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All Music Guide:
One of the most consistent industrial bands of the 1980s, even though they regularly pursued a more electronic variant of the sound that swept into vogue during the '90s, Front 242 were the premier exponent of European electronic body music. Initially, the group was just a duo when formed in October 1981 in Brussels; programmers Patrick Codenys and Dirk Bergen recorded "Principles" and released the single on New Dance Records. A year later, programmer Daniel Bressanutti (aka Daniel B. Prothese) and lead vocalist Jean-Luc de Meyer joined as well; dubbed Front 242 because of the name's universal meaning and united connotations, the quartet debuted in 1982 with the single "U-Men" and album Geography, recorded for Red Rhino Europe Records (RRE).
Not dissimilar to Depeche Mode and other synthesizer bands at the time, Front 242 began playing live later that year, adding percussionist Geoff Bellingham but later replacing him with an ex-roadie, Richard 23 (born Richard Jonckheere). (Dirk Bergen also left the working band, but stayed on to direct management.) The group's sound began to grow more aggressive with 1984's No Comment EP, still reminiscent of synth pop but with harder-hitting rhythms and added menace from de Meyer's vocals. By 1987, Front 242 had gained an American contract through Chicago's Wax Trax!, the home of a diverse group of mostly European aggressive synthesizer acts later lumped together as exponents of industrial rock. Wax Trax! reissued much of the group's recordings (including the rarities collection Back Catalogue) and released a new album, Official Version. The first Front 242 LP to coalesce as a consistent recording, the album contained several cold-wave club hits ("Masterhit," "Quite Unusual") and, for the time, excellent production values. Released in 1988, third LP Front by Front was undoubtedly the group's best yet, with more emphasis on song structure than loose mechanistic grooves. Besides the alternative club hits "Headhunter" and "Never Stop," the record was Front 242's most consistent.
By the end of the decade, Front 242 had become the first Wax Trax! artist to make the jump to a mainstream label; Epic Records picked up the band's contract, reissuing each past album with new artwork and bonus tracks. The single "Tragedy (For You)" became another alternative club hit, and picked up rotation on MTV as well. Though the following album, Tyranny (For You), couldn't touch Front by Front in terms of quality, it made great strides for the group in the minds of audiences -- by the time of its release in 1991, Front 242 was, with Ministry and Skinny Puppy, one of the most well-known industrial acts in music.
With nary a lineup change in the past ten years, however, Richard 23 finally left the group in 1993 after an American tour with the Lollapalooza festival (the trio replaced him with lyricists Jean-Marc Pauly and his brother Pierre). That same year Front 242 released two LPs, 06:21:03:11 Up Evil and 05:22:09:12 Off, the first closer to pop music than anything the group had recorded before, and the second more abrasive than previous recordings. In the wake of industrial music's unlikely mainstream success -- which pushed unrestrained angst and raging guitars in the vein of Nine Inch Nails -- the Front 242 LPs were not well received. Vocalist De Meyer left the group in 1995 to sing with various projects, including Cobalt 60 and Bio-Tek. Front 242 released a live LP (Live Code) and a remix album (Mut@ge.Mix@ge) but for the most part remained quiet while flocks of industrial bands invaded the mainstream charts during the mid- to late '90s. In 1997 the group again toured and issued the live album Re-Boot a year later. Pulse, a studio album of new material, was released in CD and DVD formats in 2003.
Wikipedia:
Front 242 is a Belgian electronic music group that came into prominence during the 1980s. They are known for being a pioneer of electronic body music, and as an influence on the electronic and industrial music genres.
History
Formation
When industrial music developed in England in the mid-1970s with Cabaret Voltaire and Throbbing Gristle, these groups used electronic instruments, percussion with found objects, and looped samples of "found" soundbites, elements later taken up by Front 242. These techniques can be seen as an extension of the use of electronic sources of sound as musical instruments and percussion with found objects by composer Edgard Varèse.
Front 242 was created in 1981 in Aarschot, near Brussels, Belgium, by Daniel Bressanutti and Dirk Bergen, who wanted to create music and graphic design using emerging electronic tools. The first single, "Principles", was released in 1981. The front part of the name comes from the idea of an organized popular uprising. Patrick Codenys and Jean-Luc De Meyer had separately formed a group called Under Viewer at around the same time, and the two duos joined together in 1982. Bressanutti, Codenys and De Meyer took turns on vocals at first, until they settled on De Meyer as the lead vocalist (early recordings with Bressanutti on vocals were subsequently released in 2004). De Meyer came to write most of the lyrics and Valerie Jane Steele also wrote several tracks including "Don't Crash". They decided not to use the regular waveform settings on their synthesizers, arguing that creating the waveform for each note was part of the creative process.
