Today I’m going to do something different, I’m going pull something from my draft pile. I’m pulling at a story I wrote and left in the bin in 2021. It’s about Electric Circus’s Hello. Pulling at so many strands of musical thought — ambient, ethno-techno, minimalist, European post-modern classical, and pop (with a capital “P”) — Hello, rightfully, is extremely hard to pinpoint as belonging to any easy source from its time period. Yet here it exists, many years later, still sounding unlike little else.
It was 1988 when this little-heard and, quite simply, little-understood album made its release on the Venture record label. A subsidiary of Virgin, Venture held stock as a new label meant to traffic in contemporary music that sat outside a certain bubble — a label attempting to occupy a particular niche. Back then it was filled with a roster of musicians like Hans-Joachim Roedelius, Klaus Schulze, Peter De Havilland, and Cassell Webb, to name a precious few, all of whom straddled the line between experimental music and the deeply European modern-classical world. Much like the American Nonesuch label of the ’80s, Venture provided a home for artists who didn’t consider themselves “New Age” but didn’t see themselves within an existing tradition either. For all of them, this “new European music” had a home here.
Which makes what Electric Circus did seem like quite an anomaly at first. In the music of Hello you actually get to hear all these seemingly “brainy” new experimentations in a relatively accessible form. Heck, with the addition of Shauna Larson’s vocals, a very intriguing alternative to the dated “electro-pop” of that time starts to surface. In our current climate — one reared on the music of Stereolab, Saint Etienne, and Broadcast, etc. — one can easily draw a new through line, finding musicians creating hooks from very different spheres of influence, of the continental, European type.
So how did this happen, then? Look no further than the brains behind Electric Circus: one Pier Rubesa, of Croatian and Swiss descent.
Pier began his career in Toronto, helming the minimal-wave duo Bobby and Synthia. By the time of Electric Circus’s creation he had already amassed a career as a multimedia artist and music producer. It was in the mid-’80s when Pier’s bleeding-edge expertise in the new realm of digital recording spurred him to create his own recording studio he’d dub “Electric Circus Studio” in order to produce audio for music and film post-production. By then, he’d also regularly held lectures demonstrating the principles of audio production, sound design, and synthesis. Steeped in the world of modern musical technology, one could infer he knew exactly how to create a new sound that was entirely of his own design.
Album highlight “Opal” puts this into quick focus. Seemingly taking inspiration from Harold Budd and Eno’s work together, over a languid synth atmosphere, Shauna comes in with absolutely gorgeous multi-tracked vocals, tinged with just-so modulation effects, creating something approaching that echelon of sublime ambient pop rare for its time. Then, taking it a step further, they keep pushing longform interludes to treat us to miniature beat-driven codas of a similar outre universe, each one serving to segue into the next track.
Jettison yourself back to the beginning, to “Vermillion,” and this distinct formula takes shape. The stately, almost-motorik balladry of the opener slips into the stately, almost “new European” electronics of “Cloud Sails By,” letting Hello play at full length almost like a well-curated DJ mix, all the while living in its own bubble. Album closer and lead single “Snow,” which MuchMusic Canada surely has a video for somewhere in its vaults, caps the thought process with an almost doe-eyed take on the meditative, glistening immediacy of their compositions.
Virgin Canada — the label that originally signed the duo — envisioned them belonging in the league of a musician like Enya. Now, it seems they had similar company in the spirit of another F/S favorite, Uman: groups that found some kind of “spiritual” communion with the very machines they used to disassemble very human creations. In the end, as their inclusion on this very site suggests, such ideas never panned out as “popular” as their labels envisioned. But that was then and this is now, I think. And now is the time, perhaps, for a new mystery to be resolved by someone else other than myself?