Since starting these writings I’ve always thought about putting an entry for The VSS here. Their one and only LP released originally in 1997, Nervous Circuits, is a cornerstone record for me, especially back when I bought it shortly after it came out the short-lived, small Vancouver record store called Washout, which mainly focused on releases of hardcore, punk and its relative offshoots (Washout is also where I also met my bandmate in Radio Berlin, Chris Frey, who was one of the three folks working there at the time).
If I was going to put an entry for a track off of Nervous Circuits here, it had to be from some unique viewpoint that felt right, especially as I’ve referenced that record in numerous feature and interviews I’ve done as Soft Riot over the years, such as here, here and here.
I was even set on avoiding a lengthy back story on the band as there’s plenty of archival documentation of the band, with these two articles below — just a small sampling — which offer a lot of more insight than I could do given the fact that the first one gets input from vocalist Sonny Kay and drummer Dave Clifford from “the source”. The second one is written by a writer who probably has far more objective experience about writing about music than my often off-tangent approaches to this Track Of The Day feature.
I actually started writing this piece earlier this year, sometime in February. I remember there was a busy week at the beginning of that month — Xeno & Oaklander (*) were playing a midweek set at a Glasgow venue, my friend Olivier — who plays great driving, minimal electro synth music as Oberst Panizza — had flown over from Berlin for a Possession Records event I set up that we were both playing the night after here in town. There were a couple of impromptu afters at our flat in those busy few days. All the while this was happening I was dealing with a chest infection that was passed down to me after playing the first edition of the Synth Frequency festival in Paris a week or two before. Needless to say I wasn’t in a position to do anything remotely close to partying — mainly introducing a handful of guests to our flat and then promptly going to bed for another night of sweaty and fitful attempts to sleep.
Toward the end of Olivier’s stay we opted to do a rambling drive down the west coast of Scotland, checking out the expansive sights over the Firth of Clyde and over to the iconic Aisla Craig, then stopping into a neighbourhood pub in a small coastal town (a definite Scottish experience for Olivier) for food and then back to ours to wind down before an early flight back to Berlin for Olivier the next day. The night concluded with myself, my partner and Olivier half passed out in front of the television watching 2001 : A Space Odyssey — a film very familiar to us all and likely chosen at that point for mood and imagery than anything else.
One quiet night in the following week or two, when my partner was working night shift, I got a bit domestic and in that headspace started filing my LPs back into their respective places in my record shelf from listening sessions and small gatherings of pals over the previous couple of weeks and Nervous Circuits by The VSS sort of popped out at me. I’ve listened to it many times — albeit only occasionally in these times — and decided to give it a spin.
The opening track “Death Scene” bursts in and then collides right into the next track, “In Miniature” with its stuttering drum pattern and dramatic synth/organ chords. I’ve always clocked this likely intentional “pairing” of tracks, with another pairing on the flipside of the record starting on the second track “What Kind Of Ticks?” which crumbles into controlled chaos nearer to the end, immediately slamming into the interstellar drive of “Chemical In Chemistry”. All classic tracks for those in that “scene” I suppose, and likely the ones that still resonate decades later with rabid fans of experimentation in post-hardcore that was happening at the time.
But this time — likely with all of these years of distance — I found myself being sucked into the ominous empirical drone of the album’s closing title track, “Nervous Circuits”. In recent years I’ve been getting really good at writing notes (very helpful when I’m writing music) and jotted down some notes on my thoughts on this track. It then sat around for a while.
Coming back to crystalising those notes all these months later, the recently published piece on Uncanny Valley that precedes this entry gave me a nice angle due to my recent interactions with Owen (that band’s vocalist/synthesist) which then solidified my initial approach to the notes I had scratched down that were sitting around in a digital filing cabinet for months at this point, much like the drafts of twenty other entries that will be deployed as a hand in another round of “DIY music analysis poker” at some point. Both Uncanny Valley and The VSS to me had some vague sonic similarities so I opted to get this thing finished off.
Moving on…
With my deep listening of the track “Nervous Circuits” that February night months ago, I reflected back to that last night Olivier was in town when we were in a semi-conscious state watching 2001 : A Space Odyssey on the sofa. There’s a scene in that film where astronaut Frank Poole (played by Gary Lockwood), goes out on a space walk to check a malfunctioning antenna unit on the outside of the space craft. During this procedure the ship’s computer, HAL — as it starts to “malfunction” — cuts Poole loose from the astronaut’s air supply lines and sends Poole tumbling into the black infinitum of space. That clip from the film started playing in mind as an endless loop as the track “Nervous Circuits” picks up energy, culminating in a rather punishing — if not bordering on psychosis — cyclical drum loop of executed by Dave Clifford’s crashing snare/crash cymbal stomp.
