After five months of silence, Brian Dougans and Garry Cobain reappeared in May 1994 to promote their Virgin debut proper, Lifeforms. In the weeks leading up to the album’s release, they broadcast their first ISDN transmissions. And before those, was this unusual show for BBC Radio 3’s experimental music show Mixing It. It was long believed to be an ISDN transmission, but not only does it pre-date what is regularly referred to as their first radio performance (Essential Mix ’94), but the interview conducted with Robert Sandell at the start of the show refers to ISDN transmissions “in the coming weeks”. Of course, the presence of the interview itself, with voice manipulation on both Sandell’s and Cobain’s voices, suggests that it either took place earlier, or was being played around with at the time. So, was it via ISDN, or was it a show sent to the station a la the Kiss Transmissions? Who knows.
What we do know is that it forms an unofficial start to the 3D Headspace Tour, a run of transmissions that took place between May and June 1994, with a couple of later shows in September, and marked the beginning of the group making a public move away from being a band and becoming a broadcasting system. This first show in the tour is a fine example of the kind of performance that was transmitted over the following weeks. The opening interview marks it out as a bit different: the Dead Cities tour featured numerous interviews, but this is the only one we have from 1994. Long-time fans will no doubt find most of what Garry says familiar, but it features some interesting snippets: “I actually think it’s one of the most positive things you can do right now: just not take part in the bullshit of the music industry” – somewhat ironic for a band on a major label, but gives an idea of their desire to subvert the industry, and that their “foremost philosophy is that we’re absolute idiots, rather than pop ego mentality, I’m not interested in that. We’re trying to do something new and we still haven’t achieved it.” Possibly the most repeated idea from the interview is “The rock establishment is trying to force electronic music out onto the road, to try and emulate our rock brothers, and we just think that’s completely naff and very hypocritical, and we’re basically trying to show that there are other ideas and other ways of putting across electronic music. One of the ones that the music industry finds extremely frightening is the fact that it can be piped into the home.” It’s a bold statement to start 1994, and one they would live up to an expand upon over the course of the year. Garry also talks about the “weird sort of control” the band have in the studio.
The interview takes place with strange effects over both Sandell’s and Cobain’s voices, and over the top of a bed of environments, all of them totally new at this point: none of the later Kiss FM environments are present here. Once it ends, the environments seamlessly mix into ‘Lifeforms A/V’ from the Lifeforms video, comprised of various environments from the album, a short burst of ‘Dead Skin Cells’ and an excerpt of an otherwise unreleased (and unnamed) track, a wonderful ambient piece which fans have been clamouring to hear the full version of since 1994. If we ever get a deluxe reissue of Lifeforms, maybe we’ll get it then. ‘Bird Wings’, a transmission favourite, follows. By this point, the band had moved away from throwing in chunks of Lifeforms, so ‘Dead Skin Cells’ doesn’t follow as per 1993; instead, it’s ‘Slowly Falling Backwards’, the unreleased track first heard on Kiss Transmission 6. The track is high on my future From the Archives wishlist. It’s mostly known material for the rest of the show: opening environments from ‘Omnipresence’, ‘Vit’ and ‘Among Myselves’, half of ‘Lifeforms (Path 4)’, part of ‘Tired’, and even ‘Mountain Goat’, highlighting that track’s ability to sit alongside Lifeforms material just as well as Tales of Ephidrina tracks. In terms of unreleased material, a guitar-based environment at 16:14 is an unusual section which is possibly exclusive to the transmission. A further environment following ‘Mountain Goat’, revealed in one of the band’s tracklists to be called ‘Excellent Sunrise’, is a largely synth-heavy section, titled after an answerphone message from Buggy: “Yeah, it’s G. Riphead, excellent sunrise. It’s, er, ten past six. Beautiful.” One unique aspect of the transmission is the lack of movie dialogue samples, with only the Scanners samples during ‘Among Myselves’ used.
There has never been an official release of the transmission, although bizarrely the interview came packaged with the 1997 Mixing It transmission in The Pod Room. A good quality bootleg has circulated for many years, and the timings below are taken from that. The bootleg plays very slightly slower than broadcast, making the 30 minute segment run to nearly 32, and adding a touch of sluggishness to the material.
Tracklist
00:00 Robert Sandell Interview
03:45 Lifeforms A/V
– 03:45 Environments: Lifeforms (Path 1), Lifeforms (Path 5), Among Myselves
– 04:55 Dead Skin Cells
– 06:45 Environments: Ill Flower, Cascade
– 07:48 Unknown
10:00 Bird Wings
11:02 Slowly Falling Backwards
14:07 Omnipresence environment
14:48 Vit
16:14 Unknown environment
16:58 Lifeforms (Path 4)
20:56 Among Myselves environment
21:45 Mountain Goat
26:36 Excellent Sunrise environment
28:58 Tired
31:40 Transmission end
Fractional Difference 