John Foxx and the Maths
The Machine

For the writer, John Foxx is one of the greatest musicians and composers of the last thirty to thirty-five years. His career started in the early seventies with the embryonic group named Tiger Lily, which later became Ultravox! It has developed since the beginning of his solo career with that essential album 'Metamatic' (1980), in a succession of minimalist and ambient compositions where he has consistently demonstrated his compositional skills and great artistic sensitivity.

Reconstructing every step of his career in a few lines is practically impossible because, despite the little attention from the public and critics over the years, his output is very extensive: in practice, in fact—if we exclude a phase at the beginning of the nineties—his career has always continued uninterruptedly, carrying out several projects parallel to his solo work. Among these, I would mention the collaborations over the years with his alter-ego Gary Numan, with Tim Simenon (Bomb the Bass), Louis Gordon, and this project born in December 2009 named John Foxx and the Maths, where he is joined this time by the musician and producer born in 1967 Ben Edwards, better known as Benge.

Since 2009, the two have released five studio albums and a live album. The latest studio album is titled 'The Machine,' released last February 10 via Metamatic Records, which, of course, is John Foxx’s own label. Initially conceived as the soundtrack for a theatrical performance based on E.M. Forster's work 'The Machine Stops,' the album was practically completed between 2015 and 2016 but sees the light only now after a post-production phase that preceded its release.

Primarily born as a soundtrack, the album inevitably evokes the contents of E.M. Forster's work to which it is conceptually closely connected. Forster's tale, first published in 1909, depicted a world where Earth's population had lost the ability to live in open spaces. Consequently, everyone lived withdrawn in a kind of isolation beneath the Earth's surface, with every physical and spiritual need satisfied by a superior entity called 'Machine.' In this universe, people move little, and communication occurs mainly through instant messaging and video conferences. The balance is broken by the two protagonists of the story, Vashti and, particularly, her son Kuno, who first discovers that it is still possible to live on the surface and then realizes the deterioration of the 'Machine,' which will soon lead to its end and the end of the system it created.

The first live performance of this album already took place in May 2016 and in a context as suggestive as it is pertinent to the dystopian story of Forster, namely inside the York Cold War Bunker, a bunker built in 1961 in the area surrounding the city of York to monitor potential nuclear explosions in Yorkshire should a world conflict break out.

The album (noteworthy is the participation in the project of Elizabeth Bernholz - Gazelle Twin) can be defined as an album of ambient music and minimal compositions and musique concrète with particularly intense emotional content and emotional suggestions ranging from states of unease and deep anxiety, anguish and claustrophobia to what can be triumphant and revealing sensations. As with every other production of the project, the compositions are meticulously crafted, and the style is elegant and refined, the use of analog instrumentation conscious like few others in the contemporary music scene, the style imbued in any case with that sacrality and those solemn tones that recall John Foxx's 'Caathedral Oceans' series. We could name artists like Brian Eno and David Sylvian or the minimalism of Philip Glass, and in any case, you might have valid reference points to understand what we are talking about. As far as I'm concerned, it's often said of some songs that they should be the soundtrack of your funeral; in this specific case, however, regarding John Foxx and his compositions in general, including this latest album of his, I’ve always thought that his music is what I'd want instead to be the soundtrack of my life. An infinite variety of emotions that are not all necessarily positive but all so dense and full of that main meaning and content I would define as 'beauty.'