“Going to the Threshold of Creation:” The Story and Legacy of A.R. Kane

When talking about artists who had a huge influence on development of indie music, there are several names that come up recurrently. While some legacies are well documented, there are some others who fly under the radar. One name that doesn’t come up as often as it should is A.R. Kane. In this piece, we’ll dive into the band’s career and legacy of influence.

A.R. Kane was a British music duo made up of Alex Ayuli, the son of two Nigerian parents, and Rudy Tambala, born to a Malawian father and English mother. The two met at their East London primary school and were active in music from adolescence. Speaking on their musical upbringings, Tambala recalled:

“Alex was from more of a dub soundsystem background – his brothers were into these reggae soundsystems from East London. I was more from like a soul and jazz-funk background, my older brother was involved in that club scene. So were pretty much immersed in music, and then I guess added to the cocktail was all the pop music of the time: going into the whole punk era and then getting into the more alternative sides of jazz, dub-reggae, or the stuff that John Peel would be playing. That hotchpotch of different musical influences had an effect on us I guess.” 1

A.R. Kane would begin as a band in 1986, spurred by their viewing of a captivating television performance and a lie told by Tambala. They each watched the Cocteau Twins perform on the Channel 4 music show The Tube, and were blown away by the band’s presence and sound. Said Tambala, “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.” 2

After the program ended, the two got on the phone and began talking about making music together. At a party a few days later, Tambala was asked how he knew Ayuli. He lied and said the two played in a band, whose sound he described as “a bit Velvet Underground, a bit Cocteau Twins, a bit Miles Davis, a bit Joni Mitchell”. The woman they spoke with told her friend Derek Birkett, who ran the One Little Indian (now renamed One Little Independent) record label. Intrigued, he asked them for a demo. Not having any songs at the moment, they quickly recorded a demo using a guitar and two cassette players. Birkett loved the demo and wanted to see them play live. Hastily they cobbled together a live band, which included Tambala’s sister, and future recurrent collaborator Maggie on backing vocals, a friend to play drums and another on bass. Recalling the show, Tambala said “”We made this absolutely disgusting noise. Straight after we played, Derek went: ‘You’re shit. Let’s make a record.’ We’d been a band for about two weeks.” 2

When You’re Sad (1986)

The duo then began recording their debut, the When You’re Sad single, which was released in 1986. On the process behind the titular track and the B-side “Haunting”, Tambala explained, “We deliberately removed the ‘human factor’ from the songs production – no Rock-n-Roll riffs, no funky bass, no syncopation – and replaced these with pure sound, layers of feedback and echo, rolling bass, reverb’d, disembodied vocals.” 3

While the distorted guitar textures, and the 60’s pop stylings apparent on the A-side, were not unlike the ramshackle buzz of the many noise pop acts in the UK indie scene, A.R. Kane stood out from the rest in several aspects, one being their Blackness. Tambala recalls the gigs that followed the single’s release, and how the group defied the expectations of the audiences, saying “”They’d see these dreads get up on stage and expected us to play reggae. When they got a wall of feedback, they figured there was a technical problem, and they would leave, but that was the set.” 2

Some members of the press dubbed them a Black version of The Jesus and Mary Chain, whose highly acclaimed debut record Psychocandy was released in November 1985. It is true that “When You’re Sad” shares many common characteristics with the JAMC’s violent noise pop: a repetitive drum beat, shrieking guitars, and a song structure similar to that of 60’s girl groups . Both groups had some common reference points, such as being fans of incredibly influential group The Velvet Underground. But whereas The Jesus and Mary Chain took cues from the snotty punk of The Stooges, the dissonant industrial clamour of Einsturzende Neubaten, and the candy-coated pop of the Shangri-Lahs, A.R. Kane’s main influences were rooted elsewhere. They most definitely weren’t copycats either. In fact, the band hadn’t even heard anything by the JAMC until after “When You’re Sad” was released. In an interview with Simon Reynolds for Melody Maker, they said:

“Since we put out the record, we’ve had loads of people coming up to say, “you should listen to this, but we can’t say we’re impressed by any of these shambling bands. The shambling sound is very trimmed, somehow. All these bands are based in rock ‘n’ roll and the Sixties, whereas our heritage is totally different – jazz and soul and dub, and punky-dub, things like Basement Five. Miles Davis is our main inspiration, but not directly, more in terms of that improvisational attitude.

