Franco
Well-Known Member
got mailed this. mcd.
THE YOUNG GODS
Special Guests just announced CHANNEL ONE
30 November 2005
Temple Bar Music Centre
Swiss sonic pioneers The Young Gods will perform in the Temple Bar Music Centre
30 November 2005.
It has been 20 years since The Young Gods formed and to celebrate they have
released a best of album "XXY (Twenty Years 1985 - 2005)" including the new
track "Secret".
In the mid-80s The Young Gods' line-up was vocals, sampler, and drums. Their
self-titled first album was voted 'Album Of The Year' by UK magazine Melody
Maker in 1987. They went on to sample and cover everything from Gary Glitter to
Shostakovich, while still sounding like only themselves. The 90's brought
commercial success and the support of many of the industrial / Goth fraternity,
while also having a decisive influence on a generation of rock bands - most
notably Nine Inch Nails.
The Young Gods open a fascinating trail, always changing, without ever losing
their identity. It's an exacting work and the research for new sonorities never
leaves out the visceral energy that emanates from the band.
Dreamy atmospheres… Music for confines which is only a pulse at the beginning, a
beat to identify, then turns into something warm, unique, alive. Just like a
heart….a human heart.
Tickets 22.50 (include booking fee)
Biography 1985 2005
20 years since The Young Gods formed, you might have expected the rest of the
rock world to have caught up with them. Instead, it has receded, as if in fear
of the 21st century, into the retro, the kitsch, the neo-conservative, the
corporate facsimile of yesteryear. The Young Gods are further ahead than ever.
By the early Eighties, Franz Treichler was already bored with conventional rock
music, the so-called 'new wave'. He was an excellent guitarist, classically
trained but he lay aside the instrument and instead started to toy with a device
new to the market - the sampler.
When The Young Gods formed in 1985, in Switzerland (home also to fellow avant
garde pioneers the Dadaists), samplers were not widely heard of. However, by
1986, they were all over the pop marketplace, a source of controversy and
technological fascination as they enabled you to plunder from pop and rock
history. Still, in the hands of most artists, samplers were used in a
depressingly non-futuristic way - 'quoting' the classic sounds and beats of old
hands like James Brown and Led Zeppelin with a sort of fatigued irony, as if to
suggest there was nothing new under the sun, nothing left to do in rock but
refer back to a lost, golden age.
No such defeatism for The Young Gods. They used samplers in a radically
different way - to reconfigure and reinfuse rock, recycling its dead matter as a
means to create new shapes, fresh fire. Their line-up was as follows; Franz
Treichler (vocals), Cesare Pizzi (sampler), Frank Bagnoud (drums).
This was unheard of. So, while their opening broadside, 'Envoyé', though it
sounds like quintessential, high octane rock music is, on closer inspection, the
product of machine loops rather than handmade riffs. This was a new, modernistic
version of rock, brilliantly synthetic, capable of bending and discharging,
fading and glowing, disintegrating and reintegrating, in a manner unknown to the
traditional punk or metal guitarist.
With their first two albums The Young Gods (voted album of the year by Melody
Maker in 1987) and its follow-up, 1989's L'Eau Rouge, The Young Gods wrought a
noisy yet unheard sonic revolution. It wasn©ˆt just the way they recycled and
bent new shapes from the discarded metal of rock©ˆs scrapheap (from Motorhead to
Gary Glitter, whose 'Hello, Hello, I'm Back Again' they memorably covered on
their debut album). It was also their borrowings from classical music, which
they used, not in the banal manner of an ELO or Deep Purple, hoping some of its
pomp and prestige would rub off. Rather, they ripped away chunks of its more
clamorous moments. So, on L'Eau Rouge's 'La Fille De La Mort', which begins with
what sounds like a wheezy, grinding organ, before stormclouds gather and an
excerpt from Shostakovich's Symphony No. 5 breaks like a looped thunderclap. All
this, plus Treichler©ˆs unabashedly elemental lyrics, which cite the moon, the
sun, the ocean in all of their movements and arcs, add to the sense of a music
that is imperishable, indelibly inscribed in the granite like the stick figures
that were their album cover's motif, epic, both pre-and-post rock history.