Their next single, "U-Men", was released in 1982, followed by the band's first album Geography that same year. In 1983, Dirk Bergen left the band to pursue graphic design, and Richard Jonckheere, referred to as Richard 23, joined as vocalist.
Rising popularity
Front 242 became a popular musical group in Belgium. Their next album, No Comment, released in 1984, was the first to introduce the term electronic body music in association with their sound. Front 242 signed with the Wax Trax! label in 1984, and started their first tour in the United States with Ministry. This tour led to the creation of Revolting Cocks by Richard 23, Luc Van Acker, Alain Jourgensen of Ministry and others.
In 1987, Front 242 signed with Wax Trax! Records in the U.S. and Red Rhino in Europe, and released Backcatalogue and Official Version.
In 1988, Front by Front was released, and in December of that same year, "Headhunter" (with a video by Anton Corbijn), became the band's first club hit, reaching #13 on the US Billboard Dance/Club Play Songs chart.
1990s
Tyranny (For You), released in 1991, became the band's highest charting album, reaching #95 on the Billboard 200. Tyranny (For You) was the first album they released under contract with a major corporate label, Sony/Epic, after the widespread popularity of Front by Front. Sony/Epic also acquired the rights to the band's back catalog from Wax Trax! and issued re-released versions of the albums with new cover art and bonus tracks taken from singles and EPs.
A broader public was exposed to Front 242's music in 1992 in the film Single White Female, starring Bridget Fonda and Jennifer Jason Leigh. In the film, obsessed roommate Leigh ties Fonda to a chair but leaves her with the television remote control. In order to attract attention, Fonda tunes in to a music video channel and turns up the volume. The video playing at the time is Front 242's "Rhythm Of Time", from the album Tyranny (For You). Also in 1992, the television commercials for the film K2 were set to the Front 242 song "Moldavia", from the same album.
In 1992, Bressanutti returned to combining graphic arts with music, taking his lithographs on tour to three U.S. galleries. Bressanutti also composed a solo half-hour atmospheric recording called Art and Strategy (or The Art Corporation) to play during viewings of the lithographs, and released it in a limited edition of 1,000 CDs.
Front 242's style shifted abruptly with each of their next two albums, released in rapid succession in 1993 on Epic's sub-label RRE (originally planned as a double-CD): 06:21:03:11 UP EVIL and 05:22:09:12 OFF (the numbers correspond to letters, spelling "FUCK UP EVIL" and "EVIL OFF"). The band describes the two albums as "based on the duality of good and evil." However, strains were emerging, with the band members apparently having different artistic views. Despite these tensions, they performed on the main stage of the 1993 Lollapalooza tour.
Neither of these albums had significant input from Richard 23, and 05:22:09:12 OFF only included their lead vocalist, Jean-Luc De Meyer, on a remixed track originally from Up Evil. On the other hand, a variety of new contributors were listed as members of Front 242 on these albums: Jean-Marc Pauly and Pierre Pauly (of the Belgian electronic group Parade Ground) on Up Evil, and 99 Kowalski and Eran Westwood on Off.
99 Kowalski is the stage name of Kristin Kowalski, making a tradition out of Richard 23's idea of number-as-name. Kowalski and Westwood were originally members of a New York City band called Spill who Bressanutti and Codenys had brought to Belgium to produce their debut album. After the recording sessions fell apart, they contributed to Front 242 on the Off release.
After the release of 06:21:03:11 Up Evil and 05:22:09:12 Off, there was no new material from Front 242 under any lineup. Instead, the band released a stream of live recordings and remixes. However, this period also saw a proliferation of side projects, an inordinate number of which involved De Meyer.
Earlier, Richard 23 played in the Revolting Cocks, and De Meyer had a side project doing vocals for Bigod 20 for their single, "The Bog" in 1990. In 1995, De Meyer met Marc Heal of Cubanate at a Front Line Assembly concert, and the two of them collaborated along with Ged Denton and Jonathan Sharp, to record as Cyber-Tec Project for the new (and short-lived) Cyber-Tec record label.
After the departure of Sharp and the demise of the Cyber-Tec label, the remaining group continued working under the name C-Tec. De Meyer also took over as vocalist for Birmingham 6 for their 1996 album Error of Judgment. 1996 also saw the debut album Elemental from Cobalt 60, which De Meyer formed with Dominique Lallement and Frederic Sebastien of Reims, France, members of Kriegbereit. This was the start of a number of releases from Cobalt 60, which also did the soundtrack for the video game Wing Commander V. Meanwhile, Richard 23 recorded with the groups Holy Gang, and later, LaTchak.
The four core members of Front 242 regrouped in 1998 to compose radically reworked versions of many of their songs, which they then performed on their first tour in five years, appropriately called the Re:Boot tour. They acknowledged the influence of The Prodigy and their Fat of the Land album in crafting the new, more techno style of Re:Boot.