Reynolds went on to ask, “if Miles is the influence, why pick up guitars to make noise?”, to which he received this response.

“Guitars are cheap and relatively easy to express moods on, whereas horns are fearfully expensive and very slow progress. Plus, you can get really violent on a guitar. We use loads of effects. We both play the guitar, and, live, we compete with each other, which is how the noise thing began. On record, though, noise is only one of the things we’re into.” 4

Lollita (1987)

Given their fascination with noise, a challenge that the duo was running into was the clinical practices of the day’s studio engineers and record producers. Their tendency to hold onto “best” practices and industry standards were at odds with A.R. Kane challenging convictions and stereotypes about what a guitar band ought to be doing. The duo described these challenges in a 1987 interview:

Tambala: “We find the recording process as it stands really stupid—all that technology going to waste. You’ve got to push the studio to its limits. We abuse our amplifiers and equipment to the point where the sounds [we] create are just new. Then the producers come along and put that into a box. We want to smash the box as well.

Ayuli: “That’s the trouble–people get to have too much respect for their machines, they start to worship their tools. You have to abuse them, and take them as far as they’ll go…Our music’s like sculpture–there’s this chaos that we chip away at until there’s this beautiful shape. We love chaos, you can lose yourself in it. That’s why so many people hate chaos and won’t let it in. It’s too vast, you can’t tie it down. Which is why everyone tries to tame it, make a system over it.” 4

The duo were upset with One Little Independent, who had failed to make good on a promise that they could work with producer Adrian Sherwood, so they approached the 4AD record label and inquired about being signed. Derek Birkett thought 4AD was trying to snatch away the band and a heated argument between him and 4AD boss Ivo Watts-Russell ensued. In the end, the duo signed and began work on their next release, which would be the Lollita EP.

The project was an exciting opportunity for the duo, as Cocteau Twins guitar mastermind Robin Guthrie was to produce the release. Guthrie was known for butting heads with producers in the past, and had resolved to self-produce the Cocteau’s music to get the sound he wanted. It had worked, as their unique sound driven by Guthrie’s otherworldly guitar soundscapes and Liz Fraser’s powerful voice belting out undecipherable language has made them one of the most celebrated dream pop and shoegaze-adjacent bands.

Given the duo’s admiration for Guthrie, they trusted him to give them the sound they were looking for. Said Tambala about working with Guthrie,

“[Robin] has a sound and is going to give you that sound and who knows better than you what your songs are about. It was hard to take that but we trusted him wholeheartedly and he was like a genius at the time. He was out there. No one else sounded like him, no one else even knew how to make a song sound the way that he made it sound. This big kind of spacey thing and it was perfect for that song. It had really quite gentle bits and then an explosion of noise and then it could be really quiet, gentle and soft.” 5

The Lollita EP is not just a recreation of the Cocteau Twins sound, but rather an excellent installation of A.R. Kane within the palette of Guthrie’s production style. There are moments of soft spaciousness and blasts of feedback-laced frenzies of noise. In sound, it is quite representative of the art on the cover sleeve. On the front side, a topless woman stands staring intently forward with her hands behind her back. When the cover is turned to its backside, we see the same woman from behind, revealing that the hands behind her back are brandishing a massive knife. Lyrically, this duality of sensuality and violence is also apparent, eventually rearing its ugly head with the screams of “I’m going to KILL YOU” in “Butterfly Collector”, before a frenzied vortex of gnarled guitars and pummeling drum strikes close out the EP.

M/A/R/R/S (1987)

Lollita would not be the only 4AD release that A.R. Kane was a part of. They and Colourbox had both reached out to Ivo Watts-Russell about releasing a dance music single inspired by the American house music that have begun to find its way onto the UK charts. It was decided that the two groups would work together under the moniker of M/A/R/R/S to do so, but the collaboration was far from harmonious. Watts-Russell recalled “They made the record and they fucking hated each other.“ 6

The eventual product was a single with two A-sides, one of each worked on independently by one group and then sent over to the other to make an addition to it. Colourbox put together “Pump Up The Volume”, an acid house track crammed full of samples from movies and other pieces of music, to which A.R. Kane added some of their trademark guitar noise. A.R. Kane composed “Anitiиa (The First Time I See She Dance)” which would feature drum programming from Colourbox. Tambala recalls the process behind the track:

