Metamatic : The Official John Foxx Website...
2021
 2020  2020: "Organised" noise might be stretching it a bit, but at least some of it was labelled and back then in the bunker things made a strange kind of sense. Prograde motion. Going backwards is easy: takes less than 40 minutes once he plugs that thing in; could take 40 years of course - we only had pens in those days. Everything happens at once and no-one knows where we will end up. Locked down in a jungle somewhere with donkey jackets and jumpleads? From Cornwall, with love...
 2019  2019: Status update: rare vagrant. One unconfirmed report of a single sighting in Manchester. Observers unknown. Associates, offspring and mutations now operating independently and without adequate supervision. Last seen walking away from the camera along a shingle spit onto vanishing land in Suffolk. Into the Eno-verse: a derelict radar base; coastal heathland where once there was a city. Music haunted by wider levels of reality and half-dreamed potentials.
 2016  2018 : I have become the Hidden Man. Someone hardly there at all. They talk of me fondly. Encouraging and respectful, acknowledging influence, inspiration and everything in between. I am the ghost in their machines, and the cogs turn to bring the circle just. With barely no effort at all, and armed only with a download code and a small mirror, we have arrived back where we started. An alamogordo logic prevails, and 1979 goes by my window. Three-disc deluxe. Definitve. Discreet, shatterproof and invisible.
 2016  2017 : A shift in the trajectory. It's 1909. Imagine if you can a small room, hexagonal in shape, like the cell of a bee... Hive Frequency prevails, only the voice escaped; instrumental album remained unscathed. Delightful glitch in the sequencing. Fractured by irrational juxtapositions. Cars in the garden. Can't see the forest for the trees. Vocal adrift on its outward journey. Turn left at Cadogan Hall. 1983? Another green world. Like jazz, but without the clichés.
 2016  2016 : Gently revolving. Publish by proxy and travel by phone. Tear up the map, fold the pieces carefully. Low profile - let the ghosts do the work. There are more as we get older; they crop up with increasing frequency. Hollywood-noir fever dreams become a reality, even after centuries in the basement. City soundtracks revisited. Met that young chap from the park again, the one in the T-shirt. 'Five', I think they called him?
 2015  2015 : Miles away now, and invisible. Look upon them as they plunder the archive, rummaging through boxes of dusty tapes. Triumphant, they lift decaying somethings up to the light. Vague memories, long dispersed... There was this Beautiful Ghost, and a woman with a violin? London. Overgrown & splendid. Haven't been here for 30 years. It's post-digital now - Basinski dancing with the Smoke Fairies to Xeno & Oaklander's Tallis remix.
 2014  2014 : Both experiments concluded this year suggest that the genome is replicating successfully. Viral implants indicate sustainability. Physical form of parent cell is difficult to maintain - Archive Nutrition still required, administered by pilferage and plunder. Detection now impossible among cut-up movies and found sounds. Seems to exist only in glimpses and by inference. Dispersing fragments may hold vital evidence.
 2013  2013 : Infiltration and re-interpretation. Over recent months, active cells bearing traces of invasive DNA have been detected in Los Angeles, Detroit, Finland, Dresden and Paris leading to concerns that influence is going viral. Analysis of the Belbury parish magazine also suggests prolific activity in Madrid in the summer of 1983. Possible Lynchian disguise. Check all of the avenues for dream imagery and further clues to whereabouts.
 2012  2012 : Invigorated and alive. Unlocking drawers and pulling things off shelves. Scanning notebooks for phrases and phone numbers. Calling in those who stayed loyal and making a thousand new connections every day. Assigning projects and flowing between the shapes. Refreshing the palette with the intention to surprise. 'Always select the hypothesis with the fewest assumptions'. Heuristic evidence.
 2011  2011 : Opened the window to let some of the steam out. Passers-by overcome by hissing and fumes. Broken sunlight falls across a young designer, resting on a chair. He's been working underground for years. Blinking now, speaking in primary colours. An integration of intelligence and instinct. There's a knock on the door. It's man in a hat, and a girl in a bright red dress. Everything was calculated.
 2010  2010 : Thirty years ago I heard someone speak. Synchromatic behind cigarette smoke. An ancient language, almost runic - phrases in a familiar tongue that no-one else speaks any more. Modular phrases, the language of the Moog Whisperer. Calming, encouraging. Inspiring. Exquisitely functional. Tones, gestures, notes. The pleasure of electricity amid the conversation of ghosts. Taking form. Materialising...
