From: RShae@aol.com
Date: Sun, 12 Feb 1995 01:31:17 -0500

ROBERT SHEA offers some details on the English event organizing
collective/record label that has been building a cultural paradise all of its
own for close to ten years. Michael Dog supplies the quotes. 

Who and what are these dogs - Club Dog, Planet Dog, Megadog?? What do they do
and how do they do it and with who and why? As I slowly became more and more
exposed to all things Doggy, I became more and more interested, and after
long talks via fax and phone with Michael Dog and some heavy sniffing about,
I decided this story needed to be told. By no means am I talking about a
historic narrative, just some background and insights into the organization
doggedly slogging away to keep our musical horizons glistening.

First there was Club Dog, a name chosen for the parties that Michael Dog and
brother Bob (almost their real names, not their real pictures) started to
produce back in the mid-eighties. They looked around at all the other events
in their London town, which used such names as "Club Tropicana" or "Club A
Go-Go", and they decided they wanted a name that was the antithesis of that
sort of glitzy imagery, hence Club Dog. "The original flyer for Club Dog
featured a cartoon picture of a rather pathetic looking dog, with an arm
holding a big club (baseball bat) hovering over its head, thus creating the
pun on the name Club Dog. As the British are obsessed with dogs and their
welfare, we figured that this would guarantee that people would remember the
name, and it worked. By the way, neither Bob nor I particularly like dogs, we
both much prefer cats, we have 2 cats each at our respective homes!" For its
formative years, Club Dog was a musical smorgasbord of styles and sounds.
Both Michael and Bob had become deeply involved in the free festival scene,
where large groups of people and any number or variety of performing acts
would roam England putting on huge free parties in the outdoors, usually with
minimum fuss from the locals. After years of avoiding the traditional white
rock music arena, their tastes in music had become much more aligned with the
sounds of reggae, world music, jazz, and psychedelia; at this time, few
organizers in the London club scene shared their eclectic tastes, thus the
birth of Club Dog at North London's Wood Green Trades Union Center. Weird
indie bands shared the stage with DJs spinning fast reggae, and the promoters
maintained a very open music policy and no door policy. The time was ripe for
these sorts of events, and Club Dog became very popular. A couple of years of
steady clubbing went by and Club Dog moved to Sir George Robey pub in
Finsbury Park, where they still run events.

Read carefully now, this is where it gets complicated. At the student union
of the University of North London early in 1989, the Dogs pulled off the
first Megadog, a larger and more intense version of their club (and meant to
be the dance-based event, as opposed to the musical eclecticism of Club Dog),
and over the coming months Megadog grew into a monster. Not only were they
featuring the future jazz of bands like the Sandals, they were also becoming
more and more technofied; Test Dept., Orbital, Underworld, Psychick Warriors
Ov Gaia,  System 7, Eat Static and more started playing regularly, making
Megadog not only a fantastically produced event, but also the place to see
the most intriguing live acts of the day. No doubt Michael and Bob were aware
of the changing focus, and were wary of becoming too focused on any one
segment of the musical spectrum. "In the past, our live events were more
musically diverse than they have been in the last couple of years. Megadog
was originally intended to be a specifically 'dance' based live event to run
alongside the more diverse Club Dog, but we have had to make Club Dog a more
occasional event as Megadog has become more popular. We are now in the
process of widening out Megadog's brief, to encompass all forms of dance
music, including reggae and hip hop based stuff as well as jazz and world
dance crossovers. Musical elitism is unfortunately an ongoing problem amongst
both artists and the fans, as well as the people who pull the strings in the
music industry, but the reality is that most people listen to a wide range of
music out of choice, regardless of being told what is and isn't 'cool' to
listen to." 

IT'S IN THE MIX

This applies not only to the music people take home with them, but what they
want to see and hear on a night out, and Michael has thought about this at
length: "The main event is the whole thing, though people are starting to get
the idea of mixing live music with a club, not many are doing it, even though
it is a really logical thing to do. Music venues in this country have been
going through a recession, as basically less and less people have been going
out to see bands. The gigs aren't presented very well, you go to a venue that
is usually painted black inside, and you stand there and the sound guy will
put on this favorite tape, the band comes on and plays. Most clubs just play
one style of music, and never really use much effort to create any sort of
ambiance, they just hire a couple of DJs to play their favorite records, and
if you liked the kind of music they were playing, that was fine, but as that
was the main thing there wasn't really much else to attract you to the club.
What we have been trying to do is combine the best aspects of both of those
scenes - to create a vibrant club atmosphere to present live music in; we
break it up, we have a number of live performances, interspersed with
interesting DJs. We do this often, we do a show in London, Manchester and
Leeds, all once a month, in between those, we'll do little blocks of touring,
where we'll play 2 or 3 shows in different parts of the country. We work with
whatever bands are able to gig at the time, one main aspect of Megadog is to
be a showcase for what we consider interesting live music, so we are
certainly not about showcasing only the Planet Dog bands, it's a showcase for
the whole genre of head music. We look after the people who work with us,
it's in all of our best interests for the bands to do their best possible
performances when they play with us, and we try to facilitate that as best as
possible. We understand the pressures of playing live, as we've all played in
bands, so we try to make it as nice as possible for the band to work with
us!"

