This was something of a touchstone for me - and it’s sobering to think it’s nearly 15 years old. I’d had a passing interest in Chapterhouse as they seemed from the vantage point of small-town Lancashire the most interesting of those Thames Valley scene bands [purely because of the drum sample on Pearl. An astonishingly lax judgement in retrospect, but I was young and the Great Indie Dance War was on - this is about the same time as I thought the most interesting thing about My Bloody Valentine was the Weatherall remix of Soon. Oh, to be so young, dumb and full of cum again! But honestly, if you didn't follow THIS path, the alternative seemed to be Ned's Atomic Dustbin.]
Anyway, the second Chapterhouse album, Blood Music, was bobbins [1993 was the year I vowed never ever to buy another record made by white men with guitars - a resolution that probably lasted all of two weeks and has been repeated, to the same degree of success, on average once every seven months since then] but the copy I bought, from Action Records in Preston I believe, came with the Global Communication remix of the album. I forget the chronology of their releases round time, but the same year I also bought the Reload album A Collection of Short Stories on Infonet and a Reload remix of a Slowdive track, so Mark Pritchard and Tom Middleton were floating around my bedroom quite a lot but I didn’t know any of their more techno stuff (Link, E621) - until my kid brother turned it up!
The Global Communication ‘retranslation’ of Blood Music into Pentamerous Metamorphosis, however, was music of choice for the stretch from 3am to 5am after a night out and I’ve had it filed away in my head with other stuff that fitted the bill at the time - Future Sound of London’s Lifeforms was out the following year, and The Orb’s Wau! Mr Modo stuff like the cover of Hotel California [which I've just looked up, was released under the cringe-inducing pseudonym Jam On The Mutha] and Blue Pearl’s Naked In The Rain were already a couple of years old. [The originals of both were a bit rubbish, but the 12s came with the ubiquitous 'ambient' remixes. As did Zoe's hit Sunshine On A Rainy Day].
This is the one that holds up most over the years though. Split into five distinct, but flowing, sections, it’s far from just ‘ambient’. Alpha Phase starts off all drifty and Orb-like, but halfway through picks up with a cool acid drum line, Beta Phase is cinematic and slow-burning, and may have been what I was thinking of when I tried to relate it to New Zealand drone guitarist Peter Wright [in retrospect not a comparison that holds up, but something in the style still connects], Gamma Phase was my favourite at the time, probably because it related more to stuff like Future Sound of London, but listening now it’s possibly the most dated of the sections. Delta Phase is dark and picks up more of the guitar from Chapterhouse [I mean, I'm assuming they're actually using SOME samples of the album in here and not just going off on their own - to be honest, I can't be arsed going back to Blood Music to check]. Epsilon Phase sounds the best in 2007 and, strangely, while dissing the Chapterhouse album, THIS is the only time Global Communication take voice sounds from it - and it works. The middle four minutes with the vocals lifted over drifting bits of, what sound like, treated feedback is gorgeous. It’s noticeable that the lyrics they’ve taken - ‘reaching to the light, changing all the time’ - are disembodied from whatever context they had on whatever Chapterhouse track they came from and are just used as a slogan. The kind of thing we had got very used to with acid and techno over the previous four years/next five years, but which was still a novelty in ‘indie’ [although obviously quite detached from 'indie' by the time they'd been filtered through this context - the Global Communication album wasn't even included as part of a 2CD box. It came in a separate card sleeve packed, if I remember right, in plastic with the original album. It's a really insubstantial little thing. Which makes it even stranger that they seem to be going for £100-plus on Amazon. Dunno how many copies of the Chapterhouse album you can get for that.]
I think that point about taking the vocal out of context and just using it as a signifier is why I really liked this and why I was losing patience with the guitar scene of the time - it was just so much cleverer, and at the same time had more feeling than the source material. Not that there was ‘two culture’ thing going on - there were connections between. Infonet was a Creation subsidiary, and there are stylistic, as well as record company reasons, why the earliest releases by Global Communication and Reload were rehashes of Thames Valley shoegaze types. And that leads to some interesting connections these days - Ulrich Schnauss, The Remote Viewer, Lali Puna, a lot of the stuff on Static Caravan or City Centre Offices.
This is Epsilon Phase to enjoy.
