People talk a lot about how it's easier to be an "experimental" band in the 21st-century. Like most rhetoric about the way the web changed music, that's not quite so true for everyone all the time. But the story of British avant-rock band Disco Inferno certainly proves how hard it could be to try something new in the days before the internet allowed you to get your music out to a worldwide audience without the cost, financial and otherwise, of widespread touring, album production, and distribution-- all that supposedly 20th-century baggage.
Between roughly 1991 and 1996, Disco Inferno wrote two albums and five EPs that comprised some of the most forward-thinking rock of an era when rock bands were constantly trying to one-up each other in pushing the music into the future. Yet it wasn't until the 21st century that DI finally found the devoted audience they deserved. In a very real way, we can thank message-board word-of-mouth, blog bootlegging, and the work of a few evangelical fans for The Five EPs, a long-rumored legal collection of the cream of DI's output.
It seems hard to argue now, given how widely loved they are, that DI's music is too out-there, too much to process, too difficult to reach a large listenership. Perhaps the grind-- press indifference, label mismanagement, trying to build a fanbase one low-paying and sparsely attended gig at a time-- proved to be too much. Whatever the reason for DI's dissolving, their 21st-century rescue from obscurity is cause for celebration, and so is The Five EPs, a record that should be heard by anyone with an interest in those rare times when rock attempts brashly to chart new sonic territory.
So what was so experimental, so forward-thinking about DI? Well, they were a rock band who used digital samplers, inspired by the hip-hop and rave wizards making jigsaw-puzzle pop with Akais and bottom-shelf PCs at the turn of the 90s. "Rock plus samples" might have been a novel hook at the time, but not quite unheard of. (Certain industrial acts beat DI to the punch there, for one thing.) And it probably seems so common as to be unremarkable now, when almost every band packs a laptop when going on tour. What made DI so exciting is what they did with those samplers, which sounds as singular now as it did then.
Singular, but not wholly alien. True, The Five EPs can occasionally get pretty abstract. Easily the album's most difficult but oddly inspired nine minutes, "From the Devil to the Deep Blue Sea" takes samples of breaking glass and fashions them into something halfway between a Steve Reich-like percussion piece and someone "improvising" with a window and a hammer. But for the most part, these 15 tracks aren't "soundscapes." DI were still very much a songwriter's band, even after switching allegiance from power chords to 1s and 0s.
The rhythm section of Rob Whatley and Paul Wilmott, the band's perpetually underrated foundational element, could still lay down a driving groove learned from years of listening to Joy Division records. Frontman Ian Crause could unfurl sparkling melodies, gleaned from masters like Vini Reilly, that actually seemed to issue from a guitar you could pick up at your local music shop. And Crause's lyrics (more about these in a bit) were among the most impassioned but clear-eyed of the 90s. But after accelerating their standard-issue, garage-band gear with the latest in musical tech, DI replaced riffs with children's jumprope chants or old-time radio show chatter or trilling birdsong, and drums with fireworks popping in mid-air or splashing water or the crunch of hard-packed snow.
Sometimes DI's use of samples feels like thrilling punctuation to what might otherwise be sparkling indie pop or moody post-punk songs, using natural sounds or the noise of urban life the way other bands might throw in a James Brown drum fill or a quote from an old movie. But more often they stripped away everything but a suggestive bass pulse or ripple of guitar. Then they built whole tracks, layer by layer, from those sampled sounds, textures, and noises that seemed like they couldn't be coming from a guitar, bass, or drums. Yet they were. That tension between tradition and future shock means there are moments here that may remind you of something you've heard before. But there are many, many more when you'll wonder why more bands didn't follow DI's lead and make "guitar" music that could actually, truly sound like gale-force winds, or a multi-car crash, or a trip to the dark side of the moon.
At their best, DI rendered a familiar template-- the kind of rock songs once released by Factory Records or Rough Trade-- once again unpredictable and vital. It's probably no accident that they drew the attention of Rough Trade itself toward the end of their career, as torchbearers for the label's visionary spirit. They didn't trash the idea of rock songs in favor of the new genres blooming all around them at the time. They kept rock songs alive by proving you could still write them even after you stripped away just about every familiar element.
That rebuilt-from-unfamiliar-bits approach had the potential to leave accessibility far behind, but DI's music could also have a playfulness about the possibility of alienating people. "D.I. Go Pop", from the third of the EPs, plays like a tape of a three-chord punk pisstake that's being sped up and slowed down by a band that's sick to death of punk rock, until the whole track becomes a see-sawing smear of digital distortion. Unlike the 1994 album of the same name, which is undeniably DI's most willfully chaotic and deeply sad record, "D.I. Goes Pop" has some of the same cheek of the Beta Band, who crafted a much smoother rock-meets-DJ-cut-up aesthetic a few years later, with the same pull between making you laugh and tweaking your nose.
They also had a knack for couching discomforting sentiments in even their most boisterous and agreeable tunes. "It's a Kid's World", which infamously swipes the drums from Iggy Pop's "Lust for Life", imagines what the Children's Television Workshop or the producers of Pee-wee's Playhouse might have done with the materials of glam rock. That booming big beat gets swarmed by ray-gun noises and slidewhistle silliness until it builds a whimsical wall of noise, like a kiddie MBV. Yet it opens with some of the most withering lines in Crause's none-too-sunny catalog: "Mediocrity surrounds you/ People pressing down around you/ There's nowhere else to go but down and out." Things don't get much lighter from there on out, and I don't just mean in this particular ditty.
It's almost too easy to discuss DI as if they were some sort of left-field DJ project. Everyone focuses on the mind-boggling musical invention, and they're not necessarily wrong to do so. But one of the most exciting things about DI's music is the way all-too-human feeling is woven into the futuristic collage through Crause's lyrics. Crause again and again takes a long, hard, unblinking look at his country, his time, but most of all himself, and alternating currents of disillusionment and hope, uncertainty, and possibility run through The Five EPs.
The Five EPs describes a world where an oasis of happiness is a rare thing, the best lack all conviction, experimental indie bands are thwarted by indifferent landlords, the free market's left the working poor up shit creek, people who hope to change things have no idea where to start, and immigrants get beaten on the streets while everyone else politely averts their eyes. "Summer's Last Sound" takes the comforting vocabulary of new-age music-- rushing water, birdsong-- and darkens it with mentions of "mass graves" and "broken windows" and "foreigners [getting] hushed-up trials," all while the bulk of Englanders go on about their late-summer fun, oblivious. It's as beautiful and immersive as anything to come out of shoegaze or the ambient house that was being made at the same time, but it also suggests that chilling out is a luxury for those who are lucky enough to be able to avoid the headlines.
I don't want to give the impression that this is a wholly bleak record, though a lot of it can be emotionally hard-going. It's not as if a pervasive unease and sorrow hangs over The Five EPs. There are moments of guarded-if-not-great joy, too. If DI's sound suggests three men endlessly thrilled by the way digital technology could extend and reshape rock, emotionally as much as sonically, then that sense of possibility has to leak into the lyrics and the mood occasionally. "There's so much pessimism in the world it's frightening," Crause sing-songs on "The Atheist's Burden", one of several songs that suggests the past is a country suffocated by mistakes but the future might still have a place for realists, if not cynics.
If the band was wholly without hope, why would they have bothered to push themselves so hard on these records? If disillusionment finally won out, the band is ultimately entitled to its personal reasons for packing it in. Because at least they gave us the records, and The Five EPs, along with DI's last two albums, remain as light and dense, as dizzying and inspiring, as when they were recorded. And hopefully now they'll be heard by many more than they were at the time.