As L'Eau Rouge demonstrates, this was a music that wanted not to destroy rock
but warp and melt it, rediscover its liquid essence. One discernible quote does
burn through the album©ˆs title track; a snatch from the raging, incandescent
fadeout of Jimi Hendrix's 'House Burning Down'. While in the late Eighties the
likes of U2 were paying reverential but uninspired homage to Americana with the
double album Rattle & Hum.
With projects like 1991's Play Kurt Weill, however, The Young Gods were
reintroducing a sense of Europe©ˆs great musical wellsprings. Their cover
versions of songs like 'Mackie Messer' and 'September Song' were like sonic
cubism, enabling the listener to rediscover these subversive mock-cabaret
ditties from new angles. It was in 1992 and TV Sky, however, that The Young Gods
made their long-deserved commercial breakthrough, particularly in America. Their
decision to sing in English undoubtedly helped them but this was no sellout.
Though The Young Gods were never Goths, the more adventurous of that black clad
wing did embrace them; meanwhile, a growing thirst for so-called industrial
music, much of it inspired by The Gods (Nine Inch Nails in particular) meant
that they now attracted a wider audience.
By now Cesare Pizzi and Frank Bagnoud had departed, replaced by Al Comet and Use
Hiestand. The Gods modus operandi did not fundamentally change. But TV Sky is
more recognisably in the urban traditions of rock than previous offerings - like
Suicide, they sound like they've got right down to the genre's basic,
oil-stained, motor pulse. But there are still huge vistas and digressions for
those who dare follow, like the 20 minute 'Summer Eyes', which re-views the
desert Prog terrain of a Pink Floyd through a cracked, modernist lens. What was
most gratifying about this period was seeing the band perform to large, packed
houses. Despite the computer-generated element of their music, The Young Gods,
as their two live albums attest are a band to be experienced in the flesh, in
their element. (This writer has a photo of himself after a Young Gods gig in a
state of sodden bliss, shirt half ripped off!).
Come the mid-Nineties and The Young Gods developed their (always strong) spatial
awareness, began to investigate the 'ambient' and beyond. Check 'Moon
Revolutions' on 1995's Only Heaven, one of their greatest, extended works. It
kicks in with a backward riff, a sped-up nod to Hendrix's 'Are You Experienced',
as sampled guitar snakes up and spurts volleys of lava into the air. Then, a
mid-section, which hovers like some engine-less, metal condor high, high above
the Andes, before once again the almost-tribal drums kick in and the track
eventually blazes itself out. 'Moon Revolutions' measures the expanse of The
Young Gods' range - from the very bone marrow of the rock riff to the outermost
reaches of orbit.
A further Nineties album, Heaven Deconstruction would see The Young Gods meander
further into ambient, while on the assured Second Nature, Franz Treichler would
come upon a keynote concept, that 'Lucidogen', a fictional drug which doesn©ˆt
render people comatose or enable them to escape from life but rather gifts them
with hyperconsciousness, enabling them to see life for what it is. By now, Al
Comet and additional member Bernard Trontin were more involved in the
compositional side of the Young Gods, their input and exchange of ideas subtly
altering and upgrading the fabric of the sound.
Such is The Young Gods©ˆs present-day take on ambient, as evinced on their most
recent album, Music For Artificial Clouds, with its Hubble Telescope -like
visions of a fictional beyond. Ambient isn't a soothing, bubblebath New Age
snooze, nor is 'nature' something to drift passively along to, as if dozing in a
boat. As The Young Gods showed when they first set out 20 years ago, the great
thing is not merely to accept the dead facts of things as they are but to
engage, to use machinery to bend, 'artificially' contrive and reshape the
'natural' into the ideals posited by the imagination. Long may they carry on
doing so.
