Bourbonese Qualk's industrial landmark, a monument to the sound’s ‘80s variegation of intensities, necessarily returns as part of Mannequin’s reissue programme - churning up a heavy reference point for Raime, possessed by myriad revolutionary and outernational energies
Forged in the crucible of ‘80s UK’s counter-culture, ‘The Spike’ is a definitive testament to Simon Crab and co’s refusenik thrust as Bourbonese Qualk. Guided by the DIY principles of punk, but shy of that tag’s hoarier cliches; and gassed on industrial music’s outsider archetypes, yet not beholden to its stylistic restrictions; Bourbonese Qualk trod a singular path on their own terms, quite literally via their own label, studio, and creative steam. On this, their 3rd album, the band played to their strength in locating a feral, yet coherent, voice from unruly aspects of gnarled electronics, industrial dub, folk, primitivist funk-rock and tribalist rhythmic impulses that placed them in a special category of industrial/post-industrial musick pioneers shared by the likes of Throbbing Gristle, Zoviet France, and 23 Skidoo.
Recorded 1984-85 for Dossier, an arm of Berlin’s Atonal festival, which they were co-organising at the time, ’The Spike’ depicts BQ at a crest of their early powers. Its 11 tracks are galvanised by an anti-Thatcherite politics against the backdrop of the miner’s strikes, the Falklands war, and a rising counter-cultural energy fostered by their anarchist squat-cum-recording studio/activist space, The Ambulance Station, on the Old Kent Road in South London.
Unafraid to ruffle feathers in the traditional left, as much as they were unafraid to knit what were formerly mutually exclusive strands of music, the band rove from stentorian bark to ambient strum across the record’s breadth of styles, notably including the ricocheting electro-folk of ‘Pogrom’ (that formed a basis for Raime’s ‘The Walker in Blast and Bottle’) jostling for attention beside the serpentine folk-drone mantra ‘Suburb City’, hot-stepping roil of ‘In Flux’, and crooked dub-funk sleaze of ‘Papal Order 1 & 2’, and contrasting acutely with the frayed melancholia of ‘Preparing for Power’ and Two Daughters esque wheeze of ‘About This’.
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Bourbonese Qualk's industrial landmark, a monument to the sound’s ‘80s variegation of intensities, necessarily returns as part of Mannequin’s reissue programme - churning up a heavy reference point for Raime, possessed by myriad revolutionary and outernational energies
Forged in the crucible of ‘80s UK’s counter-culture, ‘The Spike’ is a definitive testament to Simon Crab and co’s refusenik thrust as Bourbonese Qualk. Guided by the DIY principles of punk, but shy of that tag’s hoarier cliches; and gassed on industrial music’s outsider archetypes, yet not beholden to its stylistic restrictions; Bourbonese Qualk trod a singular path on their own terms, quite literally via their own label, studio, and creative steam. On this, their 3rd album, the band played to their strength in locating a feral, yet coherent, voice from unruly aspects of gnarled electronics, industrial dub, folk, primitivist funk-rock and tribalist rhythmic impulses that placed them in a special category of industrial/post-industrial musick pioneers shared by the likes of Throbbing Gristle, Zoviet France, and 23 Skidoo.
Recorded 1984-85 for Dossier, an arm of Berlin’s Atonal festival, which they were co-organising at the time, ’The Spike’ depicts BQ at a crest of their early powers. Its 11 tracks are galvanised by an anti-Thatcherite politics against the backdrop of the miner’s strikes, the Falklands war, and a rising counter-cultural energy fostered by their anarchist squat-cum-recording studio/activist space, The Ambulance Station, on the Old Kent Road in South London.
Unafraid to ruffle feathers in the traditional left, as much as they were unafraid to knit what were formerly mutually exclusive strands of music, the band rove from stentorian bark to ambient strum across the record’s breadth of styles, notably including the ricocheting electro-folk of ‘Pogrom’ (that formed a basis for Raime’s ‘The Walker in Blast and Bottle’) jostling for attention beside the serpentine folk-drone mantra ‘Suburb City’, hot-stepping roil of ‘In Flux’, and crooked dub-funk sleaze of ‘Papal Order 1 & 2’, and contrasting acutely with the frayed melancholia of ‘Preparing for Power’ and Two Daughters esque wheeze of ‘About This’.