Bark Psychosis

"We've never been interested in rock', claimed Bark Psychosis" Graham Sutton in Melody Maker magazine upon the release of his band's 1994 debut, Hex, "I'm even uncomfortable with the idea of being in a band. It seems such a juvenile thing. I'm trying to break it all up at the moment." Within a year of the album's release, the band had effectively split. Comprising Graham Sutton (vocals, samplers, guitar, keyboards, melodica), John Ling (bass, samples, percussion), Mark Simnett (drums, percussion), and Daniel Gish (keyboards), Bark Psychosis formed in Snaresbrook, London, England, in 1986 and took almost a decade to work up to their stunning debut. Hex - alongside Insides' Euphoria and Butterfly Child's Onomatopoeia - represented a new drift within and against the morass of alternative rock and pop. With lines like "It's 3.00 am/Don't know where we're going/Just drive somewhere fast/And below/The West Way reaches out/To clutch you back" ("Big Shot"), Hex was a near ecclesiastical elegy to the city and the relationships possible with places. The astute deployment of space and silence and quiet, urgent percussion and oneiric bass, meant the nearest comparisons were probably with Talk Talk's Spirit Of Eden and Laughing Stock and Miles Davis' In A Silent Way and Kind Of Blue.

Bark Psychosis played their last show in Russia in April 1994, alongside Seefeel, Autechre, Ultramarine and Aphex Twin. Even prior to the release of Hex, Sutton had claimed to be listening almost solely to techno. Increasingly seduced by breakbeats, sampling and programming, Sutton recorded a drum 'n' bass album, Balance Of The Force, under the Boymerang moniker. Bark Psychosis posthumously released a duo of archival collections, Independency and Game Over. The former collected the band's pre-Hex recordings, including 1992's remarkable "Scum", a 21-minute piece gestated over the course of a week in the crypt of an east London church. The latter compiled a selection of tracks lifted from singles and compilations including, oddly, a cover version of Wire's "Three Girl Rhumba".

Having spent the 90s exploring drum 'n' bass with Boymerang, by the end of the decade Sutton had grown tired of the genre and made the decision to revive the Bark Psychosis moniker. With his former colleagues long since gone he employed several musician friends to help record new material at his London-based studio. Fans of Sutton's previous post-rock excursions were rewarded with an excellent new album, Codename: Dustsucker, released by the Fire label in summer 2004.