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Of all the bands that Marcus and Mica Acher are in, the Tied & Tickled Trio are probably the ensemble with the comparitively most releases who do the least amount of globetrotting. The primary purpose of this release is the hour-long live concert for Observing Systems, filmed in April of 2004, but the bonus material of music videos, live TV appearances, and a CD of unreleased material makes for a fantastic package that will please nearly every fan.
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LTM
Section 25 were always a difficult proposition, because they were
really two bands. First, there was the late-1970s incarnation typified
by the debut album Always Now,
produced by Martin Hannett. At this phase of the band's career, the
group wore the Factory uniform through and through, pumping out bleak,
claustrophobic noise-rock owing a tremendous debt to Joy Division. This
version of Section 25 has not aged well at all, and only record
collectors and Factory fetishists actually like the music. The other
Section 25 began around 1983-4, after some personnel shifts and a
complete 180-degree change in musical strategies. Instead of
sour-faced, doomy boredom, the band embraced keyboard programming,
synthesizers and the Roland 303, producing excellent, influential early
techno that has held up surprisingly well through the years. For those
who enjoy charting the connections between the proto-electro of
Detroit/Chicago and the more stiff, angular white-boy dance and funk of
the early 1980s Manchester scene, Section 25 are ground zero. This DVD
contains both incarnations of the band, but leans heavily on the latter
phase of their chronology, which is more than fine by me. The DVD
begins with a nine-song set captured at London's ICA in the summer of
1980, and it's predictably faceless and largely uninteresting. Then
there is a set of clips from various venues dating from 1981 to 1984,
and things start to get interesting. A promotional video for "Looking
From A Hilltop" is suitably retro and quite a lot of fun, even though
the band is just miming to the recorded version of the song. The best
material comes from two shows dating from 1985, one at Chicago's Metro
Club and another at Prince's First Avenue club in Minneapolis. Section
25 is at the height of their powers here, unleashing addictively
futuristic proto-acid techno with dual live drumming, breathy vocals,
dramatic keyboard melodies and a galaxy of weird sound effects. Even at
this stage, however, Section 25 were still performing more
rock-oriented material, though it has now been retrofitted with banks
of synthesizers, Human League-style. The video and sound quality varies
wildly across the disc, but most of the best performances are watchable
and enjoyable. At over two hours, this is a generous package and a
must-have for fans of this nascent period of techno.

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Another archival DVD package from LTM, unofficial torchbearers for the marginal artists on the Factory Records roster, this one collects two performances by Glawswegians The Wake.
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Section 25 were always a difficult proposition, because they were
really two bands. First, there was the late-1970s incarnation typified
by the debut album Always Now,
produced by Martin Hannett. At this phase of the band's career, the
group wore the Factory uniform through and through, pumping out bleak,
claustrophobic noise-rock owing a tremendous debt to Joy Division.
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Soleilmoon
Soleilmoon's new DVD release of 1998's Live at La Luna
VHS adds absolutely nothing to the original release, sharing the same
set list and running time, and boasting absolutely zero extras. Most
disappointingly, the DVD does not even have chapter stops, making it
impossible to cue forward or back at anything more than double speed.
Would it have killed Soleilmoon to put some chapter stops between
songs?

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Mute
To round out their ongoing series of Cabaret Voltaire reissues, Mute has released Doublevision Present Cabaret Voltaire
on DVD. Originally issued through Factory in 1984, this DVD is
identical to the original VHS release: the same 14 videos in the exact
same sequence. It's a shame they couldn't find something extra to slap
onto the digital version, but it's still a welcome reissue for those
who have no patience for the deterioration of their VHS collection.
Doublevision was a communications company founded by Kirk, Mallinder
and Paul Smith in 1982, with the express purpose of releasing
music-based video for an affordable price, eventually transforming it
into one of the first explicitly audiovisual record labels. This is not
surprising for Cab Volt, who were always two steps ahead of their
contemporaries, it seems. For these 14 videos, Cabaret Voltaire
utilized nascent video editing technology, splicing together television
clips, performance videos and archival film footage, gluing it all
together with low-tech early video effects. The interesting thing about
watching these videos in 2004 is that the primitive video techniques,
which probably seemed piss-poor at the time of their release, now play
into the current avant-garde video art obsession with early 1980's low
budget pirate video aesthetic. 20 years on, this collection of random
video cut-ups and ugly, jagged editing techniques seems positively
vanguard. The tracks presented are from the finest period Cabaret
Voltaire: "Diskono," "Obsession," "Nag Nag Nag," and "Seconds Too
Late," among others, are represented. Televised nature and anthropology
programs are intercut with images of war, death and destruction from
new broadcasts. Clips of Leni Riefenstahl films and videos or surgeries
rub shoulders with grainy, decayed video images superimposed over each
other in a weird Burroughsian collage of overlapping transmissions,
giving rise to a mysterious "third mind" of accidental coincidences and
synchronicities. As experimental video, it all works amazingly well. As
music videos, the effect is somewhat more muted, as the edits often out
of sync with the beat structures of the music. Still, it would be hard
to imagine a more appropriate visual accompaniment to Cabaret
Voltaire's abrasive, subterranean, low-fidelity electronic music.

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