69 (album)

69
Studio album by A.R. Kane
Released	1 July 1988
Recorded	1988
Studio	H.ark Studio
Genre	Dream pop avant-rock
Length	40:26
Label	Rough Trade
Producer	A.R. Kane Ray Shulman
A.R. Kane chronology
69 (1988) "i" (1989)"i"1989

69 is the debut album by British dream pop band A.R. Kane. After their successes with the house collaboration project M/A/R/R/S in 1987, A.R. Kane moved from 4AD to Rough Trade Records and recorded the Up Home EP (1988), followed by 69 at H.ark Studios. The band produced and engineered the entire record, with co-production from Ray Shulman on two tracks. The album followed the band's self-coining of the term "dream pop" to describe their music.

69 was influenced by an array of music, including the Cocteau Twins, Miles Davies and dub music. It features feedback and dizzy vocals. Some of the songs on the album were described as "doodles in sound." Music critic Simon Reynolds described the album as being governed by obsessions with the ocean and sleep. Music critic Martin C. Strong, writing in The Great Rock Bible, said 69 was "avant-rock-styled" and "hard to pigeonhole yet seminal nevertheless."

Released by Rough Trade Records in July 1988, 69 was an immediate success, reaching number 1 in the UK Independent Albums Chart. It was praised as a very innovative and important album. Melody Maker described it as "the outstanding record of '88." The album has gone on to be hugely influential, influencing bands in genres such as shoegazing, post-rock and trip hop including Bark Psychosis, Seefeel, My Bloody Valentine, Lush, Slowdive, Radiohead and Flying Saucer Attack. The album has since been included in lists of the greatest music.

Background and recording

A.R. Kane formed in London in 1986, a partnership between Alex Ayuli and Rudi Tamabla. Ayuli is of Nigerian descent, while Tambala was born to a Malawian father and English mother. The two first met as school children in an East London primary school, and both became involved in formative and culturally diverse music communities as adolescents. In 1983, Ayuli became an advertising copywriter, one of few black creatives working in the London ad business. The roots of the band lay in a joke, as at a party in 1986, Tambala was asked how he and Ayuli knew each other; he lied that the two played together in a band, going on to describe their sound as "a bit Velvet Underground, a bit Cocteau Twins, a bit Miles Davis, a bit Joni Mitchell." A week later, the two were contacted to record a demo on the strength of Tambala's fabrication.

Originally adopting a noise pop approach, they became hailed in the press as "the black Jesus and Mary Chain" upon releasing the single "When You're Sad" the following year on One Little Indian, before moving to 4AD later on in 1987 to release the follow-up EP Lollita, described by Allmusic as "an impressively eclectic blend of gorgeous dream pop bliss and nightmarish squalls of feedback produced by the Cocteau Twins' Robin Guthrie." While at 4AD, label chief Ivo Watts-Russell suggested that Ayuli and Tambala team with roster mates Martyn and Steven Young of Colourbox, champion mixer Chris "C.J." Mackintosh, and London DJ Dave Dorrell to record a one-off single fusing the rhythms and beats of classic soul recordings with state-of-the-art electronics and production. Dubbing the collaboration M/A/R/R/S, the resulting single, "Pump Up the Volume" was a breakthrough effort heralding sampling's gradual absorption from hip-hop into dance music and ultimately the pop mainstream, reaching number 1 on the UK Singles Chart in September 1987. With both early EPs and the M/A/R/R/S smash success behind them, A.R. Kane found themselves more than ready to go ahead with a full album in 1988 According to Allmusic, "A.R. Kane again picked up stakes, moving on to Rough Trade to begin work on their much-anticipated full-length debut." The band had become increasingly noted for their unique sound, and in known dislike for the terms the press applied to their music, the band coined the word "dream pop" to describe it.

