Punk rock
Punk rock is a rock music genre that developed in the mid-1970s in the United States, United Kingdom and Australia. Rooted in 1960s garage rock and other forms of what is now known as "proto-punk" music, punk rock bands rejected perceived excesses of mainstream 1970s rock, they produced short, fast-paced songs with hard-edged melodies and singing styles, stripped-down instrumentation, political, anti-establishment lyrics. Punk embraces a DIY ethic; the term "punk rock" was first used by certain American rock critics in the early 1970s to describe 1960s garage bands and subsequent acts perceived as stylistic inheritors. Between 1974 and 1976 the movement now called. By late 1976, bands such as Television and the Ramones in New York City, the Sex Pistols, the Clash, the Damned in London, the Saints in Brisbane were recognized as forming its vanguard; as 1977 approached, punk became a major and controversial cultural phenomenon in the UK. It spawned a punk subculture expressing youthful rebellion through distinctive styles of clothing and adornment and a variety of anti-authoritarian ideologies.
In 1977 the influence of the music and subculture became more pervasive. It took root in a wide range of local scenes that rejected affiliation with the mainstream. In the late 1970s, punk experienced a second wave as new acts that were not active during its formative years adopted the style. By the early 1980s, faster and more aggressive subgenres such as hardcore punk, street punk and anarcho-punk became the predominant modes of punk rock. Musicians identifying with or inspired by punk pursued other musical directions, giving rise to spinoffs such as post-punk, new wave, indie pop, alternative rock, noise rock. By the 1990s, punk re-emerged in the mainstream with the success of punk rock and pop punk bands such as Green Day, The Offspring, Blink-182; the first wave of punk rock was "aggressively modern" and differed from what came before. According to Ramones drummer Tommy Ramone, "In its initial form, a lot of stuff was innovative and exciting. What happens is that people who could not hold a candle to the likes of Hendrix started noodling away.
Soon you had endless solos. By 1973, I knew that what was needed was some pure, stripped down, no bullshit rock'n' roll." John Holmstrom, founding editor of Punk magazine, recalls feeling "punk rock had to come along because the rock scene had become so tame that like Billy Joel and Simon and Garfunkel were being called rock and roll, when to me and other fans and roll meant this wild and rebellious music." In critic Robert Christgau's description, "It was a subculture that scornfully rejected the political idealism and Californian flower-power silliness of hippie myth." Technical accessibility and a Do. UK pub rock from 1972-1975 contributed to the emergence of punk rock by developing a network of small venues, such as pubs, where non-mainstream bands could play. Pub rock introduced the idea of independent record labels, such as Stiff Records, which put out basic, low-cost records. Pub rock bands put out small pressings of their records. In the early days of punk rock, this DIY ethic stood in marked contrast to what those in the scene regarded as the ostentatious musical effects and technological demands of many mainstream rock bands.
Musical virtuosity was looked on with suspicion. According to Holmstrom, punk rock was "rock and roll by people who didn't have many skills as musicians but still felt the need to express themselves through music". In December 1976, the English fanzine Sideburns published a now-famous illustration of three chords, captioned "This is a chord, this is another, this is a third. Now form a band"; the title of a 1980 single by the New York punk band Stimulators, "Loud Fast Rules!", inscribed a catchphrase for punk's basic musical approach. Some of British punk rock's leading figures made a show of rejecting not only contemporary mainstream rock and the broader culture it was associated with, but their own most celebrated music predecessors: "No Elvis, Beatles or the Rolling Stones in 1977", declared the Clash song "1977"; the previous year, when the punk rock revolution began in Great Britain, was to be both a musical and a cultural "Year Zero". As nostalgia was discarded, many in the scene adopted a nihilistic attitude summed up by the Sex Pistols slogan "No Future".
While "self-imposed alienation" was common among "drunk punks" and "gutter punks", there was always a tension between their nihilistic outlook and the "radical leftist utopianism" of bands such as Crass, who found positive, liberating meaning in the movement. As a Clash associate describes singer Joe Strummer's outlook, "Punk rock is meant to be our freedom. We're meant to be able to do what we want to do."The issue of authenticity is important in the punk subculture—the pejorative term "poseur" is applied to those who associate with punk and adopt its stylistic attributes but are deemed not to share or understand the underlying values and philosophy. Scholar Daniel S. Traber argues that "attaining authenticity in the punk identity can be difficult".
