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Available 08 May 2012, Hyperbolic Masses is a limited edition cassette that contains 8 tracks, 5 previously unreleased, that will be available at live shows over the coming months as well as some available by mail order through this site. It provides a document of the current material of Soft Riot before the unreleased tracks see a proper released further down the line. More information can be found on the Hyperbolic Masses page.

Friday, May 18th / Manchester @ Dancing and Laughing (Fuel) w/LEBANON HANOVER + A TERRIBLE SPLENDOUR

Saturday, May 19th / Sheffield @ TBA w/LEBANON HANOVER + A TERRIBLE SPLENDOUR

Then onto a tour of Europe with various dates between June 13th and 23rd with London’s N?i Kabát. A number of dates including Berlin, Budapest and Vienna have been confirmed but we’re still looking for shows in Amsterdam, Prague and dates for June 17th through to the 21st so please contact at softriot@gmail.com to get in touch. More information can be found in the LIVE EVENTS section.

SOFT RIOT “You Can’t Please Everyone”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydfSrCEx4oo

SOFT RIOT “Another Drone In Your Head”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22B6KDW-Joo

Filming and video editing skills have also been supplied to friends in the group A Terrible Splendour for their promo video for the track “Victimless Crime”, which can be viewed here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epgGJcp7WVg

That is all for now…

Babe Rainbow’s Set Loose (Soft Riot’s Manhunter Version) by Soft Riot

Subpoena The Past were a post-punk project that existed from 1997 to around 2001, in which time they were sporadically active from various urban centres in California such as San Francisco, San Diego and Los Angeles. They released two EPs: 1998′s “This Year’s Eclipse” and 2000′s “Conjure Itch”, both of which contain different line-ups and have notably different sounds in instrumentation. All incarnations of this project featured Sonny Kay, who was the main mover and shaker of Gold Standard Labs (GSL), a label that captured the zeitgeist of the post-hardcore scene of the late nineties and early naughties. It was one of those go-to labels and one of the first to feature bands interpreting classic darker post-punk sounds with bands such as Beautiful Skin, The Faint, Get Hustle, Chromatics, etc. – all a number of years before that sort of thing was more common place.

This is also is the second entry of this Journal that I’ve dedicated to reflecting on some previously released recordings. I’m labelling these under the banner “Slightly Off Track“. Acting as some sort of digital filing shelf for audio gems of the recent and distant underground, these entries will offer up some stuff that have been lost in the ether over the years, and in particular stuff from the mid to late 90s and early 2000s. I just happen to have a good amount of that sort of stuff laying around — some of it almost impossible to find — and happened to be there in some respect as it was all being released. Slightly Off Track will be a sporadic venture. I don’t have any aspirations to rise in the world of music journalism or on-the-pulse blogging.

The two releases for Subpoena The Past came into consideration for a re-listen through my friend Ryan, whom I’ve only actually met once in the summer of 2001 in a show in a cafe in San Pedro CA while on tour. I’m not really sure what we talked about or how we connected but to this day we’ve been keeping on an off correspondence over the course of over ten years. I’ve moved overseas in that time and he’s moved around the US numerous times. He got in touch again with me recently after a year or so of being off the radar. We caught up on what we were going, with one entry from him going as follows:

“Oh! & You probably would be the right person to ask, but do you have any Subpoena The Past? Please say yes, I have been looking to start a blog that focuses on the more obscure releases of the nineties/early 00′s, & I feel that those bands always kind of got the short end of the stick.”

Short end of the stick. Yes, to some degree. It came out at a time riding on the back of the ‘zine and underground music magazine culture of the 90s and before the easy “click n’ browse” underground music enthusiast of the internet-saturated naughties came to a full tilt.

I had recently had all of my vinyl 12″ and CD collection shipped over from some dank place of storage back in Canada and decide to give both EPs a re-listen.

