Artist:
Luke Slater
Title:
Alright On Top
Label:
Mute
Cat#:
STUMM198
Release Date:
08th April 2002
2013 (re-release)
Format:
CD, vinyl, download & streaming
Tracklist:
01.
Nothing At All
02.
You Know What I Mean
03.
Stars And Heroes
04.
I Can Complete You
05.
Only You
06.
Take Us Apart
07.
Searchin’ For A Dream
08.
Take Me Round Again
09.
Twisted Kind Of Girl
10.
Doctor Of Divinity
Press Info:
Luke Slater is set to release a new album, his first release on Mute, following his recent switch from the novamute label, on the 8th of April.
“Alright On Top” features ten new tracks, including the forthcoming single ‘Nothing At All’, and sees Slater enlist the vocal talents of The Aloof’s Ricky Barrow. The result is the most diverse and ambitious Luke Slater release to date and should see “Alright On Top” hailed as one of the finest electronic pop records of 2002.
Luke Slater has been at the forefront of UK Electronic music since the early ‘90s with a string of brilliant releases under a number of guises including Clementine, 7th Plain and Planetary Assault Systems. He signed to novamute in 1997 and the following year saw the release of his groundbreaking album “Freek Funk”. The follow up “Wireless” was released to critical acclaim in 1999 and took Slater far beyond the confines of the techno scene. Live shows and successful festival appearances over the last few years have consolidated his growing reputation.
Luke Slater will be touring with a full band line for the first time throughout 2002.
—-
Luke Slater is dead. Long live Luke Slater. For ten years now anyone with an advanced ear and a taste for things dark and long has recognised the enigmatic Slater as one of the most graceful composers and forward thinking inventors within techno. On decks around the world, and within his deepest south London studio, Slater has proved himself a genius sculptor of kinetics, squeezing magic from the tight parameters of post-electro underground dance.
Five albums, including two pivotal releases on novamute, and a slew of projects under pseudonyms have confirmed his status as a brilliant sound system expressionist. Yet for all the stylistic twists and jump cuts within his decade of geometrically dissected frontier funk noir, nobody really could have predicted the leap taken with his rocket-boosted new album.
Slater’s opening salvo for the 21st Century “Alright On Top” sees him accelerate into a parallel universe of hyperdramatic songcraft. Former Aloof singer Ricky Barrow joins Slater and his longstanding tech-head collaborator Alan Sage to create a warmer humanised machine music. This is no longer Luke the abstractionist, the subtle pulse manipulator, vying with Hawtin or Wink for command of a Berlin basement. This is Luke Slater, the dramatic, the hydraulic, the lyrically specific, hook wielding, extrovert electronic blues band.
Ten tracks of pure liberation are about to blast Luke into an entirely new orbit. It’s Slater’s first release on parent label Mute. Now all they need is the intergalactic tour bus. “I’ve wanted to do an album with songs for some time. It’s just that nothing’s ever been all right at the same time,” states Slater. “With the albums on novamute I didn’t have a singer and I’m not really that open to working with people just off the cuff. I have to get on some kind of wavelength with someone to work with them and it just never seemed right before. It never seemed the right time, but all the time I was writing bits for songs and storing them up and I thought yeah, I’ll do them one day.”
The immediate predecessor to vocal phase Slater – 1999’s “Wireless” – had been hailed as an inspired millennial edge redesign of ’80s electro, bringing live percussion and industrial rock into its domain. There were even moments where it sounded as if the machines were straining to sing, digi-ennunciating phrases in ‘Body Freefall, Electronic Inform’ and ‘All Exhale’.
When it came time to record the next album, however, Slater had resolved to go all the way and bring in a vocalist to fully flesh out the ideas. While Luke was down south in Crawley, casting around for the right voice, and struggling through audition tapes encompassing full on soul dudes and synth pop impersonators, Ricky Barrow was on the other side of the city, recovering from his experiences in The Aloof. Label problems had left The Aloof adrift, and despite widespread warm feelings towards the Dean Thatcher founded dance fusioners, the band had split up.
Within The Aloof, Ricky had found a way of breaking with a natural tendency to head in the stylistic direction of a Horace Andy or Marvin Gaye. He was working on some ideas with Richard Thair from Red Snapper. By chance, however, someone at Luke’s label knew Ricky was seeking collaborators and the two were introduced to see where the combination of Ricky’s open grained voice and Luke’s intrepid songtronica would lead.
“It just came together really well,” says Ricky. “I always wanted to do something different, not go down the normal path, because when I wanted to do stuff on my own I went into this soul mode and a reggae sort of thing, and I needed someone else to say ‘try something different’.”
“It was really weird because Ricky just came in and wrote a few words and just did it really,” recalls Luke. “I think if something’s going to work, it just kind of flows, and we tried not to look at anything too complicated, just use the principle that if it’s working it’s working and ‘do I like it myself?’.”
