Add n to(X) video

Add n to(X) Ann Shenton, Barry 7 & Steven Claydon. http://www.addntox.com/ Feature from 1999 on Chnnl4 UK. *Simon Reynold's excellent review of 'Add Insult to Injury' from 2000: Imagine an alternate universe where the synthesizer displaced the guitar as rock's primary instrument. A world where the superbands of the 1970s weren't Zep or Sabbath but keyboard-dominated prog-rockers like Heldon and Goblin, where punk was kickstarted by Silver Apples and Suicide not the Velvet Underground and the New York Dolls, and where techno never needed to happen. This is the parallel reality conjured by Add N To (X). Where synth-based fare today is dancefloor oriented, pulse-based, and hypnotic, Add N To (X)'s music is heavy riffing and headbanging. Electronic music has an in-built tendency towards Appollonian neatness and prissy subtlety. Psychotic rather than neurotic, Add N To (X) seize upon the synthesizer's under-explored capacity for mess, mayhem, and Dionysian disorder. They relish the analog synth's vocabulary of vulgar blurts, toxic emissions, fartacious eruptions, and histrionic whinnies. Their tracks are steam-punk contraptions, creaking and hissing like B-movie computers pushed to the limit. Add N To (X) are also a rampaging, fully live band, with two human drummers (well, if it was good enough for the Allman Brothers and Adam and the Antz). They may hate electronica's machine rhythms, but they're not totally averse to digital techniques: "Peanuts for Eno" features jungle-style drum breaks that are pitchshifted and computer-edited, and they even dabbled in sampling on their last album Avant Hard (with a sample from Canterbury scene proggers Egg!). "Plug Me in", the single, is deceptively light and Air-y, and it foregrounds one of the irritating aspects of their analog fetish: the belief that deploying voice-box is any kind of big whoop, even after Cher's "Believe" and the endemic use of vocoder in recent R&B. Mostly, though, Add N To (X) eschew kitsch in favor of bombast: the mastodon boogie of "Incinerator No. 1", the 16 minute pomp and circumstance of "The Regent Is Dead." There's also an oddly appealing English seediness: "Monster Bobby," with its thuggish chant and Gary Glitter beat crunching like a Doc Marten in the groin, could be a soundtrack candidate if they ever remade A Clockwork Orange, while the sleazy bass-pummel of "Peanuts for Eno" recalls the Moog-laced punk of The Stranglers's "Bring On the Nubiles". Some folk regard Add N To (X) as just a conceptualist novelty outfit, pure English art school. But Add Insult to Injury is actually the group's third album in three years, and if not quite Grand Funk Railroad three-albums-per-year rate, still testifies to a desire to be taken seriously as a proper musical entity. In that parallel universe where the burn-outs play air synth, Add N To (X) are the hardest workin', hard-rockin' band around. *Simon Reynolds http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Reynolds