The track eventually resolves into a drone-based, noise-inflected frazzled conclusion but as the song faded out I was thinking how that crashing loop could have been engineered as a locked groove on the LP version cycling into infinity. The image of tumbling through space forever at ungodly speed of thousands of miles per hour is a frightening prospect, and the music of this track syncs up with that pretty well for me. Overall this track could be the soundtrack for any number of cosmical catastrophic events, such as the slow motion horror of another planet crashing into Earth — a concept explored in Lars Von Trier‘s 2011 film Melancholia.
So sure, from the aesthetics there’s a science fiction angle to this, but more for me underlying that it prompts overarching thoughts on life, death and the cosmos as well.
These very subjects are cryptically addressed in Sonny’s lyrics, which for me are far less anchored in topics generally penned in lyrics from most hardcore/post-hardcore and more from a surreal, perhaps psychedelic place — seeming more of the Dali or Jodorowsky school of imagery than anything else, and with a colourful use of imagery and words.
“Nervous Circuits” itself carries over a number of traits that are spread throughout this album, including the alien treatment of Sonny’s voice — by way of heavy, intentional studio effects — which for this album were tempered more into a suitably styled character from the band’s earlier output, and indeed from the chaotic insane noise (I say this positively) of his previous “hardcore” band Angel Hair, which also included The VSS‘s guitarist, Joshua Hughes.
Another notable trademark is the sonic qualities of the band’s usage of the Roland Juno 6 synthesizer used heavily on this record. That series of synths generally has a very coveted built-in chorus effect (which in recent years is now available a standalone effect unit by TC Electronic), but the drones from that on this album also have what seems to be a slow and subtle LFO treatment that drifts on the pitch, making for a very “woozy” effect — especially as it was likely recorded and played live through a guitar or bass amplifier that brings out the grit of the sound more. As far as I can discern, in live performances bassist/keyboardist Andy Rothbard would put the Juno to play itself using the hold button and play bass over top of the drones.
I could have probably seen this myself when they played in Seattle, Washington in June of 1997 (a clip from a show in the same city but from 1998 below) while touring Nervous Circuits. A friend of mine from Seattle invited me down to come and see the show, however I was young (18 pushing 19), moved to Vancouver recently, had never been to the States before and was at that time definitely a bit blown away by the fact that I had just moved to a “big city” from small town Vancouver Island and had enough to adjust to even to where I had just moved to. Missed opportunities I suppose.
Anyway, this “woozy” effect on the Juno 6 — likely in tandem with using the pitch bend “joystick” — is especially apparent on the instrumental track on side A, the plodding menace that is “Effigy” (see clip below) which also features an out-of-tune piano used to great effect. The piano line in that track has more classical roots, and the image of discovering Bach, banished on his own to some distant planet playing that passage again in infinity only lifts the cosmic paranoia of this album even further. This track also features the most “dead” drum sound on the record, maybe more in line with the tonal qualities of Steve Jansen (an incredibly underrated drummer) of Japan‘s kit, with the majority of the other tracks from this record opting for a very wet, gated sound generally associated with drum production of the 1980s. This again was production choice of the band as they sought to move themselves away from the self-perpetuating post-hardcore aesthetics of the time.
Overall there’s a lot of dissonance on this album — a sonic quality I admire and have peppered over my own music as Soft Riot for most of my run — and again that, as well as the unique vocal style that connected this record to the Uncanny Valley piece I wrote prior to this one, prompted me to finish this entry. Like Owen from Uncanny Valley, Sonny is not a “singer” in the classic sense, but makes up in strides for being a very unique vocalist. If voices were characters you could very easily pick Sonny’s “voice” out of a police line-up — a procedure usually reserved for ones doing any range of crimes.
There’s also the connection with both bands using a lot of custom made gear and found random sources, with The VSS bringing their own custom-made DIY lighting rig to gigs which vocalist Sonny Kay operated the controls to.
And like Uncanny Valley, The VSS were born out of a band whose sound evolved out of their live performances. However, The VSS — being active only for a short run from 1995 to 1997 (1998?) — has had far less media documentation in predominantly pre-internet age. Video clips of the band that do exist, and have been uploaded to YouTube as well as the DVD component on one of their several re-issues of Nervous Circuits, are there in there in all of their HandyCam glory — unforgiving, static visual focus and that wildly uncompressed sound that our extremely computer software-enhanced “smartphones” can render out these days with fancy, fandangled software compression that is built in.
