RhoDeo 1303 Beats

Hello, the beats go on....and today we look back almost 20 years, jeez how time flies, good thing todays artists split and found new ground since, specially The Black Dog have seen a real revival these past years, some of that is for next week, in the meantime it's back to the beginning when this world we live in today was still in it's digital infancy. . .. .... NJoy

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Taking their name from a British euphemism for imminent doom, the Black Dog Productions was founded by Ken Downie along with Ed Handley and Andy Turner. In 1989, they were unable to find a label to back their releases and had to start their own, Black Dog Productions. Their first full-length album, Bytes, was released on 15 March 1993. Their music was often produced under a number of different names, such as Close Up Over, Xeper, Atypic, I.A.O., Balil and the Discordian Popes.
Forging a challenging, relentless combination of early techno, electro, and hip-hop with a penchant for odd time signatures, high-tech atmospherics, and Egyptian iconography, the group immediately distinguished itself from the scores of disposable techno musicians covering familiar ground. They were immediately placed in the emerging "intelligent techno" category upon the release of their full-length debut..

As Plaid, Ed Handley and Andy Turner had already released a handful of material (including an album) prior to meeting Downie, but their time spent in BDP was their most productive up to that point. In addition to the Dog's inclusion on the perhaps more high-profile Artificial Intelligence compilations on Warp and remixes for the likes of Björk, Blondie, and UNKLE, they also released several full-length works as a group before Handley and Turner defected in 1995 to refocus on Plaid full-time. Downie continued on with the Black Dog name, releasing the full-length Music for Adverts (and short films) in 1996. In 2002 Downie collaborated with Parisian spoken word artist Black Sifichi on the William S. Burroughs tribute Unsavoury Products, and the Downie/Sifichi pairing was given the remix treatment on the following year's Genetically Modified. In 2001, Downie teamed up with Richard and Martin Dust, owners of the label Dust Science Recordings.[8] Since then, they have started to play live again and have released eight EPs and four full-length albums on Dust Science. Their first album, Silenced, was released in 2005.

Silenced, although only his second proper album since 1997, is another excellent album of listening techno; it bears all the hallmarks of his Black Dog classics without overly relying on them, and it has to force a readjustment in how critics view him in the history of electronica. Most closely resembling Black Dog's 1995 record Parallel (right down to the "Bolt" interludes), the record is driven more by mood than technology; the drum programs aren't complex, but Downie has a way of bewitchingly conjuring the past with his productions that not even Boards of Canada can touch.

The second, Radio Scarecrow, was released in 2008 and was very well received[10] and nominated for DJ Mag’s Best of British 2008.
The follow-up, Further Vexations, was released in 2009. It was described as having a dark cynicism of Orwellian practices of government and the passivity of the general public. "We’ve helplessly watched with mounting horror, while the government trashed the country, signed away its sovereignty to Brussels (with a flourish of a specially minted silver pen), sold off precious national industries and assets at next to bargain basement prices, and indulged itself with two utterly pointless wars which it couldn’t afford," the group stated on their home page. It was followed by Final Collected Vexations a year later

In May 2010, the Black Dog teamed with creative agency "Human" to create Music For Real Airports, described by them as "a contemporary reply to Brian Eno's work from the 70s". While Eno's album is well known for being peaceful and sedate, The Black Dog intend theirs to be tense and bittersweet, saying "This record is not necessarily a comfortable listen. But it captures the spectrum of emotions stirred by airports.

2011 saw a flurry of activity under a Liber 'umbrella' Chaos, Dogma, Nox, temple, Kult.


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Black Dog Productions' full-length debut is a sprawling deviation from techno-as-throwaway-dancefloor-fare, weaving surprisingly engaging melodic and harmonic passages around complex rhythmic patterns and diverse, somewhat ambient atmospherics. Although all of the material was previously released in 12" or EP form, it holds up surprisingly well as a unified, coherent whole. With B12's Electro-Soma and Autechre's Incunabula, one of the first and finest blasts in the European "intelligent techno" movement.

Black Dog Productions - Bytes ( flac 399mb)

01 Plaid - Object Orient 5:44
02 Close Up Over - Caz 6:15
03 Xeper - Carceres Ex Novum 6:42
04 Atypic - Focus Mel 7:12
05 Close Up Over - Olivine 4:45
06 I.A.O. - Clan (Mongol Hordes) 6:24
07 Plaid - Yamemm 6:14
08 Discordian Popes - Fight The Hits 6:20
09 Balil - Merck 4:33
10 Close Up Over - Jauqq 5:46
11 Balil - 3/4 Heart 7:34

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Black Dog's proper debut, this time for the GPR label. Includes probably the group's most well-known single track, "Cost II," released on 12-inch simultaneously with the album.

