the shamen: c/d

The Shamen were fantastic.

Another absolute gem from that period capturing that same feeling is Sequencial's The Big Cahoona which according to the booklet is a PLURed out concept album about a psychedelic space journey involving meditation and, ehm, "space gypsies". It also manages to shoehorn (remixes of) their pre-album house hits like "Cycades" and "Psychotronic" into the bizarre storyline.

Colin Angus was going out with my flatmate around that time and I can vouch that he was a genuine psychonaut, and very earnestly utopian.

― stirmonster, Wednesday, 5 August 2020 21:24

Awwww, Colin Angus was genuinely adorable in a kind of Ralf Hütter-esque way, and I really hope he was a kind and lovely sort of fellow, as well as an earnest psychonaut.

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/80/78/57/807857681090f5aaf74671eb861bc019.jpg

Before things degenerated into kind of Cyberdog silliness, there was a whole thing through the mid to late 80s of apparently heterosexual-(ish) men going about dressed like fetish lesbians and I am SO HERE FOR IT.

https://nostalgiacentral.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/shamen33.jpg

A couple of months ago some ~Tumblr kids~ of my acquaintance were passing around scans of a fashion catalogue from the late 90s - it wasn't Cyberdog, but it was very very cyber-y rave-y super-wide pants you could hide a 90s laptop in the pockets of, neon circuit board inserts in the T-shirts type stuff and they were all laughing their heads off going "what WERE our parents thinking?!?!?" - but at the same time recognising that it was not a million miles from their own net-kid aesthetics - like hippie-cyber-utopianism millenarianism was a very specific time and place, and I really suspect that the corporate wave of Web 1.0 dot.com-bubble killed off the joy of it. But I am still very nostalgic for that time and place.

Also Bytes, Surfing on Sine Waves, Gargantuan, The Brown Album and UW's Spikee, Rez & Mmm..Skyscraper. Plus lots of ace compilations like Trance 2 and Dub House Disco 2000 xps

~Ecstacy and MIDI Will Set Us All Free~ --> the birth of the 21st century's brutal technosurveillance-capitalism was a very short but absolutely wild ride

Sound Clash Republic (Fabio Paras) - The Birth Of Shiva Shanti epitomises 1993 prog house for me. xps

Did love taht point where they were just becoming more electronic , stuff like She's Shitting ON Britain.

Not sure if I've heard Aloneagainor the original incarnation of the band.

did wind up being put up in what had been Will's room i a shared house in Edinburgh though I think he may have already moved out at the point, definitely not there when i was.

Would love a whole cd of that era around Shitting oN Britain but not sure there was one. Think the compi that did have several of the tracks also had some other eras.
THink I came across the SSOB track on a compilation tape that was covermounted on lime Lizarrd.

Meta-post, please skip if you hate meta

This thread is really showing me the difference between the two 'sides' or 'modes' of ILM, and I know that we had at least one thread (possibly several threads) about those modes, but the labyrinthine quality of ILM and its search function are making it impossible for me to locate those discussions.

There's a style of fandom/criticism which is curative, collecting. It's about the *what* of the music, how is it made, what does it relate to, where does it fit within notions of 'genre', how does it compare to others of that type (list-making, polling, etc.)

There's another style of fandom/criticism which is far more... how is this music *used*? Under what circumstances do people listen to it, where did they encounter it? What does it mean, how does it fit into other forms of culture and subculture, contextualising and storytelling.

And ILM is great, because the community as a whole constantly slips back and forth between the various modes, and ILM starts to be really boring when one mode dominates completely over the other. However, I personally have strong preferences for one form of engagement over the other. This thread is really, really reminding me of that tension as it slips back and forth. (Where the Jane's thread was almost entirely the latter.)

(Damn! I wish I could remember what thread it was. I have an awful feeling it was part of the Rockism v Poptimism wars. Where on earth do The Shamen fit in the Rockism vs Poptimism Wars, I have no idea.)

Plavka (vocalist on Hypereal and later on Jam and Spoon’s awful Right in the Night)

I love the Shamen, but "Right in the Night" and "Find Me" are still better than any of their singles.

When sky sports introduced the new Monday night football! The Shamen signing Ebeneezer Goode at Highbury in 1992.

I do hope they had the good sense to keep them away from Paul Merson.

Also, back in the day I remember people saying that the quality of the Shamen's output dropped after Will Sinnot drowned in 1991? They certainly seemed to move to a more poppy/Eurodancey direction after his death, but that could've been a coincidence (and the Eurodance singles were great anyway).