Before releasing 69, their debut album, the band moved to Rough Trade Records and released the Up Home EP in 1988. When asked by The Quietus "what happened to the A. R. Kane sound from [1987 to 1988] and were you recording [69 concurrently with it?]," Tambala only replied "Up Home was special. Something happened. I can't explain." The band said "we were very lucky, we used to sit in bars, and stare wide-eyed at each other and laugh like spliff-heads, just cry with laughter for ages, saying, 'What the fuck is happening', and we knew it was not our doing, it was just that, it was happening, and we enjoyed the trip, with no sense it had ever started or would ever end. We were in an altered state for a few years. Drug-free, I hasten to add. Well, mostly. Fame caused rifts with our friends – we ended up spending more time with creative types, musicians and the like. I never met any of our fans, except the sexy ones." 69 was recorded at H.ark Studios. A.R. Kane wrote, performed, arranged, engineered and producded the entire record alone, except for the co-production of Ray Shulman on "Crazy Blue" and "Baby Milk Snacher."

Music

"This is no muso affair; all the songs bar "Sulliday" work as exquisite pop. Instead of hooks, though, there are "slides and slips," swooning cadences signifying pangs or shifts between altered states. I would say that the record is deeply moving−certainly it provokes severe internal bleeding in this boy–except that what AR Kane are about is the immobility of rapture. For them, each spasm of the gaze is a step out of time. They are petrified by beauty."

 —Simon Reynolds writing for Melody Maker, 1988.

An experimental dream pop album, 69 was influenced by several eclectic influences, including mid-1980s Cocteau Twins, Miles Davis, Can, and the "disregard for sonic structure" of dub music, whereby 69 "disappears into distant echoes that strikingly predict the succulent Seefeel," and features feedback and dizzy vocals. Music journalist Simon Reynolds described 69 as finding "unprecedented connections" between jazz, dub, acid rock, Sonic Youth-style "reinvention of the guitar" and Cocteau Twins circa Head Over Heels. According to Ned Raggett of Allmusic said 69 shows the band felling "playful, mysterious, and inventive all at once, impossible to truly pin down." He said the album was "never simply poppy nor completely arty, and definitely not just the Jesus and Mary Chain/Cocteau Twins fusion most claimed they were." The record possesses a very stripped down sound, and tracks that at times straddled the line of music and noise.

Although the band coined the term "dream pop" to describe their music, Matthew Losi of Onda Rock noted that the British music press had difficulties describing A.R. Kane and 69 in genres, terming 69 as "proto-shoegaze / late wave", and the group's description in the press as the "black Jesus and Mary Chain" became reinforced. The reviewer also created his own genres to describe the album: "dream-dub," "narc-psych" and "trip-wave." Martin C. Strong, writing in The Great Rock Bible, said 69 was "avant-rock-styled" and "hard to pigeonhole yet seminal nevertheless." Besides the Cocteau Twins and the Jesus and Mary Chain, critics drew comparisons between parts of the album and Lee Perry, Gong, early Pink Floyd, the "experimental end" of Jimi Hendrix, John Martyn, Arthur Russell, Public Image Ltd, The Durutti Column, and Van Morrison's Astral Weeks. Reynolds would later describe the album as "an idyll midway" between Miles Davis' Bitches Brew and Cocteau Twins' aforementioned Head Over Heels.

Music Arcades, calling the album "pretty elliptical," noted that some of the tracks on 69 are not songs, but "doodles in sound — but they also showed they could be very commercial when they wanted to be." According to Simon Reynolds, there are two "obsessions" that govern 69; the ocean–"where normal laws of gravity, acoustics and breathing are eluded", and sleep–"the sleep of beauty, certainty, but above all, the waking sleep of innocence, where every moment is liberated from the grid of adult forward planning, experienced full because free of past and future anxiety. Where these obsessions converge is in the womb." In their 2011 book Beyond and Before: Progressive Rock Since the 1960s, music journalists Paul Hegarty and Martin Halliwell refer to the band being at the centre of Reynolds' idea of "oceanic music" and that the band reached new heights of rock experimentation on 69. Geiger said that "sea water is in many ways also the element that binds the whole plate together. The water is as a symbol of beauty, liberation and innocence. The concept is regressive in the sense that it seeks towards the pre-language, the pre-born - in the end fetal huddled perfection."

