Uncanny Valley - Seeds

A good number of entries in this Track Of The Day section on this site sometimes take time to come together. In some cases they’re tracks from releases that have been swirling in my head for some time and are slowly built out as drafts incrementally. Sometimes I need a spark of an idea for an interesting angle to really get into writing about it.

Such is the case with this entry — a track I’ve been curious about for a while — where the ideas to flush out the written structure came after my recent visit to the Midi-Pyrenées region of southern France — more specifically in the Montagne Noir region — to spend a quiet, focused week there mixing the forthcoming next Soft Riot record there with an old friend and audio production extraordinaire Owen Pratt, who works under the umbrella of Shepardtone Audio Post-Production. Owen and I met in the early 2010s when we were both still living in London and had been on numerous tours of Europe with his projects Noi Kabát (active in the first half of the 2010s) and more recently Uncanny Valley. We’d often be sharing the same van in our treks to various cities in different European countries. I’ll be getting into these more below, as obviously Uncanny Valley is the main subject of this entry.

The last time I saw Owen was in March 2020 as I was about to embark on some European tour dates that fell like a house of cards as the world clamped into lockdown as coronavirus reared its mighty head. Owen was there in Berlin as well, and in our brief time hanging out we all made split-second decisions to get back to our respective homes. Owen then moved to this region of France a year or two later.

It should be said here that his studio in an old country home was absolutely the ideal location to get the work done. It’s in a quiet village with friendly characters apparently — albeit many amenities seem to be only open on random days or times of the week — and nestled in one of the many valleys in this region. Its dense forests hid any given number of abandoned buildings and factories in the woods, a number of which I discovered on the numerous walks we did in the surrounding area when giving our ears a break from the fun yet extremely productive mixing sessions. If one drives south over a couple of mountain ranges the vegetation transitions to a more Mediterranean landscape — tall narrow cypress trees, vineyards and limestone escarpments. The medieval village of Minerve is perched on a precipice in this landscape, yet close by to where we were working and was quite the treat to visit.

At some point Owen I were discussing the almost Twin Peaks vibe of the area he’s based in, with its narrow winding roads of logging trucks hauling lumber, the aforementioned strange abandoned buildings in the forests in the hills, and an added “bonus” of spotting an overturned car we saw in the woods with nary a road anywhere nearby. About a twenty minute drive west there was a massive lumber yard with a nightclub at one end of it — an odd pairing. Le Roadhouse perhaps?

It’s almost like if Twin Peaks were either (a) in some alternate universe shot by a French director or (b) David Lynch opted to set that series in this region of France with a French cast. My mind drifted on that prospect, trying to envision Ray Wise‘s role of the complex Leland Palmer character re-cast to an actor such as Gérard Depardieu, who in this alternate television universe might be swirling around a vintage Bordeaux wine in a balloon glass, gesticulating wildly asking, “Who is this Bob you speak of?” (of course, in a nice and thick French accent).

The whole week was almost like Soft Riot‘s DIY version of going to Compass Point in the Bahamas to do a record, that being the same studio where the Manchester group Happy Mondays infamously blew a lot of money and went to excess for their 1992 album Yes Please!. However, our time working on mixes was light years more restrained and infinitely more focused than anything like that. We were clocking earlier nights of rest with fresh morning starts, as in line with what happens with countryside living.

Now moving this along to what this is all about in this somewhat lengthy entry…

Uncanny Valley started around 2014 or 2015 after Owen bowed out of the London trio Noi Kabát (which mundanely means “women’s jacket” in Magyar) (1), who were definitely one of those “you had to be there to see them” type of bands. A flash and then it’s gone. The original line up of that band — Owen Pratt (electronics, percussion), Dee Rüsche (vocals) and Jonas Ranson (acoustic/electronic drums) — had shone pretty brightly in that line-up’s run from 2011 to 2013 and were a very unique band to see live.

