(July 2010) San Francisco based Dark Entries is back with another release, this time focusing on home soil with Dark Day and their Window LP. After being briefly part of DNA, New York based Robin Lee Crutchfield founded the pioneering electronics project: Dark Day. The group came into being in the late 1970’s, with their debut release hitting stores in 1979; a no wave ensemble of industrial and electronic experimentation. The tracks still had some traditional elements, such as guitars played by Nancy Arlen and Nina Canal. Arlen and Canal soon left the project leaving Crutchfield to seek new like-minded pastures, which he found the form of Bill Sack. The Dark Day sound took a turn with Sack on board, moving down a much more synth centric route. In 1982 the Window LP was the culmination of this collaboration, originally, and serendipitously, being released on Plexus Records, now resurfacing on Dark Entries.
The album has a wonderful juxtaposition to it, meshing deep tones with an almost childlike innocence. Crutchfield and Sack were interested in what they could do with electronics, sadly finances would only allow certain measures of abstraction.
“We couldn’t afford drum machines, sequencers or real synthesizers, and were reduced to emulating them on cheap portable and affordable keyboards.”
Nevertheless, economic restrictions did not limit Dark Day. The shoestring budget adds to the duo’s sound giving it the D.I.Y. quality that is synonymous with most of the best minimal synth and cold wave. The tracks of Window have a rawness as well as a playfulness to them, like the despondent, yet uplifting, “Don’t Bother.” “The Metal Benders” has a much more sullen aspect to it, reflecting man’s mechanization as the computer age begins to peer onto the factory floor. Crutchfield lends his vocals across the album, soft broody lyrics layered over sharp snare and subtle synth-lines. The metronomic “Sleep” toes a minimal twilight, slow and staggering along instrument and vocal solitude. Like so many cold wave and minimal synth tracks ‘Window’ is full of strangely catchy pieces, such as the absorbing staccato tones of “Dancer/Danger.” Experimentation hits fever pitch, and undoubtedly some of those bargain basement synths were pushed to their limit, with the ultimate piece: “Eternal Return.” Chords are turned in on each other, with vocals being abused and molested through distortion and contortion to produce a haunting final piece.
Window is a symbiotic meshing of man and machine, not in a well groomed Kraftwerk way but in a more tactile and cobbled manner. The tracks have an inert roughness to them, one that distances and welcomes the listener. Crutchfield manages to pour his fascination with mechanic percussion and contemporary culture into a unstably cohesive structure; like a modern day Tower of Pisa which proudly flaunts its askew tilt. Dark Entries have taken a record that disappeared into the void almost thirty years ago and rescued it back from the brink, and collector’s bedsits. Another piece of music history wonderfully brought back to life.
Window is out now on Dark Entries.
