Kevin Martin, Techno Animal, God, Ice, Bug

Kevin Martin quickly became one of the leading intellectuals of 1990s rock music. Almost all of his projects became milestones in the genre’s evolution. Martin is one of the most gifted figures among those who are relentlessly searching for a new path in trance music, drawing on seemingly irreconcilable genres like jazz, industrial, dub, and punk rock.

Martin (singer and tenor saxophonist from Brixton) entered the scene with an already ambitious plan, even if initially limited to the jazz-rock fusion of the Canterbury bands. Once jazz-rock’s time had passed, Martin’s ambition became radical: it wasn’t about using jazz as a “spice” to make a rock song more refined or evocative, but as a structural framework on which to layer rock music’s sounds—executed with the intensity of punk.

God are an ensemble with two drummers, three bassists, three saxophonists, and a guitarist. The EP Breach Birth (Situation Two, 1989) and the live album Loco (Permis De Construire, 1991 – Pathological, 1991) featured a lineup perhaps too intellectual: on Surf Locomotive they could express their eccentricity, but on the sprawling thirteen-minute I'll See You In Hell, it became overly cerebral. Justin Broadrick (Godflesh, guitar), Tim Hodgkinson (ex-Henry Cow, ex-Work, ex-Momes, alto saxophonist and bass clarinetist), Steve Blake (ex-B-Shoops, saxophone), John Edwards (B-Shoops, double bass), Dave Cochrane (ex-Head Of David, bass), Gary Jeff (bass), Scott Kiehl (ex-Slab, percussion), and Lou Ciccotelli (ex-Slab, drums) form a team of virtuosos and geniuses with few equals.

Possession (Virgin, 1992) is more of a programmatic manifesto than a conventional musical collection. It features three long jams: Soul Fire (ten minutes) moves heavily as rough guitar dissonances alternate with saxophones one by one as solo instruments, random piano notes, and vocals that start reverberated as in a “trip” but soon become agonized screams; Lord, I'm On My Way (another ten minutes) begins with a confab of peevish saxophones, interrupted by a heavy-metal guitar break, which is then smashed back by the rest of the “orchestra” at full volume for a doubled shock effect; Love (sixteen minutes) drags along a hypnotic beat amid a maelstrom of noises in search of trance, reaching dramatic heights when Martin’s screams are sampled and layered in crescendo over the general clamor. The group’s jamming is always frantic, convulsive, and chaotic, though its excesses are rarely justified by purpose.
Martin discovers the gift of synthesis in other compositions (real compositions, not just improvisations): the opening Pretty consists of a mantra of dissonant guitar chords, raucous shouts, and shrill saxophones all mechanically repeating; at the start of Fucked, the lyrics are a single word, repeated in a whisper like during an orgasm, while the rhythm morphs from industrial cadence to tribal frenzy, from psychoanalytic nightmare to infernal sarabande, with saxophones intoning heroic rounds and the collective chaos evoking a multitude of car horns in a traffic jam. Martin, singing only with inarticulate screams, echoes the early Mike Gira; the ensemble plays deafening, chaotic free jazz, barely guided by the text.
Return To Hell starts in a similar chaos of electronics, percussion, staccato flute phrases, abrasive bass rumbles, and piercing sax cries, evoking a workshop with thousands of heavy machines at work. The driving piano and bass drum rhythm of Hate Meditation and the surreal sampling of bells—again proliferated to total chaos and combined with a simple piano motif in Black Jesus—are perhaps the most striking effects achieved by Martin’s compositional work (in the literal, not merely musical, sense).

