#maybe moreso from pater's perspective but we take those

[bornetoblood]

If Red was ever captured by Arquebus and sent to be re-educated, do you think Pater would insist upon having the honor of personally re-educating him?

😳😳😳😳😳😳😳 i mean i sure hope so 😳😳😳😳😳😳

He'd probably try and convince Red to just give up and not have to be tortured but I doubt that'd work. So, yeah, he would do it himself. Happily.

[passionate-reply]

This week on Great Albums: one of very few albums that I think is truly perfect. John Foxx’s second solo LP, The Garden, is a masterpiece of Medieval mysticism, romantic longing, and modern electronics. Transcript below the break!

Welcome to Passionate Reply, and welcome to Great Albums! In this installment, I’ll be looking at a classic sophomore album, and one which epitomizes the principle of taking one’s sound in a different direction the second time around: The Garden by John Foxx, first released in 1981.

While The Garden was Foxx’s second release as a solo artist, it’s also his fifth LP overall, as he had spent the late 1970s fronting the original incarnation of Ultravox. Foxx’s Ultravox was an eclectic mix of influences from glam, punk, and, of course, electronic pioneers like Kraftwerk, but it would be the latter of these ideas that dominated Foxx’s solo career. His 1980 solo debut, Metamatic, is some of the purest, starkest, and harshest minimal synth around, and remains one of the most iconic early works of the subgenre.

Music: “Underpass”

If you want more like Metamatic from Foxx, you’ll want to skip ahead to the 1990s, because he turned his back on this thin and aggressively inorganic sound remarkably quickly. While he would produce several more LPs in the 1980s, the group of them seems to grow progressively lighter and softer, with less blistering analogue synth, and more radio-friendly love themes. But while Foxx’s third and fourth efforts are often panned, The Garden has actually won nearly as many fans over the years as Metamatic, proving itself to be powerful in its own ways, despite its radically different aesthetic. Where Metamatic dealt in brutalist city blocks and Ballardian psycho-sexuality, The Garden takes place in moldering cathedrals, embracing Gothic splendour and (imagined) Medieval emotionality.

Music: “Europe After the Rain”

“Europe After the Rain” opens the album, and also served as its lead single, becoming a relatively minor hit in the charts. As we hear it, we immediately become aware that Foxx has abandoned the instrumental palette of Metamatic, made almost exclusively with an ARP 2600 synthesiser, in favour of something more lush. On “Europe After the Rain,” traditional instruments like acoustic guitar and piano are impossible to ignore, though the constant bass synth ensures we never forget Foxx’s roots either. It also seems to be a major thematic leap away from Metamatic, with its tender and romantic feel. Still, that may not necessarily be all there is to it--the song is presumably named after a famous painting of the same title, by the Surrealist Max Ernst, executed in the early 1940s as World War II was first beginning. Ernst’s painting is a sort of apocalyptic vision, in which crumbling structures are overtaken by vegetation, and two figures wander through it, seemingly passing by one another. Perhaps Foxx’s “Europe After the Rain” is also a theme for a devastated landscape, its lovers meeting again the last survivors of some nuclear holocaust? Maybe it isn’t too far away from the themes of crushing modernity employed on Metamatic after all.

Note, as well, the emphasis on “Europe,” conceptually--The Garden is, at least partially, a sort of search for a new European cultural identity. The Garden fuses electronics, and hence Europe’s characteristic technological achievements, with a love of more traditional European cultural ideals, namely, the aesthetics of Medieval Christianity. For evidence of that idea, look no further than its most obvious apotheosis, the track “Pater Noster.”

Music: “Pater Noster”

“Pater Noster” is, of course, a setting of the Latin-language translation of the so-called “Our Father” or Lord’s Prayer, one of the most popular and well-known texts in Christianity. “Pater Noster” is the album’s most obvious love letter to the Middle Ages, but an informed listen will show that it has little to do with actual music from that era--I actually could forgive the synthesisers, which might be analogized to the role of church organs, but the percussion-propelled nature of the track is what really makes it feel ahistorical to me. Despite the religious themes of The Garden, Foxx always averred not being any sort of authentic believer in religion or God, and maintained that he was interested in the traditions of the Church purely on aesthetic grounds. Whether you think this sort of appropriation is appropriate and respectful or not, it’s certainly one of the album’s prominent themes, and part of what makes it feel as unique as it does. While I’ve emphasized the themes of romanticism and religiosity, it’s also worth noting that The Garden is not a complete break from Foxx’s earlier works, and in its return to a more guitar-driven sound, it often winds up riffing on something not unlike punk.

