What I love most about the mercurial and enigmatic No Side Effects is their ability to mix two opposing sounds into a cohesive finished product. On the one hand their synth driven sound is as futuristic and clinical as it comes but it is the dreamy ambience they fashion from those digital building blocks that provides the balance; a haunting and ethereal vibe that is neatly subverts expectations. The result is the sound of the ghost in the machine, technology seemly acquiring emotion, a binary heart beating within the depths of the code and algorithms.
And it is this blend of solidity and intangibility that is the intriguing part, two alien worlds coming together and building a third possibility, a Vangelis-like soundtrack for another, as yet unwritten futuristic noir. If films have suggested possible futures as gleaming utopias or dystopian nightmares, maybe this suggests a more realistic meeting of man, mind and machine. Then again they could just be a couple of guys having fun in the studio. I suspect both are true.
[…] review of Final Forecast by Dave Franklin appears on Dancing About Architecture and The Swindonian. August […]
[…] experimentalism of Thomas Haynes’ Grasslands (though this is a lot closer to his work with No Side Effects) there is a real understatement at work here, a grandeur built from the atmosphere and anticipation […]
[…] and the experimentalism of Thomas Haynes’ Grasslands(though this is a lot closer to his work with No Side Effects) there is a real understatement at work here, a grandeur built from the atmosphere and anticipation […]
[…] Bands like Pet Shop Boys, Yazoo, Ultravox, Bronski Beat and Human League were dominating the charts but where these bands gave us the plink-plonk-pling of radio-friendly tunes, others chose a darker route. Bands like Joy Division, Depeche Mode and Talking Heads were exploring where these new sounds could take us and, finally, we arrive at No Side Effects. […]