Ice is another daring Martin project, engaged in an improbable fusion of dub, jazz, funk, and rock, all imbued with punk and industrial ferocity. Ice is Martin’s third project, following God and Techno Animal. The lineup is more or less the same, notably including guitarist Justin Broadrick (Godflesh) and bassist Dave Cochrane, with the addition of Swiss saxophonist Alex Buess. The real novelty of Under The Skin (Pathological, 1993) is a brutal, metallic, staggering sound that pushes well beyond conventional dub.
On Juggernaut Kiss, Martin, Broadrick, and Buess improvise “Hendrixian” cacophonies over a sonic dub magma prepared electronically via sampling and programming. Even more devastating is Survival Of The Fattest, with frenzied screams of a Mark Stewart lookalike, terrified hisses from the saxophones, guitar distortions resembling monkey cries, and African-style drum rolls. On .357 Magnum, the dub metronome is provided by a restrained, repeated heavy-metal riff, producing once again an effect of terror and ruin. The chainsaw-like distortion and bestial scream of The Flood are jams of terrifying, exhausting violence.
When the instruments subside, psychological tension takes over, no less terrifying. Martin constructs unbearable suspense and dark premonitions with the dreamlike reverbs of guitar and hallucinatory drum hits in Out Of Focus, with a horrifying chaos of percussion in Skyscraper, with a methodical accumulation of unpleasant sounds, and with a continuous cycle of industrial noise in Swimmer (thirteen minutes).
While the ensemble sometimes rambles, exposing the flaws of Martin’s live performances, Stick Insect captures a rare moment of “total” inspiration, channeling all elements of the sound into a grand musical cataclysm, almost like an avant-garde concert in dissonance.

From Under The Skin begins the second true God album, the monumental The Anatomy Of Addiction (Big Cat, 1994), full of good intentions but, like much 1970s progressive rock, often pretentious, redundant, and verbose. Almost all the previous members return, plus Russell Smith (guitar) and Tom Prentice (viola). The album opens with industrial music in On All Fours and a murderous Foetus-like approach, but soon the horns take control, overwhelming the cadaverous syncopations and metallic mistakes of Tunnel with clouds of alien drones, meowing chaotically over the rap-metal of White Pimp Cut Up. The album still maintains harsh and violent sonorities: ten minutes of beyond-the-grave tribalism in Bloodstream are carpet-bombed by dissonances from all instruments; the nine minutes of Driving The Demons Out (the climax of the ceremonial) teem with terrifying guitar riffs. These pale in comparison to Detox (eighteen minutes), a total immersion in the ensemble’s improvisational delirium, with all instruments unleashed to express (scream) themselves. A couple of indirect tributes to Jimi Hendrix’s dark soul (the catastrophic distortions of Lazarus and the apocalyptic slashes of Gold Teeth) and one to Captain Beefheart (the Voodoo Head Blues, sung in a lycanthropic register, punctuated by telluric thuds and teeming with a swarm of peevish horns) seal this exercise in vulgar excess. The essence of the operation lies more in the collective jamming, always at maximum cacophony.

Techno Animal is the project of Kevin Martin (God) and Justin Broadrick ( Godflesh). Their Ghosts (Pathological, 1990) is an experiment on sampling that has little in common with the careers of the two. The brief ouverture of Burn works as a sort of manifesto: a loop of grindcore drumming and metallic noise. A panzer riff and funereal beats leads the "danse macabre" in hell's kitchen of Walk Then Crawl (eleven minutes). A shroud of sampled noises is laid on the powerful polirhythmic ticking, leaving behind a strident comet of dissonances.
The percussive pieces betray the industrial roots of the duo. Pounding, syncopated beats propel White Dog. Touch Cop (eleven minutes) adds something similar to Albert Ayler's horns and Von Lmo's grotesque cacophony.
At times their music seems a cross between an accelerated and multi-layered version of the Swans' scores and a deranged imitation of Stockhausen's compositions. Freak Fucker lets samples of Hitler's speeches float in clouds of electronic dust. A Braxton-ian saxophone solo multiplies and decomposes to produce the oniric waves of The Dream Forger, at the mercy of minimalistic and ambient techniques. God Vs Flesh is an amoeba of liquid sounds that expands in ominous washes of drones while skirting Tibetan mantras and Brian Eno frescoes.
Spineless explores a third way, after the industrial-percussive one and the ambient-noise one: a wild whirlwind of samples drifting in outer space.
The range of experimentation is imposing. The results are no less devastating than Godflesh's music.