One could say that it is precisely this sort of attitude that lead to the
formation of Planet Dog, the label that sprouted naturally from the mother
organism. "The label was formed as a result of working in the live music
field, with a number of artists that quite obviously had large grass roots
audiences, but were being completely ignored by established dance and
electronic labels in this country. Most labels had an attitude that if a
record was not 'DJ friendly', then it wasn't worth releasing. 'Bollocks to
that!' I thought, so I started Planet Dog.

JOURNEY TO THE PLANET 

"The problem was, we didn't have any money, so we had to find someone we
wanted to work with who was willing to finance our ideas. By chance, an old
friend of mine worked for a company called Ultimate, and we had a long series
of discussions on how I wanted to see the label run, and how I didn't want to
see the label run, and what they wanted out of financing a label, and we
basically came to an agreement on how we would do it. They don't exert any
artistic control, they basically pay the bills and facilitate the production
and marketing of the records. They run Ultimate in a similar fashion as we
run Planet Dog, they have a very open minded view of their artists, and a
long term view as well. They don't get on their artists backs to keep
producing product, or to fit in with certain images, which a lot of labels
here obsessed with: they sign an artist and try to milk them as quickly as
possible, having little respect for that persons musical output, it's almost
as if that's the least important thing.

"The people that I work with on the label are people that I have taken time
to develop some sort of personal relationship with, or at least to try to
find out what is going on in their heads, to some degree, as I find that
important in terms of how their music is going to come across. It would worry
me to sign someone to the label who was literally only in it for the money,
because I feel we would inevitably have problems with them; they would be
tailoring their music to a more strictly commercial framework. An organic
relationship is a must with the people I work with, our contracts are a
basic, written arrangement for releasing records, rather than a real tight
thing that covers every angle. The artists who work with us are free to do
other things, play in other bands, and take on other projects, all we ask is
that they work under that name only for us. The situation in general has
developed to the point where some artists have gotten too cocky, and expect
to be able to work with a number of labels all at the same time. What that
creates is an atmosphere where no one label is willing to get behind an
artist and support them through their career, since they're looking at how
much money can they afford to spend if this guy's only going to do one record
for the label. Whereas we take a long term view with the people we work with,
we sign them for 3 album deals in hope that they'll be happy to come back and
resign with us at the end of their contract, as we're looking at working with
them for 5, 10 years or as long as their careers last."


FEED OUR HEADS

Artist wise, Planet Dog is home to such entities as Eat Static, Timeshard,
Banco De Gaia, and Children Of The Bong, and is frequently visited by a
number of extra-sonic terrestrials, including Optic Eye, Zuvuya, The Drum
Club, Pressure Of Speech, System 7, Astralasia, Spooky and Path, among
others, all of whom have contributed to what could be considered the Planet
Dog musical manifesto, the Feed Your Head compilation series. The second of
this series was just released, and succinctly objectifies Michael Dog's
musical perspective: "The tracks that I choose are chosen on their quality,
not on who is submitting them. I'm not deliberately looking for a dubby
sound, I looking for a sound that sort of takes you off somewhere, though
faster music does that, it does it in a different way. I select the pieces so
that the overall is constantly interesting, so that you don't have to
concentrate; I get offered a lot of stuff that is very minimal, or full of no
more than odd noises, where it's more soundscapes than pieces of music, and I
find that I drift off to that kind of stuff, and drift off so much that I
actually switch off. I look for music that you can drift off to, but there is
still a tune there, there is still something keeping you in touch with it and
not completely switching you off. And the tracks are mixed, so that you are
never sure if the end of one track isn't the beginning of another, to make it
all seamless as possible, considering that you have a load of pieces of music
that weren't constructed to be played together. It's a soundtrack for a mind
journey.