Starting work in Slater’s own Space Station studio in south London at the start of 2001, the threesome got the songs down swiftly. Slater was, however, determined to keep a strong dance edge to the production and many months were given over to crafting the dynamics. “Alright On Top” sacrifices none of its energy in the bid to bridge the dancefloor and the radio. Despite lyrics which explore the many facets of human (and robotic) relationships, there’s an underlying optimism to the whole work. The cerebral, obsessive edge of Slater’s earlier output is kept, but now with a voice to speak through and melodies to surf on, there’s a sense of joyous release.
“I did feel liberated being able to do songs,” says Luke. “I wanted to be able to play these songs live and have a lot of energy in it rather than making something mellow which would’ve been cool, but wouldn’t have had a lot of impact live.”
While “Alright On Top” is clearly in love with electronic music and its history, it has none of the dourness of some parts of the genre. It’s wise, referring in areas to golden eras of early synthesiser music, but not remotely egghead. There’s brazen fun there, as well as sweet poignance and streaks of the unhinged.
Against the knowingly futurist movie set of Luke’s hurtling tunes, Ricky explores the spectrum of feelings. ‘Nothing At All’ mixes emotional anaesthesia with the thrill of supersequenced tech-pop. ‘Stars And Heroes’ locates its star-crossed lovers within an awesome future retro synth anthem. ‘I Can Complete You’ invents an entire new genre of operatic sing along tragi-robotica. ‘Only You’ diverts into lover’s space jazz.
There’s a dance rooted confidence at work which allows them to take on melodrama without losing the plot. ‘Take Us Apart’ rushes ahead with four to the floor uber-cyber-pop. ‘Searchin For A Dream’ is in equal parts brutal, cosmic and epic. ‘Twisted Kind Of Girl’ supplies an overdose worth of lust and psycho-beats. ‘Doctor Of Divinity’ completes the loop with its update on surreal pulse-scapes.
“Alright On Top” creates a unique world, but at the same time it could only have been made right now, when much tech-based ‘underground’ dance music has decided it’s OK to infiltrate pop, and at a point when Luke’s imagination has found a way of setting his vast experience free.
“At one point I was thinking ‘Yeah, so we’re doing songs about love and breaking up and feelings, and Ricky’s voice is quite bluesy at times, and that’s over the hard techno rhythm… this is a bit different’,” says Luke. “But then I was like, yeah, it is different and I like it.”
“We wanted to think up loads of plays on lust, on a woman that’s just playing you around and leading you astray. So some songs are really up and then some are quite sad. I think ‘I Can Complete You’ is probably the saddest, it’s a vocoder track, so it has that robotic thing in it. That song brings a tear to my eye, it really does. It’s kind of the sadness of being a machine.”
A surface supposition about the roots of Luke’s fascination with computer music might point to Kraftwerk as his starting point, but Slater is keen to point out that his entry into electronics came via Afrika Bambaataa and Soul Sonic Force rather than the German camp.
Born in Reading, Luke’s parents moved to Horley in Sussex, where the embryonic producer started to play with his dad’s old reel to reel tape recorder. After drumming with ‘progressive rock’ type bands as an early teen he started working in record shops – Mi Price in Croydon and Jelly Jam in Brighton – where he was able to load up on late ’80s electro and incoming house and techno. By 1988 he was DJing jack tracks within the early acid house micro-scene, notably spinning at a London club called Troll. With his record shop buddy Al Sage he put together his first tune ‘Freebase’ in ’89, released through the Jelly Jam shops offshoot label.
For the next decade Slater would hover above the underground as one of the most distinguished producers of pan-genre bunker vinyl. He moved at pace through styles, picking up and warping strands as diverse as Detroit inflexions, old school influenced ambience, noise barrage and electro. By 1997 he’d been prominent on DJax, Irdial, Peacefrong and GPR, using the pseudonyms Clementine, Morganistic, Planetary Assault Systems and 7th Plain.
Leaving behind the assumed names and a trio of collectable albums – “X Tront Volume Two” (1993, Peacefrong), “The Four Cornered Room” (1994, GPR), “My Yellow Wise Rug” (1994, GPR) – he teamed up with novamute in 1997 and issued his acclaimed mindbender dance album “Freek Funk”. The latter was simultaneously sexy and avant-garde. His next major emission, ’99s “Wireless” continued to mess elegantly with the codes, re-sculpting electro to his own ends and previewing his fondness for the odd cyberdisco synth by sampling Cerrone’s ‘In The Pocket’. Described in the press as “gangster boogie for the new millennium”. In a way, the bold step into song writing was inevitable.
