Correcting a Wrong

Hello, and welcome back to the Rinse newsletter. If you remember last week’s newsletter, I left you with a video of the Cocteau Twins playing on The Tube, a music program that aired on Channel 4 from 1982 to 1987. I told you that it was an important part of the story of A.R. Kane, the band I will be writing about this week. If you are asking yourself who A.R. Kane is, you're not alone. Criminally underrated and only really remembered by record store clerks, collectors, and college radio DJs (the Venn diagram on this triad is uncomfortably close to being a circle), A.R. Kane is one of the most important bands to come out of the mid- to late-80s underground. Their influence can be felt in post-rock, trip-hop, house music, and shoegaze. Furthermore, the band coined the term “dream pop.” So, how do we get from a TV show performance to influencing four different styles of music and coining an important subgenre? Easy, with a lie.

Back when the Cocteaus were on The Tube, both members of A.R. Kane, Alex Ayuli and Rudi Tambala, watched the performance independent of one another. The next day, they talked on the phone and lost their minds. They saw this trio—a bassist, a guitarist, and a vocalist—playing to a taped drum track and moving as little as possible. For both of them, it opened a world of possibilities of what music could do. Fast forward a few days, and Ayuli and Tambala were together at a party. Ayuli was asked how he knew Tambala, and even though they had been friends since they were eight, Ayuli lied and said that they were in a band that was “a bit Velvet Underground, a bit Cocteau Twins, a bit Miles Davis, a bit Joni Mitchell.” The woman that they told this to informed Derek Birkett, who ran the One Little Indian label.

Birkett was immediately interested, and asked Ayuli and Tambala to send him a demo. Given that they had only talked about being a band, they had no music. Ayuli and Tambala quickly slapped together two tracks and sent them off. Birkett was deeply impressed, and wanted to see them play live. Again, since they aren’t a real band, Ayuli and Tambala quickly assembled a band and played, by their own words, “absolutely disgusting noise.” Birkett came up to them after the show, and said “You’re shit. Let’s make a record.” This was two weeks after the Cocteaus performed on The Tube. (Fun fact: According to Tambala, when they went to sign their contract with One Little Indian, Birkett showed them a picture of “what appeared to be a six-year-old girl holding a frog.” That woman was Bjork, and we know what came of her.)

Over the next eight years, from 1986 to 1994, A.R. Kane went on to push music in strange, interesting directions, presaging a considerable amount of work that would come in their wake. Their first formal release was the single “When You’re Sad.” If one were just checking vibes, they would think that it was a Jesus and Mary Chain song. And, in fairness to those people, they wouldn’t be completely wrong in thinking so. The vocals are covered in echo, the guitars are overdriven, and the drum machine plays a primitive loop. It sounds like a lost Psychocandy track. Two problems with this approach though. The first is that it is weirder than the JAMC at that time. The Reid brothers were obsessed with 60s pop, and this song doesn’t relate to that structure in any way. It floats along rather than trying to fit into a neat verse-chorus-verse frame. Second, the other song on this single, “Haunting,” is far more spectral. While the noise is clearly present, it is being used to shape an idea rather than to challenge the listener, as was often the case with JAMC at this time. Lastly, Ayuli and Tambala had never heard of the JAMC; they had never listened to their music. It’s hard to rip off a band you’ve never heard.

With this single and the Lollita EP, A.R. Kane was staking out an interesting place for themselves in the music world. While they recall their contemporaries of that time—JAMC, Cocteau Twins—their musical vocabulary and conception of themselves is extremely different. To start, there is something important to know about Ayuli and Tambala: they are two Black men who are children of immigrants. (Ayuli is of Nigerian descent, and Tambala is of Malawian descent.) In addition, they did not come up on the music of the British indie scene of the time. Before they started playing together, Ayuli was a part of a dub soundsystem, and Tambala was a part of the London jazz-funk scene. Both of these things put them on the outside of the indie scene, but it also made their music more interesting.

Before A.R. Kane went on to make the music that would solidify their legacy, they made yet another piece of music history. M/A/R/R/S, a one-off collaboration between A.R. Kane, Colourbox, DJ Dave Dorrell, and mixer C.J. Mackintosh, made “Pump Up The Volume,” a classic of the acid house genre.

While this was not the easiest collaboration—4AD founder Ivo Watts-Russell said about the collaboration, “They made the record and they fucking hated each other”—the song is phenomenal and mostly out of step with everything that A.R. Kane would make going forward.