What happened to the other member of the rock version of the Shamen besides Sinnot, btw? Were they still around after they switched to dance music, or was it only Colin Angus, Mr. C. and Sinnott at that point?

Sorry, the name is Sinnott with two T's, not Sinnot.

Further down the rabbit hole I found this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7lt9c4qm_G0

Like imagine going to an Underworld gig in Ibiza at the tail end of the last decade and then have Mr C just come on and the band just launch into Move Any Mountain. Everyone would go fucking bananas.

Also from their Wikipedia entry, is this true? Because this is some Holly Herndon shit right here, 25 years early:

Always seeking to push out musical and communication boundaries, the Shamen saw themselves as an information band. Their Internet site Nemeton [6] was amongst the first British music sites to host unique Web based events, e.g. releasing the first ever single and LP on the net in 1995[7] and it also features a remarkable piece of software devised by Angus to convert the DNA structures of human life into electronic music. "S2 Translation", a track on Axis Mutatis, was generated using this software.

looks like there wasa specific point in 1988 that I really liked, before the band really became house influenced I think.
& there was an e.p. from taht era, expanded on cd but not reissued since then.
THe one with the tory minister on acid sample as lead track I think.

Also from their Wikipedia entry, is this true? Because this is some Holly Herndon shit right here, 25 years early:

Always seeking to push out musical and communication boundaries, the Shamen saw themselves as an information band. Their Internet site Nemeton [6] was amongst the first British music sites to host unique Web based events, e.g. releasing the first ever single and LP on the net in 1995[7] and it also features a remarkable piece of software devised by Angus to convert the DNA structures of human life into electronic music. "S2 Translation", a track on Axis Mutatis, was generated using this software.

I don't actually care if this is true or not, it's such a great story I need to go and seek this out right now. I don't think I have ever heard the full album - I experienced them soley as a singles / tracks you hear on the dancefloor band, and am quite unfamiliar with the album tracks. Is this going to be painful or amazing?

Yeah, the DNA thing is true (or at least a very convincing fabrication), it was mentioned in their interviews at the time. And Axis Mutatis does have the track (supposedly) based on the human DNA code, there's some info on it in the liner notes. It sounds pretty much as you'd expect, basically and IDM peace with aleatory "melodies".

"basically an IDM piece"

Haha, it sounds like a less glitchy take on... Holly Herndon. (Unsurprisingly)

What happened to the other member of the rock version of the Shamen besides Sinnot, btw? Were they still around after they switched to dance music, or was it only Colin Angus, Mr. C. and Sinnott at that point?

Will Sin replaced one of the original members himself, and then AIUI the other members at the time left within a year or so as Angus and Sin steered the band harder into electronics.

I experienced them soley as a singles / tracks you hear on the dancefloor band, and am quite unfamiliar with the album tracks. Is this going to be painful or amazing?

I do like the album, it's pretty evenly split between the more poppy Eurodance tunes and more experimental trancey tunes. The only real minus is that the main sung vocals are done by Angus only, no Plavka or Jhelisa Anderson, and I've never really considered him that great a singer.

But you gotta love the fact that they had a top 20 hit with a rap verse like this:

And on across the Rubicon
So immanentize thy eschaton
Unto Ragnarok or Nemeton, and beyond
In the name of Adam Kadmon, you move on
Ego gone as one
Transformation to solarisation
Towards the final confrontation
Eschaton is thy destination

OMG @ that Underworld do Move Any Mountain clip?!?!? I'm not sure I can cope with this at this time in the morning. My BRANE is broken.

Techno Dads on acid... but totally authentically ~of the period~, with a glittery dude on guitar making gestures which bear no relation to any actual sound apparent within the mix?

Awwww, Colin Angus was genuinely adorable in a kind of Ralf Hütter-esque way, and I really hope he was a kind and lovely sort of fellow, as well as an earnest psychonaut.

Yes, very much so.

What happened to the other member of the rock version of the Shamen besides Sinnot, btw? Were they still around after they switched to dance music, or was it only Colin Angus

I used to see one of the brothers from the rock version around Edinburgh during that era and as far as I recall he didn't do anything music related after The Shamen.

https://www.nemeton.com/static/nemeton/sitemap.html

it's pretty evenly split between the more poppy Eurodance tunes and more experimental trancey tunes

So out of my depth when I try to discuss genre names and assignments here, but the stuff I loved from them was stuff I would consider big, ridiculous, rock-riff Stadium House - I suppose that's the more Eurodance end?

