They are one of the most famous obscure electronic music acts in the world and have been honored and name checked by the likes of Depeche Mode, Skinny Puppy, Front Line Assembly, NiN & Orbital.
Portion Control is now highly active and creating innovative, uncompromising electronic audio.
After their return in 2004 they have self-released a stream of critically acclaimed CDs and EPs as well as actively presenting their live transmissions at festivals such as Tinnitus Festival (UK), Reverse Forward Festival (Germany), Wave Gothic Treffen (Germany), BodyBeats Festival (Belgium) to name a few.
Now Portion Control teams up with Sigsaly Transmissions to release this two-disc 6 page digipak release. CROP includes a compilation of material from 2004-2008 as well as an CD EP of reworked and new material.
With release on Sigsaly Transamissions CROP will be the first Portion Control product to be comprehensively promoted and distributed, hopefully exposing their influencial sound to new listeners.
Biography:
Portion Control are a British electronic and industrial band formed in London in 1980. The band calls its music style electropunk or hard rhythmic electronics. They are one of the most famous obscure electronic music acts in the world and have been honoured and name checked by the likes of Depeche Mode, Skinny Puppy, Front Line Assembly, NiN & Orbital
Having made a stylish return to the electronic underground with the album Wellcome in 2004, industrial act Portion Control now delivers a timely retrospective box set for collectors. Here we find 5 CDs of which appears to be the vast majority of their vinyl back catalogue work - plus extras - for the first time available in digital format. The material includes the bands early albums and EPs spread over the first 4 discs, with a limited edition bonus CD including high quality MP3s of everything included on the initial 4 discs, plus a remix of the track Refugee Rebuild by Rhys Fulber and 135 past & present related images of the band.
Disc one focuses on the 1982 album I Staggered Mentally, accompanied by the EP Hit The Pulse, which was released the following year. This is the rough template from which many industrial bands were influenced, and to some extent copied – notably two of the genres most successful and original protaganists, Front Line Assembly and Skinny Puppy, alongside the hard rhythmic electronics of Depeche Mode.
I Staggered Mentally is as raw an electronic album as you could possibly find, focusing around Dean Piavani’s anguished vocals set to an urban-industrial backing track of creaking metal, maudlin drones, primitive beats and alienating analogue flickers.It also is considered the first album to feature the legendary roland bass line TB-303 On the Hit The Pulse EP, Portion Control’s sound becomes more refined and sophisticated, although still completely out on a ledge for its time. This is the band’s first movement towards critical acceptance – with tracks like Thrust Angle showing innovation through its primitive sampling and sequencing methods – the music shaped by much cleaner beats and bass lines, although the heavily rhythmic bruise of the excellent Abbodabbo retained their leanings towards intense musical masochism.
Disc Two, titled Code002, features Portion Control’s final albums of the eighties before their lengthy semester, Step Forward (1984) and Psycho-Bod Saves The World (1986). Personally, this is where I find Portion Control at the peak of their powers – an amalgamation of purist industrial music, now shaped into songs rather than atmospheres – with marching rhythms and melodic passages. On Step Forward, we find classic tracks such as Havoc Man, with its edgy sequenced bass line and New Order-style synth-stabs, Piavani is on top form here vocally. There is also a number of creaking instrumental atmospheric numbers here – Eno antidotes I call them. The song Tex Mex is another blinder – I’m leaning towards the more melodic tracks – but you can see how easy and perhaps tempting it would have been for Portion Control to drop their principles and enter the synthpop mainstream fray – Depeche Mode for one said “thanks very much” – took what they could then amalgamated it into their synthpop universe.
On Psycho-Bod Saves The World, you can see the clear influence Portion Control had on industrial purists Front Line Assembly – with its reams of multi-layered film samples and moody soundscapes. The album embraces live drumming and more fluid songwriting ethics, the basslines powering the songs forward, moving further away from the static, motoric robotisism of previous works. Fistful Of Creds, with its tribal rhythms and wailing siren synth sounds is a brooding standout.
