The Legendary Pink Blog: Under Triple Moons

Welcome to Postmodern Accident, and welcome to the ongoing Legendary Pink Blog.

I have to admit it's a bit of a bummer to return to the Legendary Pink Dots' self-released cassettes after writing about their very first album Brighter Now, which of course was a much more important release from the band as they had finally put themselves out into the industry with an LP. (Not to mention the fact that it is much easier to write about a nine-track album than it is another compilation of 16-20 songs.) But this shouldn't necessarily reflect on the quality of the material, as the band was obviously very creatively fertile in 1982. In fact, their next cassette release, Premonition may have even been released before the Brighter Now LP, as there is certain evidence on the recording to support this.

Premonition was originally released in a couple of different track variations but it appears that the latter one is the one that stuck. This release, as with Only Dreaming's presence on Ancient Daze, was kept more or less intact on a compilation CD released by ROIR in 1997, marking the beginning of a fruitful relationship with ROIR that continues to this day. The funny thing about this is that the CD was released at a new height in popularity for the band in the '90s, when their legendary tours were drawing large crowds and the albums they were releasing at the time greatly supported this live experience. So the fact that one of the most common CDs to show up in the bins at this time, due to ROIR's presence on American soil and excellent distribution, was billed as "their earliest cassette-only private edition tapes" threw many new fans for a loop.

Under Triple Moons

As If *

Splash *

Submerged *

Amphitheatre *

Digital *

Dying for the Emperor *

Oceans of Emotion *

Small Anthem *

Intruder *

Premonition 2 *

Frosty **

One for the Pearl Moon ***

The Whore of Babylon

The War of Silence

Garlands

A Lust for Powder (Version Apocalypse)

Punishment

Down from the Country ***

Premonition 1 *

* These tracks appear on the 1982 cassette Premonition
** This track appears on both Only Dreaming and Chemical Playschool 1+2
*** These tracks appear on Kleine Krieg
The five remaining tracks are culled from a 1988 compilation cassette called Traumstadt 2


Under Triple Moons back cover (above) and disc (below)


I'll be honest: I don't like this release very much. Premonition is missing a lot of the cohesiveness that made their last few releases so enjoyable, and the additional tracks added to round out Under Triple Moons seem equally haphazard in their placement. After all, the recording of the tracks range from 1980 to 1984. But the original 1982 cassette remains an important release for a number of reasons, not least of which is the introduction of the "Premonition" concept.

As seen here, numbered tracks called "Premonition" would become something of a thing in the Dots' discography, and even though they may not have known so at the time, this series of tracks would eventually become something of a staple for the band. In fact, we've already discussed "Premonition 4," which appears on Brighter Now. This mood piece was one of the bonus songs added to the LP version of that release, indicating that the Premonition cassette, with its tracks "Premonition 1" and "Premonition 2" may have come out (or at least been conceived) before the LP did.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. The compilation begins with the meat of the Premonition cassette on a crescendoing collage piece called "As If...", in which you can hear drones, bleeps, backwards masking, bits of the bridge of "Amphitheatre," and other "Did you hear that?" moments that will recall bits and pieces of other Dots songs. This segues, or rather crossfades, directly into "Splash," a low-key ode to alcoholism that features a softly-sung vocal by Edward Ka-Spel and adequately sets the tone of the rest of the program. In fact, the defining quality of this sequence beyond the low fidelity is the softness of the songs, as if the band wanted to consolidate its strengths writing three-minute pop songs akin to Brighter Now's rendition of "Louder After 6." The other defining feature, as I mentioned above, is the tendency to crossfade rather than use new interstitial bits to connect the songs together as the band was doing before. "Splash" rolls directly into a cool little sequenced bit called "Submerged," which—minus the vocoded speaking—anticipates certain strains of techno years before its popularity took foothold. Next up is a much improved "Amphitheatre," which qualifies as one of the best tracks here. The melody is simple but catchier, and more audible, than the song demonstrated just a year before, and though it is repetitive, it also boasts notable choruses and an infectious midsection with naïve charm. The end of this track cuts off suddenly, because the original Premonition cassette finished off its first side with a couple of other tracks that don't appear here, including a reprise of "Voices" and a track called "Odd," which is possibly the same unpolished track that finally reared its ugly head on the most recent incarnation of Ancient Daze.

