Meat Beat Manifesto

Meat Beat Manifesto have never been known for doing the same thing twice. Their first few records were noisy creations that fit in well with their former label, Wax Trax!. Then came the minimalistic, trance-inducing rhythms of tracks like "Helter Skelter" and "Radio Babylon." Though Meat Beat don't like being associated with the current "rave" music, these tracks proved to be a big (and often sampled) influece. Now the group has changed yet again. On their latest LP, Satyricon, the group showcases, a cleaner, dancier sound, with more structured songs and stronger vocals.

But while the sound may be different for Meat Beat Manifesto, it is nothing new for it's members, Jack Dangers and Johnny Stephens. Dangers explains that their previous band, Perenial Divide, created music that was more melodic and less harsh than Meat Beat's early work.

Perenial Divide was a 1986 one-off project that used as its theme the bad state of the British economy."There was like 56,000 jobs on the line in the next ten years, and that's slowly becoming apparent to the public now," says Dangers. "Same thing for the miners, there's 30,000 jobs. They get the paper Monday moring and realize that 30,000 jobs have just been cut. The country's in such a mess."

Dangers says that with that project out of the way, he and Stephens went about trying to create "the noisiest record ever made" and Meat Beat Manifesto was born. "The whole thing about Meat Beat was that it was going to be musically different, as physical as you could make it and visually different as well," explains Dangers.

After releasing several 12-inch singles, the group had the tapes of their debut album destroyed in a fire of their London headquarters. They re-emerged in 1989 with the Storm The Studio LP, a sixteen cut album featuring mixes of four songs. Meat Beat have been known for their heavy remixing, often creating tracks that bear little resemblence to the original versions. "Psych Out," off the group's 1990 99% LP is a good example of this practice, as some of the versions are so different that they could have been released as completely different songs. But Dangers says that there "is no limit" as to how drastically changed a song can become in the remixing process.

In addition to working with Meat Beat, Dangers has worked in the studio producing and remixing for such bands as Consolidated and Disposable Heros and Hiphoprisy. Dangers says that his favorite and most challenging remix job was David Byrne's The Forest. "It worked really well," he explains. "It was a challenge because they wanted a dance track on an album with no rhythms, all strings and ethnic vocals. It was a big task."

The early Meat Beat live shows were known for their heavy emphasis on visuals. Back then, the group even had two members who contributed nothing but visuals - dancer/choreographer Marcus Adams and costume/set designer Craig Morrison. But after a few years of highly visual shows, which featured as many as 15 people on stage at once, it was time for a change.

"We did it for 2 1/2 years, and it worked at the time," explains Dangers. "It was a good show, people talked about it, people remembered it."

Meat Beat Manifesto did not want to fall into the trap of repeating themselves, so they moved on. When the group embarked on their first American tour, playing with Consolidated, the visual side of the band was limited to one dancer and a light show. Though Dangers doesn't rule out the posiblity of using more visuals in the future, he does not see it ever reaching the same scale.

"There will be no mass costumes and things, the music's too different to do that with now," he explains. "With the more aggresive Storm the Studio period, the visuals sort of slided in with that. Then came things like 'Radio Babylon' and 'Helter Skelter'."

In getting into electronic music, Dangers cites Kraftwerk and The Human League as major influences, though he admits to not particularly liking either band. Dangers has no formal musical training ("thank god") and sees nothing wrong with sampling when it's done creatively. "It's productive, it's envoronmentally friendly - recycling music," he says.

Meat Beat Manifesto take their samples from a wide variety of sources, but on the new LP there is an abundance of spoken-word snippets taken from the television. Most of these are confined to short audio collages that link the songs, but one track, "Original Control Version 2", uses a robotic voice proclaiming "I am electro" as it's vocal hook.

"It was from a science fiction tape of really bad B-movies, from an American television program called 'The Skippy Awards'," explains Dangers. "That year's winner was 'The Westinghouse Robot - Electro'. It was this bloke standing it this sprayed cardboard robot suit called Electro"

Back in the Wax Trax! days, Meat Beat Manifesto were often pigeonholed as being "industrial". And now, with the growing popularity of rave music, the group has also been lumped in with that. But Dangers doesn't think the group fits into any particular category.

"You can count on both your hands how many good techno records there's ever been," he proclaims. "We've inadvertanly done things - we did a track called 'Radio Babylon' that got picked up on the techno scene and people sampled it to death ..We just don't see ourselves as being part of any scene."