“It’d just be boring if you did the same thing all the time,” says Luke. “I’ve never believed in all that underground V’s overground stuff. I think it’s a pile of shite, all that ‘if you’re underground you’re cool, if you’re overground you’re not’. Especially now there’s such a merging of every type of music. I don’t think anyone really knows where its all at, and I think that’s a healthy thing.”
“I think you can write songs and have quality to them, it just doesn’t have to sound the same as everything in the charts. You used to get a lot of records that were capable of being energetic but had some drama to them, but they were still pop tracks. I think that’s missing at the moment.”
It’s been a long run up for Slater, Barrow and Sage but it’s glaringly obvious that their leap into the swirling gas cloud of melody, lyrics and video-able persona has paid off. They sound like nobody else. They sound like 2002’s definitive fused dance moment. When the live show goes on the road in 2002, complete with ‘jumping up and down’ and full electronic band set up; the metamorphis will be complete. It’s not Luke Slater as we know him, Jim. But it is very definitely Luke Slater as we’ll come to love him.
“I wanted to get away from the seriousness of the way you’re sometimes seen in techno,” he reflects. “I’m serious about what I do, but its not all the theory of relativity, know what I mean, so I wanted to try and steer a bit away from that. I wanted the album to be emotional. And I didn’t want it to be totally dry and scientific. Because you need a bit of light in things these days.”
“Alright On Top”?. Actually, it’s iridescent up there.
Snippets:
Video:
“Nothing At All”
Special:
“Recorded Live At Fabric 11/06/2016”
Recommendations:
all stuff by Luke Slater and his aliases
all stuff on Mute & sublabels
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originally released in 2002
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originally released in 2002
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Luke Slater
Luke Slater looks satisfied. Leaning back in the functional surroundings of his West London record label, drawing on a prison thickness roll up and sporting a fine pair of two-tone bowling shoes(!), Slater reflects on the last couple of years. It’s not been a bad end to the century for the Sussex lad who started out as a teenage drummer eventually to end up as one of the UK’s leading exponents of what could loosely be called dance music. In 1997 a wildly eclectic and much praised album, ‘Freek Funk’ saw Slater eventually reap the rewards of a decade of hard work touring the country DJ’ing and promoting a string of underground releases.. Slater’s the real deal, a true believer, someone with a clarity of vision and passion for his trade. Someone who’s never compromised, someone who’s never given up on the feeling that inspired him all those years back on hearing the embryonic sounds of electro. And so to 1999 and the return of the boy wonder armed with a devastating album, the potent ‘Wireless’, that side-steps what we have come to expect and takes us further into uncharted territory. This is the story so far.
Born in Reading, Slater eventually ended up in the suburban surrounding of Horley, a sleepy commuter town to the south of London. Music was always around, the house resonated to the sound of his father’s big band 78’s while Luke persevered unsuccessfully with piano lessons. Tired of the limitations of playing other people’s musical creations, Luke’s attention soon moved on to a tiny drum set that had sat un-played for some time. Bashing out primitive rhythms Slater felt he had found his vocation. At the age of 12 he found himself teaming up with a gang of local teenagers in a less than successful rock outfit. Yet the dead end nature of his efforts were not to deter the young Slater in his quest for his own musical nirvana.
Undeterred and with an ever increasing interest in the possibilities of music, Luke’s attention switched towards the creation of synthesised sounds. Experimenting with sound textures and abstract noises on his father’s antiquated 1957 Garrard Hi-Fi and a less than mint condition reel-to-reel, Slater soon discovered that a world of sci-fi sounds existed beyond the constraints of the organic instruments he had previously tinkered with. Intrigued by the sound of a stylophone it was the lending of a Roland 808 that eventually sparked a latent interest in the perfect beat. Even during these formative years the young Slater’s restless and inquiring mind drove him on questioning the constraints and boundaries of the music he was making. Never content with his creations, a trait that still remains as a driving force today, and inspired by the other worldly possibilities of sci-fi films such as Stanley Kubrick’s epic, ‘2001 – A Space Odyssey’ he soon developed a wider overview of the music he was creating.
Yet by the early eighties a potent musical force had entered Slater’s world. Electro had developed out of the electronic sounds of artists such as Kraftwerk and Cabaret Voltaire and had been mutated into a funked up hybrid more tailored for dance floor consumption. Slater was transfixed. His musical vision and expectations had left him feeling isolated, yet the synthesised assault of electro provided him with an ally, a sound with which he could identify, after all Slater had been dreaming of such music for some time. Inspired and energised by these early polyrhythmic grumblings of electro, Slater set out to define his own musical vision armed only with a handful of scratch records, a battered Roland 808 and the help of a friend’s percussive skills. A journey had begun that would eventually see Slater championed as one of the UK’s most dynamic, risk taking electronic producers.