Songs

69 was influenced by artists such as Cocteau Twins (Elizabeth Fraser pictured)

The album contains ten songs. According to Ned Raggett of Allmusic, opening song "Crazy Blue"–originally titled "You Push a Knife into My Wound"–resembles "little else recorded that year or any other one", and contains a few plucked guitar notes, a sudden "jazzy scat-vamp" by singer Rudi "with his unique voice", followed by "a more direct poppish strum, the woozy line, "Ooooh...everything's gone crazy now," followed by a series of intense reverbed chime sounds and bongo-like percussion." According to Raggett, "from there on in, things take a turn for the strangely captivating in song after song." Both "Crazy Blue" and second song "Suicide Kiss" feature "lost and lonely listlessness" and languid jazz inflections.

"Baby Milk Snatcher" appears to reference both the then-UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who had became known as the "milk snatcher", and to oral sex, containing lyrics such as "baby suck my seed." "Sulliday" features buried, measured percussion and evocative drones Raggett described "Dizzy" as featuring a "mesmerizing call-and-response by Rudi with himself, veering between more gentle, direct vocals and echoed shouts, eerily foretelling much of what Tricky would similarly do years later." The song features a sway of cello and vocals, counterpointed by a "catacomb of screams" described by Reynolds as combining John Lydon with Tim Buckley.

"Spermwhale Trip Over" was described by Ott as an "oddly title masterpiece" and "the album's hallmark", saying "the track's present-tense update of the Cocteau Twins' ethereal elegies is perhaps the group's defining moment." According to MusicArcades, the song "witters on about LSDreams." The song was a singular influence on Bark Psychosis and the aforementioned Seefeel. "The Sun Falls into the Sea" was described by Reynolds as "just incomparable: a mermaid lullaby not so much "accompanied" as almost drowned out by a sound like an immense quartz harp the size of a whale's exoskeleton, from which harmonics disperse and scatter as haywire as sunlight refracting beneath the ocean surface. It's not the notes played, but the untranscribeable opalescence of the stuff of this sound that's so unbearably lovely."

Release

69 was released on 1 July 1988 by Rough Trade Records on CD, LP and cassette in the United Kingdom, Europe, Australasia and the United States. The 1989 LP released in Australia and New Zealand also credits Festival Records as a record label. Commercially successful for an independent album, 69 peaked at number 1 in the UK Independent Albums Chart. Geoff Halpin is credited with packaging "design", with John Geary drawing the "69" illustration on the album cover and Paul Khera for the "sleeve." The alternative title Sixty Nine is also used in the packaging. In the UK, 69 was reissued on CD in 1999 by Rough Trade Records and in 2000 by One Little Indian, who also remastered and re-released the album in the US in 2004 as part of their "Crossing the Pond" series of remastered editions of British albums that were never released domestically in the United States. Pitchfork Media considered the remasters of the two albums to be "the jewels in the crown of One Little Indian's Crossing the Pond reissue campaign" alongside Disco Inferno's D. I. Go Pop (1994) and Technicolour (1996).

Simon Reynolds presumed the perceived references to oral sex in some of the band's lyrics continued to the album title, 69 (as in the sex position) and the "weird sea creatures in suggestive positions" on the album cover. Tambala denied any intention, saying the album cover shows "crustacean people from the planet Zarg... But they weren't having sex... They didn't have sex organs, for a start." Ayuli said "it's an angle. To be honest, most of the song titles we don't think about. The title seems to connect at the time, and it's not until later that we think: 'oh dear, we mentioned sperm again'. And then it's too late, it's printed on the record.... But I like the idea of people inputting stuff into the music. I mean, there's only so many things that can happen, right, and if you leave enough room, then they all happen." Geiger said that "the title's reference to the sexual position is obvious, but the figure symbolizes also opposed the connectedness, the circle organic ran from one to the other. The plate cover is emerging as also on white background a dark circle in the middle of which we can faintly make out the number 69, which is shaped like two dark, undulating spirals. Inner-case's intricate shading shows the blue background and more clearly six-figure as a pregnant woman and nine-figure as a man, both swimming, in harmonious movements."