Code003, meanwhile, features the 1986 EP Purge and the 1983 compilation album Simulate Sensual. Purge saw Portion Control refining their sound further, everything is tighter here – I believe this EP represented the band’s first real stab at entering the alternative commercial mainstream at least – with Piavani’s vocal toned down somewhat, and high pitched melodic motifs increasingly apparent on tracks such as Raise The Pulse and The Great Divide.
Finally, we come to the fourth disc in the collective, which features the EP Surface And Be Seen (1982) the singles Raise The Pulse (1982), Rough Justice and Go Talk (1984), and The Great Divide (1985). This harks back to the band’s most experimental and fragmented cuts; critically acclaimed, but leagues away from what your everyday synth pundit was clamouring for at the time – and sometimes hard to swallow.
Portion Control is highly active now, and some might think better than ever, however, not only is this box set a completists dream, but it also goes some way to help map out the history of the industrial genre and other associated styles of electronic music. For that alone it’s a key body of work – well packaged and put together, despite some of the material being admittedly difficult to assimilate
In 1987 Portion Control signed to London Records and promptly vanished. They reformed a few years later as Solar Enemy which existed from 1990 to 1993. Portion Control weren't seen again until 2002 when fansite 319 Online announced a resumption of activities by the band resulting not long after in a free downloadable software demo, code 11, featuring graphics, a rare remix of an old track – suck and blow, and samples of new material. Nothing else was released by them, however, until early 2004 with the release of the critically acclaimed double album Wellcome (the title inspired by the work of Sir Henry Wellcome).
Genre:
Industrial/EBM/Elektro
Bandmembers:
Dean Piavani –voice, electronics, visuals
John Whybrew–electronics, visuals
Tracklist: CD 01
01. Hardman
02. Global
03. Pure Menace
04. Blood Rushed to Head
05. Blind Eyes
06. Too Much Damage
07. Onion Jack II Segue
08. Chew You to Bits (Rebuild)
09. Sickman
10. Onion Jack IV Segue: Pearly King & Queen
Cosh Boy. Onion Freak.Drive.By.Sunbeam
Tracklist: CD 02
11. Brain Scraper Death Dive (Rebuild)
12. Defend (NTRSN Version)
13. Witness/Transmission Intro_01
14. Amnesia (Beta.01)
Release-Date:
June 26th, 2009
Year of foundation:
1980
Order:
http://www.indietective.de
Portion Control @ www:
www.portion-control.net/crop
Portion Control @ Myspace:
www.myspace.com/porcon
Label:
www.sigmedia.us
The latest album, ‘Flowers from Exile’ (2009) goes a step further in this direction. Similar to the early albums of the legendary songwriter Leonard Cohen, stories from the (inner) exile are told here with fatalistic gestures and dark timbre; of the longing for a lost homeland, of loneliness and eternal travels, but also of unexpected friends far away and the actual homeland in your own heart. Songs such as ‘The Secret Sons of Europe’ or ‘To Die Among Strangers’ (which was previously released as a CD single) form a song cycle full of metaphors for estrangement – the poetry of longing. Highly detailed arrangements use the sound of the flamenco guitar as well as mysterious samples, pulsating beats and sad melodies. In ROME’s songs there lives a stoic sense of the melodramatic. As well as Cohen, one must look to icons such as Tom Waits and late Johnny Cash in order to be able to describe the lyrics and voice of Jerome Reuter.
Janosch Moldau, internationally acclaimed creator of electronic sounds is releasing the long awaited Remix Album of his 2nd Album „Motel Songs“. This Album features many different versions of the well known Singles "Clear" and "One with the sinner".
The
first live act took place in 2004 as support for the band Untoten in
Rüsselsheim. Because of logistic problems, the live band was cut from 4
to 2 people again.
The second album called „Torment“ came out in 2005, on time for release
at the Wave Gotik Treffen festival in Leipzig, where the band had a
concert too. With the second album the first video clip was released,
also called Torment. The song Fluegelschlag was released at the festival
sampler and again top places in the charts were reached. But not only
the publicity factor got higher, the distance between the second and the
third album, that was also the last part of the deus ex machina trilogy,
got shorter.
With ‘
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