Kas Product
By Pass

Coldwave.

The cold wave. The icy shower. The frost.

When it happens to you (and surely it already has) to read phrases like: "the icy rhythm of the '80s synth-pop," "artificial pulsations," "cold electronic beat"... well, at that moment, bear in mind that FEW things from those years coincide EXACTLY with all those definitions. And among those few things, there is a strand of French alternative music that rightly - inevitable Anglophilia aside - should be considered something of its own. To the NEW Wave (to a certain extent, at least) we instinctively associate coldness, darkness, obscurity. Creatures like Robert Smith from "Faith" and "Pornography," Peter Murphy, Siouxsie Sioux, Andrew Eldritch, when we imagine them, we NEVER imagine them in the sunlight. But always within the shadow cone of a night that knows no dawn. Simon Reynolds spoke of "Coldwave" when referring to an album like "The Scream," but he, the good old Simon, also said that the French post-punk was mostly made by "musicians closer to Jean Michel Jarre than to the Human League."

Are we really sure about that?

Nancy, in the early '80s, must have been some sort of little Sheffield. Or at least, that's how we can imagine it - reading the story of Spatsz and Mona Soyoc. Keyboards were preferred over guitars, formations of 4/5 elements were often replaced by duos, as for drums... who needed them, anyway? They could do without. The KaS Product (with a capital S) are children of minimalism and of that electronics which, in the wake of the Suicide patriarchs, was supposed to proclaim the death of rock. Deliver the final blow to its temple. But the punk spirit is there, within the music of the Product. Oh yes, it's there. Only, it's frozen. As if the guitars had risen from the rubble of a nuclear disaster, and through radiation had taken the shape of other sounds.

In the startling and alienated electro-dance of KaS Product's first two LPs (not the only ones, but the subsequent ones would allow a bit more room for arrangements) you hear Alan Vega, the D.A.F., the Cocteau Twins, but beneath the noise of the "machine" there's also a jazz approach - a legacy of Soyoc's previous background - which cannot be ignored. Mona is a vocal improviser. One who, live, is also capable of venturing a cappella up the scales, without needing the melody. Spatsz composes the bases, but she designs the vocal evolutions. She is a jazz artist in every respect. THINKS like a jazz artist. But to the "mood" of the vocalist, to that attitude that doesn't disdain to become cabaret-like at times, or to meet the universe of "spoken word", Soyoc marries the uncontrolled delirium and freedom of a punk-rocker. The audacity, the exaggeration, the taste for flirting with the murky and becoming queen of a perverse world made of night only and illuminated by few neon signs. It's not Siouxsie's gothic realm, with its dark mythology and voodoo dolls, but a de-humanized urban galaxy without coordinates. In black and white (go watch the video for "Never Come Back" - a total manifesto of this reality). Artificial, in short, as the sounds that provide its soundtrack.

A world where there is the moon, yes - but it's reflected in a puddle of dirty water, like the one seen by a drunk (alone?) Nick Cave on the first Bad Seeds album.

Thus far I have said: "is," "thinks," "are"... do you think I've lost my mind, since I speak in the present writing about a record from '83...? No, because KaS Product are STILL active, or rather they reappeared unexpectedly a few years ago... without leaving new recording traces, but also without changing a comma of the sound for which I like to remember them. And Mona still sings great, it's crazy that in all these years nothing seems to have changed. The Devil is still her favorite companion, as she sang in "Devil Fellow," and still stretches her Voice into grand articulations. The kind needed to interpret a piece like "Loony-Bin": four basic chords, nothing more. Indeed, even too many for the Product's standards. But HOW those four chords are worked on is what makes the difference between craftsmanship and pure class.

For what I consider the Masterpiece - "Tina Town" - two chords were sufficient. Almost five minutes of the darkest, most horrid, most ghostly '80s. The percussive backdrop might sound dated today, but the performance of the piece unleashes such a sick power that every other speech becomes secondary. Apocalyptic keyboards, atmospheres so heavily synthetic as to become sublime. And there is an electro-jazz of the most morbid kind, of course, the one that couldn't be missed and which Iggy, in his time, had already explored with the epochal "Nightclubbing": "Mingled & Tangled" is pervaded by it in every beat. There's the pounding/hypnotic cadence of "Seldom, Often" (100% Berlin), the genetically modified punk of "T.M.T." (PUNK STRUCTURE, but treated and synthesized in the lab). And the horror story of "Infatuation" enough to chill the blood.

And the guitar...? The guitar is there. It emerges, every now and then. It struggles to make its way through the fog of synthesizers. But at the end of "Tape," only it remains, and then you understand that Mona Soyoc is also a Guitarist with a style that... you couldn't say, if more No Wave or more Gang Of Four. Anyway: psychotic/metallic as the models impose.

And I enjoy it.