Clock DVA lives in the moment

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In 1989, Clock DVA released the album Buried Dreams. It was the group’s second album to arrive Stateside that year via Chicago’s Wax Trax Records. Singles from the album such as “Sound Mirror,” “The Act,” and “The Hacker” were high-water marks for the shape of ’90s industrial dance music to come. The Sheffield U.K. outfit, led by singer and founding member Adi Newton, was born amid the British music scene that birthed early industrial music pioneers Cabaret Voltaire and Throbbing Gristle. Through cassettes and LPs sporting titles such as Sex Works Beyond Entanglement, White Souls In Black Suits, and Thirst, Clock DVA reveled in the murky outer reaches of post-punk, stirring up brooding atmospheres with tape noise and electronic minimalism.

By ’89, Clock DVA was known for eschewing the tropes that defined industrial music by looking to avant-garde provocateurs like French painter and sculptor Marcel Duchamp for inspiration. Newton even chose Duchamp’s final and perhaps most shocking work of art "Étant Donnés" for Buried Dreams’ cover. It’s an assemblage that Duchamp spent 40 years creating in secrecy. The piece is hidden behind a large wooden door with two small cracks at eye level for viewing. A peek through the cracks reveals the warmly lit body of a naked woman splayed in an open field. Her face and extremities are out of the frame, save for her left hand which holds a burning gas lamp.

Duchamp’s surreal juxtaposition of a bucolic landscape and the suggestion of a horrific crime scene set Newton’s mind in motion. “The similarities between what I wanted to do with Clock DVA and that image were there,” Newton says. “The fact that it’s a hidden piece of artwork that was done in secret, and you are glancing at something outside the context of what you normally see. It’s hard to know what’s happening in that work. There is no conclusion. It makes you think and question what you’re seeing. With Buried Dreams, I was trying to do the same thing. Use specific subject matter, but leave it open in ways that are suggestive, but nothing is obvious.”

Since Clock DVA formed in 1978, Newton has created a body of work where each release brings a stylistic departure from the last, while maintaining an immutable DVA quality. “I think that’s what you should do,” he says, “create a unique, individual feel in the work you’re doing; strive to bring about something that’s not homogeneous to something else. I hope that over the years I’ve done that.”

For the 1981 single “4 Hours,” Clock DVA crafted the song to fit a more accessible pop format. The song was a modest underground hit that caught the attention of former Bauhaus and Love and Rockets bass player David J Haskins. Haskins' cover of the song appears on his 1986 LP On Glass.

For Haskins, it was the song’s dreamlike imagery of an alienated outsider moving through modern cities in lyrics such as “I walk down the street, the people are staring/The taxicab is slower, A piano falls from above/It smashes in front of me,” that caught his attention. “It had this kind of surrealist element as well,” Haskins said in a recent interview with Creative Loafing. “With the ‘piano crashing’ — a piano falls from above, which could be seen as also symbolic. It was kind of an uptight time. There was a feeling in the air of imminent doom. … there was a sense of unease, and it captured that. There was something Kafka-esque about that song that I liked.”
From the group’s early cassette releases, several of which were reissued this year by Vinyl On Demand, to 2014’s Clock 2 USB 4 gig smart media card, changing technology plays a role in how Newton and a revolving cast of players adapt to different art movements and ideas that affect them. In the spirit of forward movement, Newton, along with Clock DVA’s current lineup of TeZ Martinucci and Panagiotis Tomaras have opened a new chapter for the group.

After releasing this year’s Neoteric EP the group is in the States, making its way to play the Cold Waves V festival in Chicago with classic industrial torchbearers Meat Beat Manifesto and the Cocks (ex Revolting Cocks). Newton is also staging two shows in Chicago with his more experimental side project the Anti Group (T.A.G.C.).

But make no mistake, Clock DVA is anything but a nostalgia act. “I would never do that,” Newton says. “The things that you do are done in that moment. You can’t go back and relive everything that led up to what you created. This is a new band. We’ll play some of the older material, but we’ve brought it up to date; made it interesting for us. We’re mostly concentrating on new material.”

Clock DVA plays the Earl on Sat., Sept. 24. With Pyramid Club and DJ Anthony (VJ Anthony). $20. 9 p.m. 488 Flat Shoals Ave. S.E. 404-522-3950. www.badearl.com.