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Independent record label Independent Project Records (IPR) announced today that they have released two albums as companion pieces by U.K. cult band Woo. The band was recently featured in Electronic Sound magazine.
Both Robot X (originally released in 2016) and Xylophonics (2017) have been reshaped and newly conceived with updated artwork for release as, for the first time ever, a one-package release on double CD and double vinyl sets, as well as digital formats. Additionally, a new video for the Robot X focus track ‘Repeatability’ is out now on IPR’s YouTube channel, produced and created by Woo’s very own Clive Ives.
IPR and Woo first worked together in 1988 with the release of Whichever Way You Are Going, You Are Going Wrong and then the acclaimed 1989 cult favorite It’s Cosy Inside. Almost forty years later, the men behind Woo, brothers Mark and Clive Ives, have been remarkably prolific, and Independent Project Records is in the fourth year of its relaunch. Time to join forces again.
“We had a great collaboration with Bruce back then,” says Clive Ives of Woo. “Both Mark and I were delighted about this new double album with IPR. We love Bruce Licher’s aesthetic and distinct designs. He has really surpassed our expectations with his beautifully crafted letterpress artworks for the two albums. And IPR asked the brilliant Josh Bonati to master our albums!”
“I first met Mark and Clive Ives in the mid-eighties after being thoroughly amazed by the music of Woo on their self-released debut album Whichever Way You Are Going, You Are Going Wrong,” remembers Independent Project Records founder Bruce Licher. “I’m very excited to be working with them again on their catalog almost 40 years later, as both Robot X and Xylophonics are wonderfully weird albums cut from the same cloth as the electronic uniqueness they created years ago. There is nothing else quite like the sound that the Brothers Ives make — a sound that is quintessentially Woo.”
Robot X and Xylophonics tell a story of retro-futuristic visions from different angles: both proudly experimental, they combine a deluge of musical influences to offer something that is, quite remarkably, deeply layered and minimalist at the same time. The unpredictable instrumentals invite listeners to attach their own fantasies to what they hear, whether those fantasies belong to the past, the present or, more likely, a robotic future.
Robot X was created from snippets of recordings made on a 4-track tape machine in the 80s. “One of our most abstract and surreal albums," Clive Ives calls it. When the record was first compiled in 2016, the brothers felt that the reality of humanoid robots being made and being used was imminent. This concept became the main inspiration for the album, fuelled by the influence of Terry Gilliam’s 1985 masterpiece Brazil, with its blend of sci-fi and dark comedy.
The story, set in a dystopian world in which there is an over-reliance on poorly maintained (and rather whimsical) machines, proved influential for Robot X’s artwork, too: Clive Ives collaged together various old industrial machinery etchings to create robots, coming up with something that is obviously not as practical and functional as modern (real world) robots are designed to be. Even with good design, the question arises: how will these logical machines co-exist with unpredictable humans?
Xylophonics came together after the brothers Ives started reworking tracks found in the 90s section of their spacious archive. Back then, they had just begun recording onto computers. These tracks showcase their first opportunity to properly link drum machines with keyboards, and create loops and multitrack more layers without the need of sound on sound on a tape deck, working on melodic loops made with tuned percussion instruments such as marimba, kalimba and xylophone, and creating a feel that is equally futuristic and optimistic.
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