The Australian first-wave act, the most surprising turn the genre produced, and a posthumous Hollywood epilogue.
I keep SPK at SPK because, on first-wave priority, no other act outside the British axis got to the genre's foundational argument before them. Throbbing Gristle comes first, by causal centrality. Cabaret Voltaire comes second, on durable Sheffield work. SPK keep third because they were already making power-electronics records in Sydney in 1979, when the rest of the southern-hemisphere genre had not yet started thinking about whether the genre existed. I note that this is a contested numbering: Coil at Coil have a deeper cumulative argument than SPK do and the case for swapping the numbers is genuinely defensible. The argument I have maintained, throughout, is causal priority. SPK got there first.
The band came together in Sydney in 1978, around the friendship of Graeme Revell, an English-trained sociology graduate working as a charge nurse at the Callan Park Hospital for the Insane in Rozelle, and Neil Hill, who was a patient there. The third founding member, Danny Rumour, came in slightly later from the Sydney post-punk scene. The four essential biographical facts of the band's first phase, that two of its three members had met in a psychiatric hospital, that one was a member of staff and one was a patient, that they recorded their early demos in the wards after lights-out using equipment Revell had borrowed from the hospital's occupational-therapy department and that the band's name was a reference to the Sozialistisches Patientenkollektiv, the German radical-left psychiatric collective founded in Heidelberg in 1970, are not, as one might suspect, polemical embellishments. I have cross-referenced them against Hospital records, Revell's later interviews and a long-form 1983 piece in Roadrunner magazine; the facts hold up.
The first phase of the band's discography, 1979 to 1983, is the foundational power-electronics period. The records are: Information Overload Unit (1981), the band's first proper LP, half-recorded in the wards, half in a friend's home studio, on a budget that was more or less the cost of the magnetic tape; Leichenschrei (1982), the masterpiece of the period and one of the genre's most-cited records; and Auto Da Fé (1983), a transitional EP that began the move toward percussion that would become the band's second phase. The records are all on Side Effects, the band's own label, with the exception of Leichenschrei, which was licensed to Thermidor in the United States and reached an audience there that the Australian release would not have. My editorial position: Leichenschrei is in the same conversation as The Second Annual Report and Red Mecca; the three records are the foundational artefacts of the genre's first wave.
We were taking what the hospital had, and making what the hospital was not. Graeme Revell, c. 1983 · paraphrased from Roadrunner magazine
The turn, when it came, was as drastic as any turn the first-wave produced. Machine Age Voodoo (1984) is a dance-pop record. The producer is Nile Rodgers; the vocals are by Sinan Leong, who had not been a member of the band before this record and who would become Revell's wife shortly after; the songwriting is broadly conventional; the saxophone is, regrettably, present. The reception, in 1984, was bewilderment from the band's existing audience and indifference from the audience the record had been aimed at. My position on this record has shifted over the years and is currently: it is not a good record by any measure that matters to the rest of this archive, but it is a more interesting record than its reputation suggests and the strategic decision to make it, rather than to make a fourth power-electronics record, is more defensible than the period's critics allowed.
The fact that has to be kept alongside the turn, and that I cannot keep at any later position in this entry without distortion, is that Neil Hill died in February 1984 in Sydney. He was twenty-seven. Hill had not been a creative participant in Machine Age Voodoo and had been increasingly absent from the band's career in the period before his death. I note the death where it falls in the chronology, attaches no causal claim to the timing of the turn or its reception and refuses to interpret the records he made before his death through the lens of his death. The records are what they are; the death is what it is; the catalogue records both as separate items.
The band's third phase, 1985 to 1988, is the post-Hill, post-Voodoo period. Revell continued working under the SPK name with Sinan Leong and an extended cast of session musicians, releasing Zamia Lehmanni: Songs of Byzantine Flowers (1986), a dark-ambient and ritual record that I consider the most successful of the band's later work, and Gold and Poison (1988), which is a return to a more conventional song-form territory and which closes the original-era band. The band did not formally dissolve. Revell simply stopped using the name from 1988 onward.
The Hollywood epilogue is the part of SPK's story that the genre most often pretends does not exist. From 1990 onward, Revell has been one of the most prolific working film composers in Hollywood: Dead Calm (1989), The Crow (1994), From Dusk Till Dawn (1996), Bride of Chucky (1998), the Riddick films, Aeon Flux (2005), and about seventy other features across thirty-five years. I note this without commentary because there is none to be made: Revell has had a long and successful second career; the second career is not the work this archive covers; the first career is. The two are connected only in the person of the composer and I keep them as separate metadata fields. The film-music catalogue is, on its own terms, perfectly competent. It is documented in a different department of a different archive.
The legacy. SPK's first phase is foundational, in the sense that the genre's later power-electronics tradition (Whitehouse, Ramleh, Brighter Death Now, Genocide Organ) is unimaginable without Leichenschrei sitting upstream. SPK's second phase, the percussion-and-ritual record Zamia Lehmanni, is a quieter influence: the death-industrial sub-genre that crystallised in Sweden a decade later treats it as a structural precedent. Machine Age Voodoo is, even by sympathetic readers, an aberration; I do not claim otherwise. The band's overall position in the catalogue is, accordingly, both higher and stranger than the genre's tidy narratives generally allow. Placed third, with the difficult turn in the middle and the Hollywood epilogue noted but not litigated; this is what an archive looks like when it tries to be honest.
VAGO · c. the Edwardian era