“We created the entire track on a 4-track reel-to-reel recorded, in Alex’s bedroom one evening. We simply took the mix to the studio and asked Martyn [Young, of Colourbox} to beef up the drums; we had just a Roland 606 biscuit tin of a drum machine, whereas he had some massive sounds and sampled drums, and that was great. We knew what we wanted from the outset with ‘Anitiиa’ (Anita and Tina our then current girlfriends, that we spotted dancing at a party in Islington…) – dub bass, dub voice echoes, big beats, cool beats, spacey guitars, noise guitars – I guess we just threw everything at it, which would explain why I have no kitchen sink.” 7

In throwing everything at it, Anitiиa acts as a bridge between the band’s early sound and the dancier directions they would later head towards. The noisy dissonant intro breaks into a wide open space sparsely filled by vocals and a low rumbling bassline before the drums return. Later, another break materializes an intermission of hand percussion and echoing vocals cast out across the plain.

Despite the creative conflict, “Pump Up The Volume” became a massive hit and topped the charts in several countries. In the months following, there was a wave of house singles released on UK-based independent labels that took inspiration from the track. The sample-heavy craze would not last, however, in part due to the increased occurrence of house and hip hop artists running into legal troubles as the rights holders of samples pursued litigation. Despite the success of the single, Colourbox collapsed as a group shortly afterward and A.R. Kane would never again sniff the same level of mainstream success. However, the group’s legend was far from over.

The duo would then leave 4AD for Rough Trade Records, releasing the Up Home EP in 1988. The release features the track “Baby Milk Snatcher”, one of the most innovative and otherworldly songs in their catalogue. What starts as wide open negative space with echoing cracks of percussion and key stabs, is slowly washed over by droning and distorted guitar chords and soft lyrical passages of surreal sensuality, before the percussion picks up in a repetitious chorus to give some urgency to the molasses-like slow drip of the song. This combination of guitar noise, eroticism, and dub and reggae sounds would make this song an influential milestone in the shoegaze anthology, especially within the context of its inclusion in A.R. Kane’s next release.

69 (1989)

The EP would be followed shortly after by their debut album 69, which would see the duo take their sound into realms undiscovered before by themselves, their contemporaries, and their forerunners.

Said Tambala about the album’s genesis:

“We bought a studio in this dark little basement and immersed ourselves in the dark, and we had so much freedom. We were limited in what we could do, technically, but I think those limitations were perfect for us at that time, and there wasn’t any external influence on us particularly, we were just doing our own thing. And we approached each song individually – you know, how should this work? We didn’t have a specific sound we were aiming for, but working so closely together, we just knew when it felt right. That was the chemistry between us.” 1

69 heads into otherworldly and abstract directions, foreshadowed in repetition of “everything goes craaaazzzyyyy” in the opening track “Crazy Blue”. This track and the following “Suicide Kiss” are rather conventional in their song structure, but deceiving in that the remaining tracks instead slip and slide in other strange pockets of sound and atmosphere. The album makes masterful use of space, with some tracks having very minimal arrangements with instruments feeling miles apart from one another. Distant and disembodied vocals float around while guitars, that feel less like solid-form riffs and more liquid in delivery, ooze like paint poured across walls. Percussion drops in and out, existing more often as echoing pulses, ticks, and taps rather than propulsive beats that carry songs along.

As the title suggests, eroticism is a recurrent lyrical theme, as well as the dream-state of sleep. The album on a whole seems occupy a state of non-consciousness, in a dream neither euphoric or nightmarish, but in a middle ground of mystery and surrealism.

69 would top the UK Indie Albums charts and since its release has received all kinds of critical acclaim. Ned Raggett would write in retrospect: “Never simply poppy nor completely arty, and definitely not just the Jesus and Mary Chain/Cocteau Twins fusion most claimed they were (admittedly song titles like “Spermwhale Trip Over” and “Baby Milk Snatcher” easily led to the description!), A.R. Kane here feels playful, mysterious, and inventive all at once, impossible to truly pin down” 8

Rudy Tambala has spoke fondly in reflection on the duo’s debut album, saying, “69 is a gem. We wanted to go as far out as we could, and in doing so we discovered the point where it stops being music.” 2

“i” (1989)

Not wasting any time, the duo would continue their prolific streak, releasing the Love-Sick EP in late 1988 before putting out their sophomore album a year later. “i”, an ambitious 25 track venture, starts in new sonic playgrounds with danceable drum machine rhythms led by piano and a decidedly more accessible and pop-oriented sound than what was on 69, before embarking into stranger territory further into the tracklist. The B side features more loose and atmospheric assemblages of the dream pop stylings the band had instigated, and then towards the record’s end we see a return to the noisier violence of their early material on tracks like “Down“ and “Supervixens”, before closing off with the reggae grooves of “Catch My Drift.”

