artist : Thomas Leer
title : Scale of Ten
date : 2004
label : BMG
genre : Synthpop
release date: 02.28.2006
street date : 00.00.0000
tracks : 16
bitrate : VBRkbps
size : 117,8 MB
source : CDDA
type : Album
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25 years on, one of the most collectable and influential UK
indie singles remains 1979's Private Plane by Thomas Leer.
It appeared on his own Oblique label and was a groundbreaking
mixture DIY electronics, tape loops and hushed vocals.
Cut-and-paste music in a cut-and-paste sleeve. It was, as
discogs.com remembers, compelling pop with a dark heart,
swooping between the pretty and the pretty disturbing.
It sent out ripples across the music scene. ôThomas was a
huge influence on me, Matt Johnson told Johnny Marr in 2002,
ôparticularly his single, Private Plane. The fact it was
just one guy in his bedroom doing the entire thing made a
massive, massive impact on me. He was years ahead of his
time and actually inspired me to create The The really. He
later told me that the reason his vocals were so whispered on
that song is because his girlfriend was asleep in their
bedsit while he did it!
Leer followed Private Plane with another influential release
û the industrial/ambient headcharge of The Bridge, recorded
in collaboration with Robert Rental. Originally released in
1979, it was re-released by Mute Records in 1992, and was
half full-on electronic clink-clank industry and half serene,
looped atmospheres. The album was originally released on
Throbbing Gristle's own label and, as the experimental music
archive AWRC.com commented recently, If TG had had less of an
agenda, and less of a desire to shock/offend, their music
might well have sounded more like this.
From The Bridge, Leer started a solo career, signing to
Cherry Red and releasing the EPs Four Movements and
Contradictions in the early 80s. He mapped out a gloriously
low-tech, soulful alternative to the sterile synth-pop scene
of the time. And they still stir the emotions now. ôThis is
the masterpiece of Thomas Leer, says a recent blogger on
discogs.com of Contradictions. He borrowed a lot of
equipment (guitar, bass, r-box, synth) from some musicians
and recorded 7 tracks on 4-track. And this is a mixture of
soul, funk, electronics, industrial and new wave. And it's
fantastic how much soul this has.
This ôone-man anti-Heaven 17ö then signed q to a major label,
Arista/BMG, and started work on a new,
sampler/Fairlight-driven excursion. The resulting album,
1985's Scale of Ten, was Leer's attempt to subvert the
mainstream from the inside and contained the singles
International, Heartbeat and No. 1. The whole project was
anthologised by BMG records and given a long-overdue CD
release in 2004.
Critically acclaimed, although always working just on the
edge of mass appeal, Record Mirror called International ôone
of the finest, most invigorating, unquestionably vital
records of 1984.
From Scale of Ten Thomas Leer tried a new approach. He moved
backstage from centre stage and in 1987 formed the
avant-garde electro-cabaret duo ACT, with Propaganda's
Claudia Brucken. I wanted to do something totally different
to what I'd done before, he remembers, and I wanted it to be
more project based, theatrically-inspired and most
importantly with someone else fronting it.
Claudia's sound was unmistakeable and it seemed to me that
whatever context you put her in it was always gonna be
recognisably her. I was looking for an identity for an
unidentifiable music and she fitted the bill...
ACT released four singles and an album across 1987-1988
including Snobbery & Decay, the making of which was so
hi-tech it was the subject of a BBC/Tomorrow's World
documentary. But when fourth single Chance was scrapped over
legal troubles with an Abba sample, and the whole record
company machinery became far more of a burden than a
platform, Thomas jumped ship.
It was a scene reminiscent of The Prisoner, Patrick
McGooohan's 1960s psychedelic spy trip. Thomas Leer resigned
from the music industry. No one knew quite where he was or,
for that matter, why he resigned. But he had, and he stayed
in the village for the next 14 years.
By the early 2000s, the music scene was changing and in some
ways catching up with Thomas original DIY techno ethos. His
name started to be dropped in all sorts of places: in 2002,
Day Breaks, Night Heals from The Bridge was featured
alongside Kraftwerk and Aphex Twin on Mute Records seminal
compilation Rough Trade Electronic 01; in 2003 The Human
League's Phil Oakey spun Private Plane on Radio 1 in an
electroclash special, sandwiched between Yello and Pete
Shelley; and in 2004 ZTT released a three-CD box set of the
complete ACT archive, which followed a Cherry Red compendium
of his early material.
None of these really swayed Thomas Leer in returning to the
music scene. It was hearing Ninja Tune/Solid Steel's manic
DJ cut-up radio show in 2003 that did that. I'd hung up my
synths and moseyed off into the distance, he says, and I'd
have probably stayed there if I hadn't tuned into Cold Cut's
Solid Steel show on Kiss FM. One Saturday night, the Future
Sound of London doing two hours of musical mayhem. It was
fantastic and immediately made me want to start working
again...
By 2004 this work was beginning to leak out. Web-based MP3
samples, an whole album of wide-screen soundscapes for Avatar
(a Tel-Aviv trance label) and an early version of Parts of
Greater Hole, mailed on CDR from a new website,
www.thomasleer.co.uk. Now finished, mastered, remastered and
remixed, and with a suite of extra tracks, Parts of a Greater
Hole (Karvavena Records, 2005) marks Thomas Leer's return,
proving he has lost none of his experimental vigour, while at
the same absorbing many new influences and styles - from drum
& bass to glitch-music û that have emerged in the years since
his æresignation...
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01-searcher 04:06
02-lust for loneliness 04:09
03-warm 03:55
04-memories of reason 04:10
05-international (global mix) 07:11
06-heartbeat 04:37
07-sweet surrender 04:19
08-number one (extended mix) 08:00
09-mistrust 05:00
10-passing through 04:17
11-easy way 05:14
12-control yourself (out of control mix) 08:19
13-chasing the dragon 03:50
14-transition 03:53
15-time heals 03:37
16-listen 04:07
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78:44 min