Synthesizer
A synthesizer or synthesiser is an electronic musical instrument that generates audio signals that may be converted to sound. Synthesizers may imitate traditional musical instruments such as piano, vocals, or natural sounds such as ocean waves, they are played with a musical keyboard, but they can be controlled via a variety of other devices, including music sequencers, instrument controllers, guitar synthesizers, wind controllers, electronic drums. Synthesizers without built-in controllers are called sound modules, are controlled via USB, MIDI or CV/gate using a controller device a MIDI keyboard or other controller. Synthesizers use various methods to generate electronic signals. Among the most popular waveform synthesis techniques are subtractive synthesis, additive synthesis, wavetable synthesis, frequency modulation synthesis, phase distortion synthesis, physical modeling synthesis and sample-based synthesis. Synthesizers were first used in pop music in the 1960s. In the late 1970s, synths were used in progressive rock and disco.
In the 1980s, the invention of the inexpensive Yamaha DX7 synth made digital synthesizers available. 1980s pop and dance music made heavy use of synthesizers. In the 2010s, synthesizers are used in many genres, such as pop, hip hop, metal and dance. Contemporary classical music composers from the 20th and 21st century write compositions for synthesizer; the beginnings of the synthesizer are difficult to trace, as it is difficult to draw a distinction between synthesizers and some early electric or electronic musical instruments. One of the earliest electric musical instruments, the Musical Telegraph, was invented in 1876 by American electrical engineer Elisha Gray, he accidentally discovered the sound generation from a self-vibrating electromechanical circuit, invented a basic single-note oscillator. This instrument used steel reeds with oscillations created by electromagnets transmitted over a telegraph line. Gray built a simple loudspeaker device into models, consisting of a vibrating diaphragm in a magnetic field, to make the oscillator audible.
This instrument was a remote electromechanical musical instrument that used telegraphy and electric buzzers that generated fixed timbre sound. Though it lacked an arbitrary sound-synthesis function, some have erroneously called it the first synthesizer. In 1897 Thaddeus Cahill was granted his first patent for an electronic musical instrument, which by 1901 he had developed into the Telharmonium capable of additive synthesis. Cahill's business was unsuccessful for various reasons, but similar and more compact instruments were subsequently developed, such as electronic and tonewheel organs including the Hammond organ, invented in 1935. In 1906, American engineer Lee de Forest invented the first amplifying vacuum tube, the Audion whose amplification of weak audio signals contributed to advances in sound recording and film, the invention of early electronic musical instruments including the theremin, the ondes martenot, the trautonium. Most of these early instruments used heterodyne circuits to produce audio frequencies, were limited in their synthesis capabilities.
The ondes martenot and trautonium were continuously developed for several decades developing qualities similar to synthesizers. In the 1920s, Arseny Avraamov developed various systems of graphic sonic art, similar graphical sound and tonewheel systems were developed around the world. In 1938, USSR engineer Yevgeny Murzin designed a compositional tool called ANS, one of the earliest real-time additive synthesizers using optoelectronics. Although his idea of reconstructing a sound from its visible image was simple, the instrument was not realized until 20 years in 1958, as Murzin was, "an engineer who worked in areas unrelated to music". In the 1930s and 1940s, the basic elements required for the modern analog subtractive synthesizers — electronic oscillators, audio filters, envelope controllers, various effects units — had appeared and were utilized in several electronic instruments; the earliest polyphonic synthesizers were developed in the United States. The Warbo Formant Orgel developed by Harald Bode in Germany in 1937, was a four-voice key-assignment keyboard with two formant filters and a dynamic envelope controller.
The Hammond Novachord released in 1939, was an electronic keyboard that used twelve sets of top-octave oscillators with octave dividers to generate sound, with vibrato, a resonator filter bank and a dynamic envelope controller. During the three years that Hammond manufactured this model, 1,069 units were shipped, but production was discontinued at the start of World War II. Both instruments were the forerunners of the electronic organs and polyphonic synthesizers. In the 1940s and 1950s, before the popularization of electronic organs and the introductions of combo organs, manufacturers developed various portable monophonic electronic instruments with small keyboards; these small instruments consisted of an electronic oscillator, vibrato effect, passive filters. Most were designed for conventional ensembles, rather than as experimental instruments for electronic music studios, but contributed to the evolution of modern synthesizers; these instruments include the Solovox, Multimonica and Clavioline.