Looking back on the album, Tambala recalled:

“‘i’ was a luxurious experience; big studios, producers, star treatment. It gave us the opportunity to go way beyond our own technical limitations, and to push at the boundaries; we were sitting somewhere between the avant-garde and pop culture. We touched on several emerging genre[s], drawing also from the wealth of the past, and utilizing computer and digital technologies.” 3

While 69 established one distinct and far out auditory dream-world, “i” instead travels through several of them. As the group moves in through so many different genre points, there still exists a natural flow to the album, with its various stanzas like passages in a journey. Jason Ankeny wrote:

“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.” 9

New Clear Child (1994)

The duo’s output began to slow down after the release of “i”. Rough Trade Records went bankrupt in 1991 and Alex had moved to California to get away from the music industry. Rudy stayed in London, where he worked as a producer and collaborated with Alison Shaw of Cranes for a project as InRain.

Tambala and Ayuli went a while without working on new material together, until they were approached by Luaka Bop, David Byrne’s label, about releasing new music. The Americana compilation, consisting mostly of previously released songs, would be put out in 1992 and their third and final album, New Clear Child, would arrive in 1994.

On New Clear Child, the band continues further away from their noisy and more rock-oriented origins for a for a soulful and sophisticated sound that still maintains elements of the duo’s trademark dreaminess. While distorted guitar riffs still appear at points in the album, they act in a complementary role rather than a dominant feature.

New Clear Child contains a mix of midtempo tracks of the danceable set and slow-paced pieces, with a newfound richness coming from the addition of horns and strings. Grit has been traded out for a slight grandeur and sense of romance that lays central in the lyrics as well, with lines coming off as meditations on the thoughts of loves both past and arriving.

If it weren’t for the familiarity of the vocals, this album could seem like it came from a different group altogether. It demonstrates a shifting away from their punk and indie influences in favor of diving deeper into their soul and jazz tendencies.

According to Tambala:

“New Clear Child is a mutant, more special than I realised at the time. It came close to standing, but it stumbled, and glossed the grazes. A few of the tracks are really there, but as an album it painted out some of the crucial flaws. Time creeps into the spaces and they crystallize. Everyone knew it. We knew it. Still, there are some ways through on that album, and I love them still.” 10

Although New Clear Child may not have had the longstanding influence on future music that the band’s earlier work does, it is an album that probably should have had a larger cultural impact and greater chart success. It shares a lot of characteristics with the downtempo and trip hop chillness that was at the height of its relevance in the 1990s. Although the band’s several year hiatus may have also contributed to a loss of momentum for the duo, it couldn’t have helped matters that New Clear Child was released right when Britpop began to explode, with heavy hitters like Blur, Oasis, Suede, and Pulp all releasing albums that same year. Even though the album was a departure from old sounds, A.R. Kane were still coming from the dream pop and shoegaze scenes. By then, much of the press had turned sour on noisy and ethereal effects-laden experimentation in favour of Britpop’s return to traditional rock conventions and pop-based hooks.

Aftermath

The duo would disband shortly after the release of New Clear Child. Although they went their separate ways, they independently remained active as musicians, involved in several projects over the course of the years. Rudy and his sister Maggie would work together as Sufi, releasing albums in 1995 and 1997, while Ayuli would record solo and release an album as Alex! in 2001.

Tambala would reignite the band for a spell from 2015-2018, under the new name of Jubl, recruiting Maggie Tambala and Andy Taylor as members. Ayuli would not rejoin this iteration of the band.

Recalling the split and the chemistry he had with Ayuli, Tambala said:

“Ultimately, whether you’re lovers or musicians or artists or a political party, if you haven’t got that kind of connection where you completely get each other on a telepathic level, then you’re in trouble. For a while there Alex and me had that. We were really good. Just listen to those tracks, we piled so many ideas into every fucking song!” 2

https://hearteyesmag.com/blog/2020/8/21/feature-ar-kane-much-more-than-the-black-jesus-and-mary-chain

Legacy

Although there have been many other bands who have been more widely celebrated for their work in indie music of the 1980s, you’d be hard pressed to find many groups who have been more influential than A.R. Kane has been in transforming the shape of music to come.