The music immediately following this release, their 1988 album 69 and the Up Home EP, set the template for the gestating shoegaze scene. Across this music, you can hear Ayuli and Tambala taking guitar noise as a core and shaping it with delay and other effects. The vocals, dreamy and intimate, are coated in a heavy layer of echo, making them feel like they are whispering into your ear from across a room. Songs like “Baby Milk Snatcher” have keyboard stabs that could have come straight from King Tubby’s studio, with their intense tape delayed sound. The songs lack a strict structure; instead, they present ideas for the listener to explore and engage with across multiple listens. Let’s look a little more closely at the aforementioned “Baby Milk Snatcher.”

The song does have a momentum of its own, but it drifts like the finest dubs. With its revving guitar noise and hypnotic vocals, the song carries the listener away on their own trip. There is enough of a rhythm in the song to connect with, but it is clear that the beat is only one small part of the entire construction. Every time I listen to this song, I find that there is some new detail or small hole to dive into. It is truly an accomplishment that these two men could figure out a way to take all of their influences and merge them into something so dynamic and unique.

Suffice it to say, 69 is an extremely ambitious record, bursting with ideas. Each track plays like a lucid dream. To call it Lynchian would be pat, but that is how it feels sometimes. The music floats between a grounded reality and an ethereal imaginary, and you, the listener, are constantly unsure of which you are inhabiting while taking it in. It's an intriguing trick that shows how far out their ideas are. However, they managed to outdo themselves on their next record, 1989’s “i.” A sprawling 26-track album, i touches on their previous fascinations—dub, noise, jazzy improvisation—while expanding even further out. On the track “A Love from Outer Space,” you can hear the duo playing with what would become the Madchester sound with its bouncy bass and energetic synth lines. In addition, unlike some of their earlier tracks, it's just plain fun. You want to dance to it. On “Supervixens,” you can, again, hear the formation of what would become shoegaze. The guitars shimmer, creating an engulfing sound that is reminiscent of the bands that would come to record after this album—Ride, Chapterhouse, Catherine Wheel, and Slowdive, to name the ones that come to mind immediately.

While it is a challenging listen, it is deeply accessible. That seems contradictory, but it's not, I swear. With the varied genres and styles, one can find something to enjoy here. Furthermore, it’s fascinating to hear how much future music was influenced by what was done on this album.

Following these two albums, A.R. Kane lost a bit of steam. They took time off and came back with one last album, New Clear Child. This album is fine. It does not have the mystique of its previous albums. The production is a little too clear, and the ideas don’t have quite the heft that they did on previous albums. It’s maybe unfair to this album to call it lesser because it’s really not bad. Unfortunately for it, 69 and “i” exist, and they are so much more. After this album, the band called it quits. While they have reunited in the 2010s, the new music is under the name Jübl, noting a break from A.R. Kane. In my opinion, they don’t really need to make new music as A.R. Kane. They just need to be out there to remind people that their excellent music exists at all.

Now, you might be wondering why this dispatch is entitled Correcting A Wrong. There are two reasons for that. The first is that A.R. Kane has not gotten the correct amount of respect for the ways that their music has influenced multiple genres of music and a raft of bands. The re-releases of the albums and the singles compilation as well as the new attention being paid to them with the reunion is helping with that. Even without the groundwork, the music is honestly interesting on its own terms. It does not exist just as a memorial to an earlier time. The music still feels as challenging and interesting as it did when it was originally released.

The second is that I meant to write about this band back in February for my Black experimental dispatch. While their sonic palettes are a bit different, the line from A.R. Kane to Dean Blunt is absolutely straight. In both, you have people who are willing to take the tools around them and use them to present interesting ideas that had not been previously considered. As well, in both, you have artists who do not fully get the respect for how innovative their work actually is, even if it can be hard to fully comprehend.

With this dispatch, I'm freeing everyone of my dive into the music of the 1980s. I hope that this has been entertaining for y'all on any level, rather than me just forcing you to read about all of this obscure music that has clouded my mind.

There won't be anything from me for the next week and change as I'm going on an international sojourn. I'm going to be back around the 18th of June with a dispatch about music made in the last ten years. I should say that I will hopefully have a dispatch about music made in the past ten years. What will it be? I don't know. The only things I've routinely thought about that weren't music for these dispatches are the All Girl Summer Fun Band, Roc Marciano, and Donna Regina. (If you look these up and wonder what's going on with me, the answer is nothing, I'm fine.) To end this post, I'll leave you with the video for “A Love from Outer Space.”

Enjoy your next couple of weeks and if you find something cool, email me. I'd like to know about it. Thanks for reading, and tell your friends to check this out.