“The Facts” by the mysterious group Saâda Bonaire is an intriguing track for me, especially due to the “fact” that within the last week it played three times in a row in my bedroom stereo while I was winding down one evening. This was due to a syncing error between my main computer and my phone in where it put three duplicate copies of this one track at some point in the past, which was in a playlist on my phone that included all of the tracks from their posthumous album Saâda Bonaire. Usually most people would skip a song after the first full play through of it after it started repeating again, but I just laid there and listened to that track the full three times in a row — which is likely due to it being intriguing as I’ve said.
And I say posthumous mainly because it’s initially hard to actually say when this track came out, as it was included on a re-issue released in 2013 on the American label Captured Tracks, which from what I know was an album from the German music collective Saâda Bonaire that never got released back in the mid 1980s and only saw the full light of day when it was eventually re-issued. So my guess is that it was originally recorded in 1984.
Apparently the story goes that the group — centred around Hamburg vocalists Claudia Hossfeld and Stephanie Lange, all assembled by “founder” Ralph “von” Richthoven — were signed to the German branch of the major label EMI as studio project. This core group — along with a loose gathering of Hamburg-based musicians of native and foreign extraction recruited out of the city’s employment centres — recorded a bunch of tracks intended for a debut album around 1984 that was to get a major push from the label but then sort of fell through the woodwork so to speak.
A friend had told me it was because around the same time the collective’s début album was to come out, all of the promotional time and money was re-routed into a new material by another far more well-known artist on EMI, that being Tina Turner and her single “Private Dancer”. There’s countless stories like this through the history of popular music, and it’s always interesting hearing one.
So, “The Facts”… it’s one of the more sultrier and sensual tracks off of the album. Based on the foundation of a rather punchy and stomping drum pattern — coloured in a clipped gated reverb — that could easily be lifted out of an EBM track from the second half of the 80s. This pattern in turn couples up with a somewhat teutonic sounding synthesizer bassline that is quite fractured, and by that I mean over a 4 bar pattern the notes of the actual bassline cover about a bar’s worth of sequenced notes. It’s almost as if whomever was sequencing it punched in the first dozen or two 16th notes over that 4 bar pattern and then made an artistic decision to have it rest for a couple of bars. I personally love basslines that have restraint and offer a lot of empty spaces that emphasis the power of when the notes are actually being played.
Sometimes I feel there’s a lot of modern darker electronic music that relies too much on a constant eighth or sixteenth note pattern — whether played on a synth by way of a sequencer or a bass guitar (constant eighth notes being a de facto style of playing) —without considering rhythms based on played notes and rests.
The sparseness of the bassline in this particular track brings out more of an interesting and colourful contrast to the sounds that fill out the higher registers, which are a compelling mix of abstract synth clusters along with a collection of loose and organically played acoustic instruments of Middle Eastern origin (pardon my ignorance here), bongos, flutes and a reed instrument that sounds like a clarinet or saxophone. The “sultry” feel comes from the vocal delivery, which sounds like one in midst of a fever dream — hot and sweaty — recalling some sort of sexually-tinged loss of identity or something. It’s hard to explain but the overall effect works really well.
The abstraction of the instruments sort of pulls together in the “choruses”, where a mellow synth fills in the chord structures in the background that could easily be lifted out of some slower, pastel-shaded vaporwave number or some spaced out shopping channel music from the 80s or 90s.
There are other such tracks on this album and overall the album has quite a bit of stylistic variation. Tracks such as the Prince-like stomp of “I Am So Curious” (albeit a bit on the more sinister side) and the funky “Little Sister” (see below) complement “The Facts” quite well, along with others like the more laid-back pop numbers of the album’s single “You Could Be More As You Are” (promo video below) and “More Women” — then to the abstract minimal blues of “Joanna”, the bubbly Motown meets Soft Cell feel of “Heart Over Head” and even more deconstructed experimental pieces like “Second Face”. Overall I love the variety on the album as it sort of takes you on a journey of different moods and shows the versatility and broad influences of the musicians involved.
Almost a decade after the release of Saâda Bonaire in 2013, another compilation of old recordings came out on the same label, Captured Tracks, in 2022 simply called 1992 — which compiled recording sessions from the group in that year exactly thirty years later. This one sort of slipped my radar at the time, but in the end I didn’t latch onto it as much as in general I don’t feel nearly as much of an instinctual connection to the style and delivery of post-house electronic music that was around during that time. Like many artists that made their initial creative splash in the 1980s, the tracks on this record sound like the band are attempting to catch up with more current styles of the early years of the following decade with which to me sound at times like mixed and possibly awkward results.
The single from that album, “Women”, is an entertaining mash up of the “sultriness” of the band’s 80s material but merged into the more colourful, paisley-toned R&B inflected dance music of the early 1990s, complete with melisma-inflected soulful vocals. And there also seemed to be a lot of more “world music” being co-opted in popular music at the time — with artists like Enigma and Delerium especially. It’s almost like more pop-oriented musicians and film soundtrack composers of the time had discovered the back catalogue of Dead Can Dance while simultaneously discovering the stylistic drum patterns based on the “Amen break” (mentioned elsewhere in here) that were on currently on trend.
Not to say it’s bad as there’s some interesting stuff going on on that release but for me at least definitely doesn’t have the strange and mysterious allure of their earlier material.