While the press were at a loss for words when it came to finding a genre moniker for A.R. Kane’s music, Ayuli had given it the name of dream pop. In a 1987 interview, he elaborated on the descriptor with the following statement:

“Dreamlike, yeah. It’s when you remember one of your dreams you can never really explain it to anyone else. It’s really vivid, really haunting, but abstract. An ambition for us would be for people to have dreams in which our music was the soundtrack”. 4

Although Ayuli may have coined the term, the band did not claim to be the progenitors of dream pop. Tambala explained in a later interview:

“There has always been a kind of dreampop – a pop music that has its source in dreams, and also mimics the feeling of a dream, the non-natural rules of the dream experience, the death-like paralysis and wonder of the dream state – be the dream deeply inspiring, simply pleasant, boring, or a horrific nightmare…Alex and I shared a tendency to be deeply moved by dreams, it was something in our family cultures, maybe genetic heritage. We both experimented with our own dream states, and this informed our approach to music, and our perception of reality and attitudes towards more conservative forms and thinking. Dreams can be very psychedelic, the effect of a dream can be life altering, and similarly to the LSD induced trips that created a whole new pop culture in the mid-60’s, for us, dreams were very much our inspiration for our own, small contribution to pop culture.” 7

Dream pop as an overarching music descriptor has continued to stick, and has been applied retroactively to pre-A.R. Kane artists that emerged earlier in the 1980’s, such as The Durutti Column, Virginia Astley, The Wake, and of course the Cocteau Twins. A.R. Kane may not have been the first to do dream pop, but they make the strongest case for being the first band to make the dream pop offshoot genre of shoegaze.

http://theincrediblekulk.blogspot.com/2013/06/negroes-invented-rock-music-dance-music.html

One description of the shoegaze sound reads:

“a wash of instruments blending together. Guitars are typically distorted into droning or feedback drenched textures, and the group itself strives to create a ‘wall-of-sound’ atmosphere that takes a noisy, distorted approach and/or a lusher, more ‘dreamscape’ sensation. While vocals and melodies do exist, they are subordinate to the overriding sensation of the song, and melt into the background.” 11

The above definition is an apt descriptor of what exists on A.R. Kane’s debut release, particularly on “Haunting”. Although cases could also be made for songs like Brian Eno’s “Here Come The Warm Jets” or MX-80 Sound’s “Obsessive Devotion” as being earlier iterations of shoegaze, these are isolated tracks on albums more in tune with experimental glam rock (Eno) and post-punk (MX-80). The mid-80s work of others such as the previously mentioned Cocteau Twins and Jesus and Mary Chain, the fuzzy and droning psych-rock minimalism of Spacemen 3 and Loop, the chaotic noise rock of Sonic Youth, and the gloomy post-punk of The Cure was also instrumental in setting the stage for shoegaze. The ripples were already in the water, but it was A.R Kane who set off the wave of other bands with soft vocals swirling in guitar whirlpools. From 1988 onward, the first rush of shoegazing releases by bands like My Bloody Valentine, Pale Saints, Ride, and Lush would begin to surface.

One of A.R. Kane’s most vital contributions to the genre’s development was that they were the first to combine elements of jazz, dub, and dance music with fuzzy reverb-drenched walls of guitar noise. Future shoegaze groups would continue down these paths, and distinct influences from A.R. Kane are visible in the works of the genre’s two most celebrated groups: Slowdive and My Bloody Valentine.

Neil Halstead, of Slowdive, has named 69 as one of the records that had the biggest influence on him, going onto explain:

“there isn’t another record that sounds like 69. It’s a really dark record. It has all this dark space, negative space. The sound is almost empty, sucked in. For me, the attraction was, ‘What the fuck are they doing with those guitars?’ And those crazy vocals that are really disembodied. But then ‘Baby Milk Snatcher’ is just a fucking great tune – within that weird universe there’s still something you can grab hold of.” 12

Slowdive’s Souvlaki (1993) remains one of the most acclaimed and popular albums in shoegaze history. Two tracks, “Sing” and “Souvlaki Space Station”, were confirmed by the band in a now-deleted tweet to be influenced by AR Kane. “Souvlaki Space Station” is a masterpiece in echo, with its lead guitar riff spiraling out into a vast darkness, distorted melodies warping themselves over one another, and Rachel Goswell’s siren-like vocals softly floating in the expanse. The weightless wash-over feel of the song finds a place much reminiscent of territories explored on Up Home! and 69, and would foreshadow future dub-influenced exercises by Slowdive and other shoegaze groups.

