The Black Dog - 'Temple of Transparent Walls'
No. 32 of our Top 100 Electronica Albums of the 1990s
The Black Dog was one of the first “intelligent dance music” outfits to carry the Warp Records banner. Celebrated in the press and adored by Bjork, The Black Dog was a three-man effort: Ken Downie, an ex-naval radio operator, and b-boys Andy Turner and Ed Handley, who later formed Plaid on their own. The three released several groundbreaking E.P.’s in 1989 and 1990 — Virtual, Age of Slack and Playtime — including Plaid’s gem album Mbuki Mvuki in 1991, and Black Dog’s first General Production Recordings output, all later collected on 1995’s Parallel, Warp’s retrospective Trainer in 2000, and 2007’s Book of Dogma.
In 1993, the trio released two of their best long-plays together, Bytes on Warp, and Temple of Transparent Walls on GPR.* The second, which is their weirder effort, took more chances and is more cohesive.** Recorded at Techno Island Studio, the sonic forge of R&S Records, during an extended stay in Ghent, Belgium, Temple is filled with tinker toy melodies and drunken electronics, at times astray in a sad metropolis or jumping for joy in a sonic junkyard of the future. At its heart is an indomitable sense of adventure, of taking chances and of dreaming big.
Always playing with concepts and names, like breakdancers breaking ideas on the dance floor of the 1990s computer matrix, they aptly named this mysterious epic in the vein of oracles and ancient divinations. The idea of “transparent walls” evokes the invisible cities that emerged out of the Internet, what the cyberpunk author William Gibson once described in his novel Neuromancer as “clusters and constellations of data….Like city lights, receding…” i.e. cyberspace. That the name of the album was unfortunately released as “Temple of Transparent Balls” is a beguiling and poetic reminder of the technological glitches and ghosts in the machine — the human.
Its cover art a quintessential artifact of 1990s computer graphics, it shows a “black dog” in some kind of ornate techno-temple structure, a pendulum or transparent ball swinging, looking up at swirls of data or stars, hard to make out, but still reflecting the mesmerizing power of the electronic and the infinite all at once. This half-serious and almost cartoony take on the classical “music of the spheres,” presents us with a clever tone that permeates throughout The Black Dog’s Temple: The Sun, Moon, planets and their orbits form a kind of meta-clock — a mysterium for the soul.
“When we were Black Dog, we used to host a lot of websites and things to do with those kind of Egyptian cults,” Handley told Red Bull Music Academy in 2003. “It was just the association and it was sort of the early days of the Internet, where it was built-in board systems, and we used to host the Pagan Federation site as well…I think it was escaping from fairly dull jobs…Andy was a shipping clerk and Ken was a caretaker. So we all had these jobs that weren’t that fulfilling. They were really just to pay the rent. So certainly, at that point the music was to express some desire for freedom and to escape that Monday in your life.”
So the three mates refracted that mental confinement into a kind of game of obscuration, their music like the shimmering surface of a deeper proposition: The Black Dog were an odd complex of worldviews, fusing ‘bleep’ techno with dub, jazz, ambient and hip hop sensibilities — Temple compressed those influences into a sonic gemstone. “From the opening digital skank of ‘Cost I’ to the closing circuit board tears on ‘The Crete That Crete Made,’” wrote critic Peter McIntyre, proclaiming that it “took every single strand of modern music, mixed it all up and produced something that sounded like nothing else on the planet.”
Tracks like ‘4, 7, 8’ and ‘Sharp Shooting on Saturn’ sway like marionettes to delirious melodies. ‘Jupiler’ revs up like a possessed motor, a bumper car ride through an eye-popping bubble city. ‘Mango’ follows a similar line, this time freaking to Latin rhythms and ragtime keys — a frenetic jam session in a video game jungle. Serious numbers like the bolo-strut of ‘Cost II’ and the ethereal ‘In the Light of the Grey’ glide through darker environs, at once quirky and moody, while ‘The Crete That Crete Made’ is a lullaby for robots. ‘Cost I,’ ‘Cost II,’ ‘Sharp Shooting on Saturn’ and ‘The Crete That Crete Made’ still stand out as wonders of a lost world.***
“I was naïve, trusting, optimistic, and foolish,” Downie reminisced about the early days of The Black Dog to blogger Jonty Skrufff in 2007, after resurrecting his career in the 2000s. “I genuinely thought we were a ‘rock and roll’ band, in the tradition of the Sex Pistols, Clash, Damned, etc. Us against the world. Looking back, it was the best way to be, because I had a genuinely excellent time.” And in a way it is that fun innocence that makes Temples such a quiet triumph. Some of it may sound dated to more digitized ears, but its analog warmth, its playfulness, its heart on its sleeves, is what makes it nevertheless an indispensable document, a roadmap to computer happiness.
