As the band have often said: “Where we are from it is always Halloween.” The film to accompany new Ladytron single “City of Angels” Is a choreographed musical thriller inspired by cult favorites Roeg and Argento, shot in the brutalist mansion of architect Paulo Mendes da Rocha. The band haunts the set that surrounds lead actress Bianca Comparato, the star of the Netflix science fiction drama 3%, who brings her supernatural acting skills to the forefront as she plays a photographer entranced and drawn in by a mysterious force.
Bianca comments, “I’m such a fan of Ladytron – I was lucky enough to be in the music video…the whole experience was a dream come true.”
“City of Angels” is the first single from Ladytron’s upcoming album, Time’s Arrow, which will be released on January 20 2023.
True Mathematics” was filmed at the 2002 Light & Magic tour shows in London and Manchester – and forgotten for the past two decades. They are each creatively edited with abstract light effects to celebrate the band’s past as well as keeping them contemporary and fresh. It is, indeed, light and magic: we see the rare blossoming of a band that eluded today’s ubiquitous cellphone concert footage, and with the monochromatic approach, the video for “True Mathematics” presents them almost like an old clip from the classic NYC new wave show TV Party.
“True Mathematics” is one of several songs on the album that vocalist Mira Aroyo sang in her native Bulgarian, as she explains:
“We first started experimenting with Bulgarian on Commodore Rock off 604, because the language has such a different rhythm. We hadn’t planned on writing more songs in Bulgarian, but the instrumental for True Maths screamed out for something hard and staccato – kind of like The Normal’s Warm Leatherette. We pushed the sound of the language to be as percussive and metallic as possible, beyond the way it naturally is. Live, the song took on a life of its own – it became even harder, almost heavy metal. Also not many bands open their sets with a song in a foreign language, so it felt like a statement of intent. “
On utilizing the footage, Daniel Hunt adds:
“We realised was there was little record of how the band was in the flesh at that moment, late 2002. Nobody had phones with cameras, let alone video. It was Ladytron at its most punk. There was a still a lot of confusion about what we were. Still is. Going through the archives we found these tapes that our UK label had shot in the first days of the tour, and had been long forgotten about. They capture a unique group when it was just hitting its stride, at the very beginning of a world tour for Light & Magic that would last a whole year.”
Ladytron‘s excellent second album, Light & Magic, turns 20 on September 17, and to celebrate they’ve been releasing new videos for songs off the album. We’ve got the premiere of “Black Plastic,” which features video and photos of the band in Los Angeles, working on the album and having some fun, too. There’s also some informative “making of” text to go along with it. “‘Black Plastic’ is a little time capsule of our 2002 recording sessions in Hollywood for Light & Magic,” says Ladytron’s Daniel Hunt. “We are kids. We look ready to take on the world. Hazy, nostalgic, and how we remember it.” Here’s a little more recollection from Dan:
“Making our second album in Los Angeles seemed counterintuitive at the time, at least amongst our peers, but it made perfect sense for us: our label Emperor Norton was there, and there was this group of wildly talented people in LA who wanted to work with us on it. While we were recording what was a very different sounding record to what else was around, this huge electro thing kicked off, and we were positioned as if leaders of it. It was a strange moment, as we were cut off in this creative bubble, and not communicating with the press, yet they were talking like we were the future of rock and roll. Perhaps we were. When going through the archives for the anniversary of Light & Magic we found photos and video we had literally never seen. CD-Rs, a mountain of cuttings, MiniDV, VHS and Betacam tapes, and years’ worth of tour footage. All this documentation that our label sent us and we didn’t even look at. We wanted to use the found material to convey not just how it looked and sounded, but how that moment felt. It is just one of many untold stories.”
Further unseen material to be released until the anniversary of the Album’s release on September 17
August 2022 – Liverpool UK group Ladytron are celebrating the 20th anniversary of what many consider their definitive album, 2002’s Light&Magic (Nettwerk).
To accompany it, the group have assembled unseen archive material from the time, including a teaser reel, a short film of them recording the album in Los Angeles, and an unreleased music video for the title track, shot on slide film, which had lay incomplete for two decades. Further unseen material will follow until the anniversary of the album’s release on September 17.
“When we released Light&Magic it was expected that the title track would be a later single, and would therefore need a video clip of its own. But we were on tour and didn’t know how it would be done. We had all this beautiful slide film shot and envisaged animating it in some way, like a 1970s science fiction title sequence – Sapphire and Steel or something like that. We disappeared on the road, plans changed, and ideas were forgotten. Twenty years later here it is.”
