When Clock DVA first unleashed ‘White Souls in Black Suits’ as a limited-run cassette on Throbbing Gristle’s Industrial Records in 1980, it was less a debut album and more a transmission from a psychological frontier. Decades later, this 2025 reissue via The Grey Area of Mute proves that the record is far from a static museum piece. Instead, it remains a kinetic, restless, and vital rediscovery—a landmark that helped draft the blueprints for industrial, post-punk, and the mechanistic pulse of proto-EBM.
Led by the enigmatic Adi Newton, the Sheffield-based collective recorded at Cabaret Voltaire’s legendary Western Works studio and captured the core of this album in a single, eight-hour burst of improvisation. This immediacy breathes through the remaster. While the original recordings were often shrouded in tape hiss, this new edition opens up the album’s sonic architecture with striking clarity and remarkable detail. The abrasive textures are now more dimensional: bowed electric guitars snarl with refined sharpness, while reedy clarinet and saxophone lines find new, haunted space amidst the sputtering synthesizers.
The brilliance of ‘White Souls…’ lies in its refusal to stand still. It is a collision of disparate worlds; musique concrète, sci-fi vignettes, and pub-room punk all melting into a unsettling ambience. The opener, “Consent,” acts as a startling entrance, trading industrial gloom for a “jaded jazzation” that features squealing saxophones and a funk-inflected bassline, hinting at the sophisticated mutated funk the band would later perfect. In stark contrast, “Discontentment” shifts the mood toward a more malevolent, knuckling dirge, where Newton’s vocals feel like condensation running down the walls of a cold-war bunker, while “Anti-Chance” (a collaboration with members of Cabaret Voltaire) serves as a bracing centerpiece. Applying William S. Burroughs’ cut-up philosophies to sound, “Anti-Chance” is a masterstroke of deliberate decay, proving that for this scene, randomness was a profound creative philosophy rather than a mere technical gimmick.
The atmospheric peak arrives with “Film Soundtrack (Keyboards Assemble Themselves At Dawn),” a spectral piece that uses a “dripping-tap” percussive throb to create a sense of profound bedsit isolation, reminiscent of the darker corners of Throbbing Gristle’s catalog. Finally, the bonus material adds vital context, particularly “Cage” and “You’re Without Sound,” which provides a more accessible, gothic-inflected anchor to the experimentalism, landing somewhere between the skeletal post-punk of Bauhaus and the inventive synth-work of Fad Gadget, further rounding out this flurry of creativity, offering a complete look at the band’s early morphology.
Lyrically and atmospherically, Newton guides the listener through a shadowed topography of alienation and surveillance. His vocals, more incantatory than sung, straddle a line between foreboding and a corrosive truth that reflects the era’s obsession with psychological decay.
Ultimately, this reissue is an essential triumph. It highlights Adi Newton’s broader practice and offers a direct throughline to his later multimedia research with The Anti-Group (T.A.G.C.)—and reasserts Clock DVA as a pioneering force of the first wave. ‘White Souls in Black Suits’ is a living document of a time when industrial music was dangerously exciting and entirely unpredictable. For anyone tracing the genealogy of modern electronic music’s harder edges, this remaster is not just a historical curiosity; it is a creative apex.
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