Union Wireless

Ben Morris : vocals, keyboard and clarinet
Gonzalo Vina: guitars
Steve Gillard: viola and keyboards
Pete Flood: drums, percussion and vibraphone

Formed from the ashes of lo-fi band THE THROAT (with a single released on Acuarela) and the almost forgotten surf-punks THE WOODIES, UNION WIRELESS try to combine live music spontaneity with a more treated studio sound. They always take the melody (the simpler the better) as departure point, combined with studied, constant rhythms, and the results can easily become 14-minute improvisations (following the path of CAN and krautrock, not Frank Zappa’s) or short tunes of melancholic pop.

UNION WIRELESS work with calculated simplicity, where a single note is always better than three of them. Their debut single, “Hypnotic Eye”, was recorded during one weekend at the famous Toe Rag studios in London (analogic power!) to highly impressive results. A-side, “Hypnotic eye”, shows a repetitive rhythm wrapped with a sharp, round keyboard, with occasional crazy guitar explosions. All the references you can imagine won’t lead you to find a clue. B-side, “Come and Tell Me”, is more intimate and controlled, full of dark sincerity. Isolated from the outside world since 1994, except for sporadical live gigs, UNION WIRELESS offered on their first album the best ‘future rock’.

The band doesn’t write songs as such. Their music has very few concreted in the form of solid structures, which allows them to take it in different directions each time they play it. The traditional line-up of two guitars, bass and drums its re-inforced with analogic synthesizers, organ, electric piano, flute, clarinet and assorted percussions, whilst each one of the melodies is a product of endless hours of underground improvisation around ideas and concepts until a musical consensus appears.

“Saturn Ascension Experiments” is the result of twelve months working this way, which was later on condensed to produce a coherent work during a five days period at Toe Rag. The record rejects digital technology in favour of the warmer analogic sounds... not that it’s their philosophy, but they thought it would help their music.

The outcome is a strange, exigent album, full of ambition and perspective, of dynamism and groove, with a claustrophobic subtext. Each song takes its own path, from the circle rhythms in “Saturn ascension” to the mono-rhythm of “Now time styling” to the chaos of “Ten miles of bad road”. In the middle there’s an intense mixture joining elements of 70’s art rock, late sixties jazz and much more.

UNION WIRELESS make progressive music without needing to use electronic devices, avant-garde without losing human feelings, as they proved in their subsequent releases, the CD-Single “Mid Tonal Tracking” and 1998’s single “Some Morning”, devised as both the soundtrack and a sonic instrument for an installation by performance artist Angelica Fernando.

In 2000 UNION WIRELESS’ second album is out: “All her life”. It was recorded between February 98 and March 99 and was produced by Toby Robinson, who had worked with the likes of CAN in the past. This record shows the progression experimented by the band since the days of “Saturn ascension experiments”: songs are still written over single chord repetitive tracks, but there’s always the intention of inserting pop formats in them in an aim to write “real” songs with recognizable “tunes”, and place them in more interesting contexts. Steve Gillard’s viola has become a very important element in the sound of the band, and the new drummer has allowed UNION WIRELESS to widen their rhytmic perspective.

Throat discography:
- “Ten miles of bad road”.- single (Acuarela, 1994)

Union wireless discography:
- “Hypnotic eye”.- Single (Elefant, ER-120, 1996)
- “Saturn ascension experiments”.- LP/CD (Elefant, ER-1015, 1996)
- “Mid tonal tracking”.- CD-Single (Elefant, ER-308, 1997)
- “Some morning”.- single club ER-194, 1998.
- “All her life”.- CD ER-1066, 2000.

Songs in compilations:
- “I’m not used to it” and “Some morning” in BRIT POP (DOUBLE-CD Arcade, 2000)
- “Just one minute” in ELEFANT DOSMILUNO -(ER-1083 CD 2001)