In the late 1940s, Canadian inventor and composer, Hugh Le Caine invented the Electronic Sackbut, a voltage-controlled electronic musical instrument that provided the earliest real-time control of three aspects of sound —corresponding to today's touch-sensitive keyboard and modulation controllers. The controllers were impl
Vice (magazine)
Vice is a Canadian-American print magazine focused on arts and news topics. Founded in 1994 in Montreal, Canada, the magazine's founders launched Vice Media, which consists of divisions including the magazine as well as a website, broadcast news unit, a film production company, a record label, a publishing imprint; as of February 2018, the magazine's editor-in-chief is Ellis Jones. Founded by Suroosh Alvi, Gavin McInnes and Shane Smith, the magazine was launched in 1994 as the Voice of Montreal with government funding, the intention of the founders was to provide work and a community service; when the editors sought to dissolve their commitments with the original publisher Alix Laurent, they bought him out and changed the name to Vice in 1996. Richard Szalwinski, a Canadian software millionaire, acquired the magazine and relocated the operation to New York City in the late 1990s. Following the relocation, the magazine developed a reputation for provocative and politically incorrect content. Under Szalwinski's ownership, a few retail stores were opened in New York City and customers could purchase fashion items that were advertised in the magazine.
However, due to the end of the dot-com bubble, the three founders regained ownership of the Vice brand, followed by the closure of the stores. The British edition of Vice was launched in 2002 and Andy Capper was its first editor. Capper explained in an interview shortly after the UK debut that the publication's remit was to cover "the things we're meant to be ashamed of", articles were published on topics such as bukkake and bodily functions. By the end of 2007, 13 foreign editions of Vice magazine were published, the Vice independent record label was functional, the online video channel VBS.com had 184,000 unique viewers from the U. S. during the month of August. The media company was still based in New York City, but the magazine began featuring articles on topics that were considered more serious, such as armed conflict in Iraq, than previous content. Alvi explained to The New York Times in November 2007: "The world is much bigger than the Lower East Side and the East Village."McInnes left the publication in 2008, citing "creative differences" as the primary issue.
In an email communication dated 23 January, McInnes explained: "I no longer have anything to do with Vice or VBS or DOs & DON'Ts or any of that. It's a long story but we've all agreed to leave it at'creative differences,' so please don't ask me about it."At the commencement of 2012, an article in Forbes magazine referred to the Vice company as "Vice Media", but the precise time when this title development occurred is not public knowledge. Vice acquired the fashion magazine i-D in December 2012 and, by February 2013, Vice produced 24 global editions of the magazine, with a global circulation of 1,147,000. By this stage, Alex Miller had replaced Capper as the editor-in-chief of the UK edition. Furthermore, Vice consisted of 800 worldwide employees, including 100 in London, around 3,500 freelancers produced content for the company. Shane Smith – Co-Founder Suroosh Alvi – Co-Founder Ellis Jones – Editor-in-Chief Vice magazine includes the work of journalists, fiction writers, graphic artists and cartoonists, photographers.
Both Vice's online and magazine content has shifted from dealing with independent arts and pop cultural matters to covering more serious news topics. Due to the large array of contributors and the fact that writers will only submit a small number of articles with the publication, Vice's content varies and its political and cultural stance is unclear or contradictory. Articles on the site feature a range of subjects things not covered as by mainstream media; the magazine's editors have championed the immersionist school of journalism, passed to other properties of Vice Media such as the documentary television show Balls Deep on the Viceland Channel. This style of journalism is regarded as something of a DIY antithesis to the methods practiced by mainstream news outlets, has published an entire issue of articles written in accordance with this ethos. Entire issues of the magazine have been dedicated to the concerns of Iraqi people, Native Americans, Russian people, people with mental disorders, people with mental disabilities.
Vice publishes an annual guide for students in the United Kingdom. In 2007, a Vice announcement was published on the Internet: After umpteen years of putting out what amounted to a reference book every month, we started to get bored with it. Besides, too many other magazines have started doing their own lame take on themes. So we're going to do some issues, starting now, that have. In a March 2008 interview with The Guardian, Smith was asked about the magazine's political allegiances and he stated, "We're not trying to say anything politically in a paradigmatic left/right way... We don't do. Are my politics Democrat or Republican? I think, and it doesn't matter anyway. Money runs America, he has stated: I grew up being a socialist and I have problems with it because I grew up in Canada I've spent a lot of time in Scandinavia, where I believe countries legislate out creativity. They cut off the tall trees. Everyone's a C-minus. I came to America from Canada because Canada is stultifyingly boring and hypocritical.
