I’m not sure how the spark to start writing about this track came about, but from digging back through my memories of the past few weeks it was likely at my place when a friend from Paris was visiting or some friends from Newcastle-upon-Tyne were staying at mine after a recent show here in Glasgow. Overall the act of doing an entry about this track sort of ties into thoughts I’ve had about how some artists from the late 90s going into the 2000s sort of got lost in the cracks of musical history to some degree. It was a time when the simpler, linear progression of the development of popular music started to greatly fragment — especially with artists re-visiting and revising styles of the past (such as the post-punk revival) and in turn creating new timelines — and before the time in the mid-2000s when the internet and the public platform of social media got new music out to audiences wider and farther than ever before and left a footprint in the massive expanse of the internet for curious seekers to come back to. You likely remember MySpace (1), but what about Friendster or even Makeout Club?
Although having fared better in this regard due to their associations with a legendary label like Mute Records and that label’s continually enduring presence to this day, the UK band Add N To (X) (active 1994-2003) have for a lot of folks sort of slipped through the cracks, albeit not to the same obscurity as many small, brilliant bands during this time that worked with far more DIY foundations.
This observation is probably best suited to an essay of sorts all unto itself, but in the late 90s when folks like myself were tuning in to the early rumblings of the aforementioned post-punk revival, bands that were being discovered for this new interest were a lot fewer and far between. In North America these first bands working in this style came to the fore by way of the punk/hardcore underground with bands such as Six Finger Satellite, The VSS (featured in a recent entry here), The Audience, Satisfact, The Faint (also featured here), Beautiful Skin (again featured here) and a good number of others that I’ve not got the time to list here as I’m going with the flow of writing this piece out.
A band like Add N To (X) for us living across the Atlantic gave us a taste of what was happening in the UK for such artists with a punk approach to old-school analogue synths. By the turn of the millenium, when I was co-running a weekly club night that ran for a couple of years, I was avidly digging around for artists both old and new that would fit the musical agenda of that night and at times it was some deep sleuthing through music mags and crudely-built HTML fan websites.
Having said that, the music of Add N To (X) doesn’t really fit the criteria of dark synth/post-punk — definitely at least by today’s standards — but at the time when their was a broader net term for this new wave of music coming out, they did have some similarities to artists that maybe fit the term better for the following characteristics: a punk approach to synths, bringing back analogue synths in a live, more rock-based format as well as imagery and style that was more aligned with the post-punk revival starting at the time as opposed to the majority of “electronic” music around that time, that tended to be more aligned to developments in techno and rave I suppose.
If anything the band’s first two albums — Vero Electronics (1996) and On The Wires Of Our Nerves (1998) — were far more experimental and formless, more in line with freestyle studio experiments and perhaps more to the Berlin school experimentation of the 1970s. After those two initial full-length offerings, the band signed to Mute Records and released Avant Hard (1999) which shifted the group’s style into that similar of a “live band”, with a live drummer — renowned photographer Joe Dilworth — and incorporating more recognisable styles such as punk, 60s/70s kitsch and electronica and overall tracks that have more of some sort of driving beat. Tracks like “Metal Fingers In My Body” and “Buckminster Fuller” from this album see the band offering their own noise-y style of dance music here, with the former being released as a single with what was at the time a somewhat controversial music video, depicting a woman and a robot engaging in some bedroom antics through a series of stylized, comic-book style stills (see below).
However, for me the standout track on Avant Hard would be “Revenge Of The Black Regent” which was also released on its own as a 7″ and 12″ — each format accompanied by different tracks — and both came out around the same time as the album. I remember acquiring the 12″ version at the time but for whatever reason it at some point escaped by record collection over the past two decades, likely becoming a victim of a sizeable sell-off of records I undertook ahead of my move to the UK back in the late 2000s. Some of the 12″ exclusive tracks were interesting, including the psychedelic BBC Radiophonic Workshop style groove of “The March Of Pure Mathematical Evil That Ends And Results In War” (see clip below).
Starting off with a rather baroque phrase that introduces the track and one that was likely played on a mellotron, the music cuts to a rather fat-sounding analoque synth bass where one can hear the low frequency filter modulations sounding like it’s almost ripping the bassline apart. This is accompanied by a punchy, funky drum pattern with a swing field that took a bit of a cue from The Meters school of rhythm. Switching between dramatic, classical music influenced chord progressions, the aforementioned bass synth sounds its most menacing when it drops to an #F around the 51 second mark.
The construction of the track itself is almost mirrors that of some theatrical play or a tragedy in three acts, as around the 3m30s mark the track breaks down to a martial snare drum pattern with glassy, arpeggiating synth work being drapped around the voice of Ann Shenton, singing in almost an operatic style. The main bass line and phrase kick back in within this new “act” of the song complete with electronics sounds that sound like twisting metal, making for a very epic overall experience.
With the bar set with Avant Hard, Add N To (X) expanded on this formula for their subsequent two albums — Add Insult To Injury (2000) and Loud Like Nature (2002) — before splitting up in 2003. I had managed to catch the inner workings of the band first hand after the release of Avant Hard as during my tenure playing with Radio Berlin we had opened for Add N To (X) at Vancouver’s now long gone venue, The Starfish Room. It was the first show on the band’s North American tour and making introductions with the band they were clearly very jetlagged but amiable folks. During their set that evening playing in front of a pretty much full capacity show, I clearly remember some “sporty bro” in the front row thinking it might be funny to try and tip over one of Steve Claydon’s synths, which resulted in Claydon jumping down into the crowd to show said “sporty bro” the consequences of what happens when you try to fuck with an artist’s piece of vintage gear.
A couple of years later they were back at another now long-gone Vancouver venue, Richards On Richards, (affectionately known to locals as Dicks On Dicks) while touring on Loud Like Nature in 2003 — this time without Ann Shenton as at this time Shenton left the band on unknown circumstances and the remaining two members (if I remember correctly) made disparaging allusions to her departure. An old friend of mine that I used to run a night with ended up DJ-ing the show and engaging in some conversation with Barry 7.
And then that was it! Add N To (X) shortly thereafter called it quits. Since then I was aware of some short-lived projects by various members after the band’s grand finale but ultimately their music became an interesting footnote in the annals of electronic music history. In the years to follow — especially with the increased presence of blogs and social media — the whole dark and experimental synth scene exploded into new directions, driving into the direction where we find it today.