Sweet Exorcist - “Test Four”
Aural Ecstasy: The Best Of Techno
Song released in 1990. Compilation released in 1993.
Bleep Techno
Before the Sheffield, UK-based label Warp Records would go on to assume its role as the world’s epicenter for IDM and “intelligent techno” music, it was actually a small outfit that was giving rise to a different and local electronic movement, which turned out to be a short-lived one: Yorkshire bleep-and-bass aka bleep techno. And one of bleep techno’s finest acts was the duo of Sweet Exorcist, which was made up of the prolific Richard H. Kirk, who was a member of the always changing and nearly impossible to pigeonhole, experimental-industrial-post-punk-dance band, Cabaret Voltaire, and a Sheffield DJ named Richard Barratt, who went by the name of Parrot.
Both residents of Sheffield, Kirk and Barratt met each other at a club in the mid-80s, and a few years after Barratt opened for Cabaret Voltaire, and then Cabaret Voltaire played at a club that Barratt frequently performed at, the two of them started making music together, deciding to name their project after a Curtis Mayfield song.
Sweet Exorcist’s first single, Testone, is a wonderful piece of lighthearted and inventive early 90s dance novelty. Kirk and Barratt came up with an idea to sample studio test tones that came from tape machines and managed to craft some really spacious and sweet lead melodies out of it. They took their combinations of these bleeps, bass, drums, synths, and lines lifted from Close Encounters of the Third Kind and made a handful of similar-sounding tracks out of them.
So, here’s “Test Four” (also titled “Testfour”), which after initially appearing on the Testone Remixes, was featured on Warp’s own sampler, Pioneers of the Hypnotic Groove, as well as a compilation called Aural Ecstasy, which was released by Relativity in ‘93.
My favorite parts of these “Test” tunes are when Kirk and Barratt run the high-pitched bleeps against a bed of much deeper vocal synths, and there’s plenty of that going on in here. It’s just a type of contrast that will personally never get old to me, no matter how many dingy TR-808 cowbells there are that go along with it that end up revealing this tune’s true age. If you’ve been reading my posts long enough, you know that I really don’t care that electronic musicians were using far less sophisticated equipment in the 80s and 90s compared to today. It’s not the tools that matter; it’s how the carpenter uses them.
Thirty-plus years on and this shit still hits. Yorkshire bleep deserved more time!
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