The Cassandra Complex release new album Death & Sex

SAN FRANCISCO, Feb 9, 2024 COP International Records are proud to announce the release of Death & Sex, the latest album from legendary post-punk group The Cassandra Complex.

40 years ago Rodney Orpheus, Paul Dillon, and Andy Booth got together in a basement in Leeds, England with a collection of cheap second-hand guitar pedals, synthesisers, and drum machines, and created a post-punk revolution in sound with songs like Moscow Idaho, One Millionth Happy Customer, and Nightfall, which filled alternative dancefloors and topped Indie charts around the world.

In 1993 they released the album Sex & Death to a limited audience. Now, 30 years later, the band have re-recorded this classic record from scratch as Death & Sex and it will finally achieve a worldwide release for the first time as part of their 40 year anniversary celebrations.

Death & Sex features original founders of the band Rodney Orpheus (vocals, synths, drum machines) and Andy Booth (guitar), with long time additional members Chris Haskett (Henry Rollins Band, David Bowie) on guitar and Mera Roberts (Faith and the Muse, Black Tape for a Blue Girl) on cello, plus new member Brent Heinze (Probe 7) on keyboards.

The album, along with many other classic songs from the entire 40 year back catalog of The Cassandra Complex, will be featured on the forthcoming CX40 world tour beginning in the UK in March, and taking in shows in Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, Czech Republic, Austria, Latin America, and the USA throughout 2024.

Rodney Orpheus explains: “When we first wrote these songs we just didn’t have the tools we needed to fully realise them the way we wanted. Now 30 years later we can finally make them sound the way they always sounded inside our heads.”

Christian Petke, CEO of COP International Records says, “When the band told me that they would start to re-record their back catalog, I was 100% on board. It can be a dicey proposition to “fix” an old record, but I knew that they had the experience and the skill to pull this off. It was a real pleasure to see these classic gems come to new life, and the fans of The Cassandra Complex will love this fresh take.” 

Track Listing

  1. Mouth of Heaven
  2. Voices
  3. Kneel to the Boss
  4. Give Me What I Need
  5. Come Out
  6. Satisfy Me
  7. Realm of the Senseless

The album will be released on March 8, 2024 on CD, Bandcamp download, and all streaming services, with cover art by the legendary Greg Rolfes. 

In tandem with this release, COP International will also be releasing a newly remastered version of the previous album by The Cassandra Complex, The Plague, which spent 4 weeks at #1 in the German Alternative Charts on original release.

Festival of Darkness – Live in Hanover 1990

The live Festival of Darkness album, first broadcast on German radio in 1990, has now been released as a high quality download via our Bandcamp site. This is currently only available to fan club members, so if you want to get it, sign up now! This album will not be available via other streaming services, it’s strictly a fan club exclusive.

For a limited time when you sign up you will also get the Hello America album for free, as well as have all of our forthcoming releases automatically sent to you. This will include Rodney’s solo album Places Beginning with N which will be released next month, and The Cassandra Complex All the Things live album the month after that.

You get all of that for 5 bucks a month, and you will also get the satisfaction of knowing you are supporting us in our work – and you might get some more special goodies as well.

Big thanks to legendary German alternative DJ Ecki Steig for making this release possible.

https://thecassandracomplex.bandcamp.com/fan-club

High Quality downloads now available on Bandcamp!

We have now set up a Bandcamp page so you can download our remastered records in the absolute best quality possible. Also by buying our records via Bandcamp we earn much more than we do via streaming services.

If you are a real Cassandra Complex “superfan” we have something very special for you: we have also just set up a “backstage” area on Bandcamp that is only accessible to subscribers. All you have to do to get backstage access is to subscribe to our Bandcamp page for 5 bucks a month. If you do that you will immediately get a free download of one of our records, plus free access to all new releases, and special tracks that won’t be available to the general public! And you’ll get some other special stuff that we aren’t announcing yet 😉

Subscribing to our Backstage area also really helps us – so if you love The Cassandra Complex and want to have more music from us, please subscribe now!

https://thecassandracomplex.bandcamp.com/

Sun God album now available in remastered edition

The legendary solo album by The Cassandra Complex singer, recorded in 1995 in Hamburg, Germany, and also featuring Patricia Nigiani (Project Pitchfork, Aurora Sutra) and Marcus Giltjes (Pink Turns Blue, Girls Under Glass).

This is a completely remastered version of this magical album based on voudou themes, and is a must-listen for all fans of The Cassandra Complex!

Available now on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon, and all other major digital streaming and download sites.

Full credits and lyrics can be found on the Sun God page on Rodney’s website.

The Cassandra Complex release Wetware collection

Remastered versions of classic studio recordings from 2000 get first streaming releases

20 years ago (has it really been that long?) influential goth-electro-industrial-cyberpunk band The Cassandra Complex released Wetware. Now it is finally being made available again in fully remastered and resequenced versions, spread over three releases.

The songs were originally written in 1999 in Los Angeles and Hamburg, and were seen by the band as the culmination of the work they had been doing in the previous 15 years of near-constant recording and touring.

“From the moment I started The Cassandra Complex we had basically never stopped working on music – when we weren’t touring we were in our studio in Hamburg doing production and remix work for other European alternative bands. I literally lived in our studio.” says the band’s lead singer and producer Rodney Orpheus. “We had gotten fairly burnt out by that stage which left us wondering where to go next.” 

With the band lineup down to just Rodney and guitarist Volker Zacharias, Rodney was offered a job with music software company Steinberg in Los Angeles, and things looked bleak for the band’s future.

“Getting out to LA forced me to look at our past from a new perspective. I started listening to our older records in order to rediscover what had made them so good in the first place. I had also been doing some work with Kraftwerk, which got me involved with their interest in the Man Machine interface. I realised that was something also intrinsic to what we were doing with The Cassandra Complex – the synergy between very rigorous and computerised rhythms and human improvisation and emotion. That got me thinking about computer systems, where you have Hardware, which is the chips in the machine; Software, which is the information running on it; and Wetware, which is the biological operator controlling and directing the whole thing i.e. us. That became the working basis and title for what we wanted to do next.”

Working on the record meant frequent trips back to Hamburg where Rodney and Volker would feverishly work on finishing songs in the limited time they had together. The final mix was then completed back in LA.

For this new version, not only has the recording been fully remastered, it’s now being presented in three linked releases. 

First up was the 3 track Twice As Good EP on November 22, featuring legendary electronic acts Front 242 and Apoptygma Berzerk, who were now both called in to do remixes.

“I’ve long been an admirer of Stephan (Groth) of Apop and his ability to combine rock and dance elements in a song,” says Rodney “I am also a huge fan of the guys from F242. This seemed like the perfect opportunity to work with them.”

December saw the release of the other songs from Wetware split into two parts: Hardware and Software.

Rodney explains: “When we were originally working on Wetware we ended up writing so many great songs that we couldn’t fit them all into one 70 minute CD, so we had to leave some songs off. When it came time to remaster it for streaming I realised that I could now add in the missing stuff, and split the whole thing into two albums instead. So now Hardware contains the harder, faster, more in-your-face songs, while Software contains the longer, slower, more psychedelic pieces. Listening to each one individually is a much more coherent experience – it’s the two halves that make up the totality of The Cassandra Complex.”