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Victor Machin

Deep-Dive: "An Introduction Into The Insane World Of Alain Neffe"

Was he new wave? Was he no wave? Was he neo-folk, psyche experimental, or an early pioneer of minimal synth? These labels simply don't suffice when describing An Introduction Into The Insane World Of Alain Neffe, the rarified gem from legendary DIY enigma Alain Neffe. What really sets him apart as an icon of tape-culture is his range of instrumentation, in which he incorporates a lengthy variety of eclectic musical genres and styles, as well as his use of timbres and the acoustic properties of organic sounds. In that respect, his unique sound shares more in common with the audio playback techniques and sonographic elements of spectralism than he does neo folk or new wave––minus the visualizations of stereo imaging.


Album cover of "An Introduction Into the Insane World of Alain Neffe"

He's been regarded as the intermedial lynchpin of bands such as Psuedo Code, Human Flesh, Cortex, I Scream, Japanese Genius, Subject, and BeNe GeSSeRiT. With these groups, Neffe appears on several labels like Odd Size, Popwave, Gonzo Circus and Red Neon Tapes, to name a few. He's also the visionary electronic pioneer who brought about groups like Algebra Suicide (Chicago new wave duo Lydia Tomkiw and Don Hedeker), as well as Colin Potter, Tara Cross, and Merzbow (a 70s Japanese noise project created by Masami Akita). Not paying too much attention to his internet underground catchet, Alain Neffe came from humble beginnings in a small quaint city called Charleroi, in the Walloon province of Hainaut in south-west Belgium.


Cover of Music for insane Poeple

A young Neffe developed an early phonetic knack for languages like music, hidden within the enclaves of an industrial suburb, amidst the nooks and crannies of the local neighborhoods that housed noisy coal miners and iron steel mill factories. Music is the truth-be-told, universal language of the cosmos––a symphonic language, with the exception of scientific notation and the advanced math equations applied in astrophysics and quantum mechanics. This was also where he started the band Kosmose, a Belgian Krautrock group that existed from 1973-78.


Alongside members guitarist Daniel Malempré and bassist Francis Pourcel, they put out records that have been described as "lysergic" in the throes of urban deindustrialization and the waning death rattle of Progressive Rock's heyday. He was put on a steady diet of rock, pop, and jazz records from a young age before discovering Psyche music. His influences range from Jethro Tull, Nico, the Sex Pistols, and Bridget Fontaine to the tape-reel jukebox serenades of Italian ballroom orchestras and drunken accordion players.


Photograph taken in Beursschouwburg in Brussels. Xavier Ess, Guy Hicant founder of Sub Rosa Label and Alain Neffe on clarinet.
Photograph taken in Beursschouwburg in Brussels. Xavier Ess, Guy Hicant founder of Sub Rosa Label and Alain Neffe on clarinet

The group's history traces back to a single piece of equipment known as the Roland HS100, which is to Kosmose what the MS20 was to groups like Daft Punk and Aphex Twin, while also being featured on Thom Yorke's Anima solo album. Even though these tracks were produced, mixed, and mastered during the 70s, Stroom founder Ziggy Devriendt A.K.A. Nosedrip, released this compilation album off the label in 2015-2016 to revive Neffe's personal back catalogue.


 

 BeNe GeSSeRiT - "Femmes Aux Yeux d'Argile"

This first track from Bene Gesserit is like a sampled ambient recording of a tropical rainforest––cut up, pasted, and collaged into a potpourri jar of sounds. When I close my eyes and listen to this, I hear sonic reservoirs, well springs of information, the score to a lost weary vagabond wandering the desert that stirs with a slow and steady pulse, ever so slightly increasing intensity and musical friction more and more with each passing bar. Then comes auxiliary percussion: tom and kick drum with what sounds like a timpani compressed through an 808. GeSSeRiT juxtaposes a syncopated backbeat with a foreboding dissonant minor half step strum on the guitar. Reverb-drenched flute embellishments permeate the high frequencies. "Femmes Aux Yeux d'Argile" is topped off by a finishing varnish layer of cryptic, otherworldly background vocals. It comprises of angelic, harmonious choruses from the sacred temple of a dug-up Ethiopian tomb, made from the lysergic vocal cords of the angels themselves.



