You’re familiar with Add N To (X), right? Well believe it or not, they were the original ‘Peaches’ a few years back. Troublesome, bothersome, engagingly manic absurdists with a peculiar eye for the pornographic, the violent and the perverse and true believers in good old tried and tested vintage electronic equipment. Picking up a MS20 synthesizer they found in a bargain bin in Piccadilly Circus helped them craft some of the wackiest, noisiest, scruffiest, rockiest and most unsettling music of the late 20th century.
Formed by Barry Smith, Ann Shenton and Steve Claydon in 1994, Add N to X saw their creative process as “abbreviating music into intensity…taking it to its simplest form “ – a task they took to completion with the release of ‘Avant Hard’ in 1999 and the more episodic ‘Add Insult To Injury’ on Mute in 2000.
And here we are post split (Add N to (History)?) and founding member Ann Shenton and X drummer, Rob Allum have come up with another novel way of producing dumb and dearly demented pop-electronica under the moniker, Large Number.
Rifling through the draws of her analogue cupboard with the cryptic disposition of a dyspraxic John Nash seeing conspiracies of noises everywhere, Ann Shenton has managed to compile 40 minutes of mind altering bloops and buzzes – all of them entirely loose, all of them disparate – but all ultimately united by the warped but fertile imagination of their host. This is scruffy-electronica. For every fuzzy discordant noise, there’s always some fuzzy appealing hook, and with an average lifespan of around two minutes, the tracks are truly disposable jewels in Shenton’s scruffy crown. Nothing lasts long enough for you to tire of.
From the opening ersatz stomp of the Kraftwerkian, ‘The Creaky O.K’ to the bubbling effervescence and scat of ‘Pink Jazz’, Spray On Sound does exactly as it says on the spray tin. It’s instant, high impact and as pliable as a fistful of playdough.
Minimal, but never short of ideas Shenton sifts through junk boxes of country tunes and country antics (‘Crazy’, ‘Lexical Synesthesia’), medieval greensleevery (‘Autumn on Electris’, ‘Love In The Asylum’) and flagrant experimental gooning (‘Emotional Life of Animals’, ‘Twenty Two Seconds’ etc).
Moogs, theremins, harpsichords, wax cylinders, humming, belching, dogs, chickens and things that go bloop in the night, ‘Spray On Sound’ is a veritable treasure trove of pure dishevelled magic and all that’s bloody marvellous for a 0.99p microphone.