Although A.R. Kane may have been the inventors of shoegaze, no group is as synonymous to the genre as is My Bloody Valentine. Their 1991 album Loveless is widely considered the magnum opus of the genre and (too) often is used as the standard to which all other shoegaze albums are held to. Numerous artists have replicated Kevin Shields’ innovations in guitar experimentation, such as his gliding technique consisting of strumming with simultaneous whammy bar manipulation to create a warbling tape-like effect.

Shields has described the mission statement of My Bloody Valentine as “taking all the guts out” of rock, leaving “the remnants, the outline” 13, which sounds quite similar to the modus operandi of A.R. Kane on their first single, in which they “removed the ‘human factor’ from the songs production – no Rock-n-Roll riffs, no funky bass, no syncopation – and replaced these with pure sound, layers of feedback and echo, rolling bass, reverb’d, disembodied vocals.” 3. This was all part of A.R. Kane’s larger creative process that they described as Kaning the music: “going to the threshold of creation, of maximum potential where all things are possible yet uncreated.” 10

My Bloody Valentine’s trajectory towards shoegaze godliness was not of one instant success and innovation, but rather an evolution through a series of trials in various sound palettes. Having begun as a gothic/psychobilly post-punk outfit, the group’s first foray into noise pop would be on their The New Record By My Bloody Valentine EP in 1986, arriving a year after Psychocandy and the same year of the When You’re Sad single. The group would continue to hone their newfound sound over the course of three EPs released in 1987, but it wouldn’t be until the August 1988 release of the You Made Me Realize EP that MBV made the transition from followers to leaders of the burgeoning shoegaze movement.

When asked what he thought about the broad influence A.R. Kane had on the shoegaze-tagged bands of the late-80s and early 90s, Tambala had this to say:

“This is a bastard of a question. And a juicy one. How can I answer it without sounding arrogant, and without post-rationalising? I can’t, so there you have it, here we go. We brought something very different into the indie music scene. We were not part of that scene, but it adopted us, and the music press pushed us forward as the new wave. The absolute immersion in feedback-drenched chaos was, for most, too much back in ’86, but for a few it was thrilling, and inspiring. It was for us.

In truth I don’t know what effect, if any, we had on those bands. Except maybe the track “Slow” by MBV, which is a straight lift of “Baby Milk Snatcher”, and the birth of their signature giddy, slip-sliding sound. We chucked everything into our music – there was the noise, but also the dub bass and effect, the samples and grooves, the soulful twang, the disco beats, the acid-inflected lyrics. It was a broad and deep palette for any young musician to take cues from.” 14

Simon Reynolds describes the development of shoegaze, and particularly the role of Kevin Shields, through the lens of Brian Eno’s “scenius” concept, which is described as:

“the idea that music evolves through collective processes, in an incremental and reactive way, rather than through heroic innovators making giant steps that everyone else follows. A sound emerges and everyone wants in; the style—usually a mixture of new technological possibilities and aesthetic choices—becomes the idiom through which you express what you have to say.” 15

We can consider Shields to be the “scenius” of shoegaze, the one who took all the ingredients that pointed in its direction and fused them together most masterfully, particularily on Loveless. By taking inspiration from the best that other groups had to offer, and writing timeless songs, My Bloody Valentine had made a record that if somebody asked for a definition of shoegaze, could be answered by having them listen to the record. As groundbreaking and genre-defining as Loveless may be, a distinction must be made between the innovations My Bloody Valentine spearheaded and what other groups did first.

At the time of the release of Loveless, one of its most futuristic-sounding songs was the lead single “Soon”. The track features breathy, vague yet evocative vocals that slowly melt each syllable through droning guitars while a head-bobbing drum machine beat bounces everything along. The track would later be remixed by Andrew Weatherall, a DJ who played a crucial role in the burgeoning development of the Madchester/baggy and alternative dance scene, which saw bands realizing the potential in combining indie guitars with the acid house sounds of the rave scene.

