Today is Dashiell Hammett's birthday.
In honor of the seminal crime writer I submit for your perusal a noirish track from my favorite full-length record by one of the finer bands from the 1980s and 1990s:
CLOCK DVA
I love all the different phases of Clock DVA. The early tape-loop, electronic noise, wired to Beefheartian funk and white-boy-free-jazz and the sound of the Advantage-era which is basically a more sleeker, cleaner version of the earlier gritty noise.
Even the late 80s and 90s music programmed by the re-activated Clock DVA sounds like nothing else released in the era. In a time dominated by the industrial stomp and roar and pound and orgasmic moans of Wax Trax Records, Clock DVA was a much darker mystery.
Even their inevitable release on Wax Trax Records (the label had a roster filled with legends of the genre) sounds much more sinister than anything else on the label. The title track is all sex and Elizabeth Báthory...
Their last three full-length releases were made even more thrilling because of the liner notes that contained information about what inspired each track on the record. You came away from a listen wanting to know more about parapsychology, cybernetics, sound research, sexual fetishes, etc. There was no other band around with that sort of presentation. Dig the liner notes to Buried Dreams (1989) for just one example.
For me, the track ("Dark Encounter") tends to conjure a more 1950s Jim Thompsonesque, sexy sort of darkness than the steely, toughness of Hammett's books from the 30s.
But it was Hammett who brought the light to the darkness.
As Raymond Chandler wrote:
Hammett took murder out of the Venetian vase and dropped it into the alley...he gave murder back to the kind of people who do it for a reason, not just to provide a corpse; and with means at hand, not with hand wrought dueling pistols, curare, and tropical fish.
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