Landscape

Every generation or so, a new musical trend blows through the landscape and the stagnant waters of corporate music get churned up. It’s an exciting time, but usually only lasts for a little while before the lumbering multinational corporations adjust to the new forms and clamp back down on them, stifling the airwaves and shoving everything back to the middle of the road, where things are safe and profitable and very, very boring. I love those moments, even if I don’t love the causes of them, because during the mad scramble to assimilate, lots of clueless label R&D guys go around madly signing up a wide range of talents that would otherwise go unheard. There’s nothing altruistic or adventurous about this, it’s merely the by-product of a flailing label. Some new sounds have appeared on the horizon, something that doesn’t show up on their carefully annotated charts, the kids go rushing towards it, the labels smell a dollar, and they all go running around grabbing all kinds of unusual acts just because they’re unusual and nobody quite knows what’ll stick. So Nirvana explodes and nullifies the radio and suddenly every band in Seattle has a deal and “altlernative” actually means that bands that are alternative to the mainstream (like the Squirrel Nut Zippers or Soul Coughing) get signed and there’s a mad land grab in which neo-swing and lounge and electronica all get a running start before the labels codify alternative as being fuzzy-grungy and the doors slam shut once again. I don’t love the grunge sound (although Nirvana’s Nevermind is pretty swell), but I appreciated the short-lived flood of actual alternative acts that got to share shelf space with it for a little while.

Same with punk. I’m not a punk rocker – never was, never will be – but I appreciate what it did for the musical landscape. Punk as a social and musical phenomenon burned itself out pretty quickly (or, rather, became quickly codified and marginalized and easily pigeon-holed), but it shook the labels up enough that for a couple of years there that they’d sign up any unusual band, having no idea what was going to be popular. Hence, you get your Haircut 100s and your Gary Numans (who wouldn’t stand a chance, otherwise). And you get a clueless and nervous label like RCA signing an odd hybrid band like Landscape. There’s no other explanation. There’s no chance that Landscape was going to be big, but RCA didn’t know what was going on, so they might as well spend a little money on a new wave neo big band experimental synth pop group because, well, who the hell knew what the kids were going to listen to next? And, frankly, I’m grateful for their confusion, because otherwise, I’d never have a chance to hear From the Tearooms of Mars to the Hellholes of Uranus, and that would be a shame.

Reading some music mag years ago, I ran across a listener’s poll of the best record stores in the country. I was familiar with several of them. NYC’s Bleeker Bob’s made the list (for worst attitude, I think), as did Chicago and Denver’s Wax Trax!, both branches of which I had perused. My local LA haunt, Aron’s, made a respectable showing near the top of the list, but the very first slot was reserved for a store I had heard of, but hadn’t had the chance to visit, Berkeley’s legendary Ameoba Records.

When, a few months later, I was able to engineer a trip up to the Bay area (Frisco, I understand the locals like to call it), I made a point to carve out a couple of hours to visit this famous temple of wax and was not disappointed. Acres of albums by any and everybody I could think of. I was disciplined and only dropped about a hundred bucks that day, but I was suitably impressed. Imagine my delight when I discovered they were opening a branch in Hollywood. Just down the street from Aron’s (that must’ve stung).

After many impatient months, opening weekend finally arrived. I wasn’t able to make it there on the Saturday it opened – just as well, from what I understand of the mob it generated – but did get there the next afternoon. I had two specific items on my shopping list, records that had never been released on CD and that I had long ago worn through my vinyl copies of. I walked into the cavernous space and just about went blind by the sheer size and scope of the store. I was there a full hour before I realized that there was another room at the back and almost another hour went by before I noticed that there was another floor. It was gloriously overwhelming.

First things first, though, and I went looking for these two lost vinyl relics. Wonder of wonder, I was able to find both of them in their vast used record section. The first was a copy of Walter…er…Wendy Carlos’ By Request album and the other was a copy of the long lost Landscape disc, From the Tearooms of Mars to the Hellholes of Uranus. It was a good day.

So who the hell is this Landscape? Well, good question, and good luck finding out any information. Even my trusty and well-worn copy of the Trouser Press Record Guide failed to mention anything about them. From what I can glean, they were a band from England that won a semi-prestigious award for best new jazz group (!) after the release of their first album, one I didn’t even know existed until fairly recently. I did track down some really poor quality MP3s of that disc and am happy to report that it is almost entirely without merit. Their second disc, the obnoxiously titled From the Tearooms of Mars to the Hellholes of Uranus is entirely unlike their previous work. The album is proto-electronica, featuring dance oriented tracks like European Man, catchy and quirky synth pop like this minor hit Einstein a Gogo (which starts with recordings of the band trying to reach various heads of state and is the only synth pop track I know of to directly reference Jimmy Carter), creepy experimental horror soundtracks like The Dollhouse and neo synthetic big band numbers like the wonderful title track (this neo big band on synths isn’t as unique as it may seem for the times, there’s a chunk from Buggles’ second album, Adventures in Modern Recording, which was around about the same time, that does a pretty straight-forward swing arrangement on a Fairlight synthesizer (in Vermillion Sands) and that snippet, I believe, is the genesis for producer Trevor Horn’s audio alchemy with the burgeoning Art of Noise and especially their wondrous Close (to the Edit), which also uses synthetic big band tricks). Most of Landscape's tracks are instrumental and those that are songs often use treated vocals and feature strange subjects, like the wonderfully weird Norman Bates. I heard a rumour once that they wrote their songs backwards. They’d shoot a film and edit it, then use the finished film to come up with the structure and words, and then write the music to fit those words. It can’t possibly be true, but it’s a great idea.

Among the obscure bands that I champion, Landscape is one of the obscurist. Their eclecticism ensured that just about nobody could embrace them and they have almost completely disappeared from the musical map. They released a third album called Manhattan Boogie Woogie which is just about as unlistenable as their first, so it appears that From the Tearooms of Mars to the Hellholes of Uranus was a real fluke. But a wonderful fluke it is, unlike anything else out then or now.

Surprisingly, it was reissued on CD recently and is still (at the moment) available, which means I have had to drop this disc whose name I’m not typing out again from contention for most obscure album in this collection (Carlos’ By Request has also been reissued in glorious digital sound, so both those obscurities are now less so, which, I must confess, gives me a slight pang of remorse). That leaves The Hitmen’s Torn Together, Trees’ Sleep Convention, Tom Tom Club’s Close to the Bone and the original Fats Comet singles as the ultimate vinyl rarities of this set.