The Black Dog - Temple of Transparent Balls (flac  383mb)

01 Cost I 5:05
02 Cost II 6:30
03 4, 7, 8, 6:11
04 The Actor And Audience 5:17
05 Jupiler 4:42
06 Kings Of Sparta 4:11
07 Sharp Shooting On Saturn 6:39
08 Mango 5:36
09 Cycle 7:09
10 In The Light Of Grey 5:22
11 The Crete That Crete Made 5:10
 
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The last release under the group name before the trio splintered, Spanners is a great full-packed CD of modern electronic music, the band drawing on everything from dub to avant-garde experimentalism to create a varied, intoxicating collection. Funk samples are twisted and played with rather than lovingly reused, lyrics eschewed for obscure or unintelligible samples at most, generally straightforward dancefloor tracks still sound slightly hesitant or off. Even from the first song, "Raxmus," it's not too surprising that this appeared on Warp Records; the blend of shuffling yet crisp beat, ambient tones, and other sonic touches and tweaks practically could have been tailormade as a calling card for the label. Certainly, there's a healthy sense of playfulness and obscurity that won't surprise fans of labelmate Aphex Twin, neither will song titles like "Psil-Coysin" and "Nommo." The highlights are many, most often achieving a solid combination of dancefloor friendliness and unexpected sonic trickery. "Chase the Manhattan" may have a cringeworthy pun of a title, but the brisk funk/world percussion beat, soothing synth washes, and distorted electronic bass stabs all come together wonderfully. "Further Harm" shifts a number of times during its length, sometimes playing around with rough beats low in the mix and at other points serving up a variety of keyboard melodies interspersed with brief vocal bits. Other numbers of note include "Pot Noodle," with what sounds like a soft acoustic guitar or a keyboard programmed to sound like one playing a lazy, relaxed melody under the main loop, and the echoing, minimal percussion breaks and squelchy electro-inspired tones of "Frisbee Skip." A series of brief bridge tracks entitled "Bolt" (i.e., "Bolt1," "Bolt2," etc.) crop up throughout Spanners, mostly following their own curious logic as they slide from one track to the next.

The Black Dog - Spanners (flac 449mb)

01 Raxmus 3:03
02 Bolt1 0:27
03 Barbola Work 6:42
04 Bolt2 0:27
05 Psil-Cosyin 10:32
06 Chase The Manhattan 5:42
07 Bolt3 1:36
08 Tahr 3:08
09 Bolt4 1:06
10 Further Harm 6:18
11 Nommo 6:53
12 Bolt5 0:22
13 Pot Noddle 7:13
14 Bolt6 0:42
15 End Of Time 3:44
16 Utopian Dream 6:00
17 Bolt7 0:17
18 Frisbee Skip 5:25
19 Chesh 6:03

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With a cover thumbing its nose at Brian Eno's similarly titled series of albums from the 1970s and song titles ranging in reference from bad Hollywood films to washing powders, it would seem the Black Dog is engaged in a bit of a musical piss-take. Nothing of the sort, actually, as lone Dog Ken Downie's first solo work since the departure of partners Ed Handley and Andy Turner is a serious, often wistful collection of post-rave electronica, incorporating elements of techno, ambient, hip-hop, jungle, and jazz. Although lacking somewhat in complexity, Downie more than makes up for it in focus and emotional content.

The Black Dog - Music For Adverts (And Short Films) ( flac 347mb)

01 Dumb & Dumber 1:37
02 The Wind Spirit 2:10
03 Jordan 1:47
04 Tzaddi 4:18
05 Pod #1 1:35
06 No Lamers 4:29
07 Edgar Allan 3:49
08 Harpo 0:39
09 Strange Hill 3:06
10 The Big Issue 3:03
11 Crayola 2:06
12 Horny 1:09
13 AGW 1:22
14 Seti 1:03
15 Darkness 2:58
16 Euthanasia 5:22
17 Gerry Noman 0:57
18 Meditation No #4 3:41
19 Stratus 1:04
20 Dissidence 1:02
21 As Clouds Go By 1:02
22 Disench 1:29
23 Minour 4:37
24 Mo 3:07
25 Wot 0:33
26 Kheprit 6:52

The Black Dog - Music For Adverts (And Short Films) (ogg 126mb)

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 re-rip and now in Flac

The Black Dog - Silenced 05 now in Flac 303mb)

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