After a Christmas break , Brian and Garry returned to the ISDN cables to broadcast their first show to a US radio station: Groove Radio in Los Angeles. Quite a lot seems to have been made of the show, bootlegs including the introduction with the presenter mentioning they’d been talking about the show for weeks, and giving away “FSOL Groove Packs” to lucky winners of a competition. Can the band meet the hype? Absolutely: if I was asked to recommend only one show from the Dead Cities tour, it would be this one, hands down. At two hours, it’s the band’s longest transmission since 1994, and contains a huge amount of unreleased material, plus all the tour regulars. It opens with ‘Yage (Oil Mix)’, always an enjoyable rarity, and then heads off into a previously heard setlist, closest to the Fritz Radio Berlin transmission. The crunchy breaks track at 21 minutes is exclusive to this particular setlist, and is a weird sounding piece, not quite fitting into the Dead Cities sound or, indeed, any other era especially. The glitchy samples and odd subtle melodies are reminiscent of Autechre, while the gunshot sample is downright strange. ‘LA4’ and ‘LA7’ seem to be named after their appearance in this particular transmission. Following ‘Mains Interrupt’ the transmission goes off into completely new territory, including the then-recently delivered Oil remixes of ‘We Have Explosive’, an otherwise unreleased version of the single version of ‘Lifeforms’, and a premier of ‘The Empty Land’ and ‘The Exhibition’, the only known performances of the two tracks, which might even have been made especially for this transmission. ISDN-era spoken samples (“cosmic unconsciousness” and “leave the lights alone please”) as well as the closing environment from the CD and cassette editions of ‘Slider’ change the mood slightly, and another EBV artist – Simon Wells’s Headstone Lane – gets a premier with his track ‘Back in the Day’. Things head even further out with some 3D Headspace Tour environments.
As ever, even with the same setlists, there is some variation between shows, although often subtle. This transmission introduces a strange spoken sample talking about stars and twilight during the middle of ‘Her Face Forms in Summertime’; ‘Quagmire’ is introduced with a “Future Sound of London” sting rather than the “She’s beautiful” movie sample, as well as removing the “Live via ISDN” sting from the Berlin show; ‘Insides’ is a slightly longer cut than on earlier shows, and lacks the “Live via ISDN” sting; the mix from ‘Punk City’ to ‘Psycho Crab’ is completely different, featuring an unedited version of the latter; an additional ‘Future Sound of London’ sting appears at the start of ‘Carlos’, which features reversed stereo compared with the Fritz Radio transmission and lacks the ‘Live via ISDN’ sting; the ‘horse’ environment from the 1994 sessions appears after ‘Mango Tree’ (as per From the Archives Vol. 4); a “Future Sound of London” sting appears just before ‘Glass’. They’re not Earth-shattering changes, but again act as a reminder that these shows went out live, and cross-fades and sample usage varied from show to show.
Back to the bootleg, and the show ends with a 15 minute interview, with Garry and the presenter initially talking over each other quite a lot, Garry also declaring “‘ello, LA”. Lol. In the UK, this was happening at 8AM, which he declares is normally his time for meditation and hypnotherapy. Hints of the hippy era are definitely seeping through by this point. He then goes on to detail other countries transmissions have happened in, including totally undocumented shows in Italy, Norway, Russia and Croatia. Are our records that incomplete, or is this Garry playing with the truth? Who knows. Another revelation: Garry had given up writing tracks every day, trying to live more and get out of the neurotic frame of mind of needing to be constantly working; a very different perspective to the much more wound up, unhappy vibe of his 1994 interviews. There’s a mention of them getting back into remixing, including working on a remix for Supergrass; a track that would never be properly finished, and only eventually heard about 20 years later. More talk about creating audio-visual transmissions that would never surface. At some point, Brian clearly gets bored and starts messing around with his Synthi AKS, squelchy notes practically obliterating Garry’s talk. There’s lots of interesting stuff about the dynamic between the band, Bugs and the team around them.
The show was released on The Pod Room on 1st February 2010, incorrectly dated as a 1996 broadcast.
Tracklist
00:00 Transmission intro
00:49 Yage (Oil Remix)
04:53 Unknown environment
05:30 Slow of Motion
06:10 Accompaniment for Melodious Expression environment
06:51 Unknown environment
07:25 My Kingdom
11:20 Unknown environment
11:52 We Have Explosive (Part 2)
14:46 Max
17:35 Unknown environment
18:10 La Tronik 1
20:10 Kaaawa environment
20:21 We Have Explosive (Part 1) environment
21:15 Unknown
23:32 LA4
25:40 Unknown environment
25:56 Her Face Forms in Summertime
31:00 Unknown environment
31:30 Is This Real?
32:05 Oil – Slight Of Hand
37:15 Environments (Part 1)
37:44 We Have Explosive (Herd Killing)
41:41 Quagmire
46:33 Environments (Part 1)
46:43 Dark Matter
50:44 Insides
54:45 Punk City/Dead Cities Reprise
55:46 Oil – Psycho Crab
59:40 Carlos
1:06:09 LA7
1:09:50 Tired / Live in New York (Remix)
1:11:40 Mango Tree
1:15:56 War Machines
1:20:16 Glass
1:24:50 Unknown environment
1:25:36 Yashica
1:29:00 Mains Interrupt
1:31:16 We Have Explosive (Oil Funk Remix)
1:34:55 Lifeforms (Remix)
1:35:54 Unknown environment
1:37:00 The Empty Land
1:42:25 Headstone Lane – Back in The Day
1:45:41 18º to the Left environment
1:45:54 Environments Birds
1:47:04 Environments Gong
1:47:59 Unknown environment
1:48:55 A Study of Six Guitars
1:49:18 The Exhibition
1:54:02 Slider environment
1:55:09 We Have Explosive (Oil Dub)
2:01:03 Transmission ends
Fractional Difference 