Hello, and welcome to:

Stevie's very Little Add N to (x) Shrine*

Okey Dokey, Click Here (1.35Mb) for the Video for Metal Fingers in My Body, I've removed the Zip version, if you want to, down load once then watch many off your hard drive then Right click on the link and select "save target as". Warning it's rude, well not utter filth by internet standards admittedly, but a tad risqúé.

It's also available on the CD EP of Revenge of The Black Regent, but it's still here for non-digital types.

Sorry Web Fans, but I've removed the MP3 Files of the otherwise unavailable "A National Anthem For A Country Which Has Five Minutes To Exist" from the Gig freeby CD, due to copyright reasons etc... It may appear on the Offical site some time. If I get the go ahead I'll put it back up, but no counting chickens out there.

All Files remain Copyright of the respective owners and Publishers.

While you're here, may I suggest you Visit my Novak site, It's lovery. Any Complaints about Copyright etc. Contact me here and I'll remove it. Anyone after more Add N to (x) info, the best place to go is the Official Web site I don't expect to add much to this site...

ADD N TO (X) released a new EP 'Revenge Of The Black Regent' on August 9.
From the band's last album 'Avant Hard', the enhanced-CD also includes
the video of 'Metal Fingers In My Body'

The track listing for the EP:

Revenge of the Black Regent
FYUZ - (Some kind of Remix)
The March of Pure Mathematical Evil that ends + results in War
Old lady Ealing does man experiments

The 7" comes with an cover of Black Sabbath's Iron Man

Luv and Hugs, Stevie

Add N to (x) Disography

Revenge of the Black Regent

The Black Regent: ltd. UK 12" b/w , fancy sleeve

King Wasp: ltd. 12" only release with 3-D sleeve & glasses, on Satallite

On The Wires Of Our Nerves: Double LP & 12 trk CD album, on Satallite

Split 12" with Fridge. Add N to (x) track Demon Seed

Little Black Rocks In The Sun: 1,000 only UK 10" in elaborate packaging, CD single missing the B-sides.

Avant Hard (Double LP & CD, CD has hidden track, apparently. Mute)

Revenge of the Black Regent: 12", CDsingle and 7"

Also:

Track on the Thurston Moore-Root remix project

Track on some Artist-Music group collaboration album, who's name escapes me

C-Pij/SEVEN (Barry solo project): UK 500 only Singles Club 7

Reviews

Revenge of The Black Regent

Page 483 of Channel 4 Teletext (UK) review

Cementing their march around the summer festivals, this single marks their
entrance as a band of mighty pretention. It might also do your head in, but
as hideous rackets, go it's a cut above the norm.

2 little red squares out 5

The NME Review:

Ja! You like our black sex music? No joy! Real drums! Come on, boy,
die to this! Die now! Real synth! Mmmm. Analogue, yes. No!

OldladyEalingdoesman-experiment! Oh yes, you fool! Feel my
intelligence! Whips. And cream. Ha. Ha. Ha. You die now, maybe?
Themarchofpure mathematicalevilthatendsandresults inWAR. Metal
fingers in my body? I lied, I lied! I have metal fingers in your
body. Ha. Ha. Ha. Do you like my silly hat?

You die now, maybe?

Metal Fingers In my Body

The review from music365.com:

ADD N TO X
Metal Fingers In My Body (Mute)
Blazing nuevo punk from the London-based avant-garde electro guitarists. It¹s five minutes of pleasingly intense distorted electro-funk-rock noise that the band themselves describe as a "battle between us and the machines". On this evidence my money¹s on the machines. Nasty little title as well. ****

Chunky Records news letter, review of Metal fingers:

"ADD N to (x) Metal fingers in my body (mute ltd 12"/CD ***** (five out of
five) Bloody marvellous return from the ever entertaing x' ers. A humungous
bass driven Suicide meets glam rock bounce around anthem that can't fail to
make you smile. The accompanying video is a animated pornographic robot orgy
film (hence the title). Dirty Bastards!"

