Electro Assassin
mimus
Assassin in 1990.
The history as far as I can remember (it was a loooong time ago)
was...
Kev had been the main writer for the Johnson Engineering Company and
had already released a reasonably successful JEC album when the bad
split. Kevin formed EA while the remainder of JEC became Havoc and
released an album on Concrete a couple of years later.
Kev worked his day job with some members of Portion Control and they
were pretty close friends. After several years of inactivity, Portion
Control became Solar Enemy and released an album (Dirty vs Universe)
which was pretty average as I recall. I can't remember if there were
any subsequent Solar Enemy releases.
When I joined Electro Assassin, Kev had been working on tracks for the
first album and it was at a pretty advanced stage. I was brought in to
add lyrics and vocals and work together with Kev on the music and the
live shows.
'Jamming the Voice of the Universe' was recorded with a budget of
nearly £0 at a succession of scummy studios in North London, usually
in the middle of the night when rates were cheaper. Although a few
tracks came out well, overall we were not happy with the sound of the
album, and some of the writing was pretty suspect. It was a learning
experience.
After 'Jamming' came out we played a few live shows around London and
got busy with the second album, which was recorded at Remaximum in
Clapham, a rather nicer 24 track studio run by Hugh Griffiths(? I
think) who also engineered and produced the record. As far as I recall
it came out in 1993, but I'm not 100% sure.
This time round we were far happier with the way it sounded and the
new tracks were always much better received live.
By the time we started work on The Divine Invasion, things were not
looking great for EA. Despite several years hard work and apparently
some good critical reports and decent fan base, we never seemed to
make a penny out of the band - It turned out that the record label was
ripping us off (surprise surprise).
Meanwhile I was starting to take my job more seriously, and had less
and less time to spend on the band. Before the third album was
complete, I decided the fairest thing to do was to quit so that Kevin
had time to hook up with another vocalist and finish the tracks. This
turned out to be a canadian called Richard McKinley, who I never met.
I have a copy of the Divine Invasion and the musical development that
Kev exhibited on this release simply blew me away.
The vocals sucked though :)
Anyway, there it is. The EA story in a nutshell. Thanks to all of you
who remembered us.
http://www.side-line.com/forum/threads.php?id=13588_0_20_0_C
_Bioculture_ has long struck me as the release sounding most like
_Front by Front_ (even more so than any other F242 release), which is
especially interesting since EA definitely had their own sound (eg, a
much more interesting use of noise/loops), viz. the block
Electro Assassin/ Bioculture (1994)(Pendragon/Metropolis)/ "Haywire",
"Heavy Unit", "Ultrafear", "F-Zero" and "Terminal Choice" (29:53)
while _The Divine Invasion_ has long been one of my favorite releases,
viz. the block
Electro Assassin/ The Divine Invasion (1995)(Cyber-Tec/SPV/Synthetic
Symphony)/ "Bodyhammer", "Voyager", "Dreamweb" and "Beyond
Salvation" (26:35)
RIP (in my deck)
--
Let there be some half-mast throbbing.