electronic • gothic • industrial
The Plague is yet again #1 this week in the German Alternative Chart! This makes 6 weeks in a row that we have been in the Top 3 position of the chart. Big thanks to all the fans, DJs, and journalists who have helped make this possible.
After hitting a high at #3 in the DAC (German Alternative Charts) last week, this week Old Boys Network has slipped down to #10. That’s 4 weeks in the Singles chart so far, which is pretty good going!
Available now to purchase on Bandcamp:
https://thecassandracomplex.bandcamp.com/album/the-plague
…or stream via Spotify.
The new single from The Cassandra Complex is the highest new entry in the German Alternative Charts this week – going straight in at #6!
If you haven’t already got it, go to our Bandcamp page right now and fix that!
https://thecassandracomplex.bandcamp.com/
WAS (Endless Love Edition) is a completely redone version of the classic War Against Sleep album from The Cassandra Complex. Now available to subscribers to our Bandcamp Fan Club ONLY! And it sounds FANTASTIC 🙂
Sign up today and get it FREE – and you will get more free stuff every single month!
https://thecassandracomplex.bandcamp.com/album/was-endless-love-edition
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.
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!
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.
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.”
Rodney explains what Wonderworld is about…
WonderWorld is a song about the English Midlands town of Corby. For most of the 20th century it was a classic British industrial town, built around a thriving steelworks, until Conservative Party government policies shut it down, leaving the town with no money and a huge unemployment problem. Then some corporate businessmen came along and promised to rebuild the town based around a gigantic theme park called WonderWorld. They received millions of pounds of funding, got given an enormous plot of land, and told everyone it was going to be the British version of Disneyland.
There were due to be 13 “worlds” including Story Village for children, Computer Park which allowed visitors to see the latest technology and Safety Place which was a bizarrely-themed world featuring safe play.
There was Energy World, which was described as an Omnimax Cinema and Air Space, which gave people the chance to experience the latest space technology.
There was also due to be 15,000 car parking spaces, 120 acres of housing and 2,000 hotel rooms. On the same site was supposed to be a 10,000-seat sports stadium and a 4,200-seat concert hall with a 30,000 capacity open-air theatre.
https://www.northantstelegraph.co.uk/lifestyle/nostalgia/retro-end-of-the-world-for-corby-theme-park-1-5937497
Of course we realised that this was a gigantic con, but the local council didn’t, and they kept the project going until 1990, even though no work was ever done – 4 years after we released this song! The only thing they ever built was a big sign in front of a huge empty field, and a (fake) hut for the workmen who never came. They spent years telling everyone what an incredible new exciting thing this was going to be, but instead just stole what little money the working people had left and built nothing at all.
We thought this was a perfect metaphor for Britain under the Thatcher government, and so the song Wonderworld came about.
Ironically our song is now the only thing left of the entire project for people to remember.