The Techno Animal project was revived in 1995 with the double album Re-Entry (Virgin). The first part collects six long dub tracks halfway between ambient trance and industrial claustrophobia. Jon Hassell’s influence is very strong on the soft and exotic Flight Of The Hermaphrodite, an exhausting percussive ritual punctuated by the intoxicated calls of the trumpet. In the primitive setting of Mastodon Americanus, the trumpet’s role is taken over by a cluster of intermittent noises, gradually evolving into a comical robot ballet, as in City Heathen Dub. The landscape changes radically with Narco Agent, immersed in violence and urban neurosis, guided along minimal percussive patterns in slow transformation and gradual complexity buildup. The climax and tour de force of the work is supposed to be the twenty-minute dub fades of Demodex Invasion, which accumulate disturbances until they regress into piercing dissonance. The project loses impact when these marathon tracks reduce to simple studies of artificial rhythms, as in The Mighty Atom Smasher, and overall it adds little to the many circulating post-techno dance experiments.
The second part comprises six ambient and cosmic suites. The atmosphere of mystery in Evil Spirits, with periodic tolling and electronic swarms gradually rising, the fifteen minutes of subliminal music in Catatonia, and the funereal, martial hallucinations of Needle Park are merely appetizers before the monumental twenty-minute Cape Canaveral, which, finally freed from rhythm, recovers the most unsettling suspense of Klaus Schulze’s cosmic music and composes a solemn electronic poem of interstellar voids. Even more daring are the piano turbulences in Red Sea, like a minimalist, ambient version of Ravel, pointing toward a truly experimental path. Gradually, Techno Animal freed itself from the constraints of synthetic rhythms, which were first of all becoming outdated and, secondly, had not led to anything particularly creative.

The EP Babylon Seeker (Rising High, 1996) offers some remixes of these tracks in a hip-hop style and a bit of unreleased material, but essentially tries to capitalize on the dub-ambient trend without much imagination. The other EP, Unmanned (Chrome 1, 1996), continues in that direction, with slightly more dub influence, but with a collection of oscillators, delays, reverb, feedback, and white noise that would overwhelm even the boldest experimenters.

The EP Radio Hades (Position Chrome, 1998), that collects previously released limited-edition material, signals Martin's continuing interest in Techno Animal's experiments Equally threatening, majestic and innovative, the EP adopts a format of shorter, chaotic tracks: not symphonies, but sonatas. The Myth is a psychedelic extra-galactic dub of distorted vocals. Similar, dub-tinged ideas are explored in Return Of The Venom and Bass Concussion. Intercranial is a parade of Chrome-sounding androids with synth fireworks and busy drumming. Toxicity enhances the doses of chirping synthesizers and pounding drums. Interplanetary War Chant is a typical Techno Animal study on (sampled) vocals and (looped) percussion. The extreme saturation of sound peaks with Phantom Tribe, a nightmare of beats and distortion. This new version of Techno Animal has learned from Brian Eno: its music is structured in electronic vignettes a` la Before And After Science for the post-industrial age.

Martin is also active in Experimental Audio Research, a collaboration with Sonic Boom ( Spectrum) and Kevin Shields (My Bloody Valentine).

Martin is also a graphic designer, who hides under the moniker Pathological Puppy.

Kevin Martin (under the moniker K Mart) and Justin Broadrick (JK Flesh) are also active as Sidewinder: their Colonized (Virgin, 1996) is the most frantic of their works.

Kevin Martin and Dave Cochrane are Bug, a side project (originally a test for Ice's sound system) that turned deadly serious when DJ Vadim helped assemble Tapping The Conversation (WordSound, 1997). The album is meant as an homage to Francis Ford Coppola's masterpiece, and it does recreate its paranoid atmosphere with a psychophysical torture of extreme hip hop and dub sounds. The title-track of the EP Low Rider (Fat Cat, 1998) and Bass Pressure are also dominated by the bass. Pressure (Rephlex, 2003), the second full-length by Kevin Martin under the moniker of Bug, offers frantic, surreal dancehall with an assorted cast of toasters. As usual, Martin turns a genre upside down by injecting doses of visceral violence into its original formula.

