Coincidences happen to me all of the time. In fact, they happen to most people often. It’s not usually magic or fate — although some coincidences feel like that — but rather there’s billions of activities going on on a daily basic and sometimes just two of them sync up. Recently I was listening to the last release by Gina X Performance 1984’s Yinglish (at this point the project’s name shortened to just Gina X). It was an album written by the songwriting partnership of Gina Kokoine and the amazingly-named producer Zeus B. Held (real name Bernd Held) after they took a break after releasing three amazing LPs of arthouse electronic disco over three consecutive years, 1979’s Nice Mover, 1980’s X-traordinaire and 1981’s Voyeur.
Their “comeback” with Yinglish after a three year break was mostly panned. This might be because after a gap the initial momentum had dissipated as they tried to re-invent themselves a bit. Or perhaps the band suffered from what I call The Fairlight Trap, where electronic artists moving on into the 80s decide to use the most expensive, newest synth technology — specifically the Fairlight CMI or the Synclavier which at that time were digital, sample-based studio synths — pushing aside their old classic analogue beauties to move along with the times. The resulting recordings that bands did with these sampling synthesizers could be amazing if used tastefully, but sometimes recordings made with heavy use of these synths can sound a bit cold and clunky, such is somewhat the case with Yinglish.
(There’s a few recordings where these types of synths were used heavily with some great results though — take a musician like Kate Bush for example and her 1985 album Hounds Of Love.)
I still have a soft spot for Yinglish though, despite being overshadowed by its predecessors, it’s technically a more “pop” record, containing covers of “Drive My Car” by The Beatles and “Harley Davidson” by Serge Gainsbourg, along with notable originals such as “French Lift” and “Kanal Banal”. With a full listen I came across some of the extra tracks from the album, including the serene, atmospheric instrumental piece crypticially called “Bb 50”. It was rather a surprise for me, especially as I’d listened to the album before but perhaps wasn’t paying enough attention when the album’s later more experimental tracks kicked in. It takes a while for audible instrumentation on this track to start filling the sonic space and even then it does so very discretely, mostly consisting of shimmering, sample-delay ambience until it eventually fades out with a dry percussion pattern of synthetic finger snaps.
Overall it the texture vibe of this track could align more with releases on a more present-day label such as Kranky Records and would easily fit on any modern playlist showcasing artists working in electro-acoustic or electronic soundscape genres.
As an interesting aside to this release, a lot of the live drums on the record were done by Mel Gaynor, who was the long time drummer for the popular Glaswegian band Simple Minds.
So getting back to the “coincidence” that I opened this piece with. It was only a day after listening to Yinglish that I on a whim went to the record fair being held at the sports centre about a fifteen minute walk from where I live. I wasn’t expecting much — perhaps bins of classic rock and the usual punk, indie and synthpop fare that one might usually find at a record fair in the British Isles, but I managed to get a minor haul of records (and could have easily pulled more), including the original 12″ pressing of Gina X Performance‘s first release, the “No GDM”/”Nice Mover” 12″ released back in 1978. It was a must have for me — even if just for that gorgeous cover art — as coming across that record when I wasn’t even looking for it (and at a decent price to) was some coincidence waiting to happen. These two tracks are ones I listen to often, would play at parties for friends and would even exercise the opportunity to play out both tracks in any given DJ environment that I was given the chance to play in so all in all, a great addition to my already bulging record collection.
And with tracks like “Bb 50” and many other artists who have released more atmospheric pieces that are worked into a track sequence to vary the pacing of any given album, these tracks tend to likely get listened to less nowadays as listeners are far more in charge of how they listen to music. Online playlists featuring a listener’s favourite tracks from any given artists — often by genre, mood or theme — have become far more prominent than the artist-curated album sequence that dominated the airwaves in decades past. And with this practice more and more prevalent, the lesser known album-only tracks tend to get a bit more forgotten about.
Those who grew up in the age where the physical format for music reigned, such as myself, may often lament this change but then again, we have to remember that this fondly-remembered golden age of double LPs, stadium concerts, high-flying rock stars, critically acclaimed underground music, punk shows and all the other characteristics of “modern” popular music have only really been around for 70-80 years. Before that music fans would have far less options for recorded music and genre diversity, often having to go to music halls, speakeasies and recitals to hear music — a pastime that went on for many decades before this age of the physical format even really existed.
And even going back hundreds of years more — probably the way most people heard music at that time was to go to the nearest village on market day, buy some crusty old bread and turnips, watch someone’s hand getting chopped off as a punishment for thievery in the town square, and then have that all followed up by some musicians playing instruments (lute? flute?) for the townfolk, honouring the great conquests of the local baron. I could be wrong here though…