As it’s been hinted in various entries of Track Of The Day, over the past year or two I’ve been more and more getting back into listening to vinyl LPs, from oldies that I’ve been carting around to many dwellings I’ve lived in within Canada and the UK over the past couple of decades or so, to new additions that I’ve been more and more frequently picking up in more recent years as I’ve been feeling a bit more of that same thrill I used to have in days gone by of seeing what I can get in the bins at record stores and record fairs. There’s also newer methods employed, such as Discogs which I can find some surprising steals from at times, as well as mailorder.
It’s nice to pick up again, if anything to escape being in front of a computer, and more so to escape the dystopian world of corporate streaming platforms that religate music to content, data and stats with nefarious AI-powered involvement with shit like “recommended listening”, etc. No thanks — I want to go about it my own intuitive way.
Also, having friends over and pulling out records can offer a bit of a conversation piece. Let’s take a record like Revolve by an obscure, short-lived American group called Beautiful Skin for example, formed as a duo of electronics guru Ross Totino and guitarist Nick Forté and were active for a few years or so starting in the late 1990s. Up until somewhat recently I hadn’t really listened to that album in its entirety for well over a decade but was dusted off within the last year to play for a friend. Revolve, released in 2000 on the cult Gold Standard Laboratories (GSL) is the sole LP by this group, in addition to a posthumous compilation of unreleased tracks called Everything, All This, And More from 2005 on GSL as well as another GSL-released 7″ single from 2000 called the Sex Is A Triangle For The Perfect Square, the latter of which I used to own before doing a massive blow out on offloading 7″s to friends ahead of moving to the UK in the late 2000s.
“Hold Still” opens up side two of Revolve — a dancier number with a generous length just shy of eight minutes that was a staple I used to DJ back a shambolic yet fun little club night I used to co-run with two friends back in Vancouver around 2000-2001. Opening up with an old-school analogue drum machine pattern, following that a hollow sine wave bassline starts to warble on top of that basic pattern. From there some wiry, percussive guitar jabs get added in, and then buzzy analogue synths, monotone vocals and occasional piano sparkles that additively start to swirl around the framework of this song which brings the listener into a dreamy disco mindset for its duration.
At the time it was released one would compare it to “80s” bands like Wire, The Human League or even Tuxedomoon but with these decades of hindsight looking back it sort of preceded the interest in all things minimal wave and “obscure 80s” by a good half decade that would pick up traction at the end of the 2000s that is still going strong even today. It could be viewed as an “in between eras” anomaly, bridging the original time when DIY synth artists were experimenting with antiquated analogue gear in the 1980s on devices like cassette four tracks in the 1980s to the revival of the mid-late 2000s/early 2010s when that minimal, primitive electronics style was revived.
For an album — and let alone a band — that revisits such a somewhat specific aesthetic, there is some notable variation between the various tracks on the album. The opener and title track “Revolve” offers some guitar jangle over electronics that wouldn’t sound too out of place on Wire‘s 154 album (1979) whereas the following track “Slake” leans more towards the early 80s efforts of Cabaret Voltaire or even the first Skinny Puppy EP (Remission). “Harsh Distractions” is a more poppy, major-chord based number putting the analogue synths in a more krautrock context. Tracks like “A Vacant Stare” and “Current Time” are more spacious and ambient, perhaps a nod to more Berlin school kosmische electronics. The vocal delivery on the album to me sounds a bit more of its time, noting the more “shoutier”, punk/indie influence of the 1990s.
There’s a smattering of guest musicians on this record from the same general musical underground at the time, including American indie rocker Ted Leo and Jeremy Winter of the experimental New Jersey electronic shoegaze band All Natural Lemon & Lime Flavours.