The first release, “This Year’s Eclipse”, was a co-released on GSL and Hymnal Sound, the latter a San Francisco label responsible for releasing the first 7″ single by the now well-known DFA group The Rapture. It contains five tracks of cold and sparse electro-industrial in the classic vein, with moments sounding like early Coil or the more electronic moments from “Nada” by Death In June. At this point the group were consisting of Kay and Joseph Karam from The Locust. The EP was produced by Helios Creed from the legendary Chrome.

For the time the tracks sounded very alien positioning themselves in the primarily guitar-oriented landscape of the nineties. For me it was like a red beacon of strangeness flashing in the corner, or perhaps like Robert Drake’s character in Lost Highway attending a party a Gilman Street or The Che Cafe*.

“Who’s that guy?” Most of the party-goers are unphased or slightly confused but one or two take notice and are attracted by the presence.

Nowadays “This Year’s Eclipse” wouldn’t too sound out of place with newer artists like ///TENSE/// or White Car — although this EP is far less funky and less dancey, lacks the same development but offers more unsettling discord. All in all it was an pretty good starting effort but it always felt like the best was to come with that sound as this release to me was a group finding it’s footing with the full realisation to come.

And a follow up came, but it was quite different. Shedding all of the electronics and taking up a more guitar oriented approach, Subpoena The Past came back in 2000 with “Conjure Itch” on the GSL label. This was a 12″ vinyl only release, with four tracks on a single-sided slab of vinyl. The reverse side was a complex geometric etching done by guitarist Julian Myers. The artwork within were collages done by the well-known US collage artist Danger.

From what I was told this recording was recorded in a cold, cold warehouse one winter and it shows on the recording. The chilly guitar shards with heavy chorus pedal effects over top of a menacing dub-influenced rhythm section that invoked barren landscapes. “Revelations”-era Killing Joke, early Modern English or Virgin Prunes come to mind, as well as an injection of some 90s stuff like Quicksand or Jesus Lizard.

As Subpoena the Past came across more like a project than a band, likely due to the other monumental commitments of those involved, there was never the big tour or the massive push behind either record. Both releases were more exercises in experimenting with sound and style based on collected influences rather than a standard band trying to break through to an audience. Shortly after the release of the second EP the group dissolved, with those involved moving onto such projects as Year Future and Ghost Orchids, both who have long dissolved. The year is now 2012. The fictional plotlines of both 2001: A Space Odyssey and it’s sequel have already passed.

Sonny is currently a visual artist tied with strong ties band The Mars Volta and Omar Rodríguez-López. Julian as far as I know still in on the staff roster at The University of Berkeley.

Well, pens down at this point. Here’s the music:

*Both were examples of notable venues in California for touring punk and hardcore bands back in the 90s.

SUBPOENA THE PAST : This Year’s Eclipse
1. Altitude on Ice / 2. Ripe Trial / 3. A Red Decree / 4. Last Year’s Ghost / 5. Patience
Released 1998 on GOLD STANDARD LABS / HYMNAL SOUND

RIPE TRIAL

DOWNLOAD EP

SUBPOENA THE PAST : Conjure Itch
1. Sphere of Influence / 2. Holding Pattern / 3. Rats of Indulgence / 4. Ghost
Released 2000 on GOLD STANDARD LABS

SPHERE OF INFLUENCE

DOWNLOAD EP

You Indie Feature: Jack Duckworth of Soft Riot

Truth be told, Jack Duckworth has been a long time friend of YouIndie.  That said, he and his projects have also been a prolific source of music that has shaken me to the core for over a decade.  Formerly of A Luna Red, Primes, and Radio Berlin, Duckworth struck out on his own in 2011 with Soft Riot, a solo project producing darkened drones, dread-dripping soundscapes and throbbing electronic rhythms.  With No Longer Stranger, which he offered for free via the internet, Duckworth delivered inspired, albeit creepy, electronic music that still raises the hair on my arms.

