the Allotropes
Steve Swales Colin Woods Karen Aitken Ben Allen
Experimental British band noted for their harsh industrial sound. Conceived 1978 in Ulster by Swales and Woods, and later named during a school chemistry class, they were initially supplemented by the rather "abstract" rhythm section of Ken Hosick and Peter Todd, and began playing in public as punks deconstructing punk and generally sending-up youth culture. This was captured (albeit inaccurately), in the chapter devoted to the band in the book Punk - It Makes You Want to Spit. Predictably this all imploded, with Woods having left early on and Swales eventually replacing the others with guitarist Karen Aitken and publisher of Cabaret magazine, Ben Allen, one of the few reviewers who actually "got it". The reductionism continued to its conclusion on 1980's Drop the Bomb which featured broken Woolworth's guitar trash spectaculars mixed with sine wave oscillators.. The cassette generated some controversy when it was realised that despite the resurgent CND climate of the time, the Drop in the title didn't mean drop as in ban the bomb, but drop as in release over a heavily populated area. The later part of the album is increasingly electronic, which resulted in a billing at an opening night of a futurist / New Romantic disco. However the Blitz kids hoping to dance found the resulting 200bpm gated beatbox and Stukka noises more akin to Throbbing Gristle than Spandau Ballet.
Woods rejoined for 1982's psychedelic All Trees which was somewhat lighter in vein. Although veins weren't used, there was a lot of experimental psychopharmacology going on, but oddly as dosage increased the results tended towards.. disco!
This trend continued on #3 (1984), which was really a solo effort by Swales. Using mainly that Roland analog stuff, including the someday-to-be famous TB303, Swales nearly discovered Acid House four years early, if only he'd turned the resonance knob up a little more. It got them dancing at the European Music Festival (1985) anyway, surprising since only few years earlier, his proud boast to club DJs was that the only things dancing would be their VU meters.
Swales' next move was to leave the Allotropes himself, the plan being that it would be a group with no members - all output being computer generated. Unfortunately, this was still the mid 1980's, and the computer in question was a Sinclair ZX Spectrum. Naturally output dwindled rapidly, electronics+computers soon became a career choice instead of a medium, and by 1990 it really was all over.
And it still is! .But you can hear 'em they way they were, picked over, remixed, smashed into 308259000 samples and slapped onto a shiny CD. All for UK£10. So if you're the sort of person who buys stuff they've never heard but like the sound of, buy Buckminsterfullerene, and I promise you I won't give your name to anybody else..