The pièce de résistance of the 'Collected 1984 - 1989' project, all the music on this LP has never been heard before, except for a single tune released on a rare 7" in 1988. The track selection and sequence is the result of Ducret & Isar closely listening to the many hours of unreleased material Desaever shared with them. Saved from oblivion and irremediable decay, the music on this LP is now just waiting to be played and listened as well as to inspire.
Musique Pour La Danse is thrilled to present its latest "Collected" anthology, the label's most ambitious release since it released an extensive anthology of music produced by New Beat pioneer Ro Maron back in 2015. Side A is a reissue of the highly sought after Disdain EP from 1988 by White House White. Side B contains three previously unreleased tracks in a similar spirit to WHW's sound with a dark and sleazy atmosphere.
Featuring music from a lost tape of devotional keyboard jams, field recordings of migrating birds, mysterious bells, meditative noise and crooked new beat/EBM, made god-knows-when and subsequently discovered in a Thessaloniki charity shop years later. It now somehow finds its way to vinyl, newly mastered by Rashad Becker, and sounding like a lost Hype Williams x Muslimgauze madness.
Originally discovered in a musty charity shop by Live Adult Entertainment, and issued in minuscule numbers on CD in ’21, Christian Love Forum’s raverential debut ‘Naked Light’ documents the fraternal post-church jams of siblings, Scott, Kiro and N•X, plus their mate Steve, who would regularly channel the light and pain of Sunday mass sermons into their ecclesiastic crud.
As previously heard on their blink ’n miss ‘Unconditional Love’ tape, the trio express their higher purpose thru ribboning microtonal keyboard jams that sound like Gurdjieff with a Casio and a knackered drum machine after too much sacramental wine. They hit the strangest, most affective seam of religious cinematic epic soundtracks, gnarled noise and clandestine Belgian new beat that seriously pushes our buttons, sounding quite unlike anything in the contemporary sphere, but eerily also echoing sentiments explored on record by James Leyland Kirby or Bryn Jones.
Now reshuffled and clad in custom artwork, ‘Naked Light’ is unveiled to believers and skeptics as a definitive article of faith. The lord works in mysterious ways within, manifest in stages of sun-bleached post-church field recordings, whirligig melodies, blown-out bouzouki and choral tape howls and a Béla Tarr soundtrack-like campanology on the A-side, before letting their passions flow in ‘Wicked City (Parts I-IV)’; a spellbinding side-long collage of slurred synths, neo-noir hardbeat rhythms and speaking-in-tongues vox recalling V/Vm’s new beat apocrypha as much as bits from Hype Williams’ hypnagogic ‘One Nation’, thee dustiest gooches of Dirk Desaever’s archive, or even aspects of Rat Heart at his cruddiest.
‘Naked Light’ rarely fails to induce uncontrolled eye movement in susceptible skulls, destined to become an occult hit with lapsed churchgoers, new beat fiends and anyone missing the enigma and ineffable flavour of ‘00s underground noise tapes in this auspicious year of AD2023.