The new tour material was the subject of Front 242's new recording contract in the U.S. with Metropolis Records. Front 242 also indicated at this time that they were recording new material. However, they had little activity after 1998, making occasional appearances in Europe and Mexico, while Codenys recorded under the name Gaiden with Steve Stoll in 2001.
2000s
2002 saw the beginning of a wave of new material from Bresanutti and Codenys, and then from Front 242. In August 2002 a DVD/CD two-disc set called Speed Tribe was released by Dance.com. The DVD was a collaboration with experimental documentary filmmakers Rod Chong and Sharon Matarazzo, who filmed the 2001 24 Hour Le Mans. In the video, the racecars, clouds, rain and spectators form an impressionistic visual backdrop for the music.
Several months later, the first release from Male or Female, also known as Morf, a new project for Bresanutti and Codenys along with vocalist Elko Blijweert. In 2002 and 2003, Morf released an album, an E.P., a double album, and a DVD/CD two-disc combo, on the Belgian record label Alfa Matrix, and went on tour through the U.S.
Then, 2002 and 2003 also saw the release of the new material from Front 242 in a decade: the E.P. Still and Raw and the album Pulse, released on XIIIBis Records in Europe and Metropolis in the U.S. These represented another iteration of Front 242's explicitly stated goal of reinventing itself. The style of the two new releases is more mellow than some of their past work, using more "glitchy" and "bleepy" sounds. As well, it uses the manipulated voice as a musical instrument. The new releases have a much more emotional style from De Meyer, which was presaged in his later recordings with C-Tec and particularly Cobalt 60 on its album Twelve.
Front 242 promised a new U.S. tour to perform new material from these releases. They have made occasional appearances in Latin America and Europe, even being rejoined by Dirk Bergen for a reunion concert in Aarschot (De Klinker club) in 2004 under the original lineup of Bresanutti, Bergen, Codenys and De Meyer. This performance was kept secret until two days before the show but when the scene magazine Side-Line and the band's label Alfa Matrix launched the news, tickets were quickly sold out.
The band has now also set itself to re-release its entire back catalogue both as a normal CD and as a limited edition consisting of a 2CD set holding previously unreleased material. For this the band is working together with the Belgian label Alfa Matrix that already took care of releasing the albums of the Front 242 side-project Male Or Female. The first re-release is their debut album Geography, this time newly remastered personally by Bresanutti to surprisingly powerful effect and including 3 extra tracks (two hidden ones) on the normal CD format.
Meanwhile their enthusiasm for side projects has continued, as Patrick Codenys started appearing with a new group called Red Sniper, Bresanutti started recording with a new group called Troissoeur, and Codenys and Richard 23 formed a quasi-DJ project called Coder23 which toured in late 2004 and early 2005 as the opening act for VNV Nation. Jean-Luc De Meyer contributed vocals on two studio tracks for the Glis album Nemesis in 2005. The lyrical content of the two songs ("The Irreparable" and "La Béatrice") were based on the poems of Charles Baudelaire.
Front 242 toured through twenty venues in North America in November 2005, their first tour as a full band since 2000. The band performed at the Roskilde Festival in 2006. The band's sold out two day performance at the Ancienne Belgique in Brussels has been recorded for a future release via Alfa Matrix.
In December 2006, Front 242 announced from their MySpace page that they were writing music for a video game called Cipher Complex and provided a link to a teaser trailer with a short sample of one of their scores.
In 2007 Jean-Luc Demeyer announced a new project: 32CRASH via the Alfa Matrix label. The band is preparing for an album release in October 2007 after the release of the EP Humanity.
In August 2008, Front 242 played live at the Infest Festival in Bradford, England.
In October 2008 Front 242 performed for the first time in Finland, at the Alternative Party 2008 media arts festival.
Moments
On June 1, 2008, the Alfa Matrix label announced that Front 242 would make an ultimate statement towards abusive audio compression by releasing the free two-track download, First Moment. By June 15 the same year, the tracks were made available for free on Alfa Matrix's site in medium and high bit-rate MP3s, WAV, FLAC, and M4A formats. Contrary to what fans and some media speculated, the two-track download was not new studio material. Instead, First Moments consisted of two previously unreleased live tracks, "U-Men" and "Im Rhythmus Bleiben", in rather stunning sound quality. It is rumored that over 20,000 people downloaded the tracks within hours of being made available. The label later confirmed that over 25,000 people downloaded the free tracks.
On June 4, 2008, Alfa Matrix announced the release of Moments... The album was a live recording encompassing the best of Front 242's compositions. The album was shipped in several formats including limited CD box sets, vinyl in different colors including 300-copy limited editions, and as a one-disc CD release.