Avant Hard Released april 19 1999 on Mute

Avant Hard was the NME, err sorry, Carling Premier Album of the Month:, (Note gratuitous use the words 'Art C*ll*g*') Here's the short review from the best of the month section:

"Whether you put it down to the strange flash of light in the Art College
refectory one night or just plain old mysterious inspiration, Add N to (X)
are fact turning into a national treasure. The sound of robots with trouble
on their mind and a worryingly lustful glint in their eye, 'Avant Hard' was
the glitch in the microchip labelled 'groove'. A grand malfunction"

Here's the actual NME Review:

The inevitable quandary: is it art? Or is it, in the cleverest possible way, arse? Ever since Marcel Duchamp exhibited a urinal in a Paris gallery in 1917 and called it 'Fountain', the debate has raged. And rage it most certainly does as we swap disciplines and apply similarly skewed logic to music. In particular, to the music of Add N To (X), who on this, their third album, have either made the best speaker-shudderingly rock album you'll hear this year, or have merely moved blithely on to Phase Three of their bid to become a permanent fixture in the vaults of the Tate Gallery's forthcoming Museum Of Modern Art.

We'll plump for the former, largely because beneath the London trio's eccentric extracurricular activities - they've worked with Turner Prize winner Chris Ofili and are currently writing a novel on the Internet - there lies a band buoyed by such terrific imagination, self-belief and musical vision that if they want to make a conceptual record about man's physical and metaphysical relationship with technology, then they will. And the experience, on the whole, will be like wiring an orchestra into a faulty electrical circuit. Brave and exhilarating, yes, but an act which would leave most of us unable to operate heavy machinery for some time.

Though not, of course, Barry Smith, Ann Shenton and Steve Claydon, whose command of bulky vintage synthesisers has reached new levels of proficiency. Unlike previous adventures in analogue, they now control the energy which surges through their machines (and, no doubt, their veins) with masterful aplomb and new-found grace. It's the fearsome force that demolishes skyscrapers on 'Robot New York' and charges the deviant sex toys brandished throughout 'Metal Fingers In My Body'. It is, in a vigorously vivid sense, the power of love.

The climax occurs during the Wagnerian majesty of the album's centrepiece, 'Revenge Of The Black Regent', a heady procession of orchestral madness and military rhythm which pits former Orbital and Tricky collaborator Alison Goldfrapp's psycho-operatics against the might of genetically modified technology. From then on, 'Avant Hard' enjoys a blissful reverie, as distant horses literally gallop across 'Ann's Eveready Equestrian' while the sublime 'Machine Is Bored With Love' proves that romance, even at this late stage, was always on the agenda.

Meanwhile, we're off to the gallery. There's this installation - three people in weird clothes - it's causing quite a scene. Some say it's priceless.

9/10 Piers Martin

From the Telegraph Saturday 1st May, and yes they do use the typical 'Lazy Journalist scum' tag line, and that first line isn't really true is it!

"Add N to (X) Avant Hard (Mute)

ADD N To (X) cram more peculiar noises into the first 30 seconds of their
new album than most people can deal with in a lifetime. It's a journey
through sonic debris, culled from an elephant's graveyard of electronic
contraption that the band has collected from skips and junk shops. While the
ancient synths, remaindered keyboards and hot wired washing machines blurt,
babble and squeak, a bass player and drummer thrash out Sixties rock rhythm
tracks.
Strangely, ex-art students Ann Shenton, Barry Smith and Steve Clayton resent
the "art school band" tag they've been given, claiming that 10 years on the
dole has had more impact on their music. What really makes Add N to (X)
stand apart, though is their limitless good humour, which is remarkable
given their frequent equipment malfunctions.
Of course they're not an art school band, and David Bowie never recorded The
Laughing Gnome.
Richard Wolfson

This is from Spin Magazine:

There is and always will be the oft lamented poseur--the aural snake-oil
salesmen who hopes that his bag of gimmicks, the right look, and a heaping
helping of bullshit is all it'll take to pull the proverbial wool over your
eyes (and ears). This axiom remains eternal irrespective of genre--be it
rockabilly, jazz, Norwegian death metal, hip-hop, or in this case, electronic
music. With their second release, Avant Hard, Ann Shenton, Baryr Claydon, and
Steve Claydon, the English trio known as Add N to (X), have begun to tread
that thin line between fact and fraud a bit too closely. Last year's
critically lauded debut, On the Wires of Our Nerves, sounds in retrospect
like nothing more than three punk rock kids discovering a time capsule loaded
with vintage synthesizers. In other words all attitude, no aptitude. Avant
Hard doesn't fair much better.
The album's opener, "Barry 7's Contraption," sounds like a German oom-pa band
lost on an interplanetary mission. Grounded by an infinitely repeating
bass-line, the track bleeps and blips its way over four minutes sans
drumbeat, before setting down into the inappropriately titled "Skills." Songs
such as "Robot New York," "Metal Fingers in My Body," and "Buckminster
Fuller" all follow the same tired formula of looped bass-line, dance-cum-rock
drumbeat, and aimless analogue doodling. They're all annoyingly steeped in a
suffocating cloud of kitsch and irony whose end results are scatter shot and
misaligned at best.There are a few moments in which the band is focused
enough to actually kick out the jams: Track such as "FYUZ" and the sprawling,
symphonic "Revenge of the Black Regent" (with trap-bashing courtesy of High
Llama Rob Allum) retains an imagination and depth conspicuously absent from
the rest of the album.Last year's hype machine was in part fueled by their
incredibly visual live show with strapped on synths and retro-futuristic
aesthetic, as well as the hollow trans-Atlantic p.r. machine winds that
constantly blow in from the isle of exaggerated music claims. This time out
Add N to (X) have managed to wring a few new hums, drones, pops, and whizzes
out of their machines, but the avant part of Avant still sounds less
improvised than just plain made up on the spot.