 

Subject - "Be Careful!"

"Be Careful!" kicks off with a hissing hi-hat that sizzles with each stroke, opening and closing in sync with a looming bassline that see-saws in one fell swoop of parabolic curves and sine waves. The start is introduced with a vamp followed by a shoegaze high pass-filter string pad and an assemblage of catchy monophonic jingles—seemingly descended from the escalator stairway steps of the firmament. This track exhibits the web façade nostalgia of a post-internet future funk XM radio station playing in a 90s vaporwave stripmall, somewhere in Holland or at any vinyl shop located in the stretch from Antwerp to the Netherlands. "Be Careful!", much like the rest of this album, is a work of art that takes the listener into their own ecosystem, peppered with gnarly effects sends and synth lines that, albeit played on a dingy keyboard, appear to be coming from an EWI (electronic wind instrument), also known as an electronic saxophone.



 

BeNe GeSSeRiT - "Nobody Can Know"

This track has all the makings of a 1980s protopunk female  synth band. It is identified, notably, for its indie grunge vocals like Kim Deal of The Breeders or Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. It is also revered in some circles as the “a-wooo-woo” surf wax LA sound that somehow made its way north to cities like Seattle and north east to Daytona, Ohio. Yet, it evinces and undoubtedly affirms itself as an electroacoustic experimental psyche track and it does so through the fidgety error code keyboards from a Casio VL tone paired with a string synthesizer organ.



The psychosomatic software bug that invariably manifests with the bodily symptoms of a fever, computer virus that infects your desktop with a germ that you allow simply because—it feels so right. For those of us who still weren't a bun in the oven during the unveiling of the very first wireless router or even thought of when the first UNIX operating system was created, let alone the first iPod or MySpace page, and can recall the hazy flashback of loading fiber optic high-speed internet, 36 years before the “Hauk Tuah” TikTok decade became riddled with AI algos and WIFI hotspots... The sounds deployed on "Nobody Can Know" resemble the days of NSFNET, the dot-comm bubble, library Internet Cafes, and AOL dial-up modems with their tick-tick clicks, dots, dashes, dits, and dahs of morse code-encoded text. This tête-à-tête starts to ramp up gradually through the call and response of a broken malfunctioning chip-tune keyboard, an exchange that occurs between Benedict G. and Alain. Quivering tsunamis of wattage and noise glitches galore, listening to this track is like staring into a blown fuse switch apparatus that’s gone haywire with loose wires and twisted coils.


 

Human Flesh - "One Way Conversation, Part 1"

"One Way Conversation, Part 1" is to me what appears to be a thematic continuance of "Femme De Aux": spine-chilling, unearthly, seething with apprehension. It's an echo chamber for the no-name caller. The telephone rings but there's nobody home––except the dialogue of delayed drum beats and sinister synthesizers with an 808 timpani hit that strikes on two and four, and a bass twang that chugs along on the downbeat. This possessed séance features Kisha Kishnumara on lead vocals, Nadine Bal of Human Flesh (Alain's wife) on organ synth, and Neffe on ring oscillator.



 

 BeNe GeSSeRiT - "On Protège Bien Les Requins"

The opiated width of “On Protège Bien Les Requins" slides open the vistas of our eyes and ears and, in a flawless motion of finesse, rolls up the blinds to let the light trickle in. It’s a gleam of splintered sunshine emanating from a parted cloud that slips through the cracks of an open window and into our line of sight like the aperture of a camera lens, gently reminding us as to why the naked eye should see in 20/20 vision. Its warm embrace, the dopamine inducing bass, the chiming soft piano keys... Ahhh… Yes… synesthesia of the occipital lobes, the audible Rorschach test.