Next up is another new track, "Digital," which is notable for its cut-up sounds and a somewhat monotone vocal performance. It's a puzzling track with vague lyrics: "I test myself, I test my friends, it never ends. I bend their minds, I mind the bends. They take it all, don't mind at all. They're digital." But the track is not as digital sounding as one would hope, and almost to draw attention to this, it fades haphazardly into a repeat performance of "Dying for the Emperor," the video game ode lifted directly from Chemical Playschool 1+2. The song's Asian motif is cloying but it's not terrible; it just sounds like a big step backwards from the point of development that the band had reached and is probably the major faux pas of the Premonition cassette. The subdued second half of the song is more in line with the sound of this collection. "Oceans of Emotion" is another poppy song but it offers very little that we haven't heard before in a better form. This is squarely a song reminiscing about past love but without the poignancy of something like "Legacy." A sloppy fadeout takes us to "Small Anthem," a 30-second guitar snippet that was unlisted on the cassette editions and doesn't really register. "Intruder," on the other hand is upbeat and likable, with the same kind of restrained arrangement that served the band so well on the prior LP.

Finally, we come to "Premonition 2." In typical Dotsian perversity, this is sequenced before "Premonition 1" on the CD. It's a languid seven-minute track featuring a spoken sample from a political newscast about men standing together and pledged to each other, but it is not clear what cause they are supporting. Otherwise, the musical backing has the same sort of spacious mood as "Premonition 4" from Brighter Now, which raises the issue of whether this is the track that laid the foundation for that one, but played at normal speed. It's actually a meditative piece unlike anything the Dots have done before, which raises the question of what the "Premonition" tracks mean. Personally, I have always felt that these tracks are any experimental works that build dreamlike states from samples and pieces of other songs. I could swear that in its final seconds, there are bits of "Hauptbahnhof," a song not yet released.

Moving away from the Premonition cassette, the second half of the CD kicks off with "Frosty." I can't say much more about "Frosty" than was already described here, but effectively the song is one of the Dots' earliest tracks and it sounds like it. Despite its full arrangement and upbeat sound, the song appears to be about a man so afraid of the world that he is kept preserved in a freezer where no harm will come to him. I'm afraid I'm misrepresenting Under Triple Moons by featuring this song below, but it really holds a unique position in the Dots' back catalog or they wouldn't have included it here.



"One for the Pearl Moon" is next, and it is slightly abridged from its Kleine Krieg form. The next five tracks were recorded 2-3 years later and sound like it. The prominence of strings (!!) which we have yet to hear on any Dots tracks thus far are quite the telltale distinction, and though maestro Patrick Wright (aka Patrick Q. Paganini) would become a major player in the band's sound for the next decade, now is not the time to introduce him. [Perhaps I will discuss these tracks later if I try to piece together the Traumstadt 2 retrospective from 1988, from whence these came.] After that detour, we get "Down from the Country," again edited down from its longer form on Kleine Krieg.

The CD closes with the last Premonition track, the ever-important "Premonition 1." Another seven-minute mood track, this one is essentially "City Ghosts" from Brighter Now, dressed up in white noise and keyboard squeals with some pitch-shifting thrown in for good measure. The track does indeed conjure up an abstract vision of something concrete, but the question remains: Is it a vision of the past, or of the future? I like to think this is the way that the collection identifies itself as the dream state, as compared to the waking life that the Dots were creating with their actual LP. Dream states officially became an important part of the Dots mythos with these recordings, and they would only prove to grow more important as the band's career progressed.

One version of the original Premonition cassette:


GO FORWARD to Traumstadt 1 ----->
<----- GO BACKWARD to Brighter Now