Here's that infamous Peter Shapiro Of Wire Magazine review of Avant Hard:

'With a title like Avant Hard and a cover reminiscent of the schlocky Japanese sci-fi flick that inspired the Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers, you just know this is going to be a disappointment.  Last time around, Add N To (X) hotwired their obsolete synthesisers with a sensibility that was as clever and cutting as it was ironic.  On Avant Hard they let the kitsch that inevitably comes with the territory get the better of them. 'There are plenty of great noises and nice moments, but there's nothing that approximates the astroturf blues mockery "King Wasp" or the visceral power of "Black Regent" from last year's On The Wires Of Our Nerves.  Everything seems a little too forced and they sound too much like the ex-art school students they are: "Skills" has Plan 9 From Outer Space glissandi and a belching Speak and Spell machine riding Ray McVay beats and
John Barry guitar riffs; "Steve's Going To Teach Himself Who's Boss" starts out in the jungle, the mighty jungle, and then marches down the never-ending hallway in The Shining.  Elsewhere, they dedicate a self-destructing electro punk number to the inventor of the geodesic dome and blend George Martin/Beatles strings with annoying synth bombast ("Revenge Of The Black Regent", which, by the way, ends in exactly the same way as Black Sabbath's "After Forever").

'By the end of Avant Hard, however, the group gather momentum.  The single, "Metal Fingers In My Body", generates a pretty fearsome noise/groove and is easily the best track on the album.  Meanwhile, "Oh Yeah, Oh No" imagines Stereolab jamming with Walter/Wendy Carlos circa A Clockwork Orange, and "Machine Is Bored With Love" sounds like the closing song to an Italian sex farce from the 70s, with lead vocals courtesy of Peter Frampton's talkbox before taking a break and returning as Martin Denny in zero gravity.'

The first (and best) review by ASCOT (Ascot@addntox.com) The Brains behind the OFFICIAL add N to (x) website.

BARRY 7's CONTRAPTION

Like a disgruntled and overly friendly circus owner, Barry 7 plots the
unthickening dissolution of the mathematical tree forest by unleashing
his belgian transistor maintenance scheme. His mind can be heard fizzing
and popping as his outline is lost forever.

ROBOT NEW YORK
Bloomingdales, lacy's, and the turn-of-the-century brass garibaldi
biscuit factory are raided by simplistic meccano contraptions in the
disguise of high class robots. they pull off an assault of flattering
intestinal fortitude, egged on by the magnificent pulsing of an
electrical zither.

SKILLS

KNOWING that his machine is a blustering harbinger of destruction, a tiny
silver clamped machine flexes it's most intricate radiophonic muscles,
and announces at timely intervals his overpoweringly obvious trait, that
of 'skills'.

STEVE'S GOING TO SHOW HIMSELF WHO'S BOSS

Wailing, mewling and prowling up the stairs into his post-op 2 diemsional
bedroom, the minute surgeon steve screams for his parents in a rage the
likes of which everyone has seen at least once or twice. DADDY DADDY
MUMMY MUMMY DADDY he mimes,as the hysterical laughter of the sopwith
jukebox prepares him for his punishing bout of self duplication.

FYUZ

An oversexed pam ayres is gang banged by hordes of cloth eared
synthesized upper class little chefs whilst listening to a suicide gig.

