‘Reel to Real’ is a collection of recordings produced between 1982 and 1983 by Liquid Liquid percussionist Dennis Young. Although busy with the seminal band, he had recently acquired a reel-to-reel tap recorder and spent many hours at home experimenting with the potentials of the equipment he had to hand, aired with the latest emerging technologies. The material laid down during this prolific period, which ended in 1984 when young acquired his first 4-track cassette recorder which changed his approach forever, and was recently rediscovered lurking in his personal archives. ‘Reel to Real’ represents the pick of the crop.
The bulk of the material on ‘Reel to Real’ is either percussion or synth-based, primarily focused around drums and Young’s voice. But for all that, there styles in which these experimental works manifest are remarkably diverse. They’re not songs in the strictest sense; the form and structures are loose. ‘Big Boom’ hammers out a drum beat like The Fall’s ‘Rowche Rumble’, but the unintelligible vocals, shouting in a cavern of echo, contribute to the end result sounding more like a reworking of Throbbing Gristle’s ‘Discipline’.
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Young’s explorations into synthesizer-based music are interesting: and varied ‘Panic in the Air’ has Krautrock leanings but again forges an uncomfortable tension more reminiscent of early industrial recordings. Unsettling squelches and drones provide the backdrop to some manic shouting, and elsewhere the haunting ‘Space Reversed’ sends a shiver down the spine. The scratchy no-fi psychedelic folk of ‘Little Girl’ stands out as being something quite different, discordant and strange. Then again, the spaced-out reggae of ‘Overdub Dub’ contrasts with echoed samples that make up the Burroughsian collage that is ‘Radio Transmission I’
Not all of the tracks are entirely successful, but in the spirit of experimentalism at a pivotal period in the development of music technology, the explorations gathered together on ‘Reel to Real’ are never less than fascinating.
Dennis Young Online
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