 2009  2009 : Unearthed a live cable in Hoxton while digging through the archaeology of electronic music - scraped away gently to reveal a whole labyrinth of patches, loops and residual synthesisers. Followed a tunnel and re-discovered a half-flooded basement, swollen with tunes imprisoned a quarter century ago. Opened the door and they floated out. Set off back down the passage towards an unknown destination.
 2008  2008 : Interlude. Operation by proxy and semantic extension. Despatched a couple of robot agents to the other side of the world, and hid in Durham Cathedral. Partial manifestation in the cobbled squares of Europe. An interrupted radio broadcast from Shinjuku. Remixed and remastered. Ambushed in Bethnal Green by Dub-terrorist Editions, Ltd armed with sprayguns - fended them off with x-ray vision and an old suit.
 2007  2007 : No time to come up for air, must learn to breathe underwater. Simultaneous transformation and revelation. Everything that has happened until now has been an elaborate hoax, designed by a global network of re-commissioning agents. An outrageous scam. Fatal burnout feared. Existence to cease? Trace the echo pathways and invite some different guests. Rewrite the genealogy. Experiment with thought...
 2006  2006 : Met Bowie in Berlin, Eno and Weizcs-Bryant in Brick Lane. Conducted an examination on the interplay between sound, architecture and urban design. Presentation of found film fragments, recorded on hand-held cameras. Painted on, scratched off. Inevitably flawed music, recorded by remote shout method during a nervestorm. Two albums in as many minutes, and a tour in between. Small is the new big.
 2005  2005 : A series of unexpected, apparently un-related events result in collaborative antagonism, improvised harmonics and an incident in Dreamsville. Vincent turned up with Polly Jean in tow. Effortless. Projecting new scenes onto old faces. A kind of spiral overture - Satie for the iPod generation. Endless reverb, echo and imperceptible movement. Slow life. Then someone hacked the code and found the tape.
 2004  2004 : Early morning on a misty urban waterway. Flipping the script. Mixing sound and the moving image. Re-installed in London and Barcelona - engage and exhibit. Suddenly, things are being experienced that were previously overlooked. Elegant and minimal piano pieces waltz down the avenues. Texturally complex. Organic. Teaching longform electronica and the technology of creative media. Learning by osmosis.
 2003  2003 : Both sonic and visual components have evolved from the same conceptual frame. Dissolved and merging. Layered and hallucinatory. Hybrid technologies as wide as the ocean. Location and memory. Innumerable artefacts stored in dusty boxes. Lost and found on a council estate in 30s New York by 19-year old Iggy and his mate Dylan, travelling by jetpack. Broken furniture and bits of junk. Keinholtz by starlight.
 2002  2002 : Computerised folk melodies for the machine age. A meticulous odyssey of subways, hotels, and arcadian power plants. Fingerprints, logic circuits and industrial zones. An escalator frequency. External forces coming into play beyond the self. Someone else suggesting angles and frames. Genial and besuited. Cogent, convincing: designing the retro-future. Wrist watch sychronised at ten minutes to one.
 2001  2001 : Assembling and evading. Sonic afro-futuristic cinema. Angels of history drifting between London and Detroit. Symptoms manifesting after exposure several decades ago. There is no cure - suggest medication by curiosity and adventure. Avoid technique. This is the next phase. Driven by Duchamp, with Ballard in the backseat taking notes, directing a course between the significantly dated relics that litter the highway.
 2000  2000 : Further re-invention of the self described in photographs, lyrics and flashback. A kind of retro-modern everyman with a Sixties brand name. Tracing an introspective path of descent into the etheral nature of electricity and ghosts. Haunted and stunning. Intermittent cars pass by the window and fade out. A marginal episode. Future music for an unforgotten city - the dawn of an ethereal millennium.
 1999  1999 : Portfolio exposed: respect overdue. Soundsweeps operating on a premises in Leeds uncover layers of ancient coda, revealing a further ten offensives written in chalk. The future's getting closer now - don't stand still. Echoes pass hand in glove across the years. Moving shadows glimmer and sparkle. A man in a suit walks between buildings of architectural concrete, on his way back into focus. Something has shifted.
