XTC in the Press: 1990

• “The Arcane Science of Sequencing” (excerpt), Tower Records Pulse!, November 1990
• New releases, Record Collector, June 1990
• "XTC: Season Cyclers", Contrast, Spring 1990
• Suzanne Vega & XTC, Rolling Stone, March 22, 1990

Tower Records' Pulse!
November 1990
by Harold DeMuir

The Arcane Science of Sequencing (excerpt)

Another instance where sequencing played a pivotal role in an album's creation was XTC's Skylarking. For that project, producer [Todd] Rundgren chose and sequenced the material before entering the studio, constructing a song cycle out of the 30-some-odd demos the band had sent him.

“From the batch of demos we started with, we could have come up with a completely different record,” Rundgren says. “But the agenda for the album, as I saw it, was that at that point in time the band needed to seduce people into listening to them, rather than constantly sparring with the listener. I tried to find some unifying thread to determine what songs would be appropriate for the record, and we came up with the idea of a cyclic thing — birth and death, the turning of the wheel. When we went in to record, we knew where everything went and how everything fit together; we actually laid out the timing information in a way that would accommodate the segues between songs.”

Record Collector
Issue No. 130, June 1990

XTC collectors can look forward to a couple of interesting CDs this summer, both boasting archive recordings. "Explode Together (The Dub Experiments 1978-81" will include material from Andy Partridge's solo album, plus tracks from the "Go Plus" e.p., originally issued free with the band's "Go 2" album. A second disc is likely to concentrate on general rarities, like the "Three Wise Men" 45, Colin Moulding solo material and hard-to-get 'b' sides.

[Thanks to Dougie Robb]

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