Watch/Label News: Severed Heads Reissues

On June 12th Seattle’s Medical Records will reissue two long out-of-print classics from Australia’s pioneering sound experimentalists Severed Heads. 1983’s Since the Accident and 1985’s City Slab Horror, both originally on the UK’s Ink Records, find the band transitioning from their early, more tape loop driven sound experiments into a truly future-forward amalgam of electronic genres, while paving the way for all kinds of techniques and sounds that would become the mainstay of popular music in the years to come. Formed in 1979 by Richard Fielding and Andrew Wright, and originally called Mr. and Mrs. No Smoking Sign, the duo would be joined by the musician Tom Ellard later that year, and with Fielding and Wright gone by 1981, Severed Heads would become Ellard’s, until his disbanding of the project in 2007. Often considered an Industrial band, partially due to their deliberately “ugly” name, as well as their affiliation with the label Nettwerk, the brilliance of Severed Heads is that their musical output is in no way easily classifiable. On Since the Accident and City Slab Horror, the band’s fascination with tape loops, found sound, and a varying palette of sampled source material is what drives the tracks, though the albums also find Severed Heads developing an increasingly sophisticated embrace of electronic technologies and pop music structures. We’ve included here a video for the track “Exploring the Secrets of Treating Deaf Mutes“, which is off Since the Accident. Sonically the track has it’s fingers in a bunch of different pots, bringing to mind all kinds of early electronic music, including even hip-hop, with it’s extended patch of tape manipulation almost sounding like “scratching”. The video was created by Chris Skinner, and he matches these audio antics with a creepy smattering of lo-fi imagery that features strange bits of found footage, as well as odd, alien animations. Also included, after the video embed, are Bandcamp streams for both records, so check them out; and don’t forget both reissues have been mastered by Tom Ellard himself, from the original tapes, and are due out on Medical Records this June.