Vile Electrodes (London/UK)

First met at the ISYNTH 2015 in Lille.

Vile Electrodes (Live@synthclub, may 7th, 2017)
Vile Electrodes (Live@synthclub, may 7th, 2017)

And here’s the bio:

We have been playing together for a little over 6 years, and have combined a series of album and EP releases with regular live performances across the UK and Europe.

In 2013 we supported Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark and John Foxx and the Maths, and played alongside Michael Rother (Neu/Harmonia) at the Electronic Circus festival in Germany.

In 2014 we performed with the Radiophonic Workshop and also supported Mesh at their only UK show, as well as playing alongside Jerome Froese (Tangerine Dream) in Germany. We also contributed music to Matthew Sweet’s Radiophonic Workshop special on BBC Radio 3. The same year, our debut album ‚The Future Through A Lens‘ won ‘Best International Album’ and we won ‚Best International Artist’ at the Schallwelle electronic music awards in Germany.

In 2015 we supported Manuel Göttsching (Ash Ra Tempel) at the E-Live festival in the Netherlands and we were invited to perform at the Electri_City Conference in Dusseldorf alongside Heaven 17, Wrangler and Michael Rother. We featured in the BBC Introducing playlists for Southern England. We also contributed music to the BBC Radio 3 production ‘Memoirs of the Space Women’.

In 2016 we finished writing and recording our second album, ‚In The Shadows of Monuments, before embarking on a mini-tour in Sweden. We also played a handful of UK shows, including one on Hastings Pier, where we opened for Happy Mondays and The Orb.

Our musical influences include the early exponents of electronic music, disco, acid-house, techno and ‘intelligent’ dance music, Kosmische Musik, modern electropop, coldwave, early industrial music, film soundtracks and trip-hop.

We have an obsession for science fiction and Britain’s industrial and pastoral heritage, and our music is a soundtrack to that obsession. Ballardian, dystopian nightmares of longing and loss feature often, both thematically and lyrically. Our songs imagine a place between a forgotten future-that-never-was and the one we experience every day.

Our studio and live performances are characterised by an absence of laptops and software, and by the sound of old school analogue synthesizers and drum machines. But our music neither sits wholly in the past nor the present. Showing deference to ‘classic’ electronic music but not limited or defined by it.