jsREVIEW: 

I can only imagine how weird it would have been to be an avant garde band in Hamburg, Michigan during the early ’80s. I suspect, first of all, that the Inserts were not just an avant garde band, but rather THE avant garde band of 1983.

Sounding heavily influenced by the No Pussyfooting collaboration between Eno and Fripp, this quartet plays mostly guitar synthesizers (and note explicitly that there aren’t any keyboard synthesizers on the album), with a Rhodes for a touch of jazz fusion.

From tracking down Marc Taras, who is thanked in the credits and now works at local shop PJ’s Records, the main halmark of the band was its spontaneous and improvisational nature. They’d roar into the studio, start the tapes and jam, splicing anything that worked back together post hoc. Rather than ending up disjointed, the album feels spacious and anxious with broad washes of taut guitar tones playing over jittery post-punk bass work.

Clean and “modern” sounding, there’s a fairly dystopic sci-fi sound to the ordeal, like Vangelis’s Blade Runner without the plot. Still, for fans of bands like Cluster, Eno & Fripp, or even Psychic TV, there’s a lot to love about The Inserts, and you’ll never see this disc for sale again.

(Having learned that one of the members of the band, then going by birth name Mark Murrell, is now WCBN DJ Ed Special, look to this space once Cousins Vinyl can get him to talk about the album!)

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