Thanks, Canada. Vice founded its website as Viceland.com in 1996, as Vice.com was owned. In 2007, it started VBS.tv as a domain, which prioritized videos over print, had a number of shows for free such as The Vice Guide to Travel. In 2011, Viceland.com and VBS.tv were combined into Vice.com
New rave
New rave is a genre of music described by The Guardian as "an in-yer-face, DIY disco riposte to the sensitive indie rock touted by bands like Bloc Party." It is most applied to a British-based music scene between 2005 and late 2008 of fast-paced electronica-influenced indie music that celebrated the late 1980s Madchester and rave scenes through the use of neon colours and using the term'raving' to refer to going nightclubbing. The British music magazine NME is responsible for popularising the term throughout 2006 and 2007, until claiming in mid-2008 reviews that "New Rave is over"; the genre has connotations of being a "new" version of music heard at raves, as well as being a play on the term "new wave". The aesthetics of the new rave scene are similar to those of the original rave scene, being centred on psychedelic visual effects. Glowsticks and other lights are common, followers of the scene dress in bright and fluorescent colored clothing. New Rave has been defined more by the image and aesthetic of its bands and supporters, than by its music.
Trash Fashion lead singer, Jet Storm, Electro heroine Uffie, have been described as the scene's own pin ups. The use of electronic instruments, a musical fusion of rock and dance styles, a particular anarchic, trashy energy are key elements. Klaxons, Trash Fashion, New Young Pony Club, Hadouken!, Late of the Pier and Shitdisco are accepted as the main exponents of the genre. The term was coined by Angular Records founder Joe Daniel and was featured on the "An Angular Disco" flyer used to advertise Klaxons's first gig. Klaxons declared they were not new rave, describing it as a "joke that's got out of hand" and that the term was ironic, not serious. In reaction to the media overkill of the "genre", Klaxons banned the use of glowsticks at their gigs in April 2007, saying that "We kept getting asked to explain it; the whole idea of new rave was to take the piss out of the media by making them talk about something that didn't exist, just for our own amusement. And they'd say, I appreciate that, but can you tell me more about new rave?"
Los Angeles Times critic Margaret Wappler comments that the "minimalist dance-punk of LCD Soundsystem, the analog classicism of Simian Mobile Disco, the fanatical electro-thrash of Justice, the international amalgam of M. I. A; the agitated funk of!!! and the art-schooled disco-sleaze of Cansei de Ser Sexy" contributed to the thriving'new rave' dance scene, which led to a rediscovery of indie rockers, a critical and intellectual revolution in dance music. The sound of the original rave style is discernible in the majority of bands referred to as new rave. Bands such as The Sunshine Underground, Cansei de Ser Sexy and Hot Chip are labeled as new rave due to their large following by fans of the genre. M. I. A. has been described as "a new raver before it was old." Several have publicly declared. Stylist Carri Mundane described saying New Rave was "Vacant in retro. It’s just a marketing machine.... I guess it was a fun time but I’m more excited about what happens now; the next level - the next generation.
There’s a mood of neo-spiritualism and futurism that excites me."The new rave scene can be viewed as a media construct propounded by the NME and TRAX, with other publications treating the subject as a joke. The belief that many of the bands associated with new rave can more appropriately be associated with the genre of dance-punk has given credence to such suggestions, although differences between both genres are said to be minor and more down to aesthetics. Critic John Harris has stated in The Guardian newspaper that the genre is nothing more than a "piss-poor supposed'youthquake'" that will soon go out of fashion in the same way as rave. "Rave Dog" - a documentary about Trash Fashion and new rave on the Channel 4 programme FourDocs
Post-punk
Post-punk is a broad type of rock music that emerged from the punk movement of the 1970s, in which artists departed from the simplicity and traditionalism of punk rock to adopt a variety of avant-garde sensibilities and diverse influences. Inspired by punk's energy and DIY ethic but determined to break from rock cliches, artists experimented with sources including electronic music and black styles like dub, free jazz, disco. Communities that produced independent record labels, visual art, multimedia performances and fanzines developed around these pioneering musical scenes, which coalesced in cities such as London, New York, Melbourne and San Francisco; the early post-punk vanguard was represented by groups such as Siouxsie and the Banshees, Public Image Ltd, the Pop Group, Cabaret Voltaire, Pere Ubu, Gang of Four, Joy Division, Talking Heads, Throbbing Gristle, the Slits, the Cure, the Fall, Au Pairs. The movement was related to the development of ancillary genres such as gothic rock, neo-psychedelia, no wave, industrial music.