Using a bizarre selection of antiquated synths, metal percussion treated with custom built contact microphones, live drums played on a hybrid acoustic/electronic kit along with Dee’s dramatic and masterful vocals, Noi Kabát‘s only “official” release was the Make Room! Make Room!/Industry 7″ (the title track with a promo video further down with a number of folks we all knew dancing in it at some point) that came out on the popular Berlin label Aufnahme + Wiedergabe before that label started shifting to releases more of the dark techno variety. They also had a few other available tracks including “I Corrode” on the 2013 LP sampler And You Will Find Them In The Basement released on the now defunct Desire Records. It was a collaborative release put together by the small community of like-minded bands that were active in London at the time with a foreword by myself in that release, which is now sold out. “I Corrode” was also digitally released as a single and cassette with another track “Seeds Of Time” and remixes, including one of my own.

Other than that Noi Kabát tracks outside of those mentioned above I seem to remember were available to the lucky few who had a “demo” tape which offered a lot of other gems by the band that never really met a broader audience — much to the loss of said audience. I might be wrong here. Time does that to one’s memory.

They were a great band live, and footage below from a 2012 Halloween show of an extended version of their track “Industry” attests to this. It was shot in the London venue The Waiting Room (formerly The Drop) for the amazing club night Endurance — which starting in 2009 had a five year run. The night itself focused on classic and underground EBM and new beat — as well as like-minded current artists of the time. It was a night of four talented DJs which included Chris Gilbert of Mild Peril/Paladin, another artist covered in these pages.

All four of us became pretty tight as friends, especially as we did two summer European tours together in 2012 and 2013 with the former documented in a small “tour video” totalling 15 minutes, edited together with footage we had all taken on the tour (posted below). It’s an interesting document, especially as it was shot on digital cameras before smartphones could really handle doing video with less effort, and before software in these said phones could compress audio into something with more clarity. The live footage in this video is often blown out with distorted frequencies. For me it’s personally interesting to watch now as I as Soft Riot was sitting down then when playing in these early days, likely still overwhelmed having to play a collection of analogue beast synths when I was starting out, which eventually changed notably in the years to come as I got used to what I was doing and with more confidence.

After Owen’s departure, Noi Kabát continued on as a duo for another couple of years but I suppose the difficulty of having one member move to Budapest and then Vienna (Dee) and the other remaining in London (Jonas) was a bit too much of a hurdle to keep the momentum, everyone having other things going on in their busy, multi-faceted lives.

Owen, myself and his “new” band Uncanny Valley did a run of European shows in late 2015 when this new band was starting out. At the time they were playing tracks off of their initial Chain Store 12″ EP. It’s an interesting collection of tracks — if anything because with the exception of the bubbly electronic instrumental aptly titled “Popcorn”, the other three tracks on this release are magnetically murky, dissonant and totally side-step the “four on the floor” quantized feel of a lot of darker electronic music, opting for a more swinging yet sludgy 6/8 groove that would be more commonly found in an early/mid 70s glittery English glam rock band. A lot of the synths are simply played by hand on old mono synths. It’s a cool and strange initial offering, augmented by the fascinatingly bizarre dada-esque cover of the EP, featuring some random naked middle-aged man kneeling on the cover, giving some sort of vacant look to any listener that might be holding that record in their hands.

There’s a clip below from 2017 of the band playing the title track from this EP live at The Shacklewell Arms in London.

In the years to follow I kept moving up further north, finally settling in Glasgow, and saw less and less of these folks in the two aforementioned bands as many of them moved elsewhere as well (we still see each other and keep in touch). This brings us to Uncanny Valley‘s next release, the 2019 album Ugashia.

Five tracks into this album there’s a track called “Seeds” which is based on one bass line riff that cycles in three counts over a stomping storm of electronic and industrial percussion, the latter sounds being carried over by Owen’s mastery of custom contact microphones being attached to found metal objects and then compressed and tweaked into some howling, dissonant beast — complete with twisted guitar schrapnel hissing in the background. The bass line always fascinated me — was it played on some large, tuned metal springs? Or was it a synth? The whole record — which I’ve listened to many times from digital audio — a total revelation of a listen and brings up any number of questions in one’s head of how these tracks came together and the production decisions behind them.

