Doubting all the time. Fearing all the time. It's one of those records that sears you the first time you hear it. For me it was on one of those Ron Hardy mixes, still somehow live on the 'good' internet of 2008. The epitaph of a doomed relationship declaimed in withering couplets over a vaguely sinister Moroder/new beat synth workout. My wife pointed out the uncanny resemblance to a bit of Andrew Lloyd Webber. I always felt the KLF took a bit of 'inspiration' from Anne as well.

Anne Clark is a spoken-word artist who began her career working in record shops. She had an early association with the punk movement booking acts--Paul Weller, Linton Kwesi Johnson, The Durutti Column--for the Warehouse Theatre in Croydon. Her debut album The Sitting Room finds Anne's poetry swirling amidst heady atmospherics--effects-drenched piano, organ, strings--and no qualms about brandishing her literary influences: Dante Gabriel Rossetti's "Beata Beatrix" is the cover art. On Changing Places she collaborated with David Harrow and Vini Reilly--the alchemy of Vini's reverbed guitar and Anne is something to behold.

Joined Up Writing continued the collaboration with David Harrow, which brings us to the record at hand. Proto-techno with an edge, industrial avant-la-lettre, sitting (un)-easily alongside "Los Niños Del Parque". And sax. I don't care what some people say, the sax is brilliant.

Anyway, Josh Cheon's essential Dark Entries are pressing up "Our Darkness" on wax-- three mixes of the title track plus two classic cuts from Changing Places: "Sleeper In Metropolis", and "Poem for a Nuclear Romance" (timely! -ed.). The 12" remix is what we all know and love, a stonking darkwave classic, with the dub a nice percussive echoey take. Razormaid were a team of incredible and prolific remixers in San Francisco active in the 80s and Josh continues to do amazing work bringing this scene to life. Their take on "Our Darkness tightens things, the synth and drum interplay that gives it a nice dirty vibe. "Sleeper in Metropolis" is a synth symphony, just top filmic dystopia vibes--it could be Blade Runner or Metropolis "Poem for a Nuclear Romance" an elegiac closer : What will it matter then / When the sky's not blue but blazing red / The fact that I simply love you.

"Our Darkness" is available (from 27-March) direct from Dark Entries HERE and on Bandcamp HERE

Anne is still making music and doing all kinds of cool things--check her Bandcamp HERE