File Under 1980s, Canadian, Darkwave, Electronic, Goth Leaning, Minimal Synth, Post-Punk
As I’m writing this entry it concludes the final day of a twelve day visit back to Vancouver, Canada which has been a whirlwind trip of wandering through an ever changing urban landscape in the time I’ve moved away from it, as well as a busy schedule of re-connecting with family and friends. This in turn explains the somewhat larger time gap between this and the previous entry.
One aspect of any trip back to these lands is visiting the record stores the city has to offer, including long running ones like Zulu Records, Red Cat and Audiopile and fantastic new ones such as the wonderful Dandelion Records which was a treat to search through their crates. A good number of LPs were acquired on this trip, including a selection of Canadian classic obscurities which are rarely found over in the UK and Europe.
Such is the case with an early EP called Rotting Geraniums by the Vancouver synth/post-punk group Moev. Being from this city and being involved in anything underground, and specifically darker electronic music, the impact that the local label Nettwerk had on Vancouver’s rising electronic scene in the 1980s is immeasurable, having launched recordings by bands such as Skinny Puppy and Front Line Assembly as well as artists from further afield with similar musical aesthetics such as SPK and Severed Heads — both from Australia. One of Nettwerk‘s founders, Mark Jowett, was a member of Moev in their early days.
Why Vancouver had such a bustling scene of darker electronics during this time is probably something that can be found in the history books, and likely was based around a smaller group of musicians that planted the seeds for that sound. If anything I’ve noted that Canadian bands working in synthesizer-based music during this time had their fingers far more on the pulse of what was happening in the UK and Europe at the time — far more than their American counterparts down south. This is likely due to Canada in general getting a lot more UK media content than in America, likely due to it’s still ongoing connections with UK culture being a commonwealth country.
On one trawl through the crates in a Vancouver record shop with two friends — one with whom I used to a run a regular night back in Vancouver in the early 2000s — I was handed a copy of Rotting Geraniums and was asked, “Do you have this?”. I didn’t, and was familiar with that EP and added it to the pile. Being familiar with the band’s début album Zimmerkampf — and in particular the track “In Your Head” (see below) — I figured this earlier EP offering would be one to check out.
This EP is a more stark and minimal affair against the slightly more lush production of their album début, with the title track “Rotting Geraniums” using noise-based synthesizers to make up the drum sounds — something that wouldn’t sound out of place on Front 424’s first album Geography, or any given number of what would be called in later years minimal synth. Once the track launches into its pace, icy and brittle post-punk guitar phrases kick in as well as the higher register vocals of the band’s original singer Madelaine Morris. There’s a number of interesting chord progression choices in this track, likely pulling more influence from classical music than out of the pop/post-punk sphere.
Going further into the 1980s, the band’s line-up went through a number of changes and by the band released their second album, 1986’s Dusk and Desire, their sound had drastically morphed into a tech/EBM sound, relying heavily on emerging digital synthesis and sample-based sounds more associated with industrial/electronic music at the time, while remaining on a more melodic pop tangent than other Vancouver bands working in this style.
I did manage to see Moev once, although my memories of the show were a bit clouded over due to the fact that this show was a comeback show for the band at a now long-gone venue called The Purple Onion which occured on September 12th, 2001. For any readers out there familiar with the date this was the date after the events of 9/11 that happened the day before, leaving much of the world in shock. Needless to say in the wake of such a monumental moment in history, the show was rather poorly attended and everyone, including myself, had their thoughts far away on other things during the duration of the band’s set.
Later that decade I’d move out of Vancouver for good, and my pulse on things happening in Vancouver drastically weakened over the years, but it’s always great to come back for a visit, re-connect briefly with the city that was formative in my discovering music and acquiring a few classic Canadian finds along the way.