Reception and legacy

Professional ratings
Review scores
Source	Rating
Allmusic
Colin Larkin
Martin C. Strong	8/10
Melody Maker	very favourable
Pitchfork	9.0/10
Spin	10/10

69 was released to unanimously positive reviews, and lead to the band becoming cited by many critics and fans as one of the most important and innovative bands of the era. Fact Mag stated that the band became "considered every inch the equals of My Bloody Valentine and the Pixies." In his review for Melody Maker, Simon Reynolds was hugely favourable, saying "I'd like to think that it's a blueprint for the next decade of rock. Whatever, the album of this year is upon us, already." He said that numerous different aspects of the album reminded him of Van Morrison's Astral Weeks (1968)–"the child-woman fixations, the tongue-tied murmur, the scat-nonsense whose alliteration assonance skirt the edges of the "more can be said," the sense of the halcyon recovered of sky-gardens all wet with angel tears. Maybe, like Van Morrison's record, 69 is a maverick, singular, unrepeatable document." He later called it "the outstanding record of '88."

Later reviews were also highly positive. In the 1995 Spin Alternative Record Guide, 69 is rated a score of ten out of ten, saying the album "was a druggy drift of swoony sensuality, narcotic reverie and polymorphous desire, Alex's frail vocal wandering through labyrinthine sound-grottoes." In his 2004 book The A to X of Alternative Music, Steve Taylor names 69 as "what to buy first"–recommending the album as what listeners new to the band should listen to first. Music Arcades was favourable in its review, with the reviewer saying "I don't like describing band just by comparing them to others — it feels lazy — but in this album you can hear clear echoes of Cocteau Twins, Lee Perry, Gong and early Pink Floyd as well as the experimental end of Hendrix." The Guardian commented that 69 was, "creatively, AR Kane's high-water mark," describing it as "a brilliantly sprawling and ambitious collection that was immersive and playful – and completely off the wall." Fact Mag called it a "landmark" album.

Upon its 2004 reissue, Chris Ott of Pitchfork Media rated the album 9.0/10, saying that the album revealed that "the unreal boom-box beat" of "Anitina" [the B-side to "Pump Up the Volume" that was billed as an A.R. Kane track] was "a red herring, aimed at selling the uninitiated on feedback and dizzy vocals." Although he considered the first two songs to sound like "awkward anachronisms" in 2004, he also said they were "the record's catchiest tracks" and considered "Spermwhale Trip Over" to be "perhaps the group's defining moment." In The Great Rock Bible, Martin C. Strong called the album "seminal," saying, "closer in many respects to PiL in bed with The Durutti Column", the duo’s fantasy-league trips to the moon and back resulted in excellent ethereal pieces," namely "Crazy Blue", "Baby Milk Catcher", "Suicide Kiss" and "Sperm Whale Trip Over". In the Encyclopedia of Popular Music, Colin Larkin rated the album four stars out of five. Ned Raggett of Allmusic rated the album four and a half stars out of five, calling it "ann unfairly long-lost classic." Geriger were too very favourable, saying "the album is primarily two sides and a unique exploration of the limits of music."

Influence

"Arguably the most criminally under-recognized band of their era, the British duo A.R. Kane anticipated virtually all of the key musical breakthroughs of the 1990s a decade before the fact, with the roots of everything from shoegazing to trip-hop to ambient dub -- even those of post-rock -- lying in their dreamy, oceanic sound."

 —Jason Ankeny of Allmusic.

69, alongside the band's other albums for Rough Trade, made a deep impression on emerging shoegaze, psychedelic and post-rock bands such as Flying Saucer Attack, Slowdive, Bark Psychosis and Disco Inferno. According to Geiger, 69 is "both an important rock-historical document and a key liaison to the hybrid-like solutions of rock stereotypes that happened in the late 1980s and early 1990s. AR Kane's mixing of different musical genres show as a whole to these differing waves as shoegazer, ambient, trip hop and post-rock." The album has been said to "strikingly predict" the sound of 1990s band Seefeel, whilst "Spermwhale Trip Over" was a direct influence on Seefeel and Bark Psychosis. "Suicide Kiss" has been said to predict "heavier" shoegazing bands such as the God Machine. Hugely regarded shoegaze band My Bloody Valentine's song "Slow", described as the birth of their signature "giddy, slip-sliding sound," was directly influenced by "Baby Milk Snatcher." Tambala recalled My Bloody Valentine "were a jangly indie band until we put out "Baby Milk Snatcher". Suddenly they slowed it all down and layered it with feedback. And they did it better than us, which was interesting." "Dizzy" was observed by Allmusic for somewhat predicting the music of Tricky.