Here we had a trip through the ages, but one in the spirit of astronomers and astrologers going back to the ancients: Pythagorean coordinates, interplanetary rhythms, the Minotaur and the Maze in Crete, Dionysian theater and the kings of Sparta, the metaphysical map outside of temporal walls. That Downie, Turner and Handley took that heritage of the West, remapped it to the North, South and East, is a testament to their sly inner compass, the genius cruise of ‘Cost II,’ the space station blues of its adieu, ricocheting us back to the future and far out into the Odyssean unknown of Homer’s “wine-dark” cyber seas, the stars forever sparkling above.
The Black Dog was always mercurial in its experiments, an upside down world of zero gravity techno fantasies. Later productions would prove consistently powerful in their delicateness. Spanners is their other great monument to this heady optimistic era of reflective dance music. But in terms of its glee and sense of discovery, nothing The Black Dog gang did before or after, together or apart, quite matched the feverish games inside the Temple of Transparent Walls. Step on in, and find yourself breakdancing in an astronaut’s dream.
Track Listing:
1. Cost I
2. Cost II
3. 4, 7, 8
4. The Actor and Audience
5. Jupiler
6. Kings of Sparta
7. Sharp Shooting on Saturn
8. Mango
9. Cycle
10. In the Light of Grey
11. The Crete That Crete Made
*I have taken a little liberty with titling this historic release as Temple of Transparent Walls instead of Balls. There are different stories about why GPR released the album with the Balls title. The master tape was titled with Walls, but apparently a legal and A&R dispute led to a falling out between GPR and The Black Dog camp. Downie, Turner and Handley in fact switched to Warp Records the same year, and had to release their first album as “Black Dog Productions” due to the wrangle.
The Balls title is what will come up on searches and in Discogs. But, I decided to dispense with the slightly humorous “Balls” in the spirit that “Walls” was in fact the artists’ original intent, and because the Walls title hits a more even tone in terms of the album’s thematic ambitions — a sonic exploration of the classical and digital, the ancient and the futuristic, the electronic and the galactic, i.e. a spiritual matrix.
And while a remastered blessed version was released in 2007 by Soma Quality Recordings — the same glitched title of Balls still in place — even so, returning the album to its original title hopefully gives newcomers and longtime fans a fresh perspective on this winning and elusive artifact.
**Many may disagree with the assessment that Temple of Transparent Walls is superior to Bytes. The latter is in no way a slack effort. It is in many ways better than Temple, especially in a more “Detroit techno” sense, including brilliant compositions like ‘Olivine,’ ‘Merck,’ ‘3/4 Heart’ and ‘Focus Mel.’ However, it is less concentrated and is importantly a compilation versus an album, though it was released as such for legal reasons under the “Black Dog Productions” banner and because it was expedited as part of Warp’s Artificial Intelligence album series. It’s name, “Bytes,” a pun on Black Dog “bites,” indicates its more piecemeal nature, along with its ‘Phil’ fills.
Therefore, for these reasons, Temple just slightly surpasses Bytes in a retrospective sense to my ears because of its cohesion and its singular arc. And because Bytes is ultimately a compilation and its tracks are written and are additionally credited to separate aliases (with the exception of two by Plaid), I have also decided to not include Bytes as its own Top 100 entry due to this critical difference.
Nonetheless, out of respect for Bytes and in recognition of the music industry disruptions The Black Dog endured, I hope to at some point include an entry and tribute to Bytes, and as a salutation to its many fans.
***Other than the album’s official name being a misnomer, one other blemish resulting from the GPR mismanagement of The Black Dog, is the bass line distortion in the right channel during beginning measures of ‘Cost II,’ which likely stemmed from a poor final mastering of the album, marring the ideal with abrasions of the real.
‘Cost II’ was initially released on vinyl as a single, where the song can be heard without the distortion. Even the reissues by Soma retained the flaw. As with many treasures of the world, a true ‘Temple of Transparent Walls’ is forever elusive. Yet like some dusty mixtape, for the curious and committed, its power cannot be restrained.
Also, the track ‘Jupiler’ may seem like a typo like the album title. There is a cosmic theme and aesthetic to the album à la ‘Sharp Shooting on Saturn.’ But this is actually likely a little wink and joke as Jupiler is the name of the highest selling beer in Belgium, helping give Temple a vibe of camaraderie, location and history.