From my viewpoint their were other artists around this genre time, most of which I came to knowledge of through the punk and hardcore scenes of the 1990s when numerous musicians that had played in bands of that style started discovering underground gems of the previous decade and with that began experimenting with synths. There’s a fractured list of these artists, many who released at most one album (in most cases, a single or EP) and then sort of fell under the waves. Rattling off a few names here: T Cells, Sinking Body, Subpoena The Past (with some coverage on this site here), Six Finger Satellite (1), Camera Obscura (not the Glasgow one), Fast Forward, I Am Spoonbender… and so on. A few in this general loose grouping managed to remain buoyant into the 2000s and beyond, such as The Faint and ADULT.
In the case of Beautiful Skin, Nick Forté had played in the New Jersey hardcore band Rorschach which were active from 1989 until 1993. Their two LPs, Remain Sedate (1990) and Protestant (1993) I had heard a number of times in the early/mid 90s by folks I knew that were gobbling up new hardcore releases in the underground at the time.
This was a time when the internet was starting to become a bit of a tool to connect the dots in the underground, yet before it was really used as a main tool to revive and revisit lost movements of the past — certainly before social media was a thing. The first real social media success story, that being MySpace, would see momentum start to really roll around 2005 and onward. For me the 5-7 years proceeding it there was a lot of interesting initial bubbles start to happen musically but are sort of lost in the shadows of that time.
And that’s the case in point with Revolve: you can’t buy it or find it anywhere online. And even on a platform such as YouTube, which for me is the best place to find really rare recordings that can’t be found anywhere else on the internet, perhaps except if one is keen to trawl the depths of Discogs to find some random person in, say, Arizona USA that might be selling a vinyl copy (which to the UK where I live would be pretty expensive with the shipping). I’ve luckily managed to hold onto my LP copy of this record when I bought it back in the day shortly after it was released, mainly sitting on a shelf or being moved around in boxes in the many places I’ve lived in my adult life so far.
At times in the past I’ve found an upload from tracks from this record on YouTube, then years later it’s gone, only to turn up search results of videos by beauty gurus on various methods of skincare. Lately the only version that seems to be up is a full length playback of the album on that platform that was uploaded in the summer of 2024, and even then at the time of writing this only has a couple of dozen views. This seems is the sole online record of this album that exists and heads the top of this entry.
One other video seems to exist, and that’s a live performance from 2001 at the infamous Los Angeles venue The Smell (which I’ve played at in the past a few times), when Beautiful Skin briefly expanded itself into a four piece band from the one and only short tour it went on in its sole existence. Even then, the tracks performed band sound considerably different on record — with more of a live punk feel — given the expanded line-up used for that tour. That’s posted below.
Overall, records like Revolve are an interesting listen, especially all of these years later and what’s happened musically since then. It’s also interesting based on my weird little trajectory with music over the past few decades, especially with the scene I work within now and my placement on a different continent, working with friends and folks with similar interests musically at this time but coming to this point from very different origins. There’s always some new subplot in the overall story, and some artist or group that may have had a hand — even if minor — in moving things along to new movements within music in a subculture.
Towards the end of Beautiful Skin‘s run, I had got in contact with Forté to inquire about the group’s possible interest in remixing a track by my old band Radio Berlin for then forthcoming record called Sister Sounds, to be released on the now defunct Vancouver label Global Symphonic, that was to consist of remixes and reinterpretations of songs from the band’s sophomore 2001 album The Selection Drone. In turn Forté — still using the Beautiful Skin moniker — agreed and produced a remix in a style that moved away from Beautiful Skin‘s recorded output at this point into more glitch-ier, software-based electronics that was starting to see a rise at the time — especially with laptops starting to become more powerful and being able to handle more and more processing. Forté has since been working in more abstract, experimental forms of electronic music — including full on power noise — under a variety of names, guises and groups, including Half Mortal, Christmas Decorations, Green Tea, Hells Hills and many more.
- Six Finger Satellite are probably another key group that fits the theme of this piece well, with a lot of standalone output in the 1990s and I’ll note for a time to explore in the near future