In fact, some of the compression in these grainy video clips really glitches out Sonny’s voice (see clips below), almost as if his voice were processed on some sort of 16-bit glitch plugin from the days when a company like Cycling ’74 were offering up the software digs for all of the cool cats doing glitch music that was starting to surface in the early 2000s. With a band that hand a short tenure for a few years in the mid/late nineties, it only adds more to the archival mystery.
While the album Nervous Circuits stands out as key release as hardcore transitioned into the post-punk revival of the turn of the millenium — at least in North America — another release of the band to check out for those who have any further interest piqued would be the preceding compilation album 25:37. This release has changed names over time as it’s simply a reference to the full playing time on this release, which flucuates on each re-release that comes out. It’s essentially a collection of all of their 7″ singles in chronological order from the start of the band to the cusp of releasing Nervous Circuits. It’s interesting hearing the earlier tracks with a more “conventional” hardcore sound and sonic quality (I say this relatively) up until later releases that start bringing in the synthesizers and framework for what was the band’s one and only true album.
This chronological progression the band made from the band’s Gravity (Records), with consideration of Sonny and Joshua’s previous tenure in Angel Hair really shows an interesting overarching evolution in not only the musicianship of the shared band members, but of hardcore, post-hardcore and moreover post-punk itself. Angel Hair‘s recent re-issue of their sole LP Insect Mortality on the San Diego label Three One G has had thoughts in my head for an analysis at some point as well, but I’m in no rush at this point.
Despite its relative obscurity for most, Nervous Circuits has been released three times, first with the original Honey Bear Records pressing in 1997 (of which my copy is showing the aging signs in the packaging), then again in 2008 as a deluxe 2xCD re-issue on the now defunct (?) American hardcore label Hydrahead, and then again in a 2xLP format on Sargeant House in 2012 which tacks on 25:37 as a second LP. I’m guessing these are all out-of-print now.
These two re-releases feature extra content such as unreleased material, radio show recordings as well as a cover of “No Hands” by Echo & The Bunnymen mulched through the stylistic filter that is The VSS. Sonny is a big fan of this Liverpudlian band, so much so that in our sporadic communications over the years I got a copy of of a rare Bunnymen single (I seem to remember it might be this one) sent to my flat in London when I was living there to post out to Sonny in the States as the seller was delivering to UK locations only.
Anyway, further insight to the music of The VSS can be found with a couple of video/audio interviews with Sonny Kay below, the first being from the Cult & Culture Podcast hosted by Three One G label head/musician Justin Pearson with Luke Henshaw. It’s a bit more informal due to the fact there’s a shared musical history and friendship between those involved. The second interview, with the podcast Microspy, is a bit more straight-forward with far less references to bands and people that to the uninitiated would likely not “ring a bell” at all.
I say this mainly as I’ve been living in the UK for almost twenty years now, and that in combination with rolling in different musical scenes these days that have far less relation (if at all) to that era of post-hardcore puts my own history with The VSS as sort of an unknown anomaly to most people in my social sphere these days. I’ve introduced a few folks to their music when it seemed suitable and it’s more of a point of a musical curiousity to them than anything deeper than that. “Cool synth sounds on that record, mate.”
On a lighter note (depending on who you talk to), and carrying over from Angel Hair but in a more selective manner to the next progression that made up The VSS, there’s still some quality screaming here — especially on 25:37 — notably at the end of “Silt, etc.” and after what might constitute a bridge — or at very least quieting things down — in the track “I Cut My Teeth”, which seems even crazier as it sounds like it’s going through some sort of chorus/flanger cranked up on the Rate setting.
Those both are almost up there with my favourite, quality hardcore scream of all time, which is the one bassist/vocalist Nicholas Pye from the Canadian hardcore/post-hardcore band Shotmaker shrieks out when all of the instruments drop out except for said shriek after some massive chord ring outs in the track “Security” of of their second album, 1994’s The Crayon Club (soundbyte below here from their recently issued box set). It almost sounds like his throat is being ripped out to be honest, or at least drowning in his own blood from a ruptured aorta.
And a jumping off question to conclude this entry I’m posing here: best screams in hardcore? Anyone?
* A short anecdote on Xeno & Oaklander‘s show in Glasgow. A couple of weeks earlier while in Paris, I was at Charles de Gaulle airport picking up a rental car for some additional shows in Belgium and spotted to people a few back in the queue at the car rental counter that looked familiar. Then back in Glasgow at the show Liz Wendebo, singer/synthesist in Xeno & Oaklander exclaimed, “We saw you in the car rental queue in Paris!” The dots were connected and we had a laugh about it. “What a coincidence!” as they say.