wire: the solo projects

my favorite Wire offshoot is easily the Gilbert/Lewis Cupol work on 4AD, collected as 3R4. superb tribal-ambient tesselations that beat :zoviet*france:/Rapoon et al to the punch by many years. the later P'o Whilst Climbing Thieves Vie for Attention LP sounds like a lost Xpressway tape (read: xcellent!). also can't recommend Gilbert's collaborations with (then?)-better half AC Marias highly enough. S: the One of Our Girls Has Gone Missing LP for the definitive ambient-pop document, and be sure to mop up the several stray singles as well.

i'll endorse all the Colin Newman albums up through (maybe including) BaSTARd. A-Z and Not To are very close to the Wire of the Chairs Missing-154 period. aside from the Eno-esque instrumental miniatures of Provisionally Entitled..., the remainder are lush, occasionally overdone electro/orchestro-pop collaborations with Minimal Compact, thus solo in name only, but mature, different and quite alluring.

if you like noiseambience with conceptual underpinnings, a la MSBR or Aube, Gilbert's your man these days. head straight for his 12" of very early KHz experiments on Säkhö. his many Mute albs range from music for ballet (or watching paint peel) to strafings of murderous noise. most are just dull. if you're going to pick up one, make it Insiding or This Way (to the) Shivering Man. avoid the pointless Haring, a spoken-word misfire, at all costs.

i never got into the blocky beats of Lewis' H.A.L.O. and He Said, though he couches them in some intriguing textures. his solo albums tend to be rather gray and dour. missable.

4 was originally titled Will You Speak This Word (1983), and is almost as fascinating. "To Speak" is 18 minutes long, and might be their peak, with interesting contributions from Yaz's Vince Clarke. Strings and saxophones are electronically treated, serving an overall Middle Eastern sounding theme. It's stunning. You can hear Lewis' deep nosferatu-Peter Murphy vocals on a later cut, which somehow undermine's the flow. The remaining cuts are less involving, but wow, what an impressive set, considering the environment of the time -- most of the post-punkers and new wavers were dumbing down their music, trying to grab the golden carrot of MTV stardom.

Wire: On the Box: 1979 (2004)
Revisit the genius of 1970s rock band Wire in this series that taps musical archives for amazing footage. In this case, the treasure is video footage from the group's appearance on Rockpalast in 1979, in which Wire lay down the beats for such tunes as "Practice Makes Perfect," "Two People in a Room," "I Feel Mysterious Today," "Once Is Enough," "A Question of Degree," "A Touching Display," "40 Versions," "Pink Flag" and more.

I'd just say that I like 'A-Z' at least as much as '154' and probably more than 'Chairs Missing'. I also have a soft spot for 'Commercial Suicide,' which is sort of post-post-punk-maturing-well in the same way as David Thomas' mid-80s output (which is fantastic). It's almost in canon/round form, sort of unusual for pop music.

'A-Z,' 'Dome 3' and 'Commercial Suicide' are tops for me.

I like Dome 3 & Bruce Gilbert's 'The Shivering Man' very much for cut-up abstract instrumentals.

Also I like He Said's 'Hail' for fucked pop. I usually have to take Lewis' vocals just a bit at a time, but the music he came up with for this album is so strange, even the vocals work. Much, much better than the later He Said albums.

Honestly, I find the track "Alone" to be on that "Map Ref" level of individual memorability.

mmm.

I had this looong time ago on vinyl. Truly excellent. I need to find this again.

Colin Newman's solo stuff I'm kindof lukewarm about. I've bought and sold things and bought them again and failed to play them! I've still got the vinyl of "It Seems" but haven't played it since it came out. I never actually bought Commercial Suicide though, strangely enough.

I've also got some kind of Wire solo thing called P'o, but it's boring, as I imagine that MZUI thing probably is (talk about a staple of used record bins!).

Which is not to say he hasn't done 'unexpected' music, if you see what I mean.

A to Z and Commercial Suicide are both worth the effort.

Thank you thread for reminding me to play A.C. Marias again.

hopefully out sometime in feb / march

Personally, I fucking love A to Z. It's a great record, and the second and the last song on side 1 are CLASSIC. Unfortunately, my vinyl copy has been scratched on that last song side 1. BUMMER.

xpost

uh except bruce gilbert wasn't their bassist and doesn't sing.

---> oops. i guess meant Graham Lewis. thanks for the correction, i appreciate it. haha. like i said, OOPS!

holy shit. i never thought AC Marias would come up anywhere in a million years. this was one of those purchases i made like 3 years ago just based on the fact that it was a Mute release.

and ...

i didn't notice the Bruce Gilbert involvement, but i suppose that i shouldn't be so hard on him post 154.

http://www.discogs.com/release/240365

I only have the Provisionally Entitled the Singing Fish / Not To CD, and man oh man it's disappointing.

this is not at all to say that A-Z isn't incredibly great

"Newman, with admirable pluck, reminded us that there was more Bertolt Brecht in Paul McCartney than even the most addled 1977-era Wire theorem could envision."