BUCKMINSTER FULLER

The monkey shotgun blasting pipes of pan spew out their haunting looping
rhythm, whilst steve constructs a perfect geodesic dome of vocodic
luxury, reaching into the air like an awesome pile of haystacks in a
needle's head, accompanied by the velvety gilded rhythms of the massed
marching drum machines.

REVENGE OF THE BLACK REGENT

melancholy and vaguely upset by the irrepressable din of his wife f*cking
the servants deep in the basement, the black regent dons his leather
coated chocolate earmuffs in a fit of hatred and together with his
lieutenant, pens a tune of startingly elaborate content, pausing a while
to allow the strict percussion of his staid and whimsical mind to
percolate, only for them to be crushed by the realization that there is
no past or future. Meanwhile his wife sings a lilting ballad as she
reaches crescendos of illogical overpowering pride.

METAL FINGERS IN MY BODY

Descending from the sky, just above the plastic countryside, an oversexed
robot has to be reset by it's unbelievably badly drawn mistress, before
the arrival of george back home. A disdainful yes sir at best, george
asks about his wife's activities, to which she can openly reply "metal
fingers in my body".

ANN's EVEREADY EQUESTRIAN

Like an unsteady shockwave rider, RIPPING THROUGH THE MILE LOW SOUND
CENTROBE, ANN MOUNTS her flame horse generator in a fit of serious
unabashed apprehension and joyful regret. This is the perfect
demonstration of the inevitable conclusion, that the future that will
never happen is only geater invention in response to greater extremes.
the wild eyed moogrogues cannot handle this disgustingly plain fact and
tear at their velvet masks in ecstatic denial, as the the eveready
equestrian heads towards the analogue past at breakneck speed.

OH YEAH, OH NO

Oh f*ck.oh my god, oh well.the brass band of broken moths strike up a
free jazz accompaniment to ascots bloody minded indecision-making.

MACHINE IS BORED WITH LOVE

Ennio morricone and serge gainsbourg start fighting uncontrollably in a
tiny french cafe and the whistling fury of their punching reverberates
enough to attract wasps....alone in the corner of this hexagonal garlic
crusher of a bar, the lovelorn robot synthesises a phenominal audio
effect which crash lands him into a flailing mass of wah wah rainbow
tears.

The cd ends with the terrifying childrens ITV crackpot inventor, barry 7,
deep in his laboratory, melding screaming binatone transistor radios into
unholy mutant harps. a systematic and ultimately doomed practice.

Simon Williams, NME, live review 30/1/99

Then we have ADD N TO (X): aplendidly testing at the most intimate of times, tonight they are squawking, squealing menaces to polite society. The sound and vision of Space 1999 gone mad, they manufacture an extremely passable version of an Iraqi torture tactic by dint of their hellbound frequencies and buttock-trembling vibes. '"Jesus!" winces a man by the bar."This could make my bottom explode." Add N to (X) have two drummmer. Ergo, greast drummings.

Article About Add N to (x) from the Guardian:

THE SONIC LAXATIVE HAS ARRIVED

Old-tech fanatics Add N to (X) have scoured rubbish heaps for eighties
synthesisers. The result Baroque'n'roll. By LANCE HART

