DISCO INFERNO D.I. GO POP 1994 ROUGH TRADE LP POST-PUNK/JOY DIVISION EX COND

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DISCO INFERNO~D.I. GO POP~1994 ROUGH TRADE LP~POST-PUNK/JOY DIVISION~EX COND!

Product Description

by Ned Raggett

Following after three increasingly inventive, truly unique singles ("Summer's Last Sound," "From the Devil to the Deep Blue Sea," "The Last Dance") that demonstrated how thoroughly the band embraced the sampling aesthetic to create a distinct kind of modern art rock, Go Pop embraced the irony of its title with a passion. Pop hooks existed on the record, but only in the most spare, hard-to-find of forms; otherwise, Disco Inferno was out to create an album to challenge as many listeners as possible without fully embracing a noise approach. In its tension between accessibility and extreme experimentation, Go Pop resembles no other album so much as Wire's 154 for the modern day -- very English, encompassing a variety of styles and approaches, seemingly totally cryptic yet more touching to the mind, body and soul than anyone might have expected. "In Sharky Water" begins things with water sounds, a basic bass, and a drum slow pulse before turning into an overtly studio-produced thrash combined with shouted lyrics. Every song takes on a different tack, all clearly by the same band while remaining distinctly unique. "New Clothes for the New World" wraps distorted, shuddered vocals around equally strange sounding church bell samples, "Even the Sea Sides Against Us" floats on an acoustic guitar bed endlessly looping around a series of wave sounds and odd keyboard touches, and so forth. It ends with a found-sound tape of a landlady berating the band for playing too loud; it's not the noise but the complexity that leaves your mouth open. Probably one of the only bands truly worthy of the term "post-rock," Disco Inferno is heading in a direction that no previous band has fully embraced.

by Andy Kellman

Disco Inferno were formed by teenagers Ian Crause (guitars and vocals), Paul Willmott (bass), Daniel Gish (keyboards), and Rob Whatley (drums) in Essex in 1989. By autumn of that year, Gish was no longer part of the band after its restructuring; he would later join Bark Psychosis; the remaining trio began gigging around London to indifferent pub crowds. The band's early work, summed up on the accurately titled In Debt, bears the heavy influence of Joy Division, Wire, and other significant post-punk bands of the late '70s and early '80s. Though derivative and not nearly as experimental and imaginative as the band's later work, the material on In Debt successfully pays tribute (and at times rivals) the output of their predecessors. Without knowing it, you might think them to be a Factory band, circa 1981 -- dark, jagged, and haunting.

Crause soon became infatuated with the unique sounds of My Bloody Valentine and the Young Gods, as well as the Bomb Squad's revolutionary production and sampling on Public Enemy's records. A major turning point for Disco Inferno, they began to issue a series of some of the most uncompromising and experimental music of the mid-'90s. The Summer's Last Sound EP in 1992 marked this new beginning. Percolating indifference and economic troubles on the part of the band's label, Cheree, came to a head, and Rough Trade came to the rescue and began to issue the band's releases. The new label saved the band's life, as the members believed that they were too challenging for anyone else to understand or care for. The years of 1993 and 1994 turned out to be Disco Inferno's most productive and creative, yielding four EPs and an LP, D.I. Go Pop. Disorienting, confusing, and highly schizophrenic, the challenging releases were in direct contrast to the prevailing Brit-pop scene of the time. They took A.R. Kane's futurist pop a couple steps further and secured a devout and small following that found solace in their wildly imaginative, peerless nature.

After the It's a Kid's World EP, Crause found himself in a creative rut and hadn't the slightest clue as to what their follow-up should entail. Feeling creatively drained from Go Pop's boundary-breaking vision and inability to gain sustainable recognition, Crause and company mustered enough creative strength to record Technicolour, which didn't find release until 1996 and failed to register a blip on the commercial and critical radar. By that time, the group dissolved out of frustration and a seemingly endless, downward financial spiral. The band's last recording session saw posthumous release as a six-song EP on the Tugboat label. Crause continued to record under the Floorshow alias, but none of his work surfaced commercially until a single of salvaged material (issued under his own name) hit the racks in 2000. Ten years later, the One Little Indian label issued a disc compiling the five EPs released from 1992 through 1994.

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