Front Line Assembly - Plasticity EP

This is part 29 (!) in your alltime classix collection!

Infacted Recordings are great. They've been reissuing all sorts of EBM/dark Techno dregs and tidbits for the last couple of years in a series that's as patchy as it is revelatory and wonderful. I picked up about half-a-dozen of these compilations in Stuttgart over Christmas as they're both cheap and temptingly limited (1000 copies of each).

Bill Leeb's FLA are by far the most high profile act to be receive the 'classix' treatment and these tracks were some of the first I ever heard from the group on their Hardwired album. I remember being a NIN fanatic and being in correspondence with some guy on the internet who agreed to sell me a CDr of the notorious Broken video (directed by sadly-missed Chris Christopherson of Coil and TG). He'd asked if I wanted anything else on the CDr as the video hardly took up much space. I remember asking him if he knew any other Industrial bands because, living in Tewkesbury, I didn't. He asked if I knew FLA and I drew a blank so he stuck Hardwired and some Skinny Puppy tracks (including most of The Process...yeuch) on there.

In Tewkesbury we had a small independent record store...I think it was called Hedgehog Records, or something equally glib and indie, and was run by a great guy called Adam whose Dad was a Drama teacher at my school. Anyway, Adam was an oracle of alternative music, selling me my 4th ever CD which was Ministry's Land of Rape and Honey not to mention hunting down loads of NIN odds n' sods for me. He was my Allmusic back then and I remember asking him what Front Line Assembly sounded like and he said "Well, the name sums it up pretty well" and then some comment about Skynet versus Robocop.

When Hardwired on CDr arrived (and after I'd barfed/laughed my way through Broken) I took the digestion of my 8th ever album very seriously: lights were off, PC speakers cranked up, door shut, Windows Media Player visuals primed. I remember sitting (not lying) on my bed, really trying to absorb this futuristic, densely layered and cinematic music. I loved the riffage -I was a Ministry/NIN head around this time, remember -dug the electronic noises, lapped up the samples (even the bleepy 'using a computer' ones from Sci-fi films) and was entirely converted to EBM there and then.

I wanted cyber-techno-robo-gothic-datawar-space-combat-body music with fat metal riffs, computer-voices, big dirty beats and sounds I couldn't place (Is that a keyboard? Computer? Sample? Voice? What?). FLA is the place.

This EP doesn't really offer anything new, although it is wonderful to hear (for me) fresh mixes of these great tracks, as well as some UK hardcore inspired versions of the title tracks that reflect Bill's immersion in the dance music coming out of England around the time.

Overall, I'll probably pop it on from time to time when I want 75 minutes of Hardwired style-dance remixes.