The Universe of the Legendary Pink Dots

The Legendary Pink Dots found themselves wrapping up a 40th anniversary tour right when COVID started to hit, with the bandmembers hunkering down in separate locations and focusing on various smaller releases for the next couple of years. 2022’s The Museum of Human Happiness was recorded remotely as a result, the band’s visions of apocalypse taking on a new edge in context. Edward Ka-Spel’s voice feels charged with a subtle energy, and there’s a close, vibrant intensity evident in songs like “Cruel Britannia,” “Hands Free Space” and “The Girl Who Got There First.”

Recorded during the early 1991 Gulf War as a partial comment, Tanith and the Lion Tree found Edward Ka-Spel, partially accompanied by his then partner Lady Loop, creating a queasy, fractured feeling of a fairy tale definitely not designed for children, as the opening intensity of “‘O’ From the Great Sea” makes clear. There’s plenty of calm beauty as well though, as on the slow fading of the instrumental “Loop 1,” while the absolutely compelling gentility of “Prithee” – the setting of a Ka-Spel vocal then shifting into a gentle piano part is remarkable – might just be one of his best efforts.

By 1996 the Tear Garden partnership had taken Edward Ka-Spel and cEvin Key to new areas; if they had started where Ka-Spel was almost a guest with Skinny Puppy, To Be An Angel Blind felt more rooted in the Legendary Pink Dots side of things, as the opening acoustic-led “Ascension Day,” originally written by Ka-Spel and bandmate Martijn De Kleer, shows. Generally moody and understated, with songs worked out in improvisations and edited further, it has the feeling of a late night meditation, Ka-Spel singing quietly as delicate arrangements unfold around his lyrical visions.

The Legendary Pink Dots moved to the Metropolis label in America in the early 2010s, a move that continued their long-running if still almost accidental grouping with the continuing goth and industrial underground in that country and beyond. It was a fruitful move in any event, with their 2013 debut for them, The Gethsemane Option, another strong standout in what by then had become a vast number of albums. Emphasizing a rich, moody electronic sound throughout, key songs included the striking opener “A Star is Born,” the near-whispered “Pendulum” and the vividly intense “Esher Everywhere.”

Written and recorded in the space of a month, 1998’s Nemesis Online can sometimes sound it, but that sense of rushed energy and capturing a mood as fears of computer breakdown at the start of 2000 became more public made the album a notable document in the Dots’ story. The partial motto of the release – “Can you sense the zeitgeist?” – can be heard from the start with opening song “Dissonance” touching on trip-hop, but it’s generally an example of their restless range at work once more, whether it be the noisy roil of “Is It Something I Said?” or the gentle “Fate’s Faithful Punchline.”

The Legendary Pink Dots hit an American underground audience in a big way with 1990’s The Crushed Velvet Apocalypse, appropriately enough given the sheer quality of the album, featuring a new lineup that was the debut of multi-instrumentalist Niels van Hoorn. The opening song “I Love You In Your Tragic Beauty,” a fragile folk/boulevardier tune, became one of their standards, leading into a varied album meditating on, indeed, apocalypse and renewal. The CD edition included the tracks from the Princess Coldheart EP, the 60s pop-tinged title track becoming another fan favorite.

The first collaboration between the Legendary Pink Dots founder Edward Ka-Spel and Skinny Puppy’s cEvin Key followed a 1987 tour where Ka-Spel opened for Key’s group, and the resulting combination proved to be an excellent balance of aesthetics. With Key’s work further fleshed out by Dwayne Goettel, Bill Leeb and even Nivek Ogre on one track, sonically it has the impact of late 80s Skinny Puppy, heavy drum punches and an air of fraying chaos, with Ka-Spel’s lyrical invocations and surreal poetry adding strange airs to “Coma,” “Deja Vu” and “You and Me and Rainbows.”

The overlapping tangle of cassette releases and compilations covering the first year of the Legendary Pink Dots almost requires flowcharts to make sense of, but one of the most thorough, especially following a 2013 rerelease, is the Chemical Playschool Vol. 1 & 2 collection, a title which has served for a running series of similar collations since. At this stage the group’s approach was lo-fi but still quite compelling, Ka-Spel’s winsomely strange vocals over a blend of textures already in its own world, as on fascinating songs like “Temper Temper,” “Defeated” and the wry “Frosty.”

Edward Ka-Spel’s second solo album, 1985’s Eyes! China Doll, is one of his most intriguing, covering a variety of sonic approaches, from aggressive percussion to floating ambience to even a bit of reggae-informed rhythm, all while rich synth texturing and his ever-recognizable voice creates the feeling of rituals, sci-fi movie weirdness and general mystery. He finds space for some of his more extreme vocal approaches, thus the strangled screeches on “Avengelist,” while the lengthy “Hotel Blanc” is a striking multipart effort. Best song title, meanwhile: “Six Cats on a Dead Man’s Chest.”

One of the Silverman’s most fully contemplative works, 2013’s Finisterre partially serves as an exploration of what has been called dark or cold ambient, taking the slow unfoldings of various electronics to create a feeling of isolation and suspension instead of a warm bath in sound, as on the mechanistic build of the concluding track, “Spring.” The squirrelly touches to “Fitzroy Cromarty” give a sense of unknown stowaways in a vast vessel of some sort, while the steady cycle of “Oscar’s Last Day” provides, if not exactly serenity, then the sense of some kind of a cosmic progress.

