This transmission is often considered as the very start of the sessions that would lead to The Isness, but it’s actually much more transitional than that. The Mixing It ’97 session would be better described as the very end of the Dead Cities era, as everything here grew out of the sessions for that album.
A decent quality bootleg of the show was widely circulated for years, before being replaced by an official release in The Pod Room; the official version comes with an attached interview, although bizarrely it’s the interview from the 1994 Mixing It transmission. The bootleg is worth tracking down for completists, as it does contain the full interview with Garry; it’s the last time he would give a full audio interview in the ’90s. He talks about dissatisfaction with the various forms of media they’ve been experimenting with – radio, computer graphics, ISDN – and how they want to go further to perfect them; there’s also talk about having to be so clever with their samples on albums so they’re not suable, so the radio transmissions allow them to be freer. This is in answer to a question about whether the material coming up is workshopping for a new album, and frustratingly that actual question goes unanswered. Behind the interview is a bed of previously environments, what might be animal sounds. Who knows what really goes into these sounds, though?
When the music starts, it’s with an acoustic guitar line. Which is a bit different. It’s the start of ‘Sendoro Luminoso’. A track often considered to be the start of The Isness era, it actually developed out of the sessions for the ‘We Have Explosive‘ single; ‘Part 4’ grew into a track later released as ‘Implosive’, which became ‘Headhunter’ and eventually ‘Sendoro Luminoso’. And, of course, it includes flutes and the ‘seagull’ sample from ‘Papua New Guinea‘, just to add confusion. The outro is slightly longer than the version released on From the Archives Vol. 5, and similarly it leads into the coda section, featuring vocals by Ian Astbury, written with Garry as part of a potential new direction; when officially released as ‘A Sweltering Heat’, the vocals were removed. This part, with its guitars, breakbeats and vocals, is closer to the earlier Dead Cities sessions than the more synth-led IDM of the later pieces from the album, signifying a subtle change in direction. The piece comes to a fairly abrupt end, and ‘Glacier (Part 2)’ starts. This track was worked on for the scrapped ‘Glass’ single, thus still fitting the Dead Cities era. Stylistically it continues the album’s modern classical direction, with bells, classical guitar, flutes and oboes as well as electronic ambience. It crossfades into ‘Exploded Funk’, another ‘We Have Explosive’ interpolation, basically ‘Herd Killing‘ with funk bass and layers of bright synths. The bootleg features Garry’s closing speech, a rather blunt “ok, that’s your lot” and some of the opening environment over the end of the Mixing It show.
With heavy use of breakbeats, vocals, and sampled and performed ‘live’ instrumentation, plus the funky element of the final track, the set is a conscious move on from Dead Cities towards something warmer and more organic, but all of the material in the transmission is still rooted in the era. It’s another example of the ISDN broadcasts being a great way of hearing the band’s development over the months and years. As a show in its own right, the vocal version of ‘A Sweltering Heat’ is lovely, and the extended outro to ‘Exploded Funk’ is also great, but otherwise the lack of environments and all four tracks being released in some form or another makes it one of the less rewarding shows.
Tracklist
00:00 Sendoro Luminoso
07:00 A Sweltering Heat
09:00 Glacier (Part 2)
14:39 Exploded Funk
19:00 Transmission end
Fractional Difference 