THE YOUNG GODS
Special Guests just announced CHANNEL ONE
30 November 2005
Temple Bar Music Centre
Swiss sonic pioneers The Young Gods will perform in the Temple Bar Music Centre
30 November 2005.
It has been 20 years since The Young Gods formed and to celebrate they have
released a best of album "XXY (Twenty Years 1985 - 2005)" including the new
track "Secret".
In the mid-80s The Young Gods' line-up was vocals, sampler, and drums. Their
self-titled first album was voted 'Album Of The Year' by UK magazine Melody
Maker in 1987. They went on to sample and cover everything from Gary Glitter to
Shostakovich, while still sounding like only themselves. The 90's brought
commercial success and the support of many of the industrial / Goth fraternity,
while also having a decisive influence on a generation of rock bands - most
notably Nine Inch Nails.
The Young Gods open a fascinating trail, always changing, without ever losing
their identity. It's an exacting work and the research for new sonorities never
leaves out the visceral energy that emanates from the band.
Dreamy atmospheres… Music for confines which is only a pulse at the beginning, a
beat to identify, then turns into something warm, unique, alive. Just like a
heart….a human heart.
Tickets 22.50 (include booking fee)
Biography 1985 2005
20 years since The Young Gods formed, you might have expected the rest of the
rock world to have caught up with them. Instead, it has receded, as if in fear
of the 21st century, into the retro, the kitsch, the neo-conservative, the
corporate facsimile of yesteryear. The Young Gods are further ahead than ever.
By the early Eighties, Franz Treichler was already bored with conventional rock
music, the so-called 'new wave'. He was an excellent guitarist, classically
trained but he lay aside the instrument and instead started to toy with a device
new to the market - the sampler.
When The Young Gods formed in 1985, in Switzerland (home also to fellow avant
garde pioneers the Dadaists), samplers were not widely heard of. However, by
1986, they were all over the pop marketplace, a source of controversy and
technological fascination as they enabled you to plunder from pop and rock
history. Still, in the hands of most artists, samplers were used in a
depressingly non-futuristic way - 'quoting' the classic sounds and beats of old
hands like James Brown and Led Zeppelin with a sort of fatigued irony, as if to
suggest there was nothing new under the sun, nothing left to do in rock but
refer back to a lost, golden age.
No such defeatism for The Young Gods. They used samplers in a radically
different way - to reconfigure and reinfuse rock, recycling its dead matter as a
means to create new shapes, fresh fire. Their line-up was as follows; Franz
Treichler (vocals), Cesare Pizzi (sampler), Frank Bagnoud (drums).
This was unheard of. So, while their opening broadside, 'Envoyé', though it
sounds like quintessential, high octane rock music is, on closer inspection, the
product of machine loops rather than handmade riffs. This was a new, modernistic
version of rock, brilliantly synthetic, capable of bending and discharging,
fading and glowing, disintegrating and reintegrating, in a manner unknown to the
traditional punk or metal guitarist.
With their first two albums The Young Gods (voted album of the year by Melody
Maker in 1987) and its follow-up, 1989's L'Eau Rouge, The Young Gods wrought a
noisy yet unheard sonic revolution. It wasn©ˆt just the way they recycled and
bent new shapes from the discarded metal of rock©ˆs scrapheap (from Motorhead to
Gary Glitter, whose 'Hello, Hello, I'm Back Again' they memorably covered on
their debut album). It was also their borrowings from classical music, which
they used, not in the banal manner of an ELO or Deep Purple, hoping some of its
pomp and prestige would rub off. Rather, they ripped away chunks of its more
clamorous moments. So, on L'Eau Rouge's 'La Fille De La Mort', which begins with
what sounds like a wheezy, grinding organ, before stormclouds gather and an
excerpt from Shostakovich's Symphony No. 5 breaks like a looped thunderclap. All
this, plus Treichler©ˆs unabashedly elemental lyrics, which cite the moon, the
sun, the ocean in all of their movements and arcs, add to the sense of a music
that is imperishable, indelibly inscribed in the granite like the stick figures
that were their album cover's motif, epic, both pre-and-post rock history.