 

Pseudo Code - "Surrounding (Extract 1)"

Alien-like frequencies and intercepted transmissions suspended in the data ether, "Surrounding (Extract 1)" is a Brian Eno-esque diorama of pitch bends, revving modulations, and rapid zooming glissandos made partly by the counterpoint of dueling pianos unified onto a serene tapestry of white noise amp static hums and overtone bass harmonics. It's then finally weaved together by kitschy keyboard melodies that dip in and out like a vintage transistor radio.



 

Cortex - "Cortex R"

The opening of this track almost sounds like the Switched On Bach Wendy Carlos soundtrack to Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange. The eerie, ominous atmosphere and phantom limb, hair-raising synthesizers make it a digital ghost, absorbed like a sponge by the sheet metal of analog circuitry, the poltergeist trapped inside a voltage controlled oscillator. It concludes with a feeling of arrival. The spaceship has landed and the phantom has been freed.



 

 BeNe GeSSeRiT - "Tonight"

This number comes on like the tune of an antique record player in an American Gothic Grant Wood style attic. Picture this: It's eight o'clock. The strange, unusual, uncanny and exotic sounds of Bene Gesserit seep under the door frame to ring in the new weekend. "Tonight" evokes memories of sneaking out of your parents house after curfew for a night of underage drinking and premarital sex. Oh, the demure...the burgeoning restlessness of youth joined by the elegance of avoidance and nocturnal escapism.



"Tonight" is when the teenage vampires and ghouls are let loose from their flight cage aviaries and those infected turn into werewolves, a requiem for the embryonic journey we take from the sub-atomic particle of a sperm cell eukaryote to the wooly cotton brains of adulthood. The song features Daniel Malempre on bass guitar and B. Ghola on an organ strings pad, drum machine, percussion, synth and a 46 peg 44 string nineteenth century European folk instrument from Bavaria and Austria called the Zither. Before you even bother to ask, yes they are based off of their namesake (an ancient societal order of female witches or "spiritual advisors" with enhanced extrasensory psychic abilities from the movie Dune).


 

Human Flesh - "Delon Enlarges"

Like the sweet heavenly refrain of a lullaby written for the insomniac, trapped between worlds alike, "Delon Enlarges" is a viaduct between dimensional realms. It's ASMR for staring at your ceiling fan in the middle of the night on Advil PM––Dionysus getting taunted by Aphrodite. Mirella Brunello's Shiva-like voice casts a spell on the listener's psyche, hence the genre's name. It's a spiritual incantation for the third eye that is sung and chanted like the hymnal of a Gregorian Chant in a Tibetan Monastery. "Delon Enlarges" is now mixed and remastered with a rhythm box, synthesizer, and drum machine that's downloadable as a 16-bit/44.1Khz Mp3 file.



 

Human Flesh - "Every Ill Man"

What stands out the most about this poignant darkwave jam is the vocals and lyrics of Debbe Jaffe, backed by Human Flesh. This is interesting because Alain tends to write his lyrics in French or what he likes to call a "sloppy naïve English". Deb's voice is the Vox Populi, which is to say that the voice of the people is the voice of some supranatural being the townsfolk refer to as God. Written like an inscribed message on a tombstone burial superfund site: "Every ill man is an enemy, Because he's the reflection of your own illness. Every dead man is the enemy, because he's the image of your own death. Did you see the latest news on the TV? Did you see the town torn apart? Human beings are less than beasts. Violence is everywhere." This spoken word passage goes on for about two and a half minutes, held down by an in-pocket, funky, gothic bass groove and throws quips about how human beings are less than beasts and insects, as well as how cruelty and stupidity is your mother and that your victims could be your own children.