I dunno. This just rubs me the wrong way. Eh.

I love Colin's 80s solo albums, the two He Said and AC Marius albums but have always been lukewarm to some of the other stuff. On my list of projects is to compile a best of from Dome, Lewis/Gilbert, solo Gilbert, P'o, Duet Emmo, Demond Simmons, Cupol and a few other names I can't remember.

Rolling Upon My Day by Dome is excellent.

On my list of projects is to compile a best of from Dome, Lewis/Gilbert, solo Gilbert, P'o, Duet Emmo, Demond Simmons, Cupol and a few other names I can't remember.

Man, I just did one! Great minds and all that...

Please post your tracklisting!

Only Lewis+Gilbert and kept down to CD-R length:

1. Rolling Upon My Day
2. Cruel When Complete
3. Like This For Ages
4. The Red Tent I
5. Ritual View
6. Anchors
7. AR-GU
8. BA-DR
9. To Speak
10. Vanite
11. Blind Tim
12. Or So It Seems
13. The First Person
14. Reading Prof. B.

Also search Desmond Simmons' Alone On Penguin Island (1981).

― Andy K (Andy K), Tuesday, June 3, 2003 9:07 AM (7 years ago) Bookmark

http://digital.thinkindie.com/search/release.php?release_id=151039&ref=26

I finally got around to compiling my own set of Gilbert & Lewis material. I went through everything until the mid-90s then lost interest. Here's my playlist:

Anchors (Lewis Gilbert & Mills - Pacific Specific)
Cruel When Complete (Dome - 12)
Long Lost Life (Dome - 12)
Ritual View (Dome - 12)
Jasz (Dome - 34)
Dasz (Dome - 34)
Ends With The Sea (Gilbert And Lewis - 8 Time)
Or So It Seems (Duet Emmo - Or So It Seems)
The First Person (Duet Emmo - Or So It Seems)
Time And Time (P'o - Whilst Climbing Thieves Vie For Attention)
Vanite (P'o - Whilst Climbing Thieves Vie For Attention)
Only One I (P'o - Whilst Climbing Thieves Vie For Attention)
Blind Tim (P'o - Whilst Climbing Thieves Vie For Attention)
Crystal Streams (P'o - Whilst Climbing Thieves Vie For Attention)
Angel Food (Bruce Gilbert - The Shivering Man)
Eline Cout II (Bruce Gilbert - The Shivering Man)
Epitaph For Henran Brenlar (Bruce Gilbert - The Shivering Man)
Because We Must (Version 1) (Dome - Yclept)

Graham Lewis's new albums are out: "All Over" (song-based vocal work from the past 10 years) and "All Under" (4 long soundtrack pieces, one with spoken word and the last more song based) and are excellent!

Never heard He Said Omala until recently. "Catch Supposes" is this ambient kraut-techno beast with Graham's soft voice on top. I swear, Wire side projects are the gift that keeps on giving.

http://youtu.be/Vlv-cN1lU08

Angela Conway & Bruce Gilbert, probably better than Wire were at the time, great video...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bAcxQzl15LI

the AC Marias album is such an underappreciated gem, although i would gladly lop the canned heat cover off my CD version

(imagine if CD bonus tracks were watermarked so you could tell your CD player to ignore the fuck out of them)

the drop / so single is even better if less breezy

I just found Dome 3&4 at Tower on sale for $11.99. I haven't been able to find 1&2 anywhere yet. 3 is pretty amazing. It's certainly a precedent to a lot of the experimental electronica and post-rock of the mid-90s like Main, Oval, Disco Inferno, etc. Recorded 1980-81, the only influences I can hear is Eno's ambient stuff, the instrumental cuts from Bowie's Low, and Eno/Byrne's My Life In The Bush of Ghosts, with its sampled rhythms and ghostly, floating processed voices (who was A.M.C.?). Maybe a little contemporary Cabaret Voltaire and Throbbing Gristle too.

I'm listening to Dome 3 today for the first time in a while and I'm ready to proclaim it the greatest of all Wire-related projects (outside of Wire). The other Dome albums are fine but this one is just perfect. Weird we've never polled them here. If we did, this one in a landslide.

Listened to The Shivering Man as such from start to finish now – goddamm that is a complete and wonderful thing.

Hi - I am helping a friend write and prepare materials for a Wire (band and solo) family/related compendium being created through a Detroit-based publishing house.
Hoping to find a die-hard fan/collector with all the answers, we are reaching out, looking for info on the origins of a 2010 Bruce Gilbert song "Epitaph for
Henran Brenlar" on "The Shivering Man" album. Is Henran Brenlar a real person, possibly an art school colleague?

My guess: it's an anagram of LN HE RAN BARREN. LN is Lewis/Newman. He's saying the later Wire songs are not as well-written as the earlier ones.

it’s a composite/mashup of the names of two people Gilbert admires - Brendan Behan and err someone else I’ve forgotten (a quick search was no help)

Henry Miller

guessing

Asking Bruce Gilbert might be the way to go with this one.