At some point during our mixing sessions I meandered into talking about that track. “How did you get that bassline on “Seeds”?” I asked. Owen responded, “Oh, we just used my Yamaha DX7 (2) and rather than using the built in keyboard we plugged in an external keyboard to reach the lower octaves that the built-in keyboard couldn’t.” Simultaneously I had a sense of wonder and a smile on my face, and likely even laughed. That’s how Owen thinks about sound and it’s a great place to be, and one of the reasons I had come down to his neck of the woods in France to mix my record in the first place. I then reminded him — for both of us really — that I needed to get an LP copy of that record before I left home for Glasgow.

And with “Seeds” — and indeed all of the other tracks on the album that feature vocals — Owen’s voice on these recordings have a very unique quality to them: baritone, sonically “hollow” sounding and at times with a sensual quality about them. There’s not really a melody for the most part, and more like a cavernous yet human voice guiding the listener through the landscapes of their compositions. Compared to Chain Store these qualities are brought out even more and probably saw Owen spend more time finding the right treatments for it. He knows he’s not a “singer” in the traditional sense. It’s a voice that interestingly blends into the band’s dissonant sound in a very deliberate way, and one that even if you turned up in the overall mix would still just uniquely blend into the music in the right way as a unified sound. In “Seeds” there’s even more bizarre processing, with Owen’s voice going through what sounds like a Leslie speaker or gated tremolo effect.

This lines up with the fact that I’m enjoying vocalists that aren’t singing correctly all the time and if anything I’m more fascinated with vocalists who work outside of that with interesting character. Having lived in Glasgow for almost ten years now, I’ve met countless people here that have incredibly characterful speaking voices — my current partner definitely being one of them. It makes conversations more interesting with more human personality involved. Here in Glasgow there’s a term called patter — which is sort of hard to describe, especially for me not being a born-and-bred Glaswegian. The best I can describe patter is one’s quality of conversation: good stories, when to put the joke in, subtle intonation, the humour and tone of the subject matter and a myriad of other finer details. “She’s got pure good patter, aye?”

Most of our interactions with people are conversations, not singing at them if you know what I mean. Other vocalists that have interesting speech-like qualities might be Al Johnson from U.S. Maple, a band I’ve covered here before, who might offhand sound like an eccentric old man with emphysema trying to do a Bon Scott impression. Even more interesting is that for the run of that band’s albums, the choice of his emphasis on words and phrases in his delivery are totally planned out, so much so that he has cryptic vocal charts for how he delivers the lines. You can see this in action in a documentary about that band when they were recording their 2001 album Acre Thrills. There’s countless other examples of vocalists I could list here, but that’s for another article entirely.

For these new Soft Riot tracks I was working on with Owen, I’ve been moving a bit more away from just “singing” and trying on more characters for my voice, sometimes moving into sprechgesang territory. There’s tracks where I’ve recorded them pretty “straight” as far as singing goes and then have gone back to re-record those vocals, making them bend more, at points less melodic and adding in such elements as at this point in time it feels more intuitive to do where my headspace is at these days.

Moving on from “Seeds”, trying to describe the rest of Ugashia is a bit of an intimidating task. I suppose by a process of elimination we could call it post-industrial, given how much of the sound design coupled with a lot of percussion work being done on found metal objects play a lot into their sound, and the overall sound of the group informed by a more modern age in a way.

The opener, “Drowning” (see clip below), has murky, ambient spaghetti western feel, locked into a funeral almost latin mambo groove through ambience that could slot in with a Werner Herzog film in line with Popol Vuh‘s work. Another favourite of mine, “Youth” (see clip below) starts off with a restrained, slinky synth bass line that could have originated out of the Deutsch Amerikanische Freundschaft/Robert Görl school of sequencing and sound design but quickly goes off somewhere else with it’s mechanical tom-based stomp and sprays of dissonant sounds. The combined effect of the album’s tracks is unpredictable but a unified concept at the same time.