Tambala recalled reading that in 1988, David Bowie was spotted in Virgin Megastore buying 69 and noted that later that year Bowie recorded the raw Tin Machine, posing 69 as a possible influence on Tin Machine and quipping "Coincidence? I like to think not. Make of that little apocrypha what you will." In 2012, Rob Fitzpatrick of The Guardian remarked that A.R. Kane's blending of "dub, feedback, psychedelic dream-pop, house and free jazz" can still be heard in modern artists such as Radiohead, Four Tet, Animal Collective and Burial. As Onda Rock described the scenario, "69 has been very influential, and like few other artifacts of its time. That said, it seems only right to reassess, under the purely aesthetic point of view, the fragrance bouquet: that unique mix where dub, pop, electronic, minimalism and rock instrumentation serene drown, eyeing the ascetic limbo of Talk Talk of Spirit of Eden foreshadowing and a thousand other things (not least 90% of the entire catalog Too Pure.)"

Aftermath and legacy

The band followed 69 with the EP Love-Sick (1988) and the double album, i (1989), which was also met with critical acclaim. Ned Raggett of The Quietus said that "compared to the filigrees and fillips that began [on 69], i almost bursts out of the gate." Both releases were the result of "having more money to buy music [because of the commercial success of 69] and [being] exposed to a lot more through recommendation and just through hanging out in different scenes." The band recalled "we kinda broke into the candy store and went mental with Love Sick and i – somebody should have stopped us! The indie scene was new to us; I thought indie meant from Indianapolis. Our first bass player Russell introduced us to a lot of 'dark' music (Swans, Buttholes, Nick Cave) and our second bassist Colin introduced us to certain classical ideas and progressive, intellectual stuff." In 2012, Tambala "smilingly" recalled that "69 is a gem. We wanted to go as far out as we could, and in doing so we discovered the point where it stops being music."

The website of Primavera Sound said that A.R Kane "were pioneers before their time but 69, their 1988 debut, is still seen today as splendid avant garde black pop with flashes of white, whichever way you look at it." At the end of 1988, numerous critics ranked the album on their lists of "Albums of the Year"; Melody Maker ranked it 5th, Spex ranked it 28th, Rockdelux ranked it 36th, whilst Q included it in their unordered list of the top 50 "Recordings of the Year." In 1999, The Guardian ranked the album at number 78 in its list of "Top 100 Albums that Don't Appear in All the Other Top 100 Albums of All Time Lists"–a list which featuring the greatest albums that do not appear in other lists of the greatest albums of all time, and in 2007, they included it in their list of "1000 Albums to Hear Before You Die." Onda Rock included the album in its ongoing list of "Rock Milestones." Jim Dregoatis included the album in his 1996 list book Kaleidoscope Eyes: Psychedelic Music from the 1960s to the 1990s. Acclaimed Music, a site which uses statistics to numerically represent reception among critics, acknowledges the album as "bubbling under" its list of the all-time top 3000 albums.

Track listing

All songs written and composed by A.R. Kane. 

No.	Title	Length
1.	"Crazy Blue"	3:26
2.	"Suicide Kiss"	3:36
3.	"Baby Milk Snatcher"	3:16
4.	"Scab"	3:25
5.	"Sulliday"	6:33
6.	"Dizzy"	3:47
7.	"Spermwhale Trip Over"	4:40
8.	"The Sun Falls into the Sea"	5:45
9.	"The Madonna Is with Child"	3:49
10.	"Spanish Quay (3)"	2:06

Chart positions

Album

Chart (1988)	Peak position
UK Independent Albums Chart	1