Ike Yard
1982

LA RECENSIONE

Being ahead of the times sometimes doesn't pay off. It happens that you put out an excellent EP, even the American emissary of the Factory notices you promise well... very well, and she gets you to record an album, an album that resembles nothing from the American underground of those years. The New York band lays the foundations for the electronics of the future, but everything goes to hell, a year later Ike Yard ceases to exist.

However, it can happen that after several years, that eponymous album of yours becomes a cult album, that a certain techno underground names you as a master and precursor, including you in their DJ sets, remixing your old tracks, "forcing" you to come back, you release other albums and bang!

The old recordings of what was supposed to be your third attempt also resurface, forty-two years after their recording, what was supposed to be the official follow-up to that underground masterpiece sees the light... forty-two years have passed and it matters little if a handful of these tracks appeared here and there in some compilations over time, two thousand and twenty-four: the corrupt and grim beauty of these recordings is still capable of stirring oblique latent anxieties.

The thin, dense nighttime rain that has just fallen on the asphalt has seeped into its dirty cracks to the brim, gushing from them like blood from a wound, illuminated by a few flickering neon lights.

The album exudes almost suffocating noir atmospheres, recounting bare, unadorned, and unhealthy environments, it resumes the discourse of the previous work but thickens the sound by dirtying and smearing it with sharp noise splinters.

There is the thick and shadowy groove of "Freighter" and "S.I. (i couldn't see)" soundtracks for violent crimes based on a prickly, angular, almost geometric proto-techno electronics, there is a total track like "A Dull Life", raw, anxious, and emphatic rumination. The whole album seems immersed in a suffocating smoky layer, it revels in a kind of degraded and toxic psychedelia, the bass and electronic beats, slow and dense, push towards a strange sort of vigilant restless torpor, the voice is constantly a sparse and robotic detached declamation.

In "Agua (Diablo)" and "I Killed Picasso" we witness the dismemberment of the Ike Yard sound, reduced to the bare essentials emerging as a sort of radiography, a bony and skeletal framework. If in the former, the stylistic elements of minimal techno that would emerge years later are already clearly visible, in the latter, the perception that the sound matter is dispersing second by second into venomous microparticles is almost tangible, nineteen eighty-two: no one in those years sounded like Ike Yard, two thousand and twenty-four: their black asphalt jungle continues to gush blood from its wounds.