“When I think of you/Everything goes crazy”
REISSUES | COMPS | BOXSETS | LOST RECORDINGS
AR KANE
AR Kive ROCKET GIRL
DREAM POP, they called it. Given AR Kane’s Alex Ayuli once worked for advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi, it’s no surprise that he and collaborator Rudy Tambala invented their own genre before critics could stick their oar in. It was a canny move, but more importantly, it was accurate: the music of AR Kane was made for dreamers, by dreamers, and its languor and longing made it particularly bewitching listening; their music is often smeared and blurry, happily lost in its own indefinable pleasures. “We wanted dream pop,” Tambala says, “that feeling of a dream where the rules are different. Dream logic.”
The ARKane story is one of experimentation and enterprise, of unexpected developments, of willing the future to accord with one’s bidding. It’s also one of smart moves and headstrong independence, bordering at times on intransigence: Ayuli and Tambala were full of cocksure youthful energy, something you can hear across the material compiled in this boxset. Collecting three of their six releases across 1988 and 1989 – the “Up Home!” EP, debut album , and double-album – the music contained in is swarming with great ideas, wild juxtapositions and brilliant pop moments, where AR Kane’s songs overflow with melody. The key to everything here, though, and the reason why it all works so well, is the near-telepathic communication developed, over two decades,
