Violator!

I think of so many albums I love as random but there's definitely through lines across the decades when you look at producers... Peter Walsh, John Fryer, John Leckie, Flood, etc.

Ross Robinson

for MftM, didn’t they intentionally seek out the dude that did songs from the big chair?

Dave Bascombe and yup, very intentionally. Incredibly good call! They had an excellent run with Miller and then Gareth Jones before that point, and it was a good switch and step up to try something further. (And I mean, if you're Jones and your last album with them is Black Celebration, you can definitely relax and think "Yeah, job well done.")

I’d say Wilder is at the very least 50% responsible for Violator’s sound. It’s a shame the guy can’t write a tune cause his sound vision is really amazing.

I’d say Wilder is at the very least 50% responsible for Violator’s sound. It’s a shame the guy can’t write a tune cause his sound vision is really amazing.

I used to think it was very bold of DM to use a different producer on each album from MftM up to Playing the Angel. Which is almost true but for years I simply assumed SoFaD was a different producer than Violator. remarkable how different those two albums sound given it was the same producer

Bascombe had a fantastic run from 85 to 87, in between ..Big Chair and MFTM he made It's Immaterial's Life's Hard And Then You Die. It's a brilliant record but they were pretty damn lucky getting him looking back, maybe he owed someone a favour.

Watching the documentary that came with the 25th anniversary reissues for the first time and I suspect that François Kevorkian has a lot to do with the sense of space on this album. Gore talks about him spending 2 days mixing a hi-hat. I was then reading about the 5.1 remasters and it mentioned that it had been complicated to separate some of the sounds used as FK had used multiple delays on “waiting for the night”

I’d always thought that Flood had been mainly responsible for the production, but it also sounds like FK’s mixing was integral to the process.

Off the back of that I had the CD on and my copy is skipping so I thought I’d google and see if it had been released digitally on some hi def format. I wouldn’t have objected to buying some 24 bit lossless file but it doesn’t look like Mute have released any.

OOF!(check out the music))

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

Which is funny because if anything it's Roxy/Bryan Ferry who is a throughline in the actual documentary (very deft uses of "The 'In' Crowd" and "Manifesto")

Oh! I must watch that, the trailer looked fantastic.

thinking about how strange it is that this album has had a pretty limited influence on synthpop revival stuff of the last two decades, pretty everything seems to draw much more on earlier 80s synthpop?

like it's the sort of album a band could surely have a whole career ripping off but ... ?

Musically, I feel it had a huge influence on the sharper, more industrial side of things; a lot of the '80s stuff people reference is softer and mushier, and besides, this album isn't an '80s album, and the band has plenty of more traditional synthpop from which people can draw. I do, however, feel Depeche Mode has become a pretty prominent songwriting influence, so they're still in the DNA of a lot of backwards-looking stuff.

Oh my @ some of these poll results. Blue Dress robbed at gunpoint. Talk about the sweetest perfection.

Violator is so sophisticated and slick, it seems harder to "borrow" from than earlier, simpler synth pop.

Musically, I feel it had a huge influence on the sharper, more industrial side of things

oh yeah certainly, just that this album has such a distinct & perfect balance of things that i'm a little surprised there isn't more that's trying to capture the same sort of sound

Even Depeche Mode have struggled to recreate it!

It reminds me of how there aren’t many pet shop boys imitators taking on “behaviour”

Maybe it’s the songs that are difficult to recreate, though? Couple of tracks I don’t remember so well but iirc it’s wall-to-wall bangers.

Songs Of Faith.. was probably more influential than Violator (on NIN, Marilyn Manson, Garbage, etc?)

yeah its influence is way more obvious, though i've read that the influence goes both ways & they were into NIN when making it as well?

They were def. into NIN by then. "Rush" is the most obvious one. Of course "Pretty Hate Machine" was released in 1989, and also produced by Flood, just prior to "Violator," so chances are good they heard it pretty early and it might have made an impression. But then of course, "Pretty Hate Machine" clearly owes a lot to Depeche Mode.

Pretty Hate Machine is Depeche plus late 80s Ministry and that’s why it rules.

My god, it's full of samples

https://dmlive.wiki/wiki/List_of_Depeche_Mode_sample_sources_by_album/Violator

Hmm, at first I was surprised, but most of those samples are just kind of manipulated library sources, or otherwise just literally samples, in that a lot of the sounds weren't necessarily programmed or designed from scratch. Still pretty cool to learn, thanks! And yeah, some of the actual samples incorporated into this masterpiece are as inspired as they are invisible. Toni Halliday! Alan Moulder didn't engineer or mix "Violator," though, and I'm not sure they were a couple yet, so is that just a coincidence that she was (literally) in the mix?

It reminds me of how there aren’t many pet shop boys imitators taking on “behaviour”

true

xp yeah loads of emu library sounds but a few very interesting sources in amongst them - especially the uses of fleetwood mac, kraftwerk, and the bulgarian state female voice choir.

Very interesting to me too, a lot more samples of popular music than I expected