A.R. Kane A.R. Kive

A.R. Kive collates the three most astonishing works from that most miraculous of

duos - A.R. Kane - comprising the ‘Up Home' EP from 1988 that signified the

band's dawning realisation of their own powers and possibilities, their legendary

debut LP ‘sixty nine' (1988) and its kaleidoscopic, prophetic double-LP follow up ‘i'

(1989).

In founder-member Rudy Tambala's new remastering, the music on these pivotal

transmissions from the birth of dream pop, have been reinvigorated and re-infused

with a new power, a new depth and intimacy, a new height and immensity. Vivid,

timeless and yet always timely whenever they're recalled, these records still force

any listener to realise that despite the habits of retrospective myth-making and the

safe neutering effects of ‘genre', thirty years have in no way dimmed how resistant

and dissident to critical habits of categorisation A.R. Kane always were. Never quite

‘avant-pop' or ‘shoegaze' or ‘post-rock' or any of those sobriquets designed to file

and categorise, A.R. Kive is a reminder that those genres had to be coined, had to

be invented precisely to contain the astonishing sound of A.R. Kane, because

previous formulations couldn't come close to their sui generis sound and

suggestiveness. This is music that pointed towards futures which a whole generation

of artists and sonic explorers would map out. Now beautifully repackaged,

remastered and fleshed out with extensive sleeve notes and accompanying

materials, ‘A.R. Kive' reveals that 35 years on it's still a struggle to defuse the

revolutionary and inspirational possibility of A.R. Kane's music.

A.R. Kane were formed in 1986 by Rudy Tambala and Alex Ayuli, two second-

generation immigrants who grew up together in Stratford, East London. From the off

the pair were outsiders in the culturally mixed (cockney/Irish/West Indian/Asian)

milieu of the East End, with Alex and Rudy's folks first generation immigrants from

Nigeria and Malawi, respectively. The two of them quickly developed and fostered an

innate and near-telepathic mutual understanding forged in musical, literary and

artistic exploration. Like a lot of second-generation immigrants, they were ferocious

autodidacts in all kinds of areas, especially around music and literature. Diving deep

into the music of afro-futurist luminaries such as Sun Ra, Miles Davis, Lee Perry and

Hendrix, as well as devouring the explorations of lysergic noise and feedback from

contemporaries like Sonic Youth and Butthole Surfers, they also thoroughly

immersed themselves in the alternate literary realities of sci-fi and ancient history

(the fascination with the arcane that gave the band their name), all to feed their

voracious cultural thirsts and intellectual curiosity.

It was seeing the Cocteau Twins performing on Channel 4 show the Tube that

spurred A.R. Kane into being - “They had no drummer. They used tapes and

technology and Liz Fraser looked completely otherworldly with those big eyes. And

the noise coming out of Robin's guitar! That was the ‘Fuck! We could do that! We

could express ourselves like that!' moment”, recalls Tambala - and through a mix of

confidence, chutzpah, ad hoc almost-mythical live shows and sheer innocent will the

duo debuted with the astonishing ‘When You're Sad' single for One Little Indian in

1986. Immediately dubbed a ‘black Jesus & Mary Chain' by a press unsure of

Where to put a black band clearly immersed in feedback and noise, what was

immediately apparent for listeners was just how much more was going on here - a

tapping of dub's stealth and guile, a resonant umbilicus back to fusion and jazz, the

music less a conjuration of past highs than a re-summoning of lost spirits.

The run of singles and EPs that followed picked up increasingly rapt reviews in the

press, but it was the ‘Up Home EP' released in 1988 on their new home, Rough

Trade that really suggested something immense was about to break. Simon

Reynolds noted the EP was: Their most concentrated slab of iridescent

awesomeness and a true pinnacle of an era that abounded with astounding

landmarks of guitar-reinvention, A.R. Kane at their most elixir-like.

If anything, the remastered ‘Up Home' that forms the first part of ‘A.R. Kive' is even

more dazzling, even more startling than it was when it first emerged, and listening

now you again wonder not just about how many bands christened ‘shoegaze' tried to

emulate it, but how all of them fell so far short of its lambent, pellucid wonder. This

remains intrinsically experimental music but with none of the frowning orthodoxy

those words imply. A.R. Kane, thanks to that second generation auto-didacticism

were always supremely aware about the interstices of music and magic, but at the

same time gloriously free in the way they explored that connection within their own

sound, fascinated always with the creation of ‘perfect mistakes' and the possibilities

inherent in informed play.

‘sixty nine' the group's debut LP that emerged in 1988 had

critics and listeners struggling to fit language around A.R. Kane's sound. As a title it

was telling - the year of ‘Bitches Brew', the year of ‘In A Silent Way', the erotic

möbius between two lovers - and as originally coined by the band themselves,

‘dream pop' (before it became a free-floating signifier of vague import) was entirely

apposite for the music A.R. Kane were making. Crafted in a dark small basement

studio in which Tambala recalls the duo had “complete freedom - We wanted to go

as far out as we could, and in doing so we discovered the point where it stops being

music”. There was an irresistibly dreamy, somnambulant, sensual and almost surreal

flow to ‘sixty nine's sound, but also real darkness/dankness, the ruptures of the

primordial and the reverberations of the subconscious, within the grooves of

remarkable songs like ‘Dizzy' and ‘Crazy Blue'. Alex's plangent vocals floated and

surged amidst exquisite peals of refracted feedback but crucially there was Bass

here, lugubrious and funky and full of dread, sonic pleasure and sonic disturbance

crushed together to make music with a center so deep it felt subcutaneous, music

constructed from both the accidental and the deliberate, generous enough to dance

with both serendipity and chaos. ‘sixty nine' remains - especially in this remastered

iteration - ravishing, revolutionary.

The final part of this ‘A.R. Kive' contains 1989's astonishing double-LP ‘i' which

followed up on ‘sixty nine's promise and saw the duo fully unleash their experimental

pop sensibilities over 26 tracks, plunging the A.R. Kane sound into a dazzlingly

kaleidoscopic vision of pop experiment and play. Suffused with new digital

technologies and combining searingly sweet and danceable pop with perhaps the

duo's strangest and boundary-pushing compositions, the album did exactly what a

great double-set should do - indulge the artists sprawling pursuit of their own

imaginations but always with a concision and an ear for those moments where pop

both transcends and toys with the listeners expectations. Jason Ankeny has noted

that “In retrospect, ‘i' now seems like a crystal ball prophesying virtually every major

musical development of the 1990s; from the shimmering techno of ‘A Love from

Outer Space' to the liquid dub of ‘What's All This Then?', from the alien drone-pop of

‘Conundrum' to the sinister shoegazer miasma of ‘Supervixens' — it's all here, an

underground road map for countless bands to follow.” Perhaps the most

overwhelmingly all-encompassing transmission from A.R. Kane, ‘i' bookended a

three year period in which the duo had made some of the most prophetic and

revelatory music of the entire decade.

After ‘i' the duo's output became more sporadic with Tambala and Ayuli moving in

different directions both geographically and musically, with only 1994's ‘New Clear

Child' a crystalline re-fraction of future and past echoes of jazz, folk and soul, before

the duo went their separate ways. Since then, A.R. Kane's music has endured, not

thanks to the usual sepia'd false memories that seem to maintain interest in so much

of the musical past, but because those who hear A.R. Kane music and are changed

irrevocably, have to share that universe which A.R. Kane opened up, with anyone

else who will listen. Far more than other lauded documents of the late 80s it still

sounds astonishingly fresh, astonishingly livid and vivid and necessary and NOW.