An example of what I call "the rhetorics of temporality" - the way critics compulsively position and reposition things they like, or are unimpressed by, using temporal coordinates, a reshuffling of past / present / future, with each term given a different intensity or value-measure, depending on the argument.
Around this time, I - and Paul too - would celebrate acid house for its flashback echo of a lost future of the early Eighties (DAF, Liaisons Dangereuses, etc), a future then only 7 years in the rear-view mirror.
This track by Chris & Cosey fascinates me in particular, because it falls into a kind of temporal no man's land....
It's described at YouTube accurately as proto-acid house - but at the time of release (1984), it might have conceivably felt dated (since you wouldn't have known it was proto anything).
Yet if you wanted to hail it as ahead of its time (predicting Larry Heard and the like) you would be quite right, especially as I think it was actually recorded as early as 1982.
Whatever, it's a great track, made even better by the title, "Dancing Ghosts"
But I do seem to remember reviewing a Chris and Cosey album in my first year at Melody Maker and feeling like they were a bit behind the times in '86, still banging on with the breathy darkly erotic synthpop a a la Hard Corps...
"Je Suis Passee" - Regine the singer said the song was about feeling like a ghost, as it happens
Hardcorps had a smidge of critical buzz but suffered from happening just when guitars were in the re-ascendance. If they had stuck it out until New Beat happened...
But going back to something else Belgian - Telex - I think they must have always sounded a bit thin and corny, even when "bang up to date"
A Telex machine itself is now an outmoded mode of telecommunication
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Ah, here's the Chris and Cosey review from 1986. Yes, definitely a feeling that this sort of technoir avant-funk was overly familiar, as indeed were the likes of Chakk, Hula, 400 Blows and Portion Control, the 2nd-wave to Cabs Skidoo Ratio.
C+C were at least first-wavers, simply carrying on
And yet I would see them in Holland in 2012, at a festival called Incubate, playing live, and not only was it ridiculously good but it felt fresh as a daisy
It wasn't this distorted if you were in the room, it was thick and wet and glistening
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A commenter says they (Telex) were great in '79
Okay, it's a bit thick and phatter than the other stuff I've heard...
Did they have this idea before Silicon Teens did "Memphis, Tennessee"?
Behind the scenes