On February 24, Soft Riot’s latest EP, Another Drone In Your Head, was released via Tundra Dubs.  Not only does it deliver more of Duckworth’s striking work, but it also features remixes by electronic music heavies Funerals, Chris Flatline, ?AIMON, Babe Rainbow and William Winslow-Hansen.  We recently caught up with Duckworth to discuss his influences, the origins of Soft Riot, the status of Savage Furs and more.  Here’s what he had to say…

LINK TO INTERVIEW

It is true, my dad had a very extensive collection of LPs and chock full of a lot of the common classics from the 70s and 80s. For some reason I didn’t gravitate toward direct absorption of that music like what it seems others had done. My dad also had a collection of Omni magazines as well and the cover art for some of records were stranger than the music itself. “Slow Down World” by Donovan comes to mind: sort of a psychedelic man in space – lights burning and a name written in that glowing “calculator” font above his head. And films — yes, films and their soundtracks. This was a large contributing factor as well.

The first piece of music equipment I really had a play around on was some mid to late 80s Yamaha Portasound keyboard. I have no idea what model it was it. It had about 99 voices in it all trying in some fashion to emulate some “real” instrument: woodwinds, brass, guitars, Asian instruments — of course which none of them sounded exactly like the real thing. There were a few “synth” styled patches, mostly designed for the purpose of coughing out some sort of ghetto Rick James electro-funk (ie: Funky Clav, Fat Fifths, etc.). The Portasound also contained an Accompaniment section in which you could pick from a number of beats distilling various genres into some hammy backing track where you can execute chord changes to the whole backing track by pressing different root notes on the lower half of the keyboard.

I’m not sure what happened to that thing; it sort of lingered around for a few years afterwards but after that things took a slightly different route when the household acquired a Tandy computer in the late 80s. It was from Radio Shack and contained a really clunky operating system called Deskmate which was comparable to what Apple and Microsoft were doing at the time. I seem to have a memory of the mouse movements being highly inaccurate, therefore making it a somewhat frustrating physical experience to get the pointer to move around correctly on-screen.

In this clumsy operating system there was a program called “Music & Sound”. When booting up the program a pixel-mapped cartoon chacacture of Beethoven waited with while the hard disk clacked and whirled during it’s loading. Once up and running, it was a very basic program with a musical staff and four voices to choose from: strings, bells, piano, and I think clarinet (?). The sound quality would lead you to believe that these sounds were recorded on an extremely low bit rate and they probably were. Information about this Music & Sound program is a bit patchy and the old references to it on the vast expansive internet are in websites that look like they’ve been frozen in time since 1997 or something. There is one clip I’ve managed to find, which is a rather awkward sounding Xmas medley no less:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BK4JqnfkDjI

Being restricted to writing bizarre, attention-deficit classical music influenced compositions, Music & Sound quickly ran out of steam as my interests developed and a strange, predatory pace into the teen years. I had been thrashing out noise on a newly acquired guitar and although my attentions were starting to turn to harder music, I thought I could give that Tandy the equivalent of a punk hair dye job. A few years into the Tandy’s service a newer, more robust (for the time) soundcard was swapped out for the old, default one. It was an Ad Lib Soundblaster but don’t let the name fool you. “Blasting sound” was hardly a feature as it’s poorly constructed FM synthesis model was the equivalent of sound coming out of speaker cones made of generic range toilet paper. I did have a lot of fun though; writing these sort of industrial/punk/thrash compositions on them. I’d record them by plugging Walkman headphones into the rear of the computer and taping the earbuds over the internal microphone of a cheap Sanyo ghetto-blaster. That made the audio quality ten times worse with a sonic range matching the width of a coffee stir stick.

Once again, documentation is limited but here’s what remnants I’ve found online of that thing:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2UcZrrTNp8Q

Eventually I moved out of the family home and the Tandy took up retirement shortly thereafter. By that time those fancy coloured iMacs started sneaking through pop culture’s back door and I think we know the general story of where things went from there. I have recordings on tape somewhere and should I somehow fall victim to house arrest and have a lot of time on my hands, there would be consideration to digging them up and taking a re-visit to those primitive recordings.