#keith leblanc

[musickickztoo]

GOODBYE 2024

Just some of the many musicians we lost in 2024

[ruiraiox]

UNSOUND Magazine/Cassette/Zine

Unsound was a cult San Francisco-based fanzine (often called a “cassette zine” due to its heavy focus on the 1980s cassette underground) pub

Unsound (running roughly 1983–1987) was a cult fanzine based in San Francisco, edited by William Davenport and Tamara F. It is widely considered one of the most important chroniclers of the "cassette underground" and the global industrial/noise movement.

The Focus: It bridged the gap between post-punk, industrial, and avant-garde performance art. It documented a time when music was traded via mail-order tapes and independent networks.

The Aesthetic: Known for its striking DIY graphic design, it featured high-contrast photography and dense layouts that influenced modern streetwear brands like Enfants Riches Déprimés

The Subjects: It featured deep dives into artists like Coil, Einstürzende Neubauten, Psychic TV, Swans, and Sonic Youth

Adrian Sherwood’s work with On-U Sound was a frequent point of interest for the Unsound circle. During the mid-80s, Sherwood was the primary link between the Jamaican dub tradition and the European industrial scene that Unsound covered.

Industrial-Dub Fusion: Sherwood produced and remixed many of the "Unsound-era" staples, including Cabaret Voltaire, The Fall, and Einstürzende Neubauten.

The Tackhead Era: During the peak of Unsound’s publication, Sherwood was developing the Tackhead sound (with Doug Wimbish and Keith LeBlanc), which was the exact kind of aggressive, politically-charged, and technologically experimental music the magazine championed.

Shared Distribution: Both the magazine and Sherwood's label relied on the same "pre-internet" independent distribution networks (like Rough Trade or Dutch East India) to reach listeners who wanted something more challenging than Top 40.

Unsound Magazine (1980s): The SF-based zine mentioned above.

Unsound Festival (2003–Present): The world-renowned electronic/experimental festival based in Kraków, Poland. Adrian Sherwood has performed at various iterations of this festival (and similar modern events), continuing his legacy in the "unsound" world of experimental bass.

The On-U Sound Philosophy

Founded in 1979, Sherwood's On-U Sound label became a melting pot for post-punk, industrial, reggae, and funk. His style is characterized by:

Extreme Reverb & Echo: Pushing spatial effects to their breaking point.

Heavyweight Bass: A physical, tectonic low-end.

Sonic Collages: Integrating found sounds, political snippets, and unexpected distorted textures.

🤝 Notable Collaborations

Sherwood is famous for his "open-door" policy, working with a wildly diverse roster of legends:

Lee "Scratch" Perry: Produced many of Perry’s later masterpieces, including Rainford and Heavy Rain.

The Slits / Vivien Goldman: Bridging the gap between the London punk scene and roots reggae.

Nine Inch Nails / Depeche Mode: Provided high-profile remixes that introduced his dub sensibilities to industrial and electronic audiences.

African Head Charge: A long-running project blending ritual percussion with psychedelic dub.

Creation Rebel The cornerstone On-U reggae band; deep, spacey instrumentals.

New Age Steppers

An avant-garde collective featuring members of The Pop Group and The Slits.

Tackhead A powerhouse collaboration with Doug Wimbish and Keith LeBlanc, fusing hip-hop beats with industrial metal.

Sherwood & PinchA modern bridge between old-school dub and the UK bass/dubstep scene.

"I don't want to make records that sound like everyone else's. I want to make records that sound like they could only have come from one place." — Adrian Sherwood

Style and Vibe

Reviewers describe it as strange, creative, and hilariously or endearingly messy — a “hoot” that captured the raw, oppositional spirit of the mid-80s tape underground. It wasn’t slick or commercial; Davenport reportedly stopped it partly because he refused to make it more mainstream (e.g., chasing bigger bands for covers) amid financial strain. The final issue (Vol. 3, No. 2) even came with a limited-edition C90 compilation cassette featuring tracks from Controlled Bleeding, Psyclones, Hunting Lodge, Negativland, Monochrome Bleu, Problemist, and others.