 1998  1998 : Still waving - but going back into the crowds again, with a new sense of purpose. A different presence emerges in a parallel dimension - commence omnidelic regeneration. Dominant components now include pixels, programming and the carved wooden doorway of an old music hall. Engage with concepts from another time - plugs still glowing. Time and direction have no ordained sequence. Return to splendour.
 1997  1997 : Giving the game away. Characteristics verified and confirmed. 'Known to exist'. Transferred to a secure mobile unit and supplied with electricity. Commence victim support. Forensic profiling identifies twenty years of subversive activity including theft of DNA from guitars. Recommended treatment program: sub-terranean exorcism under 24-hour surveillance. Modus operandi suggests the involvement of other agents.
 1996  1996 : Suspect captured by recognition sensor. Pseudo-entity detected and evidenced by proxy. Brought in for questioning. Charged with the assimilation of nutrients into living tissue, and the modification of components used in the construction of credible fake psychedelia. Confessed on all counts, and further admitted to the formation of other potentially hazardous compounds. Sentenced to ten years of innovation and performance.
 1995  1995 : To the pressmen asking "where are they now?" - transmission detected in Ancoats, Manchester. A shifting landscape. Suspicious radio-activity traced through the noise to a bunker in the downside factory sector, teeming with insect life and buzzing with creative negligence. Known renegades thought to be harbouring the suspect are armed with ideas, vodka and extreme fishing tackle. Proceed with caution.
 1994  1994 : Remember the moth? Spent Summer with him in a Georgian house recording a grand piano and the sound of empty rooms. Mermaids in the basement. Walked among statues in the garden of time. Something to fall back on. Called on old friends for studio space. Added parts. Threads diverging, taking a myriad directions, opening up thought experiments. Unrecognisable again. One city, two lives.
 1993  1993 : Faint echoes in distant rows. Someone else is wearing them now, cutting patterns from the same cloth and making new sounds. Weaving a new fabric and reaching fresh ears. Sorting through old wires, seeking live connections. A party in Shropshire with Voodoo Ray and some guy called Gerald from Detroit. Familiar noises coming through the haze, and the shape of a man appears, powered by juju and Duracell.
 1992  1992 : Feeling retrospective and more than a little knocked around. Decanted experience into the old grey suit. A little frayed, but tailored well and comfortable. Still warm. Been hanging for years in a well-aired room overlooking Hyde Park, where the grass has grown long and hides the lake. Walking invisible through Summer rooms. Tune in the radio and dance alone to those early records. It all happened to someone else.
 1991  1991 : Inhuman presence next to my ear, cutting up sounds for multi-platform computer games. Same principle, different medium. Bitmap Brothers vs Harper Collins. Someone pulled the plug and the shelves filled up with abandoned things that would take twenty years to mature. Blinking, hand over the eyes, turning away from the glare. Shadow dancing in a foggy street with a half-remembered someone. Old street seems far away.
 1990  1990 : Both visible and invisible, on the turntables again and spreading like vapour. Low-frequency oscillation in a Leeds warehouse, messing around with broken beats and drum-machines. Left hand working with video students on a project that managed to escape, right hand sexing cherries over a beer in the Spitalfields hinterland. Bought some Super-8mm movies from the market, bits of fabric and postcards from the 1950s.
 1989  1989 : Washed up on a terminal beach in Leeds - a tale of two cities. Modular planning and class of media students. Teaching some, learning from others. Like DJ Tim and his offspring, spawned in the Brixton fridge. Enough energy around to consider some kind of re-generation, and ideas to last a lifetime. Old friends dancing again on VCR, connecting hand to hand. Ghosts taking different form, electroflesh starts to crackle.
 1988  1988 : Connecting with the old school and practising new tricks. Graphic design and image-repurposing. Artwork to order. Stand aside and watch the tide flow through the London streets. Understated performance of a vast underwater concept - new ideas, recording and re-arranging. Caught the scent of another underground. There's a hum in the clubs and whispers on the breeze. Acid leaking out, just beginning to tingle on the skin.
 1987  1987 : Came across another Soho, filmed a different scene. Nothing's quite the same anymore. Hung up the suit and sat behind a desk, loading up a new reel. Anonymous and grey. Overlapping layers. Transparent and merging. Fielding calls from those trying to find him, offering advice and taking numbers. Leave a message but no name. Hiding in plain sight and travelling in secret. Shifted perspective.
