Now this is an interesting one. The band’s only ISDN performance of 1995 (the Essential Mix, of course, being a mix rather than a show of original material). It, alongside the ’95 Peel Session, documents the early development of the Dead Cities sessions. ArtFutura is a festival of digital culture, started in 1990, centred around Barcelona and Spain. The theme of the 1995 event was Virtual Communities, and FSOL’s ISDN performances clearly fit the theme, thus a 35 minute show was broadcast to Centro Cultural de la Villa in Barcelona, at some point during the four day festival, 18-22 October. It’s believed it was on the final day, but there appears to be no exact confirmation online.
Before the main show, the band also broadcast a 25 minute “pre-show buildup”, essentially an abstract soundscape played while listeners came to the room where the main transmission would be played. It’s effectively an ultra-extended environment, lots of glassy sounding drones, spoken word recordings – including what is probably recordings of the ISDN lines being tested, as there are plenty of phrases like “Garry, you’re breaking up,” “Garry, can you hear me?” and, amusingly, “hey Garry, do you want to do a television interview right now?” – and snippets of tracks. A fractured version of ‘Mains Interrupt’ appears near the start, and the digital drones and elements of ‘Papua New Guinea‘ just before 13 minutes would be later used on ‘Environments (Part 1)’. Although more abstract than their usual fare, it is effectively an entirely new 25 minutes of unique material almost entirely unreleased elsewhere.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the main show shares a fair amount of material with the Peel Session of the previous month. The opening environment is little more than some digital static, followed by some incomprehensible words, and then ‘Quagmire’ begins. The track has subtly developed from the Peel version, including the full extended intro environment that’s included in the outro of ‘Glass’ on Dead Cities, and still having a slightly different structure and tempo to both the Peel and album versions. The intro’s use of static and electrical buzzing feels like the first hint of the overall mood of Dead Cities. The outro is more atmospheric than the Peel version, lacking some of the funkier elements, and sadly a lot shorter; it’s still a long way from the album mix. This is followed by ‘My Kingdom’, which has developed considerably in the intervening weeks. A longer intro environment starts the track, eventually introducing the synths and percussion of the finished track. When the beat kicks in, it’s largely the same one of the Peel version, albeit slightly more restrained and less tinny sounding; four minutes in, the Mary Hopkin vocal arrives, as the biggest development in the track. From this point, it deviates, structurally, from both the Peel and album mixes. ‘My Kingdom’ is the only track we’re lucky enough to have been given access to the development of in such detail. Seemingly plenty more work was needed before the final track was completed. The introduction of the synths and vocals, however, immediately give the piece a more haunting feel, moving away from the rawer, funkier Peel version. A brief environment follows as the track disappears into a bed of reverb, sounds from the end of the album version of ‘Yage’ leading into the ‘Hallucination’ version of ‘Yage’. This is the first studio version of the track heard, and it remains pretty much unchanged through to its appearance on From the Archives Vol. 1; the mix is clearer and subtler than the Peel version. The guitar outro is cut for an environment that would later appear on the 1996 tour, and a digitally stretched voice saying “drifting into a dreamlike state; into a dream that you are surrounded by a beautiful soft, white mist. You will feel yourself being drawn effortlessly back through that mist. Back through the mists of time into the memory of a lifetime you may have lived before this one.” It’s pretty creepy.
At 23 minutes, Brian and Garry throw in the first unheard material of the transmission: ‘Vit Drowning’. One of the darker tracks on Dead Cities, it does share a little of the paranoid feel of ISDN, but on the whole the acid squelches, synth sequence and pads sound much more overtly electronic than anything on that album, and it definitely looks toward the band’s future. An early version of ‘Futura’ follows, another synth-heavy track. This version includes samples of voices saying the title, suggesting it may have been a short track put together specifically for the festival itself; the mix released on From the Archives Vol. 2 lacks the vocals. It closes with the environment eventually used at the end of ‘Her Face Forms in Summertime’, which plays alongside the final new piece, ‘100 Baby Spiders’. This feels much more like an ISDN-era piece, with live drums and wild electric guitar improvisation; one wonders whether it was a track left over from that era, or actually a new recording in the style. Intriguingly, this live version includes a brief snippet of the ‘Omnipresence‘ opening environment in the middle. The sound of machines shutting down gives the transmission an oddly abrupt ending.
The ArtFutura show is an important stepping stone in the development of Dead Cities; the material performed for the Peel Session feels almost like an extension of the ISDN approach, but the changes made in these few weeks find the band embracing more synthetic sounds again, and the environments and new material all feel slightly more open and familiar in atmosphere after the surreal landscapes of the previous album. It would also be the last appearance of the band in public for nine months, and their last live transmission for an entire year, the longest break in new material in the group’s history to this point.
The band made a video for the ‘Quagmire’ element of the transmission, including largely reused footage – along with new 3D imagery – that may have been transmitted to ArtFutura at the time of broadcast. The show was released as part of a Pod Room update on 7th March 2010, incorrectly labelled as a 1996 performance, the usual cover given a green and grey colour gradient.
Tracklist
00:00 Transmission Intro
00:18 Quagmire
08:22 My Kingdom
15:30 Hallucination
23:07 Vit Drowning
27:04 Futura
29:58 Her Face Forms in Summertime environment
30:30 100 Baby Spiders
35:31 Transmission End
Fractional Difference 