I don't mind Angus' voice. He's not a strong singer, but when he's double-tracked and harmonised he does a capable choirboy. That's what I enjoyed - the contrast between these big Stadium House gestures, the female singers giving it everything, Mr C's theatrics, and then these slightly weedy indie boy vocals that reminded me of like, Ride or something? That's what made it charming for me, the unexpected mixture.

(the glittery dude is Karl Hyde, the lead singer and guitarist of Underworld)

Aww, I didn't recognise Karl. I should have known. I love him - he was in the Conny Plank film being all excitable about Krautrock. <3

Wow, the Nemeton.com has actually preserved the Axis Mutatis era site as I remember it from 1995/6:

https://www.nemeton.com/static/nemeton/axis-mutatis

Here's some further information on "S2 Translation":

"The track 'S2 Translation' was generated from the DNA sequence and the amino acid characteristics of the S2 protein. The time signature of the piece is given by the codon: 3 base pairs per codon gives one codon per bar, hence the time signature is 3/4 or waltz time.The 'top line melody' comes directly from the base pair sequence itself (the bases cystosine, adenine, guanine and thymidine being mapped to the notes C, A G and E respectively) while progressions in the bass are reflective of the characteristics of the amino acids which are the result of translation. The number and nature of bass notes per codon/bar were determined by the hydrophobicity/hydrophilicity, ionic charge (positive or negative) and size of each amino acid residue (Proline, for example,which has no characteristics other than its small size, can be identified easily as the bars where the bass line 'drops out'). The musical output resulting from these rules was further processed by mapping the notes onto different tonalities, both to make the piece more interesting, and to suggest the organisation of the protein molecule into regions of different secondary structure (although since S2 is a membrane protein and thus impossible to crystallise outside the lipid bilayer, this was definitely creative licence).

S2 is the receptor protein for 5-hydroxy tryptamine (Serotonin) and presumably for other tryptamines as well. It is thus one of the most important molecules in the mediation of both ordinary and non-ordinary (or "Shamanic") states of consciousness, which is why the molecule was chosen for this piece." - Colin Angus

So out of my depth when I try to discuss genre names and assignments here, but the stuff I loved from them was stuff I would consider big, ridiculous, rock-riff Stadium House - I suppose that's the more Eurodance end?

The Eurodance formula at its purest was: a pop-house beat + melismatic lead vocals, usually sung by a woman + a verse or two of Euro rapping. Their singles like "L.S.I." and "Phorever People" fit the formula perfectly, by Axis Mutatis they'd tweaked it a bit by Angus being the only lead vocalist, but other than it still fits the mold.

Though out of the vocal songs on Axis Mutatis, the one I like the most is actually "Prince of Popocatapetl", which is slower and moodier, doesn't have Mr. C. rapping, and sounds more like synth-pop than Eurodance.

Sorry, Tuomas I just went and read up a few ILM thread about Eurodance, and one of your polls revealed that the genre-defining track was Technotronic: Pump Up the Jam (which is admittedly one of the greatest songs ever recorded). So, basically Tom Ewing anthems. It's funny, when that material is done well, it's one of my sweetest sweet spots. But when it strays too far into Schlager, the returns diminish fast as it approaches pure cheese. (Which could be said about any pop genre.)

There needs to be a dose of genuine WTF insanity in a good Stadium House tune - something that makes you sit up and go "WTF just happened on TOTP?!?!?" Like Ebeneezer Goode is the archetype of that?

Listening to Prince of Popocatapetl now, and it's a bit too chill. Destination Eschaton, I knew as a single. Conquistador is sounding more like what I'd want. It's that choppy tremolo synth sound that does it for me, rather than the more echoey synth pad sounds.

Someone I know regularly mentions the bonus ambient (?) album that came with early copies of Axis Mutatis so I keep an eye out for the 2CD but haven't found it offline yet.

Plavka (vocalist on Hypereal and later on Jam and Spoon’s awful Right in the Night)
I love the Shamen, but "Right in the Night" and "Find Me" are still better than any of their singles.

― Tuomas, Thursday, 6 August 2020 08:58 (one hour ago) link

SACRILEGE!! But "Stella" on the other hand, remains a classic.

I loved 1993, and Emprion "Narcotic Influence" is peak 1993 for me...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YLr3dSekkIY

Sorry, Tuomas I just went and read up a few ILM thread about Eurodance, and one of your polls revealed that the genre-defining track was Technotronic: Pump Up the Jam

I'm sure that's because them majority of the voters are from the US and the UK, and that song was a big hit in both countries. But most of Eurodance was made and consumed in continental Europe, and for us the most emblematic Eurodance song would probably be 2 Unlimited's "No Limit", which wasn't a hit in the US, and which was released UK as an edited version without Ray's eurorapping, only with Anita's singing.

the most emblematic Eurodance song would probably be 2 Unlimited's "No Limit"

Naturally I must agree with this.

