There’s been a bit of a gap with these entries but as usual things have been busy with things to do, which over the past month has resulted in staying in some nights on the weekend as I’ve been too pre-occupied with the tasks at hand to really find out what’s going on in the city that I live in. And with some of those more low key weekend nights I’ve gotten into a little habit of listening to records in the night.
One album that has gotten many plays over the past twenty years — especially during such late night listening sessions — has been the 1982 self-titled (sometimes erroneously referred to as A Fact, A Second 1) record by the experimental electronic/post-punk group Ike Yard. Based out of New York, the group had run of a few years in the early 1980s followed by occasionally re-surfacing since then — including live shows and further releases — starting in the 2000s until more recently, with their latest output being a collection of unreleased recordings from their original run on the established US label Dark Entries simply called 1982, which finally brought these unreleased recordings to the public in spring of 2024.
And here it should be noted that this self-titled release by Ike Yard was the only release by an American band on the legendary Factory Records out of Manchester — a label home to such post-punk groups as Joy Division, New Order, A Certain Ratio, Section 25, Happy Mondays and many more. Well, technically this album by Ike Yard was not on Factory proper, but was actually released on the label’s Factory America imprint that was around briefly from 1981 to 1983 and again, ironically, Ike Yard were the only American band on that imprint.
As in this case with this release, sometimes records stick with you more than others solely based on the situation or context that one is first introduced to the record, which came into my world on a long late-night drive on a Radio Berlin tour way back in the early 2000s. I don’t remember which tour as that’s not really important, but as our tour van sped through the night down Interstate 5 through southern Oregon at some deep hour of the early morning, I remember a cassette dub of their album was popped into the stereo and provided a mysterious soundtrack to the weaving drive through the mountainous terrain, likely somewhere around Grant’s Pass.
The six tracks on this cassette, which make up the self-titled album, are in some other world – a feeling I dialed into immediately upon this first listen and a feeling I still hold onto today. It sounded certainly like nothing else coming out at the time, diving headfirst into abstract, atonal and heavily percussive analogue electronic synth sequences and drum machine percussion that was machine-like, deeply rhythmic and heavily dub-influenced that if anything pre-dated developments in genres like techno and what would be referred to as “intelligent dance music” (IDM) that would come about over a decade later in the 1990s with artists like Aphex Twin and Autechre.
Ike Yard seemed to be pulling in developments with the increasing accessibility (and affordability) of cutting-edge synthesizer instruments at the time, developments in post-punk but also taking in environmental sounds and musical movements born out of their native home city of New York, things like emerging hip hop, urban soundscapes and the alienation, danger and mystery of living in such a city.
There are some vague similarities to what some other, like-minded artists were doing at the time, with the work of Deutsch Amerikanische Freundschaft (DAF), Chris & Cosey and even Liaisons Dangereuses coming to mind albeit only in fleeting moments, at least to me anyway.
As this release by Ike Yard has been listened to many times over and over during the past couple of decades, and in turn probably landing itself as an important record for me, the sound and feel of the album has sort of become a barometric measuring tool of what music listeners — and the music industry in general — consider to be valid and emotionally charged music.
That concept is something I’ve thought about a lot of over the years, how established preconceptions of any given musical genre put more weight on musical traits than others. For instance, with folk music or acoustic “singer/songwriter” based music, we tend to place more weight on the emotional earnesty and emotional intensity of music that genre, and focus less on the fact that it’s generally far less musically innovative than other genres. Sure, there’s interesting takes and new directions taken with that genre — especially when merged with other styles — but usually discussions around folk music aren’t really focussed on how “fresh” it sounds or not, or if it’s something that’s already been done before.
On the other hand, more technologically-weighted music like techno, electronica and even more specific sub-genres like minimal wave have emotional earnesty far less discussed as talking points about those genres, and far more weight put on technology, production and innovation. It’s far less likely that any emotion and passion in these genres is discussed, although they’re quite valid. It’s almost like we’ve all adapted to the idea that certain genres have more emotional validity than others which is certainly not the case.
My music tastes have never really fallen in these lines, whereas in the general realm of music journalism (especially the less interesting articles) writers tend to fall into these trappings. I find traits in music sometimes that others don’t pick up that I find valid, even if it’s with an artist I don’t really latch onto like others.
When coming across reviews or features on Ike Yard, there’s usually points about how cold and alienating the music is, or how the vocals sound “zombie-like” and devoid of a human touch. I don’t find this at all actually, and despite being composed mainly on analogue sequencers of the time, it comes across to me somewhat more warm and organic, perhaps tuning into core bodily rhythms like an organic machine of humans interpreting the environment they live in by means of manual labour. The vocals sound soft and spoken, probably misunderstood by those that see histrionic vocal performances as a measure of how emotional a piece of music is.
I’ve actually had deep, emotional experiences when listening to a record such as this one by Ike Yard. It mirrors up with feelings I’ve felt where I’ve felt completely floored and torn apart by distressing events in my life, where you have nothing left to give during those times. All that’s left is the skeleton of a heartbeat, and this is where the rhythmic nature of the music comes in. It’s also music that evokes intense cinematic imagery on a blank canvas, something a lot of tried-and-tested “singer/songwriter” music can’t fill that space with.
The track from this self-titled release that strikes these feelings the hardest is “NCR” which closes out side one of the LP. It’s tense and somber yet oddly serene at the same time. The low-end bass in this track along with the tumbling mass of synth sequences and programmed drum percussion pulls you in like a wave while temporarily withdrawing from the world to find time to pull oneself back together.
The whole record is an interesting, fully immersive listen if one allows themselves to do so, from the opening tribal percussion of “M Kurtz” to the clipped, taut “walking home alone after midnight” feel of a track like “Cherish 8”. I’d even say in the early days of Soft Riot pulling itself together one piece at a time that this band and this particular record sort of seeped into what I was sonically experimenting with in those early days.
Going back to the comment made about the cinematic feelings that a record like this can conjure up, I’ve included a “fan video” clip below of the track “M Kurtz” that’s married up to clips from the 1982 Ridley Scott film Blade Runner below that works quite well. The music and the visuals here seem relatively intuitive to place together, as I imagine visuals like this to be running through the heads of Ike Yard‘s players being in the gritty New York environment that they were immersed in.
With the recently released 1982 on Dark Entries, the sonic blueprint of what the band was doing on their self-titled album gets carried over and hints at where the band may have gone before their initial run fizzled out. Then we have releases like Nord, released in 2010, which updates the band’s sound for the 21st century: more cleaner and austere, augmented by vast technological developments in the gap of almost three decades since their initial run of releases.
And prior to the release of their self-titled record, Ike Yard had put out their first, inaugural recording — 1981’s Night After Night EP — on the underground Belgian label Les Disques Du Crépuscule (which itself had connections to Factory Records in its early days) that laid the blueprints for their self-titled record, albeit with slightly more conventional rock-based, post-punk instrumentation which is also definitely well worth a listen for those that might get roped into their sound.
On a final note here, and an interesting little fact that’s hinted in the preview box above for Ike Yard‘s BandCamp Daily feature from August 2024, the band’s bassist Ken Compton was briefly romantically involved with a pre-fame Madonna at the time, and there’s another forthcoming entry to come soon enough that also makes a Madonna connection from her start in New York in the early 1980s.
- This text appears on the cover of their self-titled release, with “A FACT” on one side and “A SECOND” on the other. Apparently this text stands for “A Factory America Second release”.