Alvin Curran
The Works

This classic Music From Memory 12” focuses on the little known UK band The System. A project masterminded by Bob Lamb, a somewhat cult figure in Birmingham's music history; the short lived group released only one album ‘Logic' and a single in 1983 on the somewhat obscure French label ‘Romantic Records’. This distinctively forward thinking new wave/synth pop album met with poor distribution and with almost no promotion to speak of at the time and quickly dwindled into obscurity. The albums sense of technological exploration, outstanding production value coupled with the band’s gift of writing deeply emotive, yearning pop tunes, make it sound though perhaps more relevant today than many other far more successful albums of it's time.Whilst the band and the album might have sunk into obscurity, the band were no novices to the music business. In fact the highly regarded producer Bob Lamb had played as a drummer throughout the late sixties and into the late seventies for a number of progressive rock bands. The last of which, The Steve Gibbons Band, found moderate success both at home and in US, even opening up for The Who on their world tours. Having travelled the world as a musician, in 1979 Lamb would set up a 4-track recording and mixing studio in his basement flat to focus on production. In this state of the art Birmingham studio he would work with Duran Duran on their earliest work as well as producing UB40's very first album. With this highly developed sense of production, it was here in Bob Lamb’s studio that the four members of The System set out to make a pop record very much driven by the new possibilities of technology and developments within studio recording.With instrumental tracks ‘Vampirella’, sounding almost prophetic of Detroit techno tracks that would not be made until some 10 years later and ‘Pendy! You’re In Some Awful Danger’ a vaporous synth excursion and anthemic drum-heavy vocal track ‘Almost Grown’, this 12" also features the unreleased end of the night jam ‘Find It In Your Eyes’, a track which somehow never made it on to the original LP release.

RWD-FWD: ...“This cassette is a re release of a 2 track cassette Reducer gave away to the 1st 23 punters through the door at our 2nd gig in 1985.We have added 2 other tracks from the same recording session because we are lovely people who wish to share enlightenment.Other than that this cassette appears as it did back then.At the beginning of Reducer we had no equipment of our own, so used what was available in the “back room” 4 track cassette recording home studios, we could just afford.These 4 tracks are the first ever recorded by Reducer – the then 3 members all playing the same synthesizer at the same time whilst tape loops ran alongside, and/or one of us playing bells & flutes, whilst the other two played the synth, all tracks are recorded live with no overdubs.This simple but extremely effective way of getting an un rehearsed spontaneity into our work proved to us we had an understanding & empathy that would go on to become the fully fledged Reducer.”

Seance Centre: ...We humans, the nascent beings that we are, still haven’t quite figured out the full potential of music. Dancing, meditating, emoting, protesting; these are all pretty basic. But what if we communicated more complex ideas with music? What if we codified all of our activities with music? This idea came to composer Joanne Forman when she was commissioned to create the soundscape for an environmental exhibition of sculpture called Artifacts from an Alien Civilization in 1987. The sculptures, elaborate ruins that had been found on the moon, begged the question: who created them and for what purpose? Joanne Forman imagined that Earth’s moon was a vacation spot for advanced beings from another galaxy. Cave Vaults of the Moon became a collection of sonic texts describing the fun things that went on there; earth-viewing, collecting information, building and playing. In her mind the sculptures in the exhibit were the remnants of a deserted playground of moon castles.