808 State
Ninety
ZTT

Not so 808 STATE'S Ninety (ZZT). Named after a machine, this is a group of young men who have taken the process of record production beyond the realms of the train-spotter and into a new world where sound is all. It's eons above/beyond the notion of sampling as pleasure-in-recognition or pleasure-in-hipness, and one is given few grounding 'hooks' or elements serving as grid references. Post-house, I should imagine.

[Reviewer: Andy Darling]

[Reviewer: James Hamilton]

808 STATE
'Ninety' (ZTT 246 461-4/CD) ***1/2

A SOUNDTRACK for the dispossessed, Add House is symptomatic of a generation united in defeat.

Of course youth culture isn't the same any more, it can't afford to be. Our institutions closed, unions crushed, there's no forum left but the dancefloor and like fools we embrace it. It's positive, we say.

Like f***. Minds garbled with E can't see that we're celebrating an avoidance of real life, wallowing instead in a shallow vision of a nation united by baggy jeans and Kicker boots, marching on Downing Street for the repeal of not the Poll Tax but the licensing laws. Whitehall, so much to answer for.. .

808 State, unintentionally, match the sound to this urban blight. After The Stone Roses' discovery of pukka Sly Stone guitar chords, 808 State's elec-trip jazz-funk teeters perilously close to the indulgent mind rock of Camel or Pierre Moerlen. At times it works, a dense metallic clatter that pulls the best from its machinery. Elsewhere, these avant-noise doodles spiral into abstraction, nailed down by frantic drum patterns that take matters away from the dancefloor and into the ambient zone. 'Magical Dream' and 'Pacific 202' are a sublime fusion of these elements, but the quasi-mystic 'Cobra Bora' reeks of incense and hippy crash pads.

As legend would have it, a well-known chanteuse once spent an inordinate amount of time staring at her hotel wallpaper, claiming to see swastikas hidden in the design. The wall was blank. If we allow the current trend for introspection to run its logical course, we'll be in a similar situation ourselves - arms flailing, heads up our own arses, fighting for our right to party as the last of our civil liberties float skywards. 'Ninety' isn't responsible for these evils, but it's bound to be latched onto by casualties of the New Complacency who don't seem to realise that sometimes hedonism can be a vote in the wrong direction. 808 State deserve better than this, but they have to get the hell out of the route they seem to be plotting to prove it.

[Reviewer: DAMON WISE]

808 STATE'S music has already been described in these pages as "profoundly superficial". If Sterling Void offered one suitable name for the hollow perfection of House, then 808 State invite another. Their sound is surface deep, a thin film of blips, squiggles, keyboard splashes and instrumental doodles averting the ear from the cavernous hole that lies beneath the glistening exterior. This is only a problem when 808 State fail to make their all-important top layer particularly diverting.

"Pacific State", the hit single, is ambient New Age House that probably owes it existence to Acid, but it isn't especially representative of "808:90". What 808 State have done is to sample, and succumb to the influence of, less obvious sources, thereby giving the impression of "newness". Because they come from Manchester, and given the city's reputation for innovation, it would be easy to hear bold experimentation in every studio-enhanced splutter. Actually, "808:90" is a far less daring avant-dance production than its dazzling facade may lead you to believe.

"Magical Dream" takes Propaganda's radical Eurocision pop, but spoils it by dropping a rap on top about, "A fantasy/Taking over your mind/It will take control/Of your body and soul", the sort of semi-mystical soul hippy gobbledegook that is running rife through dance music at present.

Although the young girl rapper asks us to, "Close our eyes and disappear", the music isn't sufficiently absorbing for total surrender and, as a result, you feel as though you're witness to a trip that you can't get involved in yourself.

"Ancodia" is better, a space-age TV cop soundtrack, Jan Hammer's theme to "Miami Vice" played by astronauts, chattering funk bass and spumy keyboard riffs bubbling under the close harmony vocals borrowed from some early Eighties soul classic. Again, the words exemplify the psychedelic era/acid house crossover that has plagued dance music for the last two years, but the music has more in common with the post-Sly Stone/Norman Whitfield advances made on Stevie Wonder's "Innervisions" LP.

Also excellent is "Cobra Bora", the song that best illustrates 808 State's rivetting, busy energy. Opening like 23 Skidoo, it samples from Van McCoy's bubblegum disco gem from 1975, "The Hustle", after which it slips into more Wonder-fully frothy, effervescent funk motifs, over which a synth pattern goes mad and unravels all over the studio floor. Here, 808 State reveal one of their more unusual sources, one which informs a lot of their work, the progressive rock of the mid-Seventies, specifically the virtuoso guitartronics of the first Utopia album, and the cosmic blizzard of noise captured on Todd Rundgren's "Initiation". This is not journalistic fancy, 808 State frequently namecheck Rundgren, as well as Eno and the Germans, in interviews.

The best moments of "808:90" rediscover long-buried musical forms and apply them to this year's rhythms. At its worst it sees 808 State lost in a maze of convoluted electronic meanderings that offer precious little solace to regular clubgoers.

