Book II : Chapter XLIX - Soft Riot "No." Record Release Party

the Book Of Very Very Bad Things Podzine - a 3:33 A.M. Studios Production

JJD of Soft Riot and I hunker down for a trans-Atlantic, conversational Odyssey in 2 parts. The Canadian ex-pat began his career in the Punk sphere, playing in indie darling band Radio Berlin. after leaving for the UK, he began to stir up new anarchy with the New Wave and Industrial informed sounds of Soft Riot. This is part one of a 2 part journey into the world of JJD.

https://softriot.com

Soft Riot, consisting solely of JJD, was a founding member of Canadian first-wave post-punk revivalists Radio Berlin (1998-2005) and A Luna Red (Gold Standard Labs, 1999-2003), with Soft Riot surfacing as a solo act in the early 2010s in London, England. Soft Riot has toured Europe numerous times, from Rennes, France all the way east to Moscow, Russia with selected performances in North America. and stages have been shared with peers such as Keluar, Linea Aspera, She Past Away, Section 25, Selofan, Drab Majesty, Lebanon Hanover, Noi Kabátand Robert Görl of Deutsch Amerikanische Freundschaft. Soft Riot is currently based out of Glasgow, Scotland — a city that JJD has now called home since 2016.

With origins from the mid-nineties in the vibrant art-punk/hardcore dominating the West Coast American/Canadian underground at the time (the first EP, No Longer Stranger, is the name of a track by hardcore band Universal Order of Armageddon), JJD followed a trajectory through to the revival of synth-based post-punk music just over a decade or so ago, which spawned a number of highly successful Canadian artists out of that scene.

Soft Riot’s sound is an amalgamation of JJD’s personal experience with music, containing elements of synthesiser-based film soundtracks, romantic italo-style flourishes, throbbing arpeggiations and angular, psychedelic synth-pop all tied together with an underlying tension. It is a science-fiction heavy soundscape that narrates the listener through today’s fractured, excessive landscape with hints of black humour.

The latest album, entitled No., is to be Soft Riot’s tenth full length album to be released on 11 August 2023. To be preceded by two extended digital singles from that album (A Spade Is Played Again and Linked Between Two Minds), this new album of nine tracks brings forward expanded production techniques, experiments with vocal styles and tones, and stylistic shifts mark a progression of Soft Riot’s sound. The result is snarkier, urgent and more playful, with a focus on pure synthpop, new wave, art-punk, proto-EBM as well as grittier synth-punk and post-punk tones.

No. is a joint release between Possession Records (UK) and Wave Tension Records (NL).

In the years 2021 and 2022 there were a number of one-off tracks released on compilations, as well as a digital single entitled Windows To The Wild (Versions), including new versions of that track by Soft Riot himself as well as friends Qual (William of Lebanon Hanover) and Glasgow’s Ubre Blanca. Also released was the compilation album Second Lives in June 2021, which contained re-vamped versions of tracks from older albums, previously-released and hard-to-find covers of songs by Bruce Cockburn and Nomeansno, as well as unreleased matter from album sessions.

When Push Comes To Shove, the natural predecessor to the latest album No., was released in late 2019 and resonated with references from all corners of the synthpop’s origins. Nonetheless, When Push Comes To Shove manages to retain its own individual voice, melding and reinterpreting its antecedents with a personal twist and an impressive demonstration of synth-craft and programming.

Around the same time Soft Riot released a counter-part album, Chin Up, written at the same time as When Push Comes To Shove and released in April 2020. This album features a notably different sound: more “ambient synth pop” for lack of a better description, and more for late night listening rather than live performance.

2018’s The Outsider In The Mirrors was the first release on the Possession Records: a somewhat new label imprint co-founded by JJD. It is a consolidation of all the stylistic elements Soft Riothas pursued in the past, fusing his maximalist sonic palette with a sharp-edged sense of post-punk anxiety, unique synth interplay and brooding, claustrophobic new-wave dread. The music is tense, synthetic and precise, embodying and exploring issues of isolation, urban alienation and social paranoia. Yet despite these dark thematic preoccupations the Soft Riot sound is not without its warmth and humour.

When playing live JJD mans no less than three synthesizers, a microphone and an on-stage mixer all performed with the energy of a full band.

Image by by JJD Works.

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