Again, we can look back to A.R. Kane’s work with M/A/R/R/S, particularly “Anitina”, and the dancier moments of “i”, to see that they were paving new routes for future bands to follow. Neil Kulkarni has written:

“Before Kevin Shields even dreamt of using a breakbeat, A. R. Kane seemed to be as informed by hip hop and R&B as much as anything else that flowed into their dream pop. They never seemed like a band who had a ‘problem’ with the way sampling technology and sound engineering were progressing in the 80s – they’d uniquely found a way to utilise all that kit and to still preserve a rawness and spontaneity.” 10

Several other bands would continue to explore combinations of shoegaze walls of sounds with dance and electronica. Seefeel’s debut album Quique would feature softer yet still densely atmospheric loop-based compositions fused with ambient techno and the hollowed out spaces of dub. Scott Cortez would inject drum n bass style breakbeats into two of his projects: the particularly harsh and impenetrable walls of noise on Astrobrite’s WhiteNoise Superstar and the more delicate and haunting ethereality of Transient Stellar’s Rkodr. Chapterhouse would utilize lively drum samples for a dance-laced style of shoegaze on Whirlpool and Bowery Electric’s Beat would tether slow knocking trip hop rhythms to slowly churning guitar chords that slid in and out of a dark expanse reminiscent of the atmosphere on 69.

Intersections of electronica, shoegaze, and dream pop continued to emerge in the 21^st century, seen in the likes of the atmospheric synthscapes of M83’s Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts (2003) and Ulrich Schnauss’s A Strangely Isolated Place (2003), the merger of intimate dream pop and 80’s-era synthpop by The Radio Dept on Pet Grief (2006) and Running Out of Love (2016), the twee and blissful drum & bass of The Bilinda Butchers’ Night and Blur (2020), and a number of deep house and garage tracks coated in a textured euphoria on Jacques Greene’s Dawn Chorus (2019).

Although A.R. Kane are only one of the many groups that laid the foundation for shoegaze and the future big names in the scene, they played a crucial role in bringing in the influences of Black music: jazz, soul, dub, reggae, and dance. Although it is entirely possible that other bands may have picked those influences up from the source, it was A.R. Kane who first filtered them through wall of sound guitar-work and thus acted as translators in shaping the developing language of shoegaze and dream pop.

http://lazancadilla.com/rudy-tambala-on-pioneers-a-r-kanes-present-and-future/

Another genre that A.R. Kane played a significant role in developing, particularily with 69, was post-rock. Post-rock now is a hard genre to sum up, as it presents in such a vast variety of styles, but a description from AllMusic labels it as:

“Bands using rock instruments but more focused on creating texture and timbre rather than traditional song structure. [It b]rought together influences of other genres including “Kraut-rock, ambient, prog-rock, space rock, math rock, tape music, minimalist classical, British IDM, jazz (both avant-garde and cool), and dub reggae, to name the most prevalent — with results that were largely based in rock, but didn’t rock per se.” 16

The late 80’s and early 90’s saw the first wave of definitive post-rock releases. Talk Talk pivoted away from synthpop new romanticism towards loose and untethered jazz directions on 1988’s Spirit of Eden. They would follow this trail of experimentation on 1991’s Laughing Stock, which arrived the same year that Slint would release the moody and mathy post-hardcore tension of Spiderland. While these three records would all figure prominently in the following emergence of bands using rock instruments to make decidedly unrock music in the 1990’s, exemplified by groups like Tortoise, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Sigur Ros and many of the bands cited as members of the “Lost Generation”, it would be remiss not to acknowledge the role that 69 played in foreshadowing what was to come.

One group that rose to prominence in the early days of post-rock was Bark Psychosis. Frontman Graham Sutton spoke in an 1994 interview of his admiration for A.R. Kane and told of his plans of collaborative work with Tambala, which would be realized in Rudy’s remix of Bark Psychosis’ “Big Shot”. “Big Shot” comes from Hex (1994), the debut album from Bark Psychosis. Like songs on 69 such as “Spermwhale Trip Over” and “Dizzy”, the album utilizes negative space extensively along with deep bass grooves and abstract and minimal vocals.