[Reviewer: PAUL LESTER]

808 STATE
Ninety (ZTT/WEA LP/Cassette/CD)

INTERESTINGLY ENOUGH, the working title for 'Ninety' was 'F—eries', the latter being a term of endearment that the younger members of the band give to the contingent of ladies who like to provide them with tea and toast in the mornings. Interesting because it belies a crude, scruffy street attitude that the old guard of the music press simply don't understand.

'Ninety' is but the aural tip of a massive, predominantly white, (black kids were always into dancing) working class cultural up thrust that has taken place during the last year. The House-based Equity Culture is, as an underground phenomenon, far bigger and more open-minded than that motley old punk thing ever was.

Most people now go to clubs not to listen to old favourites, but to be blown away by new music they have never heard before. And this is why, as entertainment value, club culture gives people a continuous stream of novel music experiences in a way that no band playing their set list (even the notion of set list shows inflexibility) can ever match at a gig.

Moreover, what fires club culture, turns on ravers, varies from region to region. In Southern England people are more eclectic and willing under the guise of Balearic Beats to groove to anybody from Digital Underground and Happy Mondays to Chris Rea. In Manchester, by contrast, Techno rules everything to such an extent that the city ought to consider twinning with that other capital of the style, Detroit. It's in this context that the sounds arrayed and layered on 'Ninety' are best understood.

Although recorded in six days- the only link between punk and House Of Funners is the belief that anyone can make music and do it fast and cheaply- 'Ninety' sounds as though it could have taken a year to put together such is the eye and ear for detail at work in
the grooves.

From the opening 'Magical Dreams' to the closing 'The Fat Shadow' (named after the girth of the band's manager, Ron) everything is designed via musical repetition and ever more layers of sequencing to hypnotise the listener into a trance dance. In this, the current House Of Fun is somewhat akin in function to ritualistic music as used by tribes the world over to briefly achieve a state of altered consciousness.

Of course, the structures and soundscapes that 808 State operate within have precedents. Among these are the automotive electro streamlines of Kraftwerk, Afrika Bambaata's updating of these, and Chicago's subsequent Phuturistic Acid subversion of them.

Although the accent of 808 State may be on rhythmic repetition this doesn't mean that the eight tracks on this album are uniform; far from it, although nearly all are informed by the sharp and incessant edge of Techno House. 'Magical Dreams' begins with a glockenspiel motif which is quickly swamped by a grinding bassline until Fresh Vaness enters to rap-sing about "A fantasy taking over your mind... have no fears just close your eyes and disappear."

But where to? 'Magical Dreams' may be the only cut here with a whole vocal but by exception to the rule it does serve to remind that House music in its instrumental form- unlike rock which via whole lyrics paints a finished picture - is very much interactive with the listener. It conjures mental images in the imagination of the dancer, images which change according to the mood of the music.

As befits champions of relentless Techno, however, there is very little relaxation to be had on 'Ninety'. 808 State are built for heavy duty dancing. Nowhere is this more true than on 'Ancodia', the band's fave which has been resurrected from an earlier incarnation. The cut is very much a funky multi-percussion outing with synths spitting, the DJs scratching, and fragmented vocal samples fading in and out, a dizzying musical vertigo.

'Cobra Bora' subsequently plunges the band into overdrive with brutal discordant sheet keyboard chords being suddenly rocketed skywards on layers of (acidic) synths and breakbeats.

Such is its intensity, 'Cobra Bora' is destined to become a "Mental Mental" fave on a par with 'Strings Of Life'. If it's released as a single it will be right up there with 'Pacific State' (included here in its revamped '202' guise). Even the latter has been transformed from a jazzy, almost cocktail affair into a harder state by inclusion of a new rumbling undercurrent.

"Welcome To Techno City," goes the intro to 'Donkey Doctor' which kick starts Side Two of 'Ninety'. From here through '808080808' the BPMs mount and the music becomes more pugilistic and rudely intrusive with machines fatting huge chunks of layered squall. The album finally sets us down gently into the next decade with the more s-p-a-c-e-d regions of 'Sunrise' and 'The Fat Shadow' with its invocations of exotic tribal cultures.

In terms of its scope, the crew's abilities to take unearthly and unlikely sounds and inventively turn them into memorable music, this album is one of the year's best. It puts the Mancs right up there with their forebears such as Kraftwerk. State of the art and one of the blueprints for the '90s.

(10)

[Reviewer: Jack Barron]

808 STATE: Ninety (ZTT 240461)

As for contemporary dance styles, the band guaranteed to succeed between now and Christmas are 808 State. For a start they already have a hit single, Pacific State, and what's more they come from Manchester, the city that has deified all its critics by becoming wildly fashionable, thanks to the Stone Roses. Happy Mondays. and the rest. This is music with a function, for (preferably) stoned dancers who will appreciate the gently mesmeric clattering and tinkling synths, the textures, shifts of mood, shuffling rhythms and treated voices. Heard cold over breakfast it is far less exciting.

[Reviewer: Robin Denselow]