The Legendary Pink Dots were as close to high profile as they would ever get in the early 1990s, but despite label pressure to get even more commercial the group stuck to its creative guns, resulting in one of its most compelling and unusual albums, Shadow Weaver. The sense of exploratory composition throughout the album openly harkened back to work by very early 1970s Pink Floyd and Can, with Edward Ka-Spel’s portrayals of emotional extremity on songs like “Guilty Man-Ghosts of Unborn Children” and “Stitching Time-Twilight Hour” continuing to hold sway.

2000’s Red Letters was seen by some fans as a slight retreat for Edward Ka-Spel’s solo work to the predominantly synth days, but in ways it’s more of a perfection of the form, with a hint of near lo-fi murk at points but deployed as a stylistic point offset elsewhere even in the same song. One of his more serene-sounding releases, though with the sense of unsettled feelings contemporary Legendary Pink Dots was also hinting at, Red Letters is centered on understated performances and lyrics, as songs like “Red Rocks” and “Belief On a Breeze” demonstrate.

After increasing mutual dissatisfaction with their label Play It Again Sam, the Legendary Pink Dots switched to the Soleilmoon imprint in America and, after much internal debate about a running order, released their first album for them in 1995. With Ryan Moore ever more a key addition to the then-current lineup, From Here ranged from the genteel opener “Clockwise” to the surging “Remember Me This Way,” while the pulsing throb of “A Velvet Resurrection” captures a lyrical mixture of hope and a harder edge that remains one of Edward Ka-Spel’s best performances.

Something of a continuation of The Tower by the band’s own account – the leadoff song itself is called “Tower 6” – Island of Jewels found the Legendary Pink Dots further developing their approach, essentially creating a prog rock album in all but name, owning a style far away from mainstream attention. The vivid sense of a collapsing England depicted via Edward Ka-Spel’s lyrics and his always notable vocals is heightened by the tempo shifts, instrumental variety – clattering percussion, stirring string parts, epic guitar solos, blaring saxophone, much more – and the cover art collage.

Thirty years after their decision to start a new duo and see what happened, Edward Ka-Spel and cEvin Key continued on their particular path as the Tear Garden with a new release. Often having an elegantly danceable feeling in line with the Tear Garden’s 21st century releases, The Brown Acid Caveat sets that musical element against Ka-Spel’s always compelling vocals, sometimes here at their warmest and most yearning. But there’s plenty of dark shadows abounding still, as can be heard on the slow burn of “Amy’s Personality,” “Seven Veils” and “Sinister Science” among others.

The Silverman’s full solo debut outside of the context of the Legendary Pink Dots and other efforts, Dream Cell by default exchanges Edward Ka-Spel’s surreal and vivid imagery for the power of suggestion and atmosphere, but in a way that doesn’t make it seem like something is simply missing. Instead, it steers away from simple ambient wash for a combination of some softer melodies and what could be field recordings – not electroacoustic music per se, but with presence, feeling like one is in the room as pieces like “Rite of Passage” and “Serpent Time” are created.

Intended as the first formal album by the Legendary Pink Dots, though a vinyl release of the Brighter Now cassette ended up being that by default, 1983’s Curse found the band already starting to move beyond the understated efforts and curiosities of their earliest days, a reflection of more experience and likely more money to hand. There’s a greater sense of depth in the at once steady and constantly unsettling arrangements, melodies shot through with unexpected noises and elements, Ka-Spel’s vocals everything from a quiet conversational murmur to a recitative invocation.

The follow-up to The Crushed Velvet Apocalypse (with the Four Days cassette as an interim work), The Maria Dimension builds on the vivid majesty of the earlier album, The Legendary Pink Dots having established themselves as a presence worldwide. Edward Ka-Spel’s visions of a serenely strange world retain the sense of ritual on songs like “Disturbance,” “A Space Between” and “The Grain Kings,” while Niels van Hoorn’s saxophone adds further queasy bite. They also achieved another notable subcultural hit-as-such with “Belladonna,” a haunting synth-led ballad.

With one of their most vivid, unsettling album titles, the Legendary Pink Dots arrived in the mid-2000s with a restrained and contemplative effort, openly grappling with questions and impressions of mortality throughout its length. Edward Ka-Spel and the Silverman’s keyboards take a certain precedence on Your Children, Ka-Spel’s singing some of his most understated while retaining its own vivid presence. There’s some somewhat noisier songs like “No Matter What You Do,” but the calm, inward feelings of “Stigmata Part 4” and “A Silver Thread” are more representative of the album.

Requiem Settings was conceived as the Silverman’s response to the shattering events of 9/11, perhaps appropriate enough given the themes of death and apocalypse so often prevalent in the Legendary Pink Dots. In keeping with his work in general, the six-part composition is strictly instrumental and takes on different styles across its elements, from near-Thomas Köner levels of ringing cold chill to minimal electronics to distanced half-guessed tones under an overlay of crackle and static and more, a sense of a multileveled response across media and technology to the horror.