One important thing to note is that given the above tracks covered so far, a surprising amount of the album — if not the majority of it — is a lot of gorgeous ambient-leaning pieces, which expands the scope of the album quite considerably into something more deep and complex and makes it a refreshingly unique piece of work. This is very much so how side B of the album pans out, starting with the lush “Odd Orchestra”.

With my thoughts percolating on this piece and myself writing down a lot of notes, I had this subliminal thought about the sound, approach and pioneering spirit of both Noi Kabát and Uncanny Valley with another band that was a big thing in my life in times long gone by, and that being the post-hardcore band The VSS, who again were one of those “you had to be there to see them” bands in their sort tenure from 1995-1997. I won’t go into The VSS here in this entry, mainly as they already pop up on this website any given number of times (1) (2) (3) (4) (5). You can however check out an entry that just went up jumping off this one about The VSS here.

All three acts of these bands took first wave post-punk electronic sounds and doing their own thing with those influences, and being ultimately live bands found creative, DIY solutions to replicate their sounds on stage using an eclectic and unorthodox selection of equipment. I can’t really elaborate on that here as it’s more of a feeling or esoteric connection than anything.

As said, Ugashia for me is a very underrated, buried modern post-industrial classic but with that it hasn’t gone un-noticed. The well-known dark post-punk group Lebanon Hanover — a band whose members I had connected with personally in the early days of Soft Riot and still do here and there — picked up on Uncanny Valley‘s sound and invited them to open a number of their gigs as they became fans of the band. In fact, Larissa Iceglass — the vocalist/guitarist of Lebanon Hanover — has started a new project called Pissour Des Dieux (a term Owen told me that locals in his area use to refer to the generous rainfall), calling in Lewis of Chaos International (who also fills another role of Lebanon Hanover‘s tech hand) and Owen into the fold for this very reason I would suspect.

After Ugashia the line-up of Uncanny Valley shifted, bringing in avant garde UK musician Severin Black into the mix (who like numerous others had been called in to fill out spaces and provide communal talent in the Ugashia recordings) and resulted in a cassette release called Rhythm Reconnaissance in 2022 on the UK label Industrial Coast which is mostly instrumental and more leaning towards traits found in dark, noisier techno. Knowing the band, this likely isn’t a permanent shift in direction but more so trying something out differently on a release. At this point in time the band is still going, although on a far more stretched out timeline as all three current members live in different countries: —France, UK and Germany — and all juggling numerous things such as other projects, work, academia and families.

As my time in this fascinating region of France was coming to an end, Owen said, “I’ll get you one of those Ugashia LPs” and we ventured into the expansive subterranean basement of the house which is a very open yet murky space full of power tools, wooden French produce crates, battered amplifier cabinets with microphones positioned in front of them to take in the signals from the studio up in the floor above, and likely in the dark corners being hidden mysteries of this region of southern France from decades or even centuries long ago.

He got a cardboard box from a pile, ran a box cutter through the tape binding them together and handed me an LP. I was stoked — I buy and acquire vinyl more discerningly these days. It’s got to be something I know I’ll listen to on the turntable in my living room, and I would certainly be putting Ugashia on that turntable in the near future.

Finally — as a footnote — it’s also worthwhile to check out music that Noi Kabát drummer Jonas Ranson has been doing lately under the Zeroset moniker which you can check out here, which in a nutshell can sound like more warped and avant garde versions of Blitz Club favourites such as Visage, etc. with a truly experimental post-punk approach. Apparently there’s a new LP coming out soon. Probably worth an entry of its own at some point!

1 To spell Noi Kabát properly in the Hungarian alphabet one needs to put a double acute over the first “O” in “Noi”. This is very difficult for the most part to do on (a) a Western keyboard and (b) most fonts don’t support it. Although you can enter it using an HTML entity somewhat easily, each time you save something in an editor it breaks so as one might say here in Scotland, “Aye, fuck it.”

2 The Yamaha DX7, released originally in 1983, is an early digital synthesizer whose sound conjures up artificial piano sounds used in power ballads, brass-y horns in mid-80s pop tracks and many more.