As L'Eau Rouge demonstrates, this was a music that wanted not to destroy rock
but warp and melt it, rediscover its liquid essence. One discernible quote does
burn through the album©ˆs title track; a snatch from the raging, incandescent
fadeout of Jimi Hendrix's 'House Burning Down'. While in the late Eighties the
likes of U2 were paying reverential but uninspired homage to Americana with the
double album Rattle & Hum.
With projects like 1991's Play Kurt Weill, however, The Young Gods were
reintroducing a sense of Europe©ˆs great musical wellsprings. Their cover
versions of songs like 'Mackie Messer' and 'September Song' were like sonic
cubism, enabling the listener to rediscover these subversive mock-cabaret
ditties from new angles. It was in 1992 and TV Sky, however, that The Young Gods
made their long-deserved commercial breakthrough, particularly in America. Their
decision to sing in English undoubtedly helped them but this was no sellout.
Though The Young Gods were never Goths, the more adventurous of that black clad
wing did embrace them; meanwhile, a growing thirst for so-called industrial
music, much of it inspired by The Gods (Nine Inch Nails in particular) meant
that they now attracted a wider audience.
By now Cesare Pizzi and Frank Bagnoud had departed, replaced by Al Comet and Use
Hiestand. The Gods modus operandi did not fundamentally change. But TV Sky is
more recognisably in the urban traditions of rock than previous offerings - like
Suicide, they sound like they've got right down to the genre's basic,
oil-stained, motor pulse. But there are still huge vistas and digressions for
those who dare follow, like the 20 minute 'Summer Eyes', which re-views the
desert Prog terrain of a Pink Floyd through a cracked, modernist lens. What was
most gratifying about this period was seeing the band perform to large, packed
houses. Despite the computer-generated element of their music, The Young Gods,
as their two live albums attest are a band to be experienced in the flesh, in
their element. (This writer has a photo of himself after a Young Gods gig in a
state of sodden bliss, shirt half ripped off!).
Come the mid-Nineties and The Young Gods developed their (always strong) spatial
awareness, began to investigate the 'ambient' and beyond. Check 'Moon
Revolutions' on 1995's Only Heaven, one of their greatest, extended works. It
kicks in with a backward riff, a sped-up nod to Hendrix's 'Are You Experienced',
as sampled guitar snakes up and spurts volleys of lava into the air. Then, a
mid-section, which hovers like some engine-less, metal condor high, high above
the Andes, before once again the almost-tribal drums kick in and the track
eventually blazes itself out. 'Moon Revolutions' measures the expanse of The
Young Gods' range - from the very bone marrow of the rock riff to the outermost
reaches of orbit.
A further Nineties album, Heaven Deconstruction would see The Young Gods meander
further into ambient, while on the assured Second Nature, Franz Treichler would
come upon a keynote concept, that 'Lucidogen', a fictional drug which doesn©ˆt
render people comatose or enable them to escape from life but rather gifts them
with hyperconsciousness, enabling them to see life for what it is. By now, Al
Comet and additional member Bernard Trontin were more involved in the
compositional side of the Young Gods, their input and exchange of ideas subtly
altering and upgrading the fabric of the sound.
Such is The Young Gods©ˆs present-day take on ambient, as evinced on their most
recent album, Music For Artificial Clouds, with its Hubble Telescope -like
visions of a fictional beyond. Ambient isn't a soothing, bubblebath New Age
snooze, nor is 'nature' something to drift passively along to, as if dozing in a
boat. As The Young Gods showed when they first set out 20 years ago, the great
thing is not merely to accept the dead facts of things as they are but to
engage, to use machinery to bend, 'artificially' contrive and reshape the
'natural' into the ideals posited by the imagination. Long may they carry on
doing so.
