Anywhere

Causeway are an Idaho duo, Marshall Watson and Allison Rae, who have an album out on Friday on Manchester's Sprechen label- Anywhere. Appropriately enough, Friday is Valentine's Day, and for much of the album Allison sings of the pain that that particular emotion can bring. 'My heart is an empty well', she sings on last year's single Dancing With Shadows, a single that came with multiple remixes, all worth hearing, remixes by label boss Chris Massey, Hardway Bros and Kiaki and one by Marshall himself. 'Tragedy I'm here for you/ This loneliness is meant for two'. 

The album is built on the foundations of the 80s indie disco classics- New Order, The Cure, Depeche Mode, OMD- with cavernous drums, a wall of synths and pulsating sequencers, a dreamwave reawakening of being lost in dry ice on the floor. It's not totally retro- the production is sleekly 2025, there's the chug of 21st century cosmic disco hitched to the cinematic feel of club music. Opener Love Me Like Your Last Time turns all the buttons up to eleven, a sheen of synths and vocals caught under the neon and laser lights. The pain and melodrama of love is shot through the songs like writing in a stick of rock- It's Never Enough should soundtrack the final scenes of a lost 80s film, a figure in a trench coat walking away from the camera, perfect 80s noir. Criminal opens with bursts of synth noise and distant vocals, 'I'll always be a criminal baby'. The title track, Anywhere, rattles along rapidly, the drum machine firing underneath the chord changes and a squealing topline. 'Here we are/ One last time', she sings, another song, another break up, another ending. The penultimate song is Ruin Me, a crunching, industrial rhythm and hissing snare underpinning Allison's dual vocals, with a chorus begging for more pain- 'Ruin me gently/ Again and again'. Anywhere finishes with a cover of Nobody's Diary, from Yazoo's second album, 1983's You And Me Both, a single written by Alison Moyet when she was sixteen. Causeway's version updates Yazoo's synth duo pop, the multi- tracked synths and surging sequencers pumping away as Allison songs Alison, more heartbreak, more hyper- melancholy. 

Anywhere is out on Valentine's Day, an album for lovers and for those who want to wallow in the pain of lost love while dancing under the neon lights. Get it on vinyl and digitally at Bandcamp. 

Saturday Theme Sixteen

Today's Saturday theme is one of the great Theme records, a song which turned spring 1988 upside down- a joyous, ecstatic, sampledelic splash of neon colours, smiley face, acid house crossover mayhem. A song guaranteed to fill a dancefloor, at any occasion, still. Theme From S'Express is one of the best records of the 80s and if I was forced to put together a list of my favourite fifty singles (or something similar) it would undoubtedly feature highly. 

Theme From S'Express

Mark Moore and Pascal Gabriel constructed the track largely out of samples. Moore was a DJ, Gabriel a producer (who had recently co- written Bomb The Bass' hit Beat Dis, another sample- heavy smash in both the clubs and the charts). Moore turned up with a bag of records, they sequenced the parts they wanted onto cassette and turned everything up to ten. 

A few years ago at his A History Of Dubious Taste blog Jez pulled together the songs that provided Mark Moore with his source material which is where I got most of the mp3s I've used for what follows. I've attempted to sequenced the songs that S'Express sampled for Theme From S'Express into one continuous mix- it was a bit of a challenge, getting the sequence and the segues somewhere near right. It starts and finishes with some spoken word science fiction, goes all disco and New York, borrows from acts as diverse as Sam The Sham and Gil Scott Heron, some early 80s synthpop and the genuinely jaw dropping, X rated Tales Of Taboo by Karen Finley, a song that once heard is never forgotten. 

Theme From S'Express Samples Mix

• Laura Olsher: The Martian Monsters
• Rose Royce: Is It Love You're After?
• Peech Boys: Don't Make Me Wait
• TZ: I Got The Hots For You
• Gil Scott Heron and Brian Jackson: The Bottle
• Crystal Glass: Crystal World
• Alfredo de la Fe: Hot To Trot
• Sam The Sham And The Pharaohs: Oh, That's Bad, No That's Good
• Debbie Harry: Feel The Spin
• Karen Finley: Tales Of Taboo
• Stacey Q: Two Of Hearts
• Yazoo: Situation
• Gene Roddenbury: The Star Trek Dream

Situation

There's an interesting read here about one of the most sampled sounds, a laugh that found its way onto records by (but not only) Derrick May, Deee Lite, Snoop Dogg, Roni Size, S'Express and the Macarena. To summarise, when Yazoo were recording the B-side to what would become a number one single (Only You), Vince Clarke and Daniel Miller caught Alison Moyet off-guard with a load of reverb piled onto her vocal mic. She laughed. Clarke and Miller decided to keep the laugh on the song, and it works really well, opening the song up after its electro-pop introduction but before her vocal, trampling all over a man who done wronged her.

Situation

Situation became one of those songs which got picked up in the USA and became an underground club song. It then got re-purposed by the next wave of artists. In Detroit Derrick May under his Rhythm Is Rhythim name layered it all over Nude Photo, one of the tracks that would invent techno. From there it was used in countless tracks, from hip hop to Eurobeat.

I'll save you the bother of searching for Nude Photo if you're at work, which might prick the interest of the boys down in the I.T. Dept.