We’ve all seen our eighties nights ruined by someone dancing to ancient tunes like Pacific 202 or Cubik, doing the big-little-fish-cardboard-box thing, shouting stuff like “‘ave it!” or “get on one matey” whilst simultaneously gurning like a two year old.
Transmission Suite thankfully isn’t for those people. This is because 808 State – now just a duo of Graham Massey and DJ Andrew Barker – have used it to both experiment and take electronic music to its ingenious outer limits.
Now relocated to the site of the former Granada Television studios in Manchester, they’ve channelled source materials like Kraftwerk’s noodling, the bubbling underground techno hiss of Detroit and the BBC’s classic Radiophonic Workshop output from the 1970s, creating by design a hybrid that’s both danceable and thrillingly leftfield.
What they also capture is the movement’s early futurist outlook: opener Tokyo Tokyo sounds both from a possible 22nd century and the grimy post-industrial wastelands of Northern Britain via ghostly samples, a robot sigh motif and a piping acid bassline. That Brave New World ethos is most obvious on Pulcenta, a party tune for the sharp suited automatons of before the First World War, countered by the bullet train elegance of Skylon, which would be jazz if this wasn’t some imagined era before it had been invented or forgotten.
It would’ve been easier – and almost certainly more profitable – if Massey and Barker had merely trotted out a dozen or so rush up arpeggios and called it a legacy. But nothing here is that stilted; on Cannonball Waltz for instance an American voice apologises for its sins whilst freaky squelches and anxiety inducing pads blip relentlessly in the background, like a perpetual chase scene gone bad.
In tone Transmission Suite has some similarities to Cabaret Voltaire’s pioneering, sample heavy work of the early eighties but without the menace; the tribal drum fills of Ujala hint are almost Balearic, while Trinity is a flashback to the sleek patterns and optimism of the era in which the band were born, a rolling knot of melodies with a TV theme aesthetic, perhaps inspired by the pair’s new surroundings.
Like digging through the old tapes they might’ve found, there’s an endless, almost childlike sense of discovery; on The Ludwig Question a diva chirps into the void before a scale ramps up and down like a fried circuit, the fizzing Angol Argol sounds fresh like the Bellville Three have just got to work in 1987, while the apex moment is surely Carbonade’s irresistible pulsing back and forth.
Massey has spoken about the early phases of the original rave movement and its rejection of the status quo, of it giving young people a purpose and motivation that outsiders and the authorities struggled to comprehend. Transmission Suite is not a dangerous record in that sense, not one that will start a counter revolution, but it’s an endlessly creative, fascinating catalogue of sounds and styles that prove the elements fused together by pioneering artists were more than just a hedonist’s picture box.
This is serious music, for happy people.
