Psychic TV - Force the Hand of Chance

OK, so this is instructive. Psychic TV's Force the Hand of Chance was a blind download. I knew nothing about this other than it was suggested in a thread I made about 'song cycle' albums. This, by the way, explains how I come across about 5 percent of the albums I try.

Van Dyke Parks' album Song Cycle is undoubtedly a top-10 album for me. Going by the definition I found on Wikipedia:

A song cycle is a group of songs designed to be performed in a sequence as a single entity. As a rule, all of the songs are by the same composer and often use words from the same poet or lyricist. Unification can be achieved by a narrative or a persona common to the songs, or even, as in Schumann's second Liederkreis, by the atmospheric setting of the forest. The unity of the cycle is often underlined by musical means, famously in the return in the last song of the opening music in Beethoven's An die ferne Geliebte.

The term originated to describe cycles of art songs (often known by the German term "Lieder") in classical music, and has been extended to apply to popular music.

In that case, some of my favorite albums would be considered song cycles: The Clash's Sandinista, Todd Rundgren's A Wizard, A True Star, and perhaps Allen Toussaint's Southern Nights. (VDP's album, ironically, doesn't really fit the definition.)

I listened to this on repeat today, perhaps four or five times all the way through. I rarely do that with a new album, so this is what qualifies as excitement for me. I've been intrigued to research this album that I've never heard of before, but before I do that, I wanted to try something.

This is my guess: I'm thinking this album is from the UK and released in the span of 1988-1993. Influences include Television Personalities, Public Image Ltd., This Heat, and Bill Holt's Dreamies. I'm betting this was the band's only album. The genre is avant-garde post-punk, although it's a bit later than most post-punk albums.

So now I'll actually research it and see how close I got.



Update: Oh bruddah. I was right about the UK post-punk bit, so I should've known it was even earlier than I guessed. This was released in 1982, after Genesis P-Orridge was out of Throbbing Gristle (a band whom, despite their appearance on several post-punk compilations, I've never been able to get into). This album is as old as I am.

I was way off the mark thinking this was a one-off album. Then again, it appears Psychic TV is more of an audio/visual house collaboration among dozens of artists. They described themselves as a video group who does music, rather than a music group which makes music videos. In the mid/late-80s, they set the Guinness record for most releases in one year. Perhaps the rest of their work doesn't sound much like this one. Without digging too deep, it appears the rest of their work is more industrial and exotic before transitioning to house and techno in the 90s.

Something I don't yet understand is that Wikipedia describes this as a single album with 8 tracks. That's certainly what I've been listening to today. Yet AllMusic refers to a double-album with 13 tracks. I guess I've got to find the other five tracks.

23 Skidoo - Seven Songs

A more descriptive title would have been "Seven Panic Attacks," but even a bland title isn't able to prevent the undeniably savage, pungent impact of Seven Songs, a half-hour long album that plays out like a soundtrack to being bounty hunted in an expansive jungle. Following "Kundalini," a hectoring brain shake that hardly resembles the dormant energy it's named after, "Vegas el Bandito" enters and doesn't imply the James Brown of "Cold Sweat" so much as the panic of night sweats, churning out a taut groove of slap-happy bass, pattering drums, horn trills, and a scratchy-scratch guitar line that chases its tail. An echoing trumpet carries through the end of the song and drifts right on into "Mary's Operation," an anemic drone of even creepier horns and tape loops. "New Testament" is an industrial death lurch of rusted metallic sheets, giving way to "IY," a cluster of conga acrobatics with needling saxophones and frenetic chants thrown on top. "Porno Base," the real knockout, contains little more than a series of abysmal bass pluckings placed just far enough apart to induce chronic paranoia, sounding less like a smut-film score than "Welcome to the Terror Drone." The finale, "Quiet Pillage," despite its exotica reference, could only be played in the ruins of a lounge post-carpet bombing. This is post-punk at its most invigorating and terrifying.

(23 Skidoo - Seven Songs)