So what did HEAVEN 17 do on their first day of isolation?
Inspired by real life events happening right now, Glenn Gregory and Martyn Ware have presented a video for a new song ‘Clouds Or Mountains?’. However, keen HEAVEN 17 fans may have noticed that it sounds familiar.
‘Clouds Or Mountains?’ was previewed alongside ‘Pray’, ‘Illumination’, ‘Unseen’ and ‘Captured’ as part of a work-in-progress sampler for the long awaited new HEAVEN 17 album ‘Not For Public Broadcast’, available only to subscribers of the now-discontinued Bowers & Wilkins ‘Society Of Sound’ in 2017.
Martyn Ware told ELECTRICITYCLUB.CO.UK recently: “The origins of this song started about three years ago as an instrumental I’d done – I sent it to Glenn sometime later, and he felt inspired to put a ‘scratch’ vocal to it – we both loved the result, so Glenn created a video for it last week for fun – and this is the result”.
Clocking in at nearly six and a half minutes, Ware’s sparse electronic soundscape provides an eerie backdrop for Glenn Gregory’s impassioned baritone with a delivery that Martyn Ware says is “Very Scott Walker / David Bowie”, concurring with ELECTRICITYCLUB.CO.UK’s assessment. And as the pace heightens, there are haunting echoes of ‘Boy Child’ by the man born Scott Engel and ‘Sunday’ from the former David Jones’ ‘Heathen’ album.
No stranger to the art of the crooner, Glenn Gregory had said previously in 2014: “The way I sing anyway, people always used to say I sounded a bit like a crooner, that baritone type thing… it’s good to have that sensibility. It’s pop, not rock. I was never into The Stones, I don’t really get them. I’d much rather listen to Scott Walker or Anthony Newley.”
In the meantime, a new boxed ‘Another Big Idea: 1996-2015’ has just been released with the lavish CD edition compiling HEAVEN 17’s two reunion albums to date ‘Bigger Than America’ and Before/After’ with an unreleased instrumental album ‘Space Age Space Music’ plus assorted remixes, re-recordings and live material.
ELECTRICITYCLUB.CO.UK gives its warmest thanks to HEAVEN 17
‘Another Big Idea: 1996-2015’
https://www.facebook.com/heaven17official/
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Text by Chi Ming Lai
28th March 2020
and 
already under his belt, Starkey has been working on his new album ‘Fear City’.
follows 
and 
as trailers for ‘Fear City’, an album which wears its rumbling techno and house flavours on its sleeve but does not overblow them, with the emphasis being on synth hooks and melodies while also being propulsive enough for the club environment. Sumner makes a second appearance on the ‘Fear City’ album, contributing to its title track.
and then to celebrate the 50th Anniversary of the first manned moon landing, its 2019 follow-up 
, Brian Eno added his distinctive sonic enhancements to the largely piano-based palette, although production was left to Daniel Lanois.
began in 2005 and continued like a back-and-forth musical conversation through the exchange of files over a period of 15 years. It saw the more intuitively musical Roger improvising on a MIDI keyboard while inclined towards sonic architecture, Brian applied treatments as he saw fit using electronics to create colours and timbres not possible within a straight acoustic environment, metaphorically adding a tie to his younger brother’s suit.
and 
, the otherworldly electronics applied to the keyboard base providing a shiny escapist atmosphere. ‘Wintergreen’ paints an image as suggested by its title, with the interludes of its silence as important as its notes.
deals with revisiting and caressing wounds left by the memory of their scars. If its predecessor 
was mysterious, then ‘Birthmarks’ is something much stranger, a cryptic alchemy with Woods pushing boundaries, using her voice beyond the song format with stark minimalist electronic sounds and dark atmospheres creeping in from time to time.
is released on 6th March 2020 by Recordiau Neb, available direct from
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