"For Feed Your Head, I look for music that though essentially 'electronic' in
its origin, has a human or organic feel to it. It is quite easy, with a bit
of thought, to inject a more human feel into electronic music, but I think
that a lot of people who get into making midi-based music don't really ever
bother to push to the limit. The result is quite often bland, uninteresting
demos of factory preset sounds which are a really bad advertisement for the
possibilities of midi-based music, and which fuel the argument heard in some
quarters that electronic music is boring. In the end, most people would
rather listen to music that sounds like it has been made by a human, rather
than music that sounds like the computer wrote it itself. I feel very
strongly about this, the thing that frustrates me is it is exactly this sort
of music that is getting the most press in England at the moment; everything
deserves to get publicity, but it's very much biased towards the Aphex Twin
end of stuff. It's as if music that has melody, harmony, a tune or a feeling,
has something really un-cool about it, people don't want to know about it. I
find this very bizarre, as it's the music that I most want to hear."

PRESSING THE PRESS

My interest in Planet Dog and its music created in my mind an earlier
assumption that there must be press hype-frenzy surrounding the label, with
writers bashing down their door wanting to be the first to cover any new
release that comes out. It appears as if close to the opposite is true. "It's
very hard to get a lot of publicity for our kind of music over here, for all
that it is popular, you wouldn't know it from reading the music press.
Unfortunately, it's quite an important mechanism for making people aware of
music, yet it's a very small group who control it, and they dictate a lot of
national opinion on music. The way the magazines are staffed, there's a lot
of competition within them regarding what is going to get written about; with
the main music papers, NME and Melody Maker, the people who pull the strings
come from a background of indie rock and punk, so they inherently don't like
the sort of music that we work with. Sherman (writer of Grooves column in
NME) was very much on our side and quite supportive of the whole musical
movement, but he got the sack earlier this year, I think because he was too
much into this sort of music. The dance music magazines don't really consider
it to be up to them to cover us, they cover dance music, and they don't
really see us as part of their brief either. We have a lot of problems here
with the music press generally, because the English music press is very
cynical, they build things up and then merrily stick the knives in to cut
them down again. We're lucky because the artists we work with have a genuine
grassroots interest in this country, so it's very hard for the press to knock
them down and wipe them off the map. Reviews are important from a business
point of view, not really from an aesthetic point of view, as I have a
cynical attitude about their cynical attitude! I don't expect to see good
reviews, but it is quite annoying when there aren't any reviews at all!"

And what of the label's main act, Eat Static, started by members Joie Hinton
and Merv Pepler simply as a techno offshoot of their steady gig, the festival
hopping, crusty-haired, psychedelic fusion rockers Ozric Tentacles? After
signing to Planet Dog in March of '93, Eat Static released "Abduction", their
debut LP, following up a number of releases on their own Alien Records, which
they sold in healthy numbers at gigs. They have become more and more
ecstatically received, especially after a number of new singles, remixes and
now another full lengther, "Implant", although there are still many whose
ears find it hard to absorb the complexly psychedelic nature of their trancey
acid hyper-techno and its ambient/dub side-glances. "Joie and Merv were
influenced by the generation of psychedelic musicians before them, Gong, Can,
and various other German groups, and they are just continuing that
psychedelic music tradition, here most people laugh at the use of that term,
but really there isn't a better way of describing it, you either know the
style or you don't; I find it hard to find the words to describe it, but it
is music for your mind, I suppose. There was a very strong movement in
psychedelic music when we started Club Dog, in the mid-eighties, it was a
very underground yet large scene, and that is really the thread that has run
through until now, they've just up-dated the style of music they play, it's
gotten more electronic and less guitar based. Joie and Merv found it hard to
devote energy to both Eat Static and the Ozric Tentacles, and as the Ozrics
were starting to take off in a bigger league sort of way, it came to a time
where they had to choose one way or the other, and as it was their own
project, I guess it was logical that they would choose Eat Static. They were
always getting slated here for playing in Ozrics, practically every article
ever written about them would start off slagging the Ozrics, only to go on to
say what a saving grace Eat Static are. This always bemused Merv and Joie,
although they were obviously different projects, they came from the same
head-space, and they couldn't see what all the fuss was about, why they
should be slated for playing one sort of music, and praised for playing the
other. 

