A bit of a lead up to this one here, so bear with me…
Radio Berlin — an old post-punk sort of band I was in while living in Vancouver BC, Canada — had toured North America numerous times in the years we were active, starting in 1998 until 2005. We started of playing locally like most bands do and then in 1999 started making ways south across the border playing in the Pacific Northwest, including cities like Seattle, Olympia and Portland. In very late 1999 we did a full west coast US tour — which was called the I5 tour in some of our circles, after the interstate that runs down the west coast — with fellow local synth punks at the time, Hot Hot Heat.
The following year we booked ourselves a somewhat patchy tour in the summer of 2000 across the entire US, and then the following summer upon the release of Radio Berlin‘s second album, The Selection Drone, we managed to hook up with a proper booking agent by way of our NYC label at the time and went on a massive tour starting in September 2001 of the US, hitting many cities on the way albeit in the bizarre, sombre shadow of the recent events of 9-11, which we definitely felt when we were in New York City around two weeks after the event.
The tour schedule was packed and we were having some great shows, although the mood was somewhat hampered by Jordache, our patchwork of a tour van (see image below) that got its name due to it having no particular colour and therefore its bodywork resembling a brand of late 80s/early 90s acid-washed jeans called Jordache. During that trip Jordache had two windshield wiper motors burn out and then starting in New York state a constant ticking sound appeared under the van as we drove it all of those miles. After seeing a mechanic in NYC we had the advice of either getting the driveshaft replaced or just keep driving it and see how far we could get. We opted for the latter due to the tightness of the tour schedule, and with trying to save money we ventured on.
This sound continued to grow in volume over our crawl over the southern US and came to a climactic end in Oakland CA when the entire driveshaft fell off the van and onto the road, although we coincidentally rolled to a stop right in front of the venue we were playing there that night. It was starting at this show we were to play a series of dates with a San Francisco band called Ghost Orchids, who I had connected with over the previous year or two — even getting them “signed” to an up-and-coming Vancouver label at the time called Global Symphonic (link to archival Instagram account here). Thinking back on it they were pretty ahead of their time, preceding the coldwave/post-punk revival that would start to emerge as a force to be reckoned with in the late 2000s going into the 2010s.
We completed the tour with a rented van and needless to say Jordache got an official retirement after that tour, and then Radio Berlin, Ghost Orchids and Global Symphonic would wrap up within the next five years or so.
Going back to that summer 2001 tour and rewinding back to one of the earlier stops in the first week as we crossed over from British Columbia then into Montana and then eastwards was the Seventh Street Entry club in Minneapolis, which was the smaller room that was part of the infamous First Street club — the venue where Prince‘s Purple Rain was filmed and had hosted countless great bands over the years. We were playing there on a night earlier on in the week with a band we were all into called The Rock*a*teens from Atlanta GA and as suspected for a weeknight it wasn’t packed, but not necessarily quiet either. While performing our set onstage, both myself and our bass player/vocalist noted a colourful character in the crowd, a tall man with a shock of Cruella De Vil black and white hair wearing a stylish, fitted red pea coat. Perhaps he was here to see us?
After the show we ended up chatting with this person — a super friendly and fun guy by the name of Jon, who was living in Minneapolis at the time, knew some folks we knew in the then Seattle-based band Chromatics, and had played with a Milwaukee-based melodic post-hardcore band called Compound Red in the late 80s into the 90s, whose final proper album was released a few years earlier on Desoto Records, run by members of Jawbox. He was also a massive fan of new wave, post-punk and synthpop for quite a while, and came out to our show after hearing that we were rolling through town.
I connected with Jon and he was keen to keep in touch, which from there began a series of mix CDs that he would start sending to me in the post in the months that followed. There were many tracks on those mixes I was not aware of before, and some of those artists I’d only hear in clubs years later after moving to London and then starting to discover the underground festival circuit in Europe in the early 2010s. On these mixes were bands like Boytronic, B Movie, The Group, Das Kabinette, Die Krupps and a couple of tracks by a group called November Group that were completely new to me.
November Group were an American new wave/post-punk band that had formed out of the Boston scene in the late 70s and early 80s. Even at that time when there was far less information online about obscure post-punk bands, with the bits of information I could find out about them made me think that they were a perhaps a band working on the wrong continent. Even their name, coming from an early 20th century group of German expressionists, hinted at their Europhile leanings, along with their taut and romantic brand of darker post-punk/funk of their earlier material. That and being a band headed by two talented and androgynous female musicians — Ann Prim and Kearney Kirby — seemed to jut out at right angles from what American new wave bands were doing at the time. The only Boston band I could think of vaguely in the same category might have been ‘Til Tuesday — headed by bassist/vocalist Aimee Mann — who were still far more saccharine and radio-friendly than the more angular fare that November Group were releasing at the time. To me the band probably had far more in common — at least in vision if not a vaguely similar general style — with bands like Malaria! or Xmal Deutschland from Germany that were active around the same time.
“Pictures From The Homeland” was the first track I heard from them and latched onto it immediately, with its dry and chiming guitar lines, underlying thudding drums, popping bass and commanding vocals from Ann Prim. At some point in the few years that followed — when YouTube was launched — I discovered the promo video they had made for this track. It’s a low budget, cable access affair but works really well with it’s dark and grey imagery hinting at Eastern Bloc life and Prim singing coldly, directly at the camera. I can only imagine the band had an interest in European expressionist cinema and that shows in this video.
This track was off of their 1982 self-titled release, and in the years that followed I managed to collect more of their musically digitally, as physical LPs where really hard to find of theirs. Following this came the Persistent Memories 12″ EP in 1983 which incorporated a bit more synth work, and then in 1985 their “mini-album” Work That Dream, which moved more into electronics and production and has become of a favourite of mine still in my stereo and even on the erratic occasions that I get out and DJ a club, with very dance-friendly tracks such as “Work That Dream” and “Put Your Back To It” — the latter I’ve posted another video of below.
After this November Group started to fade out a bit, with a final self-released, three track cassette coming out in 1989 called NG89 that has some good material on it, noting the style of late 80s electronic production at the time — maybe what a band like Wire was doing at that time comes to mind — Wire being a band I’m sure November Group were aware of, and at least shared a somewhat similar approach and artistic vision with.
I honestly think that if November Group were working out of Europe — or at least had the means to tour Europe at the time — they probably would have found far more success than to playing the far more likely smaller number of art-driven synth fans that were present in the US around then. Also, it would seem that none of the band’s releases have been scooped up for any type of re-issue treatment, which has been a common method over the past 15-20 years for this general style of music to get lost gems out to new audiences, much like labels such as Dark Entries, Minimal Wave, Futurismo and other similar labels have been doing. A shame really!
In the years to follow Ann Prim would move to Minneapolis and continue on into filmmaking with her Kino Film Kraft, entering into film festivals with some of her film work (interview clip below). Her other main collaborator, Kearney Kirby, would move onto work at the Berklee College of Music in music therapy in later years.
Closing up what is becoming another long and wordy entry here, another great track from these mixes that Jon had sent me during that time was a very rare track called “Burn My Eyes” (clip below) by Minneapolis solo musician Venus De Mars (formerly Stephen Grandell) that would easily fit in a lot of primitive minimal wave sets and works on a plane similar to Fad Gadget, Thomas Leer and Robert Rental. Still sounds great all of these years later, and available through the artist’s archival Bandcamp page.
And that ends a long story, but I felt I needed the back story context about how I came across the November Group, as sometimes the story is interesting and I’ve always appreciated getting an inside to that music from a “penpal” all these years later.