"Every ill man is an enemy, because he's the reflection of your own illness / human beings are less than beasts / violence is everywhere"

 

 BeNe GeSSeRiT - "Khol"

B. Ghola is on the Tarang, also known as the Indian Banjo, which translates to "Wave of Nightengales". The Tarang is an indian string instrument that evolved from the Japanese taishōgoto in South Asia during the 1930s. It's Sun Ra met with the organic sound design of B.Ghola, Benedict G on vocals, and the sarahan gypsy music you'd hear when walking into a Moroccan hash bar in Tangier.



 

Psuedo Code - "The Crook of your Heart"

Like the title suggests, "The Crook of Your Heart" tugs on your heart strings with an undulating swelling pulse that compels you immediately, while warmed by a blanket of melancholia and sweet sounding melodic lines that wrap themselves around your cochlea like a wideband graphic Eq.


The track is mixed as if it were to be arranged on a spectrogram or an oscilloscope. For those of you who aren't lab geeks, a spectrogram, also called a spectrum analyzer, is measured in decibels and used to study the amplitude of frequency signals which can be utilized in fields that range from linguistics to seismology. An oscilloscope, measured in volts, is used to study the waveforms of frequency signals on a vertical axis corresponding with the passing of time. 3D visualizations of such analysis are referred to as waterfall displays, due to the fact that they look like the stream of a waterfall cascade.



Not to say that experimental noise artists need to write music like they're employees at CERN or interns at NASA but there is a threshold, that I can attest to, where technology arouses creative impulse and therefore enhances as well as engenders and inspires creativity. The mapping of frequencies like the human genome (not uncommon in sound engineering) which is laid out on a horizontal visual diagram with omni-directional stereo spatialization that can pan left, right, north, and south. There are nuances that are heard by an attentive ear and exemplified through stylistic mixing and mastering techniques such as the buzz that gets gradually louder in your left ear and a high pitched screech that metamorphosizes through a series of pitch transformations in your right. This goes on for about 7:30 of the full 8:28, until it winds down to a grating flanger that diminishes to the squelch-like suction cup sound of a vacuum plunger or, as I like to think of it––a portal to the paranormal that's starting to close, a liquid leak from the cosmic gateway that bridges our world with theirs.


 

The full album is available to listen on Spotify, Bandcamp, Deezer, iHeartRadio, and Apple music, which I'd highly recommend to any reader that fancies themselves a crate-digging vintage record store aficionado. Portable cassette players, reel-to-reel tape recorders and oscilloscopes aside, it certainly will turn you away from the addictive junk-food filler brain rot of the Billboard's top 100 and delouse saturated brainwashed minds from the lice that is formulaic, mass-manufactured string cheese, also known as "froyo-tune pop radio", the KY jelly dandruff of the American airwaves. My next investment is to get a tangible copy of the vinyl, not only because of the way it sounds when the needle touches the groove of that 33 1/3 RPM 12 inch LP, but because it apparently comes with more liner notes than Fleetwood Mac's Rumours, the Yes Album, and the Treaty of Versailles.


LP physical cover

For an artist that is a literal myriad composite of hodgepodge influences and has a shuffle-playlist which toggles from Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention to Tori Amos, The Stooges, Tuxedomoon and early Pink Floyd, Alain Neffe has left his indelible mark and lasting influence on the esoteric disk jockey discographies of electronic experimental music (being that that's more marketable than the auditory hallucinations: weird and disorienting section). Non-sequitur, he's particularly fond of Piper at the Gates of Dawn, which is no surprise, either. Furthermore, to reiterate my initial point, An Introduction into the Insane World of Alain Neffe is like the fossil of an icon jewel, perfectly frozen in amber and excavated by Ziggy Devriendt's select team of Stroom archeologists to be catalogued and stored in the filed archives. Doctors orders: give it a listen if you haven't already. But don't worry... The insanity's only temporary. Unless of course, you listen to the rest of Neffe's record collection.


What do you want to see covered on Enharmonic Magazine next? Let us know.

 

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