It stood alongside publications like Re/Search’s Industrial Culture Handbook but carved its own niche through enthusiastic cassette coverage and global underground networking.

Unsound is remembered as essential reading for anyone into 80s industrial, noise, and cassette culture. It helped document and connect a fragmented global scene before the internet, influencing later zines and preserving early coverage of now-seminal acts. Fans and historians praise its role in the “tape underground” alongside titles like Factsheet Five, Option, or Sound Choice. Davenport has revisited the era with projects like Unsound Redux (short films/episodes on cassette culture, zines, and noise scenes).

If you’re into noise, industrial, or 80s DIY cassette trading, it’s a time capsule worth diving into — chaotic, opinionated, and full of the kind of raw enthusiasm that defined that pre-digital underground. PDFs of issues like #1, #3, and #4 are particularly easy to find and give a direct feel for the aesthetic.

Unsound was a cult San Francisco-based fanzine (often called a “cassette zine” due to its heavy focus on the 1980s cassette underground) published from 1983 to about 1987, running for roughly 10 issues across three volumes.

Edited and published primarily by William Davenport (sometimes with co-editors like Chris Rankin of the band Problemist, and later Tamara F./L.), it emerged from the Bay Area’s experimental music scene. Davenport was a musician in the noise/experimental band Problemist and later became known for documentary filmmaking on autism and other work.

The zine centered on the first wave of industrial music, while branching into a wide range of experimental, post-no wave, noise, avant-garde, and “oppositional” sounds and art. It covered cassette culture, mail art, performance, and related underground scenes at a time when distribution was limited to tape trading, small labels, and college radio.

Key elements included:

•  Artist interviews — with figures and bands like Nick Cave (Birthday Party), Adrian Sherwood (On-U Sound), Thurston Moore (Sonic Youth), Swans, Test Dept., Psychic TV, Coil, Einstürzende Neubauten, Hunting Lodge, Negativland, Whitehouse, and many more obscure or regional acts.

Cassette and record reviews — a standout feature, often treating deep-underground noise tapes (even ultra-limited editions-of-5) alongside whatever else came in the mail, with a generally open-minded, magnanimous tone.

•  Detailed discographies — extremely useful in the pre-internet era of rampant EPs, flexis, and tape-swapping.

•  Eclectic additional pieces — short rants or observations about nothing in particular, overviews of local scenes (e.g., LA experimental/electronic underground), radio art, cassette culture history, and more.

Issues mixed serious coverage with chaotic, self-indulgent energy: blurry B&W photos of performances and wild scenes, collage elements, and a “crazed but readable” layout that threw multiple font types and sizes together without much concern for economizing page space. It felt insular and self-driven, deliberately stepping back from the punk-to-hardcore shift to champion weirder sounds.

[ruinedholograms]

Down In It (1989)

[postpunkindustrial]

Keith LeBlanc – Stranger Than Fiction

Keith LeBlanc has just died. He has had a largely unseen but incredibly influential trajectory through music.

Starting out as a member of of the Sugar Hill Records backing band he was a part of the birth of Hip hop. And later on he would be a member of Mark Stewart and the Maffia.

But what he was most known for was his involvement with the band Tack>>Head. Although not super popular in the US they were incredibly influential. Nine Inch Nails sampled Tack>>Head heavily on Pretty Hate Machine (and subesquently Le Blanc and fellow Tack>>Head member Adrian Sherwood remixed Down In It on the single)

Check out his stuff.

You can download Stranger Than Fiction his Electronic, Industrial Electro and Dub infused project from my Google Drive HERE

[24-24-1-482]

Billboard magazine July 22, 1989.

I’ll have to research if the promotional 12” was available in August.

[frgmnthtr]

Tack>>Head (1990) 

[simonwest369]

Mixcloud

[alyallow]

Album of the Year: Lucifer on the Moon (Adrian Sherwood Reconstruction) by Spoon.