8. Bruce HaackElectric Lucifer
When I moved to Sheffield in the late 90s, I was forced to hand in my guitar at the gates and had a synthesiser thrust upon me by my now-ERC musical partner and all-round synth Yoda, Mr Dean Honer. He was at the time in the wonky electronic pop group and chart botherers, the All Seeing I. Through Dean and over time, I met a lot of the Sheffield music stalwarts, I even did a single with Phil Oakey from The Human League under my once solo electro pop alias Kings Have Long Arms, which is quite a good thing to have done, I guess? Sheffield’s a bit like that – if you stand out a little, its only a matter of time before you’re doing something cool with someone proper.
We used to all knock about at this cool night that Barry 7 from Add N To (X) used to put on (when he lived in Sheffield) called Absynthesis. Basically, the night entailed weird electronic music records being played in a room with an all-night absinthe bar (messy business) and with a big screen showing disturbing and experimental psychedelic films. I remember Barry playing the track ‘Electric To Me Turn’ and I asked him what it was, as I thought the record sounded amazing. It was from Bruce Haack’s incredible Electric Lucifer LP. The album features DIY drum machines and a primitive, self-assembled electronic synthesiser that Bruce named ‘Adam 2’, he also made a weird vocoder type voice machine thing called a ‘Farad’. The album is a concept album about making a new God, whose main function is to end war and pain. What Bruce failed at with acid, stoner, hippy crap, he certainly made up for in bonkers outsider practical electronics and psychedelic nonsense. It’s an essential album.