THE MEGA-FUTURE

North America has had very little exposure to what England has been
experiencing for years (I'm not just talking about the focus of this article,
but that's another story!). This will be changing in the coming year;
Michael's most recent trip to New York, which included a live show with Eat
Static and Banco De Gaia at the Limelight, has finally resulted in some sort
of domestic arrangement. "We are very close to finalizing a deal for domestic
release of Planet Dog in America, the company we are dealing with showed a
healthy interest and are willing to make a commitment to tour support, which
is an important part of it, being able to bring the bands over. It would be
great to come, it would probably be just the bands as at the moment it would
be a little bit impractical to bring the whole Megadog show, especially to
get it out west. There is not only the bands' equipment, but the whole show
itself, and a lot of the equipment we use is virtually unavailable in
America. But I want to make it possible, somehow, as I believe that this
would finally enable us to present this relatively new concept of 'live'
dance music in a context that makes sense to both rave and gig go-ers, and
also to the quite conservative American music industry. In England, dancing
really is the prime motivation, even when people go to see a show, they don't
really come to see the band, since they know it's just a bunch of guys
standing behind some keyboards, they are coming to dance. It is more
interesting to dance to these bands than to dance to a DJ. 

"Megadog will do whatever it is meant to. Though we are ostensibly in
control, in that if we stopped doing it, it would just stop existing, Megadog
(and all of the projects, influences and possibilities that it has spawned
over the years) has a life of its own, we are just the pilots at the helm.
Obviously, the fact that we have achieved some reasonable degree of success
with both our live events and the record label is very gratifying, as is the
fact that I believe we genuinely bring a lot of enjoyment into people's
lives. It has been a long slog though, and we haven't got to the end of the
tunnel yet! We have an exhaustive touring schedule planned and other releases
and new artists' careers to look after, and this does all take a mental and
physical toll, but I honestly believe that we are on a bit of a mission to
redefine the perception of both live events and electronic music, and the
positive responses that we get from people like yourselves make it all worth
it!"


DOGOGRAPHY

Eat Static - Abduction LP 
Various -Feed Your Head
Eat Static - Lost in Time EP
Eat Static - Gulf Breeze Remixes EP
Banco De Gaia - Desert Wind EP
Banco De Gaie - Maya
Eat Static - Survivors EP
Timeshard - Crystal Oscillations LP
Eat Static - Implant LP
Banco De Gaia - Heliopolis EP
Various - Feed Your Head 2
Various - Quadruped Vol 1

THE FOLLOWING WERE IN A SIDE-BAR WITH HEADERS:

WHERE DID IT ALL BEGIN
I have no doubt that alien life exists and has visited Earth a lot, and quite
possibly had a major hand in defining the world as it is today. 

I TRY TO ANSWER MY OWN PHONE
I really appreciate receiving enthusiasm for what we do, it's very
encouraging. I tend to get a little bit isolated from people, it's the nature
of things becoming busier, I spend a lot of time working, and I don't get to
speak to many people outside our own network, so I don't get much feedback. 

I'M NOT ON GEFFEN'S PROMO LIST
The only music that I choose to listen to purely for pleasure at home is dub,
but as I listen to music for a living as a result of previewing demos for the
label and records for DJing, I tend to have quite an open mind. The only
music that I cannot stand is straight guitar based rock or grunge, and
blatantly commercial pop rubbish. My main influences as regards the label are
early psychedelic/electronic pioneers like Can, Gong, Pink Floyd, Tangerine
Dream, etc.

APPROPRIATION LEADS TO APPRECIATION
The more that people work different sorts of influences into their music the
more interesting the development of music is likely to be; there is nothing
more boring than musicians rehashing the same music over and over again. When
musicians work ethnic music forms into their music it is more likely that the
people listening to this music will be interested in checking out the
indigenous music that has influenced this crossover. 

THE MORE THINGS CHANGE, THE MORE THEY BECOME DIFFERENT
There's a bit of a debate started here about what is and isn't a live
performance with this sort of music, in terms of does it have to be a live
mix of sequences, is it acceptable that it's just a computer running
sequences, and you maybe drop them in or out, is it acceptable to play the
whole set off DAT and just play over the top of it. And what difference is
there between all these. In this country, the next step is re-introducing
live instruments; there are bands coming up that mix the best of midi-based
music with the best of live instrumentation. 

THE CRIMINAL JUSTICE BILL - IT WOULD HAVE SCARED MUSSOLINI
If they actually try to enforce it on a large scale, it could well bring
about the final charge to topple the government. As a point of view it's a
pointless exercise - it's going to make all traveling families illegal.
Thousands of people living a perfectly natural life would be criminalized.
It's like making it illegal to have sex. It shows that the government haven't
got a clue, that they've completely out of touch with this country. And that
they've lost the concept of what government is for - it's not to push people
around but to create a structure for people to live in.