Add N to (X) are Kraftwerk turned inside out. while the old Krautrockers
made their pact with the future through rhymically sleek synthetic sounds.
Add N to (X) have stripped away the chromatic melancholy of Kraftwerk's
machine. What's revealed is something fleshy and baroque.
The imminent release of  their second album has generated critical heat.
Scottish band Mogwai have called Add N to (X) "art-school pretentious
numpties", While Wire magazine saw the new album, Avant Hard as conformation
of the fact they are ex-art-school students. In the music world,
ex-art-school students are the new drink-drivers.
Band member Barry Smith looks up from under his mop of hair: "Yeah, we were
all from arts school, but we did this 10-year apprenticeship on the dole.
And that's more important to us than going to art college."
Smith and his cohorts Ann Shelton and Steve Clayldon then spend a quarter of
an hour listing an impressive working-class CV: "we keep encountering this
vision of an art school within the British music industry as an élitist,
toffee-nosed thing. People want to maintain an idea of British music as this
working-class pub thing."
The art-school slur dispelled, they explain that it was their artistic
education on the dole that fostered the antique oddity of their analogue
sound. Shelton, Smith and Claydon found old analogue machines in skips and
bins and hidden away under beds in friends' flats. The synthesiser, which
for a brief moment at the turn of the 80s was synonymous with modernity, has
been pensioned off. As Smith says :"for ten years you created This strange
museum for yourself. We didn't have a job, didn't have a vocation didn't
have a direction. So when you don't have that you sort of decorate your
internal world with all these objects you find in a synthesiser."
The band's eccentrically intimate relationship with their machine is played
out on record. The synthesisers take on a life of their own. On the last
Album, tracks such as the throbbing, pulsing tinnitus of Sound of
Accelerating Concrete, the trebly funk of Black Regent and the microwave
blues of King Wasp, invoke a world of living machines.
The oddness has won Add N to (X) fans in  the most unlikely places. Their
new single, Metal Fingers In my Body, was used to soundtrack a football
trailer for Grandstand. But for all the belching and burping of the
synthesises, the sound is generous and often humorous. And they manage to
carry this off without anthropomorphising machines in a Disneyesque fashion.
This is because, smith argues, the synthesiser operates to its own psychic
tune: "this box is a tank like thing with lots of knobs on, a funny keyboard
that is constantly repeating. It's autistic. An autistic machine. It offers
you infinite possibilities but absolutely no control."
Their use of the synthesiser bears some comparison to rock, where the guitar
has been abused in order to achieve aberrant sound s, and this partly why
the band's sound has been described as "baroque'n'roll". When they play
live, with two drummers, the pitch emitted by the synthesisers verges on a
sonic laxative. And if the machines are, as the band argue, often
dysfunctional, it's because Add N To (X) distort the traditional function of
a memory band of reproduced sounds and rhythms. The machine is
part-therapist, part-persecutor. Shelton tries to explain the love-hate
relationship. "The synthesisers provide you with something. Some machines we
have are very unpredictable and might not work sometime, so we have a
complete relationship with them. They provide a service. Some of them are
good friends and some are just pains in the arse."

Here's an interview with Ann Shelton from the NME. Thanks for Simian Spice for his help in deciphering some of the missing letters.

ON THE COUCH WITH ANN FROM ADD N TO (X)

Which song describes you best?

"'Mongoloid' by Devo. It's self-explanatory. Everyone says I look
like one in the morning."

What is heaven?

"Having sex with an octopus. Can you imagine?! And also they've just
discovered that octopuses have a sense of humour, that they like to
play. They might be quite, erm, multi-dextrous. I could have eight
orgasms!"

What is hell?

"Having sex with plankton. They wouldn't be able to do much."

What is your earliest memory?

"When I was five I had my sister in her vest and knickers and I put
pieces of cat food on different parts of her body. Then I got my
grandmother's cat, which used to dribble a lot, and made it eat the
cat food from her top lip and other places."

What's your greatest fear?

"Learning how to play."

Who is your all-time hero?

"Rommel, because he tried to kill Hitler, didn't he? But Hitler had
him killed in the end." (Er...James Brown got the sack for this, didn't he? - Ed)

What's the worst trouble you've been in?

"The time I worked in a mental home in Camberwell and I was
approached by this huge guy brandishing a butter knife who wanted to
escape, so I had to let him out and all the alarms went off. I had
no back-up so what was I to do?"

Who was the first love of your life?

"Derek Griffiths, that bloke from Playschool. He was there all the
time."

What is your greatest talent?

"Manipulating drunk people."

Upon whom would you most like to exact revenge? Why? And how?

"Father Christmas, for all the crap he's brought me every year. I'd
put 'Return To Sender' on everything."

What is your most treasured possession?

"My guns. They're little pigeon-shooting gunss, really. I like to
polish them now and again."

What have you most regretted doing while drunk?

"Je ne regrette rien! Heh heh heh!"

What can you cook?

"Pigeon. I shot one at the studio last summer, and because they're
quite a strong meat. I just plucked it, filleted it and cooked it in
a bit of red wine. It was good."

What is the best piece of advice you've received?

"Back at the mental home, this woman asked me to come into her room
to look at her drawings but when I got in she held me down on the
floor and kept saying, 'Keep farting! Keep farting!' She wanted to
get off with me but kept repeating that instead."

Can you read music?

"Pardon?"

If you were invisible for a day, what would you do?

"Play darts, because I really like playing darts but I'm embarrassed
to let anyone know."

If you had three wishes, what would they be?

"Die laughing, die drinking and dye clothing."

And as you've got down here, have a couple of pictures taken from NME and Melody Maker live reviews

Thanks to anyone who contributed anything, even if they didn't know it at the time!

*and Blatant Copyright Infringment Centre.