By the mid-1980s, post-punk had dissipated while providing the impetus for the New Pop movement as well much subsequent alternative and independent music. Post-punk is a diverse genre. Called "new musick", the terms were first used by various writers in the late 1970s to describe groups moving beyond punk's garage rock template and into disparate areas. Sounds writer Jon Savage used "post-punk" in early 1978. NME writer Paul Morley stated that he had "possibly" invented the term himself. At the time, there was a feeling of renewed excitement regarding what the word would entail, with Sounds publishing numerous preemptive editorials on new musick. Towards the end of the decade, some journalists used "art punk" as a pejorative for garage rock-derived acts deemed too sophisticated and out of step with punk's dogma. Before the early 1980s, many groups now categorized as "post-punk" were subsumed under the broad umbrella of "new wave", with the terms being deployed interchangeably. "Post-punk" became differentiated from "new wave".
Nicholas Lezard described the term "post-punk" as "so multifarious that only the broadest use... is possible". Subsequent discourse has failed to clarify whether contemporary music journals and fanzines conventionally understood "post-punk" the way that it was discussed in years. Music historian Clinton Heylin places the "true starting-point for English post-punk" somewhere between August 1977 and May 1978, with the arrival of guitarist John McKay in Siouxsie and the Banshees in July 1977, Magazine's first album, Wire's new musical direction in 1978 and the formation of Public Image Ltd. Simon Reynolds' 2005 book Rip It Up and Start Again is referenced as post-punk doctrine, although he has stated that the book only covers aspects of post-punk that he had a personal inclination toward. Wilkinson characterized Reynolds' readings as "apparent revisionism and'rebranding'". Author/musician Alex Ogg criticized: "The problem is not with what Reynolds left out of Rip It Up... but, that too much was left in".
Ogg suggested that post-punk pertains to a set of artistic sensibilities and approaches rather than any unifying style, disputed the accuracy of the term's chronological prefix "post", as various groups labeled "post-punk" predate the punk rock movement. Reynolds defined the post-punk era as occurring between 1978 and 1984, he advocated that post-punk be conceived as "less a genre of music than a space of possibility", suggesting that "what unites all this activity is a set of open-ended imperatives: innovation. AllMusic employs "post-punk" to denote "a more adventurous and arty form of punk". Many post-punk artists were inspired by punk's DIY ethic and energy, but became disillusioned with the style and movement, feeling that it had fallen into a commercial formula, rock convention, self-parody, they repudiated its populist claims to accessibility and raw simplicity, instead of seeing an opportunity to break with musical tradition, subvert commonplaces and challenge audiences. Artists moved beyond punk's focus on the concerns of a white, working-class population and abandoned its continued reliance on established rock and roll tropes, such as three-chord progressions and Chuck Berry-based guitar riffs.
These artists instead defined punk as "an imperative to constant change", believing that "radical content demands radical form". Though the music varied between regions and artists, the post-punk movement has been characterized by its "conceptual assault" on rock conventions and rejection of aesthetics perceived of as traditionalist, hegemonic or rockist in favor of experimentation with production techniques and non-rock musical styles such as dub, electronic music, noise, free jazz, world music, the avant-garde; some previous musical styles served as touchstones for the movement, including particular brands of krautrock, art rock, art pop and other music from the 1960s. Artists once again approached the studio as an instrument, using new recording methods and pursuing novel sonic territories. Author Matthew Bannister wrote that post-punk artists rejected the high cultural references of 1960s rock artists like the Beatles and Bob Dylan as well as paradigms that defined "rock as progressive, as art, as'sterile' studio perfectionism... by adopting an avant-garde aesth
Kraftwerk
Kraftwerk is a German band formed in Düsseldorf in 1970 by Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider. Considered to be innovators and pioneers of electronic music, they were among the first successful acts to popularize the genre; the group began as part of West Germany's experimental krautrock scene in the early 1970s before embracing electronic instrumentation, including synthesizers, drum machines and home-made experimental musical instruments. On commercially successful albums such as Autobahn, Trans-Europe Express, The Man-Machine, Kraftwerk developed a self-described "robot pop" style that combined electronic music with pop melodies, sparse arrangements, repetitive rhythms, while adopting a stylized image including matching suits; the band’s work would exert a lasting and profound influence across many genres of modern music, including synthpop, hip hop, post-punk, techno and club music, inspired a wide and diverse range of artists. According to The Observer, "no other band since the Beatles has given so much to pop culture."
