Pardon me as I've been taking a short break from this evolving documentary; I've got a long way to go and need to make sure not to burn out.
This next entry is an absolute beast to conquer... maybe even a basilisk! This is because my ongoing examination of the music of the Legendary Pink Dots has led us to one of the cornerstones of the band's earliest years; it is essentially the end-all, be-all of their cassette efforts and one of the band's most treasured accomplishments. I can't describe it any better than Edward Ka-Spel does here, from the liner notes of the 1998 CD edition:
"Unlike Chemical Playschool 1+2 which was a simple 'best of' the first year of The Legendary Pink Dots, Volumes 3 and 4 was a special, utterly private project. It first saw the light of day as a double C90 cassette project on The Dots' own Mirrordot label. Released in 1983, the idea was to make just 83 copies available through the mail each with hand-made covers. The demand surprised the band, some people ordered 5 or 10 copies at once, and in typical Dots' fashion they simply lost count of how many were made at one point. It is estimated that around 110 were created from this initial edition. Since then the double cassette has been re-issued 4 times, always on cassette-only and licensed to both Staalplaat and Germany's Jarmusic. However, it's a few years since this work was generally available and The Dots' felt it was high time to reissue it on CD. Both volumes have been abridged a little to fit the music into the digital format and some work went in to making the sound clearer. Perhaps it's lo-fi, but it was recorded with loving care on very primitive equipment. In fact The Pink Dots themselves considered CP3/4 to be the pinnacle of their creations for around 5 years. We still feel very close to it now... light a candle when you listen to it."
Chemical Playschool Volumes 3 & 4
BLUEPRINT FOR THE TOWER
THE APOCALYPSE DISCO
For me, this release represents a landmark transition in the band's development and it crosses that threshold between (a) the somewhat amateurish band that produced an overwhelming amount of varied material, not all of it good, just to see what would stick, and (b) a fully formed band that knew what they wanted to do, with a challenging edge and a gift for nuance and restraint. Beginning in 1984, the Dots would grow up. The progressive and avant-garde elements of their music would take a major step forward. The albums would become of greater interest to an international audience and fans of dark, experimental music. The
"industrial" aspect to their sound would come to the fore. After all, by 1984 the band was only about four years away from having their LPs available in suburban American malls, and that momentum was about to begin. But first, there is Chemical Playschool Volumes 3 & 4, the Dots' own love letter to their newly honed sound and a brilliant representation of how refined and sophisticated they had become in just a few short years.
Reviewing the artistic achievement of this release in chronology before the next two official Dots LPs is going to prove difficult, as much of what makes those releases work is first assembled here, but for the sake of this blog I will just have to treat each of these releases with a fresh ear as if I haven't come to them with a greater knowledge already. My goal is to put each release in the context of what came immediately before, not what immediately follows, and I apologize for occasionally neglecting this approach.
A LOT MORE TO COME...
Chemical Playschool Volumes 3 & 4 CD tray card (above) and discs (below)
<----- GO BACKWARD to Basilisk
"SING WHILE YOU MAY!" This phrase cryptically began appearing on the back of LPD records as early as 
The compilation immediately launches with the cassette portion of the program, which despite the presence of twelve track names is really only six substantial songs—some of which now rank as early Dots classics—plus the interstitial bits that link them all together. The sequence begins with "Premonition 8," about 90 seconds of cosmic synth sounds, starting with an imperial death march of sorts, some Poltergeist samples, and a hyper blast of white noise that could represent something taking off, in this case the Prayer for Aradia cassette. This really is not a song, but it doesn't have much to do with the moodier "Premonition" pieces that have been littered throughout the last three releases. The blast sounds die out as the bouncing staccato rhythms of "Flesh Parade" fade in. In a lot of ways, this song represents the erotic awakening of the Legendary Pink Dots, as it seems to consider the daily grind (ahem) of the sex trade but does so in a typical detached manner that never seems lewd despite some explicit references ("The longing thighs say come in for a night...", "She likes a man, but a hand's just as effective," etc). All in all, "Flesh Parade" boasts one of the Dots' fullest and most memorable melodies and would continue to be rearranged and re-recorded for several more years. In fact, this song is one example of how the recording of this material would almost fit into the LPD timeline better in 1985 than 1982. On the other hand, "Purity" has the amateurish sound of earlier Dots. It gallops into the mix rather quickly just as the arty outro of "Flesh Parade" finally starts to fade. "Purity" is much rockier than other tracks from this era, dependent on guitar and drums, and progressive in its arrangement; imagine Led Zeppelin's "Immigrant Song" with very little machismo and more of a hippie feel. The song drops off suddenly in a burst of disorienting keyboard noise and muted human howls that approximate the sound of someone in freefall. This lasts about ten seconds and is called "Purified." "Forgotten" is built upon arpeggiating synth chords that create a loopy kind of beauty; this is the beginning of a formula that the Dots (and especially Edward Ka-Spel) would employ for many years to come. The song personifies the forgotten mythological hero in the form of a weary King Arthur, mourning in a crypt for his glory days, and it introduces a motif of "tired eyes" that would follow Ka-Spel's career as well. The first half of the Prayer for Aradia sequence ends when "Forgotten" is juxtaposed with 30 seconds of dissonant piano tones, oddly entitled "Davritt."
The Atomic Roses program comes first, and despite a weak beginning it's probably the stronger part of the collection. "Of All the Girls..." is strictly introductory material, a bunch of dissonant Casio chords played on top of one another under samples of classic Hollywood movie dialogue. Nothing to see here. "What's Next?" is a slight and simple song with a little bit of melody in the music but none in the vocals. "Playschool," despite the title's use on earlier tapes, is a spoken vocoded piece that appears in longer form as "Trance" on 
Moving on to the Apparition portion of the program, the good stuff just keeps on coming! "God Speed" kicks off with the sounds of someone plunking quarters into an arcade game and a starting-gate fanfare that should sound familiar to 8-bit gamers. This erupts into a drum machine rhythm that recalls the new wave pop scene that was actually happening at this time, proving that the Dots weren't entirely oblivious to it. The melody is anemic but its close proximity to actual dance music and the collage of white noise into which it eventually breaks down adequately make up for its weaknesses. "Pay to Be Alone" is kind of weird and doomy, but its uncanny and inadvertent representation of what both the Dots' and Ka-Spel's solo material would sound like in ten years makes it ahead of its time and absolutely worth hearing. "Spontaneous Human Combustion" is nowhere near as explosive as it sounds; simple crowd sounds give way to bubbly electronics in an interstitial snippet that contains no percussive elements whatsoever. Much scarier is "The Blessing," an extended analogy between an unwanted sexual experience and, well, a blessing. ("Don't worry, dear, he likes you, it's the way he shows affection, don't you think those rolling eyes are cute?") This is mostly vocals with some minimal synth backing until the narrative of the song is overcome by a sort of incoherent ambience that could easily represent the sound of someone mentally checking out. It's chilling. "I'm in the Drill" thankfully doesn't raise the energy level too much; it melds a stoned '70s rock feel with elements of Russian dance, including what might be the first true appearance of violin on a Dots record, and ties it all up with a jazzy outro. The schizophrenic aspects of the song are a testament to the band's disparate influences.
