A.R. Kane – 69

One evening in 1985, the Cocteau Twins made a rare television appearance. Awash in a tangerine glow while performing their song “Pink Orange Red” off that year’s Tiny Dynamine EP, the group emitted an otherworldly aura. While they played, Alex Ayuli and Rudy Tambala were stationed in front of their respective televisions across London. The two young friends called each other up immediately after the segment ended, blown away by the performance. They dug the music, especially Robin Guthrie’s swirling guitar and the band’s use of a tape machine instead of a drummer, but the pair was more galvanized by what the Cocteau Twins symbolized: boundless creative freedom. Soon enough, Tambala and Ayuli purchased an electric guitar, a drum machine, and some pedals and began experimenting. The illusion that being a musician required expensive gear and formal training crumbled away.

 

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While signed to 4AD, A.R. Kane teamed up with their label mates Colourbox under the name M|A|R|R|S. The two groups almost immediately ran into creative differences and in the end, the partnership produced a double A-side with just the slightest hints of cross-pollination. Colourbox’s sample-heavy acid house number, “Pump Up the Volume,” quietly featured Ayuli and Tambala’s guitars while A.R. Kane’s contribution, “Anitina,” included Coulourbox’s drum programming. To the shock of everyone involved, “Pump Up the Volume” skyrocketed to the top of the UK charts, becoming 4AD’s first No. 1 song. It was in the wake of this strange and unexpected success that A.R. Kane recorded their debut album, 69. Now signed to Rough Trade, Ayuli and Tambala decided to forgo the professional studios where they had recorded with producers like Guthrie. Instead, they built out a space in Ayuli’s mother’s basement; rather than recalibrate their ambitions to fit a predetermined system, they constructed their own playground from scratch. Left to their own devices, with occasional assistance from producer Ray Shulman, A.R. Kane had complete freedom.
They would coin a new term to loosely describe their music: dream pop. “DREAMPOP,” as they explained around the release of 69, “is a whole new concept which we think of as pure hooks, pure pop tunes with a little harsh melodic accompaniment.” Dreaming, the duo agreed, was “crucial” to their work, and they aimed to emulate an ethereality that could just as easily become nightmarish. The band used tape echo to make every song on the self-produced 69 feel just out of reach, like your memory struggling to grasp the last wisp of a dream before it slips away. In the vein of dub pioneers like Lee “Scratch” Perry and King Tubby, they reimagined their equipment’s logical endpoints, bending, sampling, manipulating, stretching, filtering, distorting, and reversing every idea. The duo combined all these parts and then, drawing on their intertwined intuition—they were two halves of a whole, yin and yang, 69—skimmed away the fat until a song emerged. A.R. Kane recognized the ecstatic potential of noise, that when they cranked their guitars all the way up until every individual element melded into a singular void of sound, new doors might open. “We want our music to be a rush of things coming at you through the speakers, so many that the mind doesn’t have time to assimilate them and manage them,” Tambala told Reynolds. “It should be like a baby being confronted with a rattle for the first time, seeing it as it is, without preconceptions.” That’s certainly the experience of “Baby Milk Snatcher,” whose title alludes to oral sex, breastfeeding, and Margaret Thatcher. Touching on glitchy trip-hop, lethargic psychedelia, and carnal post-punk, it sounds thrillingly lawless.

69 is difficult to pin down; dream pop naturally begets dream logic. After opening with the unexpectedly jangly “Crazy Blue” and “Suicide Kiss,” the album descends into the distant, lethargic caverns of “Scab” and “Sulliday.” These last two songs sound like they were recorded in a basement where two human bodies were the only sources of warmth. Meanwhile, “Dizzy” counters an elegant Arthur Russell-esque cello melody with a faraway shout that sounds like a ghoul’s last rally as it gets sucked down a drain. Then there’s a song like “Spermwhale Trip Over” whose trippy haze is best summarized by the central verse: “Here in my LSDream/Things are always what they seem.” All the while, the faint groove acts like a guideline leading a diver through an underwater cave. The staggering late album centrepiece “The Sun Falls Into the Sea” seems to come from an entirely different planet. “An ambition for us would be for people to have dreams in which our music was the soundtrack,” Ayuli said to Melody Maker’s Simon Reynolds back in 1987. Dreams are limitless realms of new realities and 69, with its ambition, fascination with flaws, and ability to embrace both darkness and bliss, aims to capture it all.

1 Crazy Blue 3:26
2 Suicide Kiss 3:36
3 Baby Milk Snatcher 3:16
4 Scab 3:25
5 Sulliday 6:33
6 Dizzy 3:47
7 Spermwhale Trip Over 4:40
8 The Sun Falls Into The Sea 5:45
9 The Madonna Is With Child 3:49
10 Spanish Quay (3) 2:06