When it comes to the musical influences of some of the world’s mightiest electronic musicians, few loom larger than Meat Beat Manifesto.
The UK outfit was launched in the late 1980s by producer Jack Dangers, hitting the underground club scene like a bomb with a series of seminal singles leading up to their debut album, Storm the Studio.
By the early ’90s, the Meat Beat Manifesto sound evolved into a stunning multimedia live show so powerful that it threatened to overshadow headliners Nine Inch Nails when the two hit the road together in 1990, thanks in large part to dancer/choreographer Marcus Adams. Dangers would go on to sign with Reznor’s Nothing label for a handful of releases in the middle of the decade.
Stacking breakbeats with industrial sounds and layers of samples, MBM tracks like “Strap Down,” “Radio Babylon,” and “Helter Skelter” are essential classics in the electronic music canon. The group’s profound influence can still be heard in the works of Aphex Twin, Oneohtrix Point Never, and countless underground electronic artists.
Meat Beat Manifesto has gone on to release a dizzying array of music in the years since, traversing a panorama of sounds that include dub, techno, and textural soundscapes.
For 2019, Dangers and company are taking a new approach to what many would consider the band’s classic sound with new single, “Pin Drop,” taken from the forthcoming full-length, Opaque Couché.
“I heard a pin drop and it struck me as a sound that I never quite ‘heard’ and had to write a song about it,” he elaborated via email. “Opaque Couché continues the search for the most imperfect pop song. With sixteen opaque tracks, it can be seen as a companion to my previous album, Impossible Star.“
Tune into “Pin Drop” below.
Opaque Couché is set for release on May 10.