Ice's second album, Bad Blood (Morpheus, 1998), features Blixa Bargeld and several rappers, and slaughters hip-hop's structural scaffolding, leaving behind a skeleton that smolders like psychedelic music at its most transcendental. Despite sharing the same moniker, this (more conventional) album is hardly related to Ice's first album Under The Skin.

Techno Animal (Martin and Broadrick) are also involved in a couple of prestigious collaborations: The Curse of the Golden Vampire (DHR, 1998) with Alec Empire and Symbiotics (Mille Plateaux, 1999) with Porter Ricks.

Techno Animal's Versus Reality (City Slang, 1998) amplifies the concept by elaborating on themes provided by Porter Ricks (Demonoid), Alex Empire, UI, Tortoise and Spectre.

Techno Animal's single Dead Man's Curse (Matador, 2001) is a sinister experiment with hip hop, and a preview for the album The Brotherhood Of The Bomb (Matador, 2001), half of which is enhanced with a fistful of professional rappers (but the half that is only instrumental fares much better), i.e. hardly related to the ghostly ambient dub of its predecessor.
No matter how loud and noisy it gets, opener Cruise Mode 101 cannot hide its fundamental nature of uninspired rap, a problem that occurs over and over throughout the album. The noisy wasteland and psychedelic distortion of DC-10 creates perhaps the best essay of the apocalyptic hip-hop they have in mind.
The instrumental tracks are far more interesting: Hypertension provides a harrowing blend of jazz, dub and industrial music; Robosapien paints a futuristic vignette scarred by heavy metal riffing; Freefall and Sub Species are more or less abstract noise with a steady beat; Monoscopic dilutes and dilates dub music; Blood Money is a dark and chaotic nightmare.
The ensemble did not spend enough time refining the ideas for this album and probably relied a bit too much on the leaders' talent in composing frightening collages of sounds. It also takes the music.

Razor X Production is yet another Kevin Martin project, a collaboration with Rootsman devoted to revisiting ragga and dancehall classics in a punk-industrial context. Their singles were collection on the double-disc Killing Sound (Rephlex, 2006).

As usual, the Bug's London Zoo (Ninja Tune, 2008) employed a cast of singers. The massive, grinding, claustrophobic digital arrangements of this album were perceived by the crowd of 2008 as an extreme form of dubstep (a genre that he had basically invented with the first Bug album). The Bug was, however, more appropriately the moral heir to Mark Stewart's edgy dance-punk combo Pop Group. The pounding hyper-dancehall Angry and the industrial dub Jah War (originally recorded in 2006) bet heavily on a primal propulsive element, but most tracks take a tangent view of rhythm, starting with the bass-heavy post-Tamla party rap Murder We to the swinging Too Much Pain, which is more of a ballad. The cryptic exorcism Skeng is a highlight for the way it complements a post-dub step with a machine-gun pattern. The tragic six-minute Poison Dart (a 2007 single) wraps Warrior Queen's hypnotic rigmarole in a shroud of trippy reverbs and panzer bass lines.
Martin's creative rhythms transfigure African, Brazilian and Jamaican traditions. Faced with beatscapes that they had never encountered before, the rappers are forced to reinvent themselves in a (musical) language that is foreign to all pre-existing languages.
There is another album inside the album. The political manifesto Fuckaz, that relies more on electronic dissonance than on the beats, the sparse, noir bossanova You And Me and the eerie instrumental Freak Freak abandon the "in your face" attitude for a subtler approach.
Martin conceives an album as a war zone. However, this not as abrasive and hostile as his greatest projects. By Martin's standards, this album is lyrical and romantic.

Martin the producer and Trinidad-born poet Roger Robinson launched King Midas Sound, whose Waiting For You (2009) featured the lethargic dubstep of Cool Out.