a Date With The Executioner

In 1968, at age 14, he had learned how to play guitar, formed his own band and three years later released an album whom many still consider a psychedelic Krautrock classic. Not bad for a small-town German boy who is now producer, composer and music lecturer at Maintz University. He is Bernhard Rendel, founder of My Solid Ground; the other band members were keyboard player Ingo Werner, bassist Karl-Heinrich Dorfler and drummer Andreas Wursching. In 1970, at the Morfelden Studio in Frankfurt, they recorded a short track ("Flash") that won second place in an amateur competition hosted by Sudwestfunk (SWF) Radio. A year later, they released their album with nationwide success. Despite this, some of the band members started to quit and Rendel suddenly found himself with a totally new line-up…

Purge is intended as a continuation of the concepts of Pure, Godflesh's second album, which they performed at the 2013 Roadburn Festival and released as Pure: Live in 2022. Recognized as one of the first post-metal releases, 1992's Pure expanded on the bleak, drum machine-driven sound of earlier records like the mighty Streetcleaner, adding breakbeats and samples, resulting in a mutated form of industrial hip-hop which would give rise to nu-metal later in the decade. Purge is heavier on breaks and electronics than Pure, and it feels more sudden and immediate, forgoing the older album's dark ambient experimentation and extended track lengths. Justin Broadrick, who has been diagnosed with autism and PTSD, has felt like an outsider his entire life, and creating music as part of Godflesh serves as a form of therapeutic release for him…

Thom Yorke's Atoms for Peace involves longtime Radiohead engineer/producer Nigel Godrich (Ultraísta) and bassist Flea (Red Hot Chili Peppers), as well as two session veterans in drummer Joey Waronker (R.E.M., Ultraísta) and percussionist Mauro Refosco (Forro in the Dark). For their first public performance, back in 2009, they performed Yorke's Godrich-assisted 2006 album The Eraser in its entirety, as well as some fresh material. Over three years later, they've come up with this, a product of jam sessions formed – by Yorke and Godrich – into a uniform nine-track album. It sounds more like a fleshier successor to Yorke's first solo album than it does a first step, and it's presented that way, from Stanley Donwood's woodcut illustrations to the band's name – the same as a track title on The Eraser.

This is one of the Decca stereo recordings of the Gilbert and Sullivan operettas that does not include dialog. Thanks to the popularity of the work, it is familiar enough that missing the few plot points that occur in dialog doesn't hurt it. However, this is a somewhat disappointing performance and recording by the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company compared to the others in this series of reissues. Longtime principal comedian John Reed is Ko-Ko.