By 1988 Slater had already been DJ’ing at Troll in London, a defining club in the history of acid house, for over a year. Playing a mix of electro and early jack tracks that had begun to find their way over from Chicago and Detroit, Slater found himself at the centre of the musical revolution that was exploding at the time. Yet by 1989 Luke had found himself back in his native Sussex after a year or so of excess in London’s clubs and warehouse parties. Teaming up with an old friend Al Sage, Luke became involved with the running of a Brighton record shop, Jelly Jam which was soon to spurn a similarly monikered label. Recording in his spare time with Sage, a primitive track titled ‘Freebase’ became the pairs first vinyl outing.
Becoming further immersed in the sounds coming out of the Motor City at the time, Luke went further into his own musical journey teaming up with the legendary Dutch label Djax to produce a crop of incendiary tracks under the guise of Clementine. Always restless, Luke continued to craft tracks that exhibited an alarming diversity and focus. Swapping labels to the wildly eclectic Irdial, Luke created slices of shimmering electronica under the guise of Morganistic while a transfer to the fledgling Peacefrog label saw Slater mould a series of space-funk classics as Planetary Assault Systems. Further changes in identity saw Slater tinker with ambience under the 7th Plain moniker and mount an all out sonic assault with his X-Tront project. By the mid ’90’s Slater had firmly established himself as a true musical maverick, an innovator capable of moments of breathtaking beauty and power that wooed critics and fans alike. Yet his best was yet to come.
By 1997 Slater was beginning to feel the constraints of the music he was creating. Tired of being labelled in a particular way he felt the critics and public’s musical expectations weighing heavily around his neck. Wanting to instil a degree of clarity and focus to his work he dropped the monikers that had for so long defined each style and adopted his own name in a focused attempt to clear the decks and start again with musical forms he felt comfortable with. The result was astonishing.
1997 saw the release of the landmark ‘Freek Funk’ album on London based NovaMute, a piece of music that ripped up the rule book with its fevered diversity and brazen disregard of the public’s perception of Luke Slater. This was Luke as he wanted to sound at the time. Spontaneous and covering much musical ground, the album effortlessly hopped between rabid techno barrages and moments of lush orchestration that dripped a fragile beauty. He had wanted to create a multi-purpose album that could be interpreted on a myriad of levels. What he ended up spawning was something that went far beyond his vision, an album that intrigued and wooed fans and critics alike. Muzik, Mixmag and Jockey Slut pronounced it album of the month as praise came in from all quarters. Slater had produced an album that distilled everything that mattered in his musical world. Compressing his own unique musical journey into an hours worth of sonic alchemy, ‘Freek Funk’ stands as a near perfect summation of all that’s been excellent in electronic music in the last ten years. Innovative, informative and down right funky, ‘Freek Funk’ saw Slater well and truly come of age.
By late 1998 Slater was back in his Crawley based studio, Space Station ø, impatient and restless and ready to go further out beyond the boundaries laid out by ‘Freek Funk’. The autumn of that year saw Slater and erstwhile partner in crime Al Sage, holed up in deepest Sussex plotting the next move. Things had moved on, Slater had become a father for the second time, he had developed an interest in roller-skating, he hadn’t stopped thinking about his next creation and he had been once again listening to the brutal sounds of the electro beat. A plan was devised and Slater set about the casting of what was to become his latest offering, ‘Wireless’ in late 1998.
His mind had been made up. He yearned to craft an album of sharp focus that possessed a crystal clear clarity of style. Stripping away the superfluous, Slater was determined to produce an album that almost went back to basics, an album that utilised the sounds of his youth and pushed them into the future. Inspired by industrial electronic rock, Slater drafted in live percussion and guitar to add muscle to his sounds. The results are astonishing.
‘Wireless’, to released in September 1999, is testament to Slater’s ever developing musical mind. Not content with remaining static and trading on the success of ‘Freek Funk’ Slater has once again swerved violently to confound any pre-conceived expectations. Essentially an electro-breaks based sound, ‘Wireless’ is brutal in it’s lack of restraint. ‘Body Freefall Electronic Inform’ sounds dark and menacing thanks to its freeform rhythmic ferocity, while opening single ‘All Exhale’ motors along courtesy of a rabid electro beat and fazed vocal stabs. Opening track ‘In The Pocket’ and the ambient beauty of ‘Weave Your Web’ show that Slater has not fully disassociated himself from the weirded-out funk of yesteryear. Yet throughout proceedings are powered by the snarl of the kick drum and cymbal with a healthy dose of Slater’s wildly unique sound. Part Sun Ra part Mantronix and part Underground Resistance, ‘Wireless’ is another massive leap for Slater. An album that will astound as much as confound from an artist who refuses to sit still and do as he is told. Give praise to the lord and all hail the return of Luke Slater. You’ve been missed.