 1986  1986 : Turned the lights out, drew the curtains. Pulled on the dust sheets and left the keys on a table by the door. Walked through an overgrown city, visiting abandoned offices full of broken furniture. Found an empty church on the south bank, and sang with a ghost. Witnessed by the spirit of Eno, and the faint light single bulb drew in moths and made them cry. Caught one gently in the hand. Discussed ideas and fluttered off.
 1985  1985 : Lost and lovely, but moving further away. Operating remotely now, looking back and losing hope. Nothing seems to want to go in quite the right direction, and no-one wants to stay. Followed the dream but never quite caught up or caught on. Leaving them behind and looking inwards. Re-visited melody and structure, and quietly panned for gold among old friends. Letting go and drifting free. The suit no longer fits. Time to leave.
 1984  1984 : Slowly fading, trying to pull all the strands together. Fascinated by the potential of an orchestra in a suitcase. Collecting artefacts around the haunted city, reading the walls and looking for clues. Transcribing stories whispered by the Quiet Man and trying to catch him on film at various times and places. People out there, waiting - travelling by phone. Still vaguely interested, but a new perception is emerging.
 1983  1983 : Found a new frequency and a couple of extra gears. Flirted with the press, but she didn't want to play. New album, new producer. Golden times. Stepped out in the glow, got caught on camera and ended up in various extended formats. Hooked up some great session players, plugged in Robin Simon and came alive. Thin ice state. Full of energy, exhilarated. Skated around Europe and Japan. Met myself coming back.
 1982  1982 : Studio in full bloom with artists from all over the place, so hardly time to record anything. Water running down the walls in the basement, irrigating sounds new to science that would not be heard for thirty years. Geometries of coincidence and glimmers of blackened modernity. Somehow managed to put together a single in the midst of all this. Recorded in a couple of hours with tape loops and backwards sitar. Impulsive.
 1981  1981 : Met up with The Quiet Man and travelled around England taking photographs. Swam from London to Florence via Paris. Found a Shoreditch warehouse. The weather changed, and new songs emerged from the chrysalid. Back in the old familiar glow with a bunch of new musicians, bursting with vegetation and ideas. Reverb on the dancefloor, flowers on the desk and a queue of people coming down the stairs.
 1980  1980 : Broadcast me... Top Of The Pops and all that. Pop charts and posters. Millions of tiny ghosts making simultaneous random appearances. Host organism still shattered and wandering. Miles away in Europe by October, breathing fresh air laced with incidental possibilities. A couple of particles slipped through the filter. Back home, the underground sprung a leak when every man and his dog began making electronic music.
 1979  1979 : Packed out most of the emerging clubs on the East coast. Played to full houses in the West. Crackling with tension. I want to be a machine - can't expect good musicians to wait around for a part to play. Inevitable dislocation. Flew back to burned-out Blighty to shut down and recharge. Place was overrun with demos by November; had to let some of them out. Enough escaped to fill an 8-track broom cupboard.
 1978  1978 : Robin Simon in for Stevie Shears on guitar, and off to Conny's. Lost the exclamation mark somewhere in the woods outside Cologne, and returned with good material. Shame it didn't sell... dropped by Island despite selling out hundreds more gigs. Exciting, but it's like being married to four people at once - you really can't stay long. Made plans for a half-glimpsed future and printed enough cash to tour America.
 1977  1977 : Trouser-flappin' debut early on, lifted from that first album. Enossification spread liberally, and a spattering of Lee Perry. Two more singles and a second album within six months, after playing more than fifty gigs including Reading - talk about a Dangerous Rhythm! Mixed reaction from the press due to perceived changes of style; slammed for not being punk. Too clever for all that - didn't stand still long enough.
 1976  1976 : The whole city was in a band by now - London SS included everyone for a while. Toyed with names, saw Patti Smith at the Roundhouse with Mick Jones and the crowd. McLaren had the Pistols up and running before anyone else. It all kicked off at Island when Eno turned up, straight from the RCA canteen. Glamrock met Krautrock. Exclamation mark, PVC mac, neon sign and a record contract. Wild and beautiful.
 1975  1975 : Ain't misbehavin' - a debut single for the soundtrack of a soft-porn movie, though it was never used. George Melly got that one! Good opportunity to record a self-penned track for the B-side though, and buy a cheap piano with the advance. Cash to spare for studio time in Denmark Street alongside the Wailers and the Stones. Illicit recordings out-of-hours near Marble Arch thanks to Lillywhite, a tape engineer at Phonogram.
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