Vieon
Coventry has a great tradition of electronic based music, not least Delia Derbyshire of course.
Generally, Electronic music, like many genres has a wide and varied spectrum. On one extreme, you have the experimental sounds, like Delia, Stockhausen and Pauline Oliveros.
Somewhere in the middle, there’s the the late lamented Keith Emerson, Tangerine Dream, and Kraftwerk.
Right on the other side, there’s the Drama meisters like Vangelis and Jean-Michel Jarre.
Coventry based electro band Vieon, proudly fit into the last category. I caught up with the band’s main man Matt Wild. I asked him, ‘Why electronic music’?
“I’ve been interested in electronic music for as long as I can remember. One of my first memories is my dad coming home with Jarre’s Chronologie which would have been in 1993 when I was three. I’m pretty much self-taught from there and first starting making my own music in my late teens.”
Over the last few days I have been listening to the Vieon CD entitled, ‘The Sound of The Future’. Yes, the Jarre influences are all on show, but there’s so much more going on.
the track ‘Starfighter’, in my humble opinion, is as good as anything JMJ has ever produced. The whole album is alive with energy and alive with creativity.
If this was a painting, we would be looking at huge vibrant brush strokes and loads of colour. Tracks flow from one journey to the next, each one demanding attention.
I asked Matt how important this CD was to him: ” I’m very proud of the album and EP as I’ve been given the opportunity to release my music to a wider audience and the response has been amazing, especially to our live shows.”
On the subject of live shows, you can witness Vieon live at The Tin on May 11. For more information on the band go to http://vieon.co.uk/
Warriors of The Dystotheque
Another band that is happy to have something of an ‘electronic’ legacy are Warriors of The Dystotheque, though their sound takes its influences from many genres including 60s garage, broken beat, jazz, downtempo, techno, electronica, noise, psyche, breakbeat. And as they put it themselves, “and pretty much anything that opposes the mainstream beige clichés of modern music”. That really says it all about this incredibly inventive band.
The debut album, Madness in The Method, will be released on vinyl via their own label Fly Beat Music on January 26.
It will be distributed through all the major independent record stores in the UK and Ireland and on their Bandcamp page, also Juno, Beatport, iTunes, Spotify and the usual digital outlets.
The album really is a million miles away from the plastic pop we often see paraded as ‘real’ music. It really is too good not to have your attention, always clever, always original, but always remaining kinda cool throughout the process.
The album also features indie giants Pop Will Eat Itself who also feature on their next WOTD single which has a video that’s been designed in Coventry and is one of only a few 360 degree Virtual Reality videos in music.