Following the release of Electric Café, member Wolfgang Flür left the group in 1987. Founding member Schneider departed in 2008. In 2014, the Recording Academy honored Kraftwerk with a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, their latest album 3-D The Catalogue was released in 2017. As of 2019, the remaining members of the band continue to tour. Florian Schneider and Ralf Hütter met as students at the Robert Schumann Hochschule in Düsseldorf in the late 1960s, participating in the German experimental music and art scene of the time, which the Melody Maker jokingly dubbed "krautrock", they joined a quintet known as Organisation, which released one album, Tone Float in 1969, issued on RCA Records in the UK, split shortly thereafter. Schneider became interested in synthesizers deciding to acquire one in 1970. While visiting an exhibition in their hometown about visual artists Gilbert and George, they saw "two men wearing suits and ties, claiming to bring art into everyday life; the same year, Hütter and Schneider start bringing everyday life into art and form Kraftwerk".
Early Kraftwerk line-ups from 1970 to 1974 fluctuated, as Hütter and Schneider worked with around a half-dozen other musicians during the preparations for and the recording of three albums and sporadic live appearances, most notably guitarist Michael Rother and drummer Klaus Dinger, who left to form Neu! The only constant figure in these line-ups was Schneider, whose main instrument at the time was the flute. Hütter, who left the band for eight months, keyboards, their first three albums were free-form experimental rock without the pop hooks or the more disciplined song structure of work. Kraftwerk, released in 1970, Kraftwerk 2, released in 1972, were exploratory musical improvisations played on a variety of traditional instruments including guitar, drums, organ and violin. Post-production modifications to these recordings were used to distort the sound of the instruments audio-tape manipulation and multiple dubbings of one instrument on the same track. Both albums are purely instrumental. Live performances from 1972 to 1973 were made as a duo, using a simple beat-box-type electronic drum machine, with preset rhythms taken from an electric organ.
These shows were in Germany, with occasional shows in France. In 1973, Wolfgang Flür joined the group for rehearsals, the unit performed as a trio on the television show Aspekte for German television network ZDF. With Ralf und Florian, released in 1973, Kraftwerk began to move closer to its now classic sound, relying more on synthesizers and drum machines. Although entirely instrumental, the album marks Kraftwerk's first use of the vocoder, which would in time become one of its musical signatures. According to English music journalist Simon Reynolds, Kraftwerk was influenced by what he called the "adrenalized insurgency" of Detroit artists of the late'60s MC5 and the Stooges; the input and influence of producer and engineer Konrad "Conny" Plank was significant in the early years of Kraftwerk. Plank worked with many of the other leading German electronic acts of that time, including members of Can, Neu!, Harmonia. As a result of his work with Kraftwerk, Plank's studio near Cologne became one of the most sought-after studios in the late 1970s.
Plank coproduced the first four Kraftwerk albums. The release of Autobahn in 1974 saw Kraftwerk moving away from the sound of its first three albums. Hütter and Schneider had invested in newer technology such as the Minimoog and the EMS Synthi AKS, helping give Kraftwerk a newer, "disciplined" sound. Autobahn would be the last album that Conny Plank would engineer. After the commercial success of Autobahn in the US, where it peaked at number 5 in the Billboard top 200, Hütter and Schneider invested in updating their studio, thus lessening their reliance on outside producers. At this time the painter and graphic artist Emil Schult became a regular collaborator, designing artwork, cowriting lyrics, accompanying the group on tour; the year 1975 saw a turning point in Kraftwerk's live shows. With financial support from Phonogram Inc. in the US, they were able to undertake a multi-date tour to promote the Autobahn album, a tour which took them to the US, Canada and the UK for the first time. The tour saw a new, live line-up in the form of a quartet.