Talking about Eurodance here is a red herring really, just in case of where they came from and where they fitted in (as opposed to where they briefly ended up in 1992). A song like LSI is as much a cockney geezer/Scottish hippy take on Kevin Saunderson as anything else.

you people made me listen to Phorward yesterday and it stands up and also demonstrates that the Shamen got Bleep Music way faster than any of their reformed indie chancer contemporaries that i can think of

OK, I'm listening to No Limit right now (I only knew the UK version, natch) and I think we're broadly in agreement about what we're talking about.

This would fit perfectly within what I'd call Stadium House - I guess what I mean by that term is... correct me if I'm wrong, but most dance music is about the beat. When you listen to a dance track - case in point, the Emprion track above - usually it starts with the beat so that a DJ can mix it into the previous track, then adds the rhythmic components that make up the distinctive groove, that groove is what makes the song the song, and other elements are added, such as a vocal hook or a memorable riff.

In what I'd call Stadium House, it STARTS with the riff. In the 2 Unlimited track, they bash you immediately over the head with that amazing "DURR DURR DUH-DUH DURR-DURR" riff. You can stick an acid beat under it, you can stick a house beat or a disco beat or whatever under the riff, and do a million remixes. But the riff, the hook is the thing, and not necessarily the groove.

because The Shamen started as a rock band, I think their most distinctive work is about The Riff. That Make It Mine and Move Any Mountain are about the riff, the pop hook, the chant - a lot of UK dance acts of this era (the KLF were classic at this) were about taking a football chant of a vocal riff, and building a song around it.

LOL, Persephone's Quest just came on, and my immediate reaction was "this is an early Spiritualized track, right?" It's got the exact wubwubwub sounds, the exact same shimmer, it's everything I loved about the early 90s in terms of ~sonic texture~.

I guess my mistake was, I was after that specific sound, and followed a bunch of dronerock bands that were producing that sound - into all kinds of rockist nonsense I now regret. Where there's another parallel dimension where I could very easily have gone the other way and sought that sound out in Trance. (Which would have had its own nonsense.)

YES I SAID SONIC TEXTURE DID YOU MISS ME

(don't all shout "no" at once)

Naturally I must agree with this.

― Basil Ker-ching (Noel Emits),

things you were shockingly old when / puns you had missed

The origin of the user name is actually as much John Lilly's province of the mind maxim as 2 Unlimited which is a very The Shamen combo as it happens.

you people made me listen to Phorward yesterday and it stands up and also demonstrates that the Shamen got Bleep Music way faster than any of their reformed indie chancer contemporaries that i can think of

totally OTM.
i mean i loved Gorbachev and all, but this was when i really began to take notice.

That pun could have been clearer, except emit has a long vowel? If it had been Noel Emmetts, 'twould have been clearer but ah well. I get the joke now.

I have to applaud Noel Emits' long game here

also I am very annoyed that Phorward isn't on US Spotify

the 99 reissue is rather pricey on amazon !
i guess not many copies were pressed up.
you can read the sleeve notes written by Paul Lester via the Discogs listing of it.

I found the good version of En-Tact on YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehiddG5Sv3M

Freewheelin' just like Franklin.

Hang on, the track list given in the description doesn't seem to match the running order in the video?

It doesn't?

Oh, do you mean the algorithmically-generated one? I always ignore that.

You want this from the description:

01. 00:00:00 Human NRG
02. 00:03:23 Progen (Land Of Oz)
03. 00:07:29 Possible Worlds
04. 00:11:14 Omega Amigo
05. 00:15:58 Hyperreal
06. 00:20:30 Lightspan
07. 00:26:17 Make It Mine V2.5
08. 00:30:14 Oxygen Restriction
09. 00:34:02 Evil Is Even
10. 00:47:16 Human NRG (Massey)
11. 00:51:53 Make It Mine V1.3 (Pirate Radio)
12. 00:56:47 Oxygen Reprise V2.0
13. 01:02:05 Hear Me O My People (Orbital - Delays Expected)

Sorry, I'm being an idiot. Forgot Move Any Mountain was called Progen (Land Of Oz) on the album. I only ever had the 12" singles from this period, at the time. It's cool to hear how they fit together.