“Sulliday” and its reliance on guitar, but foregoing of riffs in favour of feedback and freakish fretboard frenzies of noise, foreshadowed post-rock groups that operated further within the realm of noisy and droning sounds and often intersected closely with shoegaze and space rock. One notable example is Flying Saucer Attack, whose Dave Pearce, in an interview with the Quietus, spoke numerous times in appreciation of AR Kane and the influence they had on him.

Slowdive would also drift off into more ambient territory on Pygmalion (1995), peeling back their thick and reverb-heavy guitar layers to open up a vast expanse for ones sparser but still effect-laden to echo throughout along with the vocals of Neil Halstead and Rachel Goswell.

in addition to a general conversation about how A.R. Kane forged new territory for future musical developments, it is also worth noting their specific position as Black men operating in the British indie scene of the 1980s.

As a guitar band that did not sound or look much like other guitar bands of the time, A.R. Kane were challenging expectations that were placed upon Black musicians. Said Ayuli, “We were a force of ideas. We helped to get rid of stereotypes. In the ’80s [B]lack men were doing soul, reggae or rap, not psychedelic dream rock.” 17 Regarding any perceived surprise at the emergence of Black musicians making noisy and experimental rock music, Tambala said in response, “Don’t know why they’d be surprised by our music; negroes invented rock music, dance music, and free jazz and psychedelia. At least that’s what mama says.” 10

Mama is right, and the proof is in the history. Much like many other innovative Black musicians, A.R. Kane spearheaded a style of music that would go on to be popularized by white musicians and, in comparison to some of their white contemporaries, have been under-acknowledged and under-appreciated for doing so.

In the 1990s, more bands with Black musicians would pop up in similar scenes. Within shoegaze, two notable groups were The Veldt and Majesty Crush.

Majesty Crush was a four-piece group with two Black members, frontman David Stroughter and drummer Odell Nails III. What set the group apart from much of their contemporaries was Stroughter’s bizarre lyrics about women who worked at adult book stores (“Sunny Pie”), Italian porn stars (“Cicciolina”), and plans to assassinate the president to gain the admiration of Jodie Foster on “No. 1 Fan”. Had it not been for their record label folding a month after their 1993 record Love 15 was released, I’d like to believe that some of their massively anthemic songs would have found their way to the alternative rock charts. They certainly had hooks worthy of doing so.

The Veldt would push A.R. Kane’s forays into soul and R&B even further, with the powerful vocals of Daniel Chavis exploding out through the layers of guitar that most shoegaze vocalists cooed softly from behind. The Chavis brothers would form another group, Apollo Heights, that would release two albums in the 2000s, and as a reunited incarnation of The Veldt would release the EP Thanks to the Moth and Areana Rose, which would feature Tambala remixing their song “I Like The Way You Talk”.

The Veldt’s influence can be heard in the music of TV on the Radio, with similarities especially apparent between the vocal stylings of Daniel Chavis and Tunde Adebimpe. Another musician who found inspiration from The Veldt is producer Doc McKinney, who said about the band: “For black artists, doing anything outside of the bubble, beyond what’s derivative of what white kids are doing, being able to express yourself honestly, is not celebrated at all. So when I heard these guys, it gave me confidence.” 18

One of things McKinney is best known for is his production work on several releases by The Weeknd. The dark and woozy atmospheric sound of his first three mixtapes played a massive role in shaping the sounds of R&B in the 2010s, and are indebted to dream pop in both sonic influence and source material. This is most notable on tracks like “The Knowing”, which is constructed around a sample of “Cherry Coloured Funk” by Cocteau Twins. It may be a stretch to suggest that without A.R. Kane there wouldn’t be The Weeknd, but when we consider the lineage of influence, it’s plausible to suggest that modern-day R&B could look different if Tambala and Ayuli hadn’t taken the plunge into guitar-oriented psychedelic dreamscapes in decades prior.

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All in all, the music of A.R. Kane has played a huge role in helping shape the musical landscape for years to come. They were originators with the dream pop/shoegaze and post-rock scenes, combining characteristics of historically Black music with the whiteness of indie scene and sound to pave the way for others to further explore and take these ideas to different heights. They blew up expectations about what rock music could be, with their experimental use of the guitar and refusal to adhere to conventional songwriting, production techniques, and use of electronic music technology. Most dreams come to an end, but the musical ones that A.R. Kane crafted will never die.

Works Cited

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