Desire and Blackest Ever Black have announced the collaborative release of a remixes 12" of tracks by Factory-signed post-punk/no-wave group Ike Yard. It features reworks by UK techno legend Regis and Monoton – the former tackles ‘Loss’, and the latter offers a dub mix of ‘NCR’.
The 12" arrives in advance of Desire’s full reissue of Ike Yard’s excellent self-titled debut LP, which was originally released through Factory America in 1982. That original incarnation was short-lived. Ike Yard formed in New York in 1979, and recorded a single album of brittle electronic funk for Factory before splitting in 1983, less than a year after the album’s release. However, three of the original four members – Stuart Argabright, Kenneth Compton and Michael Diekmann – reformed the group in 2007, and since released a second album, entitled Nord.
In the interim period, Argabright kept busy as half of Black Rain, whose Now I’m Just A Number reissue – which arrived through Blackest Ever Black earlier this year – helped turn attention back onto Ike Yard’s work. The reissue of their debut, then, comes at an appropriate time, when Blackest Ever Black’s release schedule and the music of a host of new industrial/post-punk-influenced electronic acts have picked up where they and their contemporaries left off.
"We had this new technology and so looking back we were really forging our own version of techno, but we never wanted to use those straight beats," said Argabright of Ike Yard’s sound, when we interviewed him earlier this year. "It became our hallmark, our rhythms, it’s been said, were always off-kilter. We were just doing our own beats, and we were never going to do anything like what we’d heard – for example disco music, which I had a big emotional reaction to. I could enjoy disco music as party music, but as culture, either moving forwards into the future or even in the present, I couldn’t really get with it. So we were very careful to try to just do our own thing."
Ike Yard are set to tour the US and Europe in autumn/winter of this year. The remixes 12" will be a limited vinyl release – 700 copies for the world – with artwork by Stephen Americh inspired by the original sleeve design for Ike Yard. There’s no release date given for either the 12" or the album reissue – watch this space.
