoegazetronica discussion

His mention of MBV (specifically the bonus single instrumental with Isn't Anything -  breakbeat overlaid with ghostly wavering) and A.R. Kane's "A Love From Outer Space" reminded me that the precursors to shoegaze had dancey moments.

Well, there was M.A.R.R.S. obviously....

But A.R. Kane did a one-off single as A R K that was their stab at house

Possibly motivated by desire to prove that they'd contributed more to "Pump Up The Volume" than a coloursplash of guitar? Or perhaps to show that they could do full-on dance music if they wanted to....

Comrade Oldfield oversells the side project a little bit in this 1988 Singles Page.

Paul makes it sound a bit more enthralling and achieved than it actually is. But that's how we rolled in those days ("inflation of meaning" yunno). This review is an example of what one Melody Maker editor teasingly referred to as the National Geographic school of reviewing then prevalent at the paper (at least, with my crew).  Moraines, escarpments,  that kind of thing...

Rudi and Alex had already showed their dancey tendencies on the flipside of "Pump Up the Volume" with this beauty, to which Colorbox lads contributed only a bit of drum programming.



A remix I have no recollection of ever hearing.




Then, as referenced by Cardross with "A Love From Outer Space", there were several boppy tunes on i.




"Crack Up" was a favorite.




Another vaguely housey chugger




There was even a remixes mini-LP or maxi-EP in 1990 - the typographically clever Rem'i'xes

Several of the remixes - "Miles Apart", "Crack Up", and "Crack Up (Space Mix)" - were actually done by Robin Guthrie. But they don't seem to be available on YouTube.

shoegazetronica

Says Chal Ravens, "really enjoying The Primitive Painter reissue coming on Apollo – glittering cybertech waters, distant polygonal islands, '90s digiutopics, that sort of thing"

Now I was wondering if the artist name (an alter ego for Alter Ego, apparently - i'm stealing a Youtuber's quip here) was a reference to Felt

... and thought "nah, more likely it's directly referring  to Lascaux"

But lookee here, a nod to The Waterboys

and "Cathedral" - as in the proverbial "sonic cathedral" for 4AD-ish religiose reverb aesthetic?

Felt had this proximately titled song

and this even more proximately titled song




ah - and, stop press - as Cesar in comments points out, there is also this Felt song 

so clearly formatively rooted in mid-80s Anglo-indie this The Primitive Painter chap - or chaps, rather, since Alter Ego = duo 

now I'm wondering if that song is named after the House of Love offshoot captained by Terry Bickers of vitreous-guitar showering you with crystalline splinters renown?

The shoegaze into post-rock evolution is well documented and logical

But the shoegaze into the electronic listening music / chill out / IDM side of techno is less delineated

Chapterhouse got that album remixed by somebody or other IDM-ish (Global Communications? Future Sound of London? )

Morr Music

a German friend of mine Heiko Hoffmann - long time editor of electronic music magazine Groove, until recently - did a shoegaze compilation back in 2003

the texturitis and blissy feeling of dreampop / shoegaze was a gateway drug for E-lectronic dance and non-dance, for some, maybe

for me as a writer, maybe that applies too - texture-attentiveness (texture > text) vis-a-vis MBV et al, sets me up well for texturrythm-attentiveness about rave .... ditto "the politics of ecstasy" becomes "the politics of Ecstasy" (although in both cases I would say now that it's more like an "anti-politics" - for better or worse, and increasingly, i think worse) 

but as a listener I was into club music and synth-abetted funk right from the start of the 80s

and in fact would write about things like Mantronix  in that engineer-as-poet / new sonic architecture mode well before I became a raver - at the exact same time as I was hymning A.R. Kane in similar sort of terms (not man-machinic but certainly the human figure disappearing into the miasma of sound)

same kind of becoming-abstract, depersonalized, sensation-not-significance approach

"against interpretation" (before I'd even read Sontag's essay)

Deleuzian, before I'd ever cracked open A Thousand Plateaux 

one instinctively know what is right

and this was the right response to what the music was doing 




the missus reviewed this gig (where they were supported by The House of Love) 

later we saw Felt's final gig together