COMMAND V:

What is Command V? Simply put, Command V = the new industrial dance music for our digital age, created by a stellar New York collective. It is a sonic quicksilver reflection of our fast-moving present, a bright / dark glimpse at the future. To listen to Command V's eponymous debut is to be allowed in on an exquisite secret - the sparkling inner sound of singer/songwriter Cynthia Sley (Bush Tetras) and composer/instrumentalist Pat Irwin (Raybeats, Eight-Eyed Spy, B-52s).

Film-maker Rachel Dengiz (Coffee and Cigarettes, currently working with Steve Buscemi's Olive Productions) features on vocals and visuals, while session drummer Zack Alford (credits include: David Bowie, Bruce Springsteen, George Clinton, B-52s) and bassist Sara Lee (Gang of Four, B-52s, Todd Rundgren) join for their live shows, making for a compelling group sound and atmosphere. Introspective and outrospective in equal parts, at times reminiscent of a kind of deconstructed Art of Noise, Portishead or early Moloko, Command V are bringing us something new, experimental and deeply personal.

Three decades ago, both the Bush Tetras and The Raybeats emerged from the influential and musically incestuous No Wave scene during a time of recession, paranoia and broken dreams. New York was abandoned, 'past tense', according to Sley, but they and their contemporaries, including James Chance and the Contortions and Lydia Lunch, broke through the joylessness, made the most of the rock-bottom rents, rehearsed, jammed, mused and played. Thanks to this surge of wildly creative electricity, New York started crackling back to life.

Personal circumstances may have changed but it seems no coincidence that, in this current period of isolation, over-stimulation and economic confusion, Sley is writing again. Sley and Irwin met again at one of Lydia Lunch's readings, a meeting that led Sley to share her new songwriting ideas with Irwin. By the summer of 2008, Command V was born.

As we learn from the Command V blog posts, the intensity of New York itself, and the strong, strange personalities that populate the city, have inevitably inspired tracks on the album (including 'I Laugh Instead', and 'Turn The Key').

"New York is a very alive city," says Sley. "You don't know what you're going to run into. There was a guy I kept seeing, I don't know if he was homeless but he was definitely out there. He would say these bizarre things and it was as if they were just for me! You can interpret whatever you want from the experiences you have on the street, that's what I like about it.

"(New York) has a semblance of being a big thriving city but it's crumbling," Sley continues. "It's different but there's still a struggle, it's difficult to make money, there is a desperate hustle going on. It goes to that thing where you're just making music because you want to make music. I took off ten years from writing, but I just felt this overwhelming urge to do it, but I had to do it in a totally different way to how I did with the Bush Tetras.

"We were really rebellious, writing about personal politics, 'Too Many Creeps', that was about feeling outside the norm, kind of saying, 'Fuck you! We're outside the norm!' But now it's more personal."

So why Command V, computer speak for 'paste'? (This name also appears to be proving as enigmatic as the music, with some interpreting it as having a military slant, others assuming the 'V' is the Roman numeral for '5'. But no, it's definitely 'paste'. As in 'copy and'.)

"I was just starting to learn how to copy and paste," explains Sley. "You can take a section from the song and repeat it, it's so easy to manipulate little pieces around in Garageband and ProTools. It's revolutionised everything, so: copy and paste!"

Pat Irwin: "I feel like the sound is a direct result of the sound Cynthia got in her apartment. I can imagine her home alone, very late at night, and turning on the computer and singing a melody to nothing more than a beat. There's a very eerie and solitary quality to the basic tracks.

"My working situation is very solitary as well and that definitely informs the sound. When I first got the vocal tracks from Cynthia I was working on a cartoon with Andre 3000 called 'Class of 3000'. It was a lot of work with brutal deadlines. But sometimes, usually very late at night or early in the morning, I would take one of Cynthia's tracks and start to build it up. My studio at the time was in a very desolate part of New York City, very solitary. There wouldn't be a soul on the streets after I would finish up working on them."

This home-grown, nocturnal technique is part of what gives Command V's music its innate sense of twilit mystery, and the delights of Garageband have ensured Command V can record nascent song ideas, words and melodies simply and quickly, as if they were diary entries. Many of the vocals you hear on Command V are in fact the raw, original vocals that were recorded straight into Sley's computer, taking the post-punk 'DIY' ethic to new levels.

"I'll walk in the street and I get an idea in my head and then I get home and sing it into Garageband. The technology freed me up to be able to write what was on my mind, and I just kind of invent things on the keyboard that's built into the computer."

"The digital society that we have," concludes Sley. "I find it liberating in some ways, and in others we become a slave. It's double-edged."

Irwin says working with Sley's ideas is "always exciting, like opening a present." To the listener, an immersion in the sounds and concepts of Command V can be like opening the present, deciphering our reality in this epoch of relentless data and virtual worlds, peeling back the pasted-on layers, digging out its soul.

---

COMMAND V: INFO

MUSH Records
www.mushrecords.com

MUSH Records Command V Profile
www.mushrecords.com/release/MH281.php

THE GLYPH MEDIA GROUP, INC (Web Site Design)
www.glyphmedia.com
www.vintagesilvertones.com