Hütter and Schneider continued playing keyboard synthesizers such as the Minimoog and ARP Odyssey, with Schn
Siouxsie and the Banshees
Siouxsie and the Banshees were an English rock band, formed in London in 1976 by vocalist Siouxsie Sioux and bass guitarist Steven Severin. They have been influential, both over their contemporaries and with acts. Mojo rated guitarist John McGeoch in their list of "100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time" for his work on "Spellbound"; the Times cited the group as "one of the most audacious and uncompromising musical adventurers of the post-punk era". Associated with the punk scene, the band evolved to create "a form of post-punk discord full of daring rhythmic and sonic experimentation", their debut album The Scream was released in 1978 to critical acclaim. In 1980, they changed their musical direction and became "almost a different band" with Kaleidoscope, which peaked at number 5 in the UK Albums Chart. With Juju which reached the top 10, they became an influence on the emerging gothic scene. In 1988, the band made a breakthrough in North America with the multifaceted album Peepshow, which received critical praise.
With substantial support from alternative rock radio stations, they achieved a mainstream hit in the US in 1991 with the single "Kiss Them for Me". During their career and the Banshees released 11 studio albums and 30 singles; the band experienced several line-up changes, with Siouxsie and Severin being the only constant members. They disbanded in 1996, with Siouxsie and drummer Budgie continuing to record music as the Creatures, a second band they had formed in the early 1980s. In 2004, Siouxsie began a solo career. Siouxsie Sioux and Steven Severin met at a Roxy Music concert in September 1975, at a time when glam rock had faded and there was nothing new coming through with which they could identify. From February 1976, Siouxsie and some friends began to follow an unsigned band, the Sex Pistols. Journalist Caroline Coon dubbed them the "Bromley Contingent", as most of them came from the Bromley region of South London, a label Severin came to despise. "There was no such thing, it was just a bunch of people drawn together by the way they felt and they looked".
They were all inspired by their uncompromising attitude. When they learned that one of the bands scheduled to play the 100 Club Punk Festival, organised by Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren, were pulling out from the bill at the last minute, Siouxsie suggested that she and Severin play though they had no band name or additional members. Two days the pair appeared at the festival held in London on 20 September 1976. With two borrowed musicians at their side, Marco Pirroni on guitar and John Simon Ritchie on drums, their set consisted of a 20-minute improvisation based on "The Lord's Prayer". While the band intended to split up after the gig, they were asked to play again. Two months Siouxsie and Severin recruited drummer Kenny Morris and guitarist Peter Fenton. After playing several gigs in early 1977, they realised that Fenton did not fit in because he was "a real rock guitarist". John McKay took his place in July, their first live appearance on television took place in November on Manchester's Granada, on Tony Wilson's TV show So It Goes.
They recorded their first John Peel session for BBC radio and appeared on the front cover of UK weekly Sounds magazine the following month. While the band sold out venues in London in early 1978, they still had problems getting the right recording contract that could give them "complete artistic control". Polydor offered this guarantee and signed them in June, their first single, "Hong Kong Garden", featuring a xylophone motif, reached the top 10 in the UK shortly after. A NME review hailed it as "a bright, vivid narrative, something like snapshots from the window of a speeding Japanese train, power charged by the most original, intoxicating guitar playing I heard in a long, long time"; the band released their debut album, The Scream, in November 1978. Nick Kent of NME said of the record: "The band sounds like some unique hybrid of the Velvet Underground mated with much of the ingenuity of Tago Mago-era Can, if any parallel can be drawn". At the end of the article, he added this remark: "Certainly, the traditional three-piece sound has never been used in a more unorthodox fashion with such stunning results".
The Banshees' second album, Join Hands, was released in 1979. In Melody Maker, Jon Savage described "Poppy Day" as "a short, powerful evocation of the Great War graveyards", Record Mirror described the whole record as a dangerous work that "should be heard"; the Banshees embarked on a major tour to promote the album. A few dates into the tour in September, Morris and McKay left an in-store signing after an argument and quit the band. In need of replacements to fulfill tour dates, the Banshees' manager called drummer Budgie with the Slits, asked him to audition. Budgie was hired. Robert Smith of the Cure offered his services in case they could not find a guitarist, so the band held him to it after seeing too many "rock virtuosos"; the tour resumed in September and after the last concert, Smith returned to the Cure. Drummer Budgie became a permanent member, the band entered the studios to record the single "Happy House" with guitarist John McGeoch of Magazine, their third album, released in 1980, saw the Banshees exploring new musical territories with the use of other instruments like synthesizers and drum machines.
The group had a concept of making each song sound different, without regard to whether or not the material could be performed in concert. Melody Maker described the result as "a kaleidoscope of sound and imagery, new forms, a