Music: “Systems of Romance”

Astute followers of Foxx will have already noticed that the track “Systems of Romance” shares its title with the third and final LP he released with Ultravox, in 1979. Apparently, it was written that much earlier, though it wouldn’t be seen to completion until several years later. Combining a hard-driving guitar, played by Foxx’s Ultravox bandmate Robin Simon, with the inscrutable, sensual, elemental lyricism Foxx employs throughout his mid-80s oeuvre, the track “Systems of Romance” really feels like a bridge between 70s art rock and 80s avant-synth-pop, moreso than anything else on the album. Much as “Systems of Romance” extracts a certain prettiness from punk, so does the aesthetically-oriented “Night Suit,” which plays with appearance, deception, and masculinity.

Music: “Night Suit”

“Night Suit” is the track on The Garden that I feel is the most exemplary of its own time period, a mysterious ode to a mystical garment that could almost feel at home on an album by Visage. The Garden is interested in “romantic” themes, but “Night Suit” truly feels at peace among the New Romantics. It’s got some of the most “believable” rock influences, with a prominent guitar riff from Simon, and yet its emphasis on the power of fashion and appearances, destructive, and perhaps even supernatural, is hard to imagine in a genuine punk context. As it implores us to “be someone” or “be no-one,” it’s easy to fit “Night Suit” into one of the major themes throughout Foxx’s career: the tranquility and liberation of personal anonymity. Why is the “Night Suit” a suit in the first place? The song wouldn’t make sense if it didn’t deal with a garment that is also a non-garment, something to wear that feels default, neutral, and unassuming--not to mention classically masculine.

On the cover of The Garden, the main thing we see is, well, a garden. Despite Foxx’s more obvious personal presence on the albums before and after The Garden, it’s easy to miss him here, dwarfed by the scale of nature that surrounds him. It’s almost like the album is more meant to be about this place, and the concept of “the garden,” than it is Foxx as a person, or any particular perspective of his.

While the actual capital-R Romantics were deeply interested in the “sublime,” and the scenes and moments in which mankind faces its vulnerability and insignificance when compared to the natural world, it’s also worth remembering that a “garden,” by definition, is really not a natural space at all, but rather one which is arranged by human hands. Even if this composition resembles those of Romantic painters, I think it’s worth looking earlier in the European past to interpret this one. Gardens were one of the most prominent symbols in Medieval literature, and scholars have suggested that they serve as symbols for sensuality, romance, and the yoni itself. Through the association with the Garden of Eden, gardens often represent a sort of lost, but longed-for paradise, and a return to innocence which is as tantalizing as it is impossible. In particular, “Europe After the Rain,” with its theme of lovers meeting again after the passage of some time, seems to connect with this idea.

In hindsight, The Garden really stands alone in Foxx’s career, a masterpiece whose precise style he would never attempt again. We might say it became that Garden of Eden, to which the artist could never return. While Foxx’s interest in Medieval spirituality would return on ambient works like Cathedral Oceans, and he would occasionally return to love songs with an electronic backing, the precise combination of lovelorn bardistry with a flair for the baroque that appears on The Garden remains totally singular. Foxx’s follow-up to this album, 1983’s The Golden Section, narrows its thematic focus towards poppy love songs, and its instrumental focus, likewise, is that of a fairly unremarkable mid-80s synth-pop record. But at the same time, I like to think that tracks like “The Hidden Man” manage to maintain a sense of the mystical.

Music: “The Hidden Man”

My favourite track on The Garden is “Walk Away.” While it lacks the severe and tragic grandeur of the album’s title track, which closes the album on a lofty note, “Walk Away” shares some of its delicate qualities, reviving the soft piano that we heard on “Europe After the Rain.” Thematically, “Walk Away” seems to deal with fragility and transience, and the grave significance that a brief, passing moment may have--which makes that “delicateness” feel all the more poignant in context. Its call-and-response outro, featuring one of Foxx’s most anguished vocal performances, really makes it a stand-out. That’s everything for today--as always, thanks for listening!

Music: “Walk Away”