Lately there’s been a pretty stacked schedule in the studio: new music, design work, social events and a myriad of other things. When things get busy it seems I don’t really have time to choose any music to listen to and I just get on with it. However, recently I’ve been trying to dig through my archives of music I’ve collected over the past few decades to go back to things I’ve missed or haven’t heard in a while.
It was in this dig about that I came about a number of tracks I had by the San Francisco-based dark synth-punk band The Vanishing, remembering I had their 2003 album Songs For Psychotic Children as a vinyl LP preserved and squeezed in the record shelf that hadn’t had any spins on the turntable for — well — a very long time, so that was a cue to bust it out.
Sometimes when you come across music you haven’t listened to for a while it comes with all the personal flashbacks from the time you discovered it or listened to it, as such was the case here. The band were pretty active during their time, releasing two albums on the Californian underground label Gold Standard Laboratories (GSL) — a popular, underground DIY label for all things relating to post-hardcore, post-punk, weird, eclectic, slightly dark and gothy, etc… a “go to” place for those listeners seeking out that sort of thing.
At the time the pool of any bands interpreting a dark, post-punk revival sound was pretty small — far less than it is in these current times — and if anything bands during this early naughts time period were weirder, noisier and less accessible than a lot of the newer crop of bands. Stuff made by genuine underground freaks. In all fairness, this viewpoint is probably how I remembered things at the time as these musical developments were all seemingly fresh and exciting — that in being in my early twenties.
Before discovering The Vanishing I had come across a previous band involving some of that band’s members called Subtonix, which was a band comprised were players in a number of punk bands prior that converged in San Francisco perhaps in the late 1990s, creating a high-octane, dark and brooding style of goth punk that perhaps took some cues from early 1980s Batcave bands — and possibly X-Ray Spex and Bikini Kill — but definitely with their unique take on it, bringing in a lot of influence from likely music from the DIY underground of the last decade of the 20th century. The sole Subtonix LP, Tarantalism, was released in 2001 on the New Jersey underground label Troubleman Unlimited — a label that started in the 1990s releasing underground hardcore and punk (Shotmaker, Rye Coalition, etc) and branched out into broader realms such as the post-punk revival that occurred at the turn of the millenium, much like GSL — that label being sort of a west coast equivalent. At this point in time I was keenly into both these labels and checking out artists I’d never heard before based on the track record of these two labels, which is how I came across Subtonix.
The band was short lived, with Subtonix‘s Jessie Evans moving onto The Vanishing a short time later, with a sound that carried over key stylistic elements from her former band but with more of a post-punk “death disco” sound, bringing in more danceable beats, aggressive-sounding analogue synthesizers and most notably, Evans’ mastery of the tenor saxophone which definitely was a unique and stand-out characteristic of The Vanishing‘s sound. They released two albums on the aforementioned Gold Standard Laboratories — the 2003 album already noted as well their 2004 album Still Lifes Are Failing, which contained probably one of their most well-known tracks, “Lovesick”, which was a dancefloor staple in gritty, dark post-punk clubs of the early 2000s but still I track I hear in sets on occasion these days at synth/darkwave events I’ve been to across Europe in my travels over the years.
Opening with a rounded out, full-bodied analogue synth bass with the resonance filter cranked a bit, that’s followed by a sizzling, slightly overdriven drum kit bashing out a danceable beat. Then the saxophone comes in from there it flies on its own, alternating between wailing sax lines and yowling vocals through copious amounts of murky delay effects. The track then kicks into a bit of overdrive as the bassline moves into disco-inspired alternative eighth note octaves. It’s a track that was designed to work in a live setting, and even to crossover in sets of a ragtag network of DIY post-punk DJs that was developing at the time.
There’s a proper music video for this track on YouTube (heading this entry) which looks like it was shot on 16mm or Super 8 film which suits the band’s aesthetic very well.. It’s a bit pixelated as it was uploaded back in 2007 when that platform was relatively new with compression and video standards at that time being a lot less high definition than they are now.
