Something new – from 35 years ago! ICHOR, the band I was in back in the early 90s with Steve Ashburn and Ron Hartman, has a new archival release on Bandcamp.
Before NONPLUS…
The band that would become Ichor was in flux. The members of suburban synthpop experiment From The Fourth Side – Steve Ashburn, Chad Blinman, and Ron Jon Hartman – were moving their music in a deliberately darker, more aggressive direction, and cultivating a new identity to suit it. In 1991, with the addition of guitarist Derek Martin and operating under the name EYEBALL, the band wrote and recorded an eponymous six-song EP to exhibit their new sound – somewhere between darkwave and industrial dance music: lush gothic atmosphere layered with punishing drums and guitars, bristling with sharp angles and infused throughout with grim humor.
By 1994, Eyeball had slimmed back to the original Ashburn/Blinman/Hartman lineup, Ashburn playing guitar in Martin’s place, and changed names again; the following year Ichor would release the album Nonplus, including re-recorded versions of three of the songs from the Eyeball tape.
Distributed in very limited numbers on handmade cassettes, original copies of the Eyeball tape are exceptionally rare artifacts from the emerging industrial scene of the early 1990s (one copy is thought to be held by Rick Frye, who performed backing vocals on “Spasm”). Thirty-five years later, these recordings have been made available again, remastered from the original tapes.
This collection also includes a selection of exclusive bonus tracks, never before released in any form: An early version of fan favorite “Another Day” (later re-recorded for Nonplus) and four additional, unfinished songs from the same period, restored from the archives and presented here with their original working titles.
