Meat Beat Manifesto: Британдық электрондық музыка тобының тарихы

British electronic music group

Meat Beat Manifesto, often shortened as Meat Beat, Manifesto or MBM, is an electronic music group originally consisting of Jack Dangers and Jonny Stephens that was formed in 1987 in Swindon, United Kingdom. The band, fronted by Dangers (the only permanent member), has proven versatile over the years, experimenting with techno, breakbeat, industrial, dub and jazz fusion while touring the world and influencing major acts such as Nine Inch Nails, the Chemical Brothers and the Prodigy.

Dangers and Stephens had formed the English pop group Perennial Divide in 1986 with Paul Freeguard and released the first few Meat Beat Manifesto singles as a side project. The first release under the Meat Beat name was 1987's Suck Hard EP on Sweat Box Records. They left Perennial Divide in 1988 to record a full Meat Beat album. The tapes of what would have been the debut MBM album were claimed to have been destroyed in a studio fire before it could be released (detailed in a publicity statement). The former founder of Sweat Box Records (Rob Deacon) said that the fire never happened. Jack Dangers confirmed the story of the fire in a 2010 interview. The pair then recorded the LP Storm The Studio, which got them pigeonholed as an industrial act because Sweat Box Records sold the rights to the LP to Wax Trax Records for release in the United States. and video clips accompanying live instruments, sequenced electronic instruments, and live DJing. In the United States, they opened for Nine Inch Nails on their debut national tour in 1990. In 1991, they performed at The Limelight in Manhattan and toured North America with Consolidated. While Dangers had, in the past, flirted with jazz instrumentation and sampling on a handful of Meat Beat Manifesto tracks, At the Center was a marked variation of the expected MBM sound and was more of a one off experiment than a whole new direction for the band. The album has been well received by many critics, with one reviewer calling it "one of the best albums of the year in any genre." An EP of outtakes, live tracks and a remix titled Off Centre was released shortly after. From 2005 through 2006, MBM launched a worldwide tour, their first since 1999, making use of video sampling technology that allowed the band to trigger video clips in real time, on two large screens positioned stage front, while the band performed either side stage or behind the screens, out of the audience's view; instead, live video footage of the band performing was displayed onscreen alongside the pre assembled clips. Many of the video clips used were the sources of samples previously used in various MBM tracks, such as footage of Elektro the Robot and clips from films such as Head and Dark Star. Dangers and crew performed a wide variety of hits and fan favorites from the entire back catalog, though relatively little of the new jazz fusion material from At the Center was played. In 2006, Meat Beat Manifesto's "Suicide" was released on the Underworld: Evolution soundtrack and is the only MBM track to date to prominently feature a guitar. In May 2007 Dangers released a double CD titled Archive Things 1982 88 / Purged. The first disc contained many early Meat Beat Manifesto experimentations, including demos of what would later become seminal MBM tracks such as "I Got the Fear". The second disc was an instrumental version of the Perennial Divide album, Purge.

MBM's ninth studio album, Autoimmune, was released on 7 April 2008 in Europe via Planet Mu Records and on 8 April 2008 in the US and Canada via Metropolis Records., with each territory's issue featuring a different track listing. The album featured the first vocals by Dangers himself since 1998's Actual Sounds + Voices, as well as collaborations with DJ Z Trip, MC Azeem, and Kenneth James Gibson. The album has been described as a return to an older, harder MBM sound and as a dubstep album, though Dangers has stated that he prefers not to fall into any specific genre or category with his work. The lead single, "Guns And Lovers" was released as a digital single via iTunes on 18 March 2008, while the track "Lonely Soldier" was released as a single via bleep. com. Meat Beat Manifesto once more toured to support the new album with the same stage setup as the 2005–2006 tour. Meat Beat Manifesto released Answers Come in Dreams in late 2010, once more via Metropolis Records in the US and via Hydrogen Dukebox in the UK. Answers Come in Dreams continued to reference dubstep as had its predecessor Autoimmune, but overall was a darker, denser album, at times descending into beatless ambient noise passages reminiscent of the experimental second disc of 1996's Subliminal Sandwich.

After the release of Answers Come in Dreams, Meat Beat Manifesto entered a period of limited activity lasting several years. Between 2011 and 2016, a small handful of EPs were released, and MBM only performed live sporadically. They appeared at the Cold Waves V festival in Chicago in 2016, the first live Meat Beat Manifesto show in five years. The following September they performed at Cold Waves LA. In January 2018, Meat Beat Manifesto released their eleventh studio album Impossible Star on the label Flexidisc. First single "We Are Surrounded" was premiered online by Igloo Magazine on 24 October 2017. The album has been called a "proverbial return to form" after the dalliances with dubstep on Autoimmune and Answers Come in Dreams. MBM also contributed an original track to the Cold Waves VII benefit compilation later that year, and a limited U. S. tour took place in the fall. Opaque Couché, Meat Beat Manifesto's twelfth album, was released on 10 May 2019 via Flexidisc. The track "Pin Drop" was released as a video single on YouTube on 6 March, with "No Design" following on 1 April. Considered a companion album to Impossible Star, Opaque Couché was named after "the world's ugliest color". MBM debuted a brand new song and video and contributed a pre recorded performance set to the Cold Waves 2020 "Lost Weekend"; the entire festival was streamed on Twitch due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic in the United States. The new song also appeared on the corresponding Cold Waves 2020 compilation.

Meat Beat Manifesto have released a number of albums and singles, and participated in remixes and compilation albums.