Most bands working in this style around this time were playing pretty much all of the synth parts by hand, as it seemed reliance on sequencers was far less common back then as it is these days where now that there’s a far broader range of current affordable synths, drums and sequencers out there to choose from, many modelling older synthesizers but with newer, more precise features, built-in sequencers and more. However, it was also it was a lot easier to come across a genuine early-era analogue synth in those days for cheap. One could simply go into the classified section in a newspaper or online, find someone selling an “old 80s keyboard”, arrange a meeting and then pick up something like a Juno 6 or MonoPoly for $100. Such was the case when I was in Radio Berlin — I think we got our Roland Juno 106 for about $100 back in 1999. Vintage synths weren’t quite as coveted back then as the bulk of musicians around this time working with “synths” seemingly were more in dance or rave scenes and therefore looking for then-modern groovebox units. I’m starting to divert off topic here…
The Vanishing happened to roll through Vancouver in 2003 when I still lived there, and with this I had the opportunity to see them as well as share a stage with them when I was still playing in A Luna Red — both bands being on GSL at the time. The Vanishing‘s set was concurrently mesmerising and also wonderfully intimidating, with Jessie’s grand and energetic stage presence igniting the audience at the now-defunct Vancouver venue The Brickyard into dancing and shrieking during their set. At this point memory gets a bit hazy here — the band either stayed at my apartment I was living at at the time, or at the very least came by for an afters, from which I have a vague recollection of the drummer Brian getting a bit mentally floored by sampling the potency of Vancouver’s local “smokable horticulture”. Overall, a bit of fun was had by all!
While San Francisco at this time was becoming reknowned for lo-fi no-wave inflected bands (Erase Errata, Numbers) as well as a lot of glitchy electronic experimentalism (Blechdom from Blechdom, Matmos, Kid606, The Soft Pink Truth), it was also becoming a bit of a hotbed for musicians forging noisier/punk-influenced takes on more darker, sometimes synth-inflected goth music, with any given of its key players mainly born out of the 90s punk and hardcore scene.
There’s a somewhat long list of bands I can remember from that time — many that are unheard of — starting in the late 1990s with bands such as The Audience — formed out of the ashes of Bay Area hardcore group Portraits Of Past (and current members of Tamaryn) — and Denver transplants The VSS, who released one album in 1997 that’s still one of favourites. Going into the new millenium this expanded to not only the forming of The Vanishing and Subtonix, but other groups such as Ghost Orchids1, Heart Of Snow, Swann Danger, Secret Skin, The Holy Kiss2, The Phantom Limbs, Sixteens, Veronica Lipgloss and The Evil Eyes and a number of more I know I’m missing but only have vague memories of at this point in time.
I’m not privy to the detailed inner connections with these bands, mainly as I never lived in San Francisco, but perhaps there was vaguely common traits between them: cut and paste collage artwork, death rock aesthetics, dirty un-sequenced analogue synths, distorted bass guitars and sung/shouted vocals through a wall of chorus and delay effects. If anything it was simply West Coast American kids growing up on punk and hardcore of the 80s and 90s that also loved their first wave deathrock, goth and synth bands.
As the naughties progressed, two members of The Vanishing left San Francisco for the more exotic climes of Berlin, with Evans re-surfacing in a project called Autonervous along with Bettina Köster of Malaria! Evans was then in Brazil for a while and is currently working in a project called Nauti Siren with Dmitry Bill of Deee-lite (remember “Groove Is In The Heart”?), working in a shift in sound Evans has been moving to in more recent years that explores more world music, pop and reggae sounds.
With The Vanishing for the most part having vanished from the music scene with the passing of time, their music has post-humously surfaced on BandCamp on what seems to be an account set-up by members of the band, which you can find on the purchase link further down below. Yet despite the distance from those times in San Francisco, The Vanishing has reformed at least once for one off events here and there, including the Near Dark Festival back in Oakland CA in 2019, for which I’ve included a clip from that below of the track “Lovesick”. For most of the track the audience seems to be singing along with the lyrics, which shows what staying power that track has — at least in the city where they found their roots!
Footnotes
- Ghost Orchids were friends at the time that Radio Berlin did some touring with, and with that got their debut EP Architecture released on the Vancouver label Global Symphonic. My other band A Luna Red ended up doing a split 12″ with them on the same label.
- One member of The Holy Kiss — Alli — ended up being the guitarist for the current and active NYC post-punk group Bootblacks later on. It’s a band I’ve crossed paths with in their various incarnations and are good people. The singer of The Holy Kiss, Matty Rue, unfortunately passed away I believe in the late 2000s.