Prefab Sprout “I Trawl the Megahertz” tastes like the battery-acid-bitter, corrosive, chemical-electric, milligram-heavy crystals of the methamphetamine MDMA

Prefab Sprout
“I Trawl the Megahertz”
(EMI)

I recently realized that I associate certain records with taste experiences. Why? It’s a mystery to me. This highly contingent, bizarrely arbitrary, almost synesthetic pairing occurs regularly, but not constantly. “I Trawl the Megahertz,” one of the later masterpieces by the band Prefab Sprout—released in 2003 as the first solo work by Prefab Sprout mastermind Paddy McAloon and later re-released under the band name—is no exception to this gustatory association: The LP tastes like the battery-acid-bitter, caustic, chemical-electric, milligram-heavy crystals of the methamphetamine MDMA, quickly washed down with drinks by the majority of users at parties because they can’t stand the taste. Others dissolve the emeralds in a glass of gin and tonic. Isn’t such synesthesia an expression of aversion to “I Trawl the Megahertz”?

The opposite is true: In the short audio pieces, which are sometimes musical, sometimes compositional, and sometimes assembled as a collage of texts – with words that are contemplative in the truest sense of the word, with gentle instrumentals – McAloon speaks of sensations and feelings, namely those that have passed, that will never return, that seem lost forever outside of memory, remain untraditional, only in the process of the phone-in show (more on that in a moment) are they revived before their possible final disappearance, , which reminds me of the very similar “high chasing,” the “come-down,” the inherent melancholy of the emotion and empathy drug MDMA: It will never be like it was back then / the first time! It will never be like last night again! I will never be happy again! Everything is gone! “I’m 49,” the moving seventh track on the LP, features a sample from one of these phone-in shows, which has already been briefly mentioned. The format “Someone calls in to a radio/TV show and talks to someone who has turned empathy into expertise,” popularized in this country by WDR talk show host Domian, continues to enjoy far greater popularity in the United Kingdom to this day.

In Prefab Sprout’s song, a middle-aged man confesses, “I’m 49, divorced…” – it’s the shortest novel in history. These three or four words contain a wealth of missed opportunities and missteps, former feelings of happiness, infatuations, and a struggle with newfound loneliness. The confession is initiated by the show’s host: “What’s wrong?” What’s actually wrong with being 49 and divorced?

2003, the year the album was released, was a time of upheaval, the effects of which continue to occupy us today – Employ: After the terrorist attacks of September 11 (and the subsequent fear of further attacks, which would claim thousands of lives over the course of the decade in various places such as Madrid and London, but also Islamabad and Mosul), a strange form of public sphere emerged, which would later be perfected in what came to be known as social media. Here, becoming a subject is closely linked to public confessions: Who are you? Where are you from? What do you do? What is your relationship status? etc. In this total public sphere, which interacts with the intimacy of the originally private confession, emotions are repeatedly produced and identities created for both senders and receivers. For in a then still young media representation between confession and therapy – sure, Jerry Springer, Oprah, here Ilona Christen, Hans Meiser, and Vera Int-Veen were already cultivating the field in the 1990s; the first recordings for “I Trawl the Megahertz” were also made in 1999 – an elastic, multi-coded, optimally uncertain and permeable social being became an increasingly fixed, hardened individual in a sphere that simultaneously impoverishes the achievements of pop and postmodernism: The real experience, the event, especially the one that is not commercialized, disappears from everyday life.

McAloon himself is also threatened with loss on several occasions: “I Trawl the Megahertz” is just one early highlight in a tale of woe based on McAloon’s detached retina. The Prefab frontman suffers loss of vision and is in danger of losing his eyesight forever. Instead of seeing, he has to listen for quite a while. And so he turns on the radio and doesn’t turn it off for a long time: discussion panels, folksy pastoral care, and war news, especially from Afghanistan, suddenly become the acoustic backdrop of his life. (Just as an aside: today, McAloon suffers from Ménière’s syndrome, which has been causing him tinnitus, dizziness, and hearing loss for years. Another loss.) He wants us to share in this: the material presented is not only available as samples, but also as text material. The 22-minute title track and opener of the album is a collage of numerous anecdotes, confessions, and memories “from another time” that McAloon collected and assembled over weeks. What hundreds of women and men have confided to radio DJs becomes a stream of memory here: the fleeting moment in the hotel, the flirtation, a wrong word… pieced together into an inevitably incomplete but consistent “feature film” of a life.

Performed by a charming but distant voice, bordering on coldness. It is difficult to deny a certain similarity to Chantal Akerman’s “Jeanne Dielman.” A retrospective that aims to give meaning to life in retrospect—at a point where so much seems lost: love, time, life. This sentiment, sometimes expressed in shades of gray, is brought to life by swirling compositions. The string and wind sections of the Mr. McFall’s Chamber chamber orchestra seem inspired by unusual material from the world of video game soundtracks, especially Japanese role-playing games, informed by the compositional techniques of MIDI technology. The fact that McAloon writes the pieces on an ATARI fits in perfectly with this picture. While the chamber orchestra’s recording is not lacking in warmth, the pure sheet music appears “crisp” in its own way. An effect that still resonates today: OberKAPUTie Thomas Venker is convinced that Charli XCX has come out as a fan of the album – which makes perfect sense, as a proximity (or perhaps even a pioneering spirit) to the high dynamics and more machine-like compositions of hyperpop is easy to discern.

As I write, I can almost feel the breath of the aforementioned OberKAPUTie on the back of my neck: “Where’s the personal touch?” I have to admit, the intro to the text promises wild stories of after-hours parties with “I Trawl the Megahertz” playing in the background; the unspoken promise is perhaps that you are about to be thrown into a world of excess and intoxication, of mental fog and tripping. I don’t have such a story to offer. Prefab Sprout’s record came into my life long after I had given up my nocturnal experiments. It was after a breakdown, after a crisis, after months of not being able to write or work. “What’s wrong?” – “I’m 30, depressed…” Where before night had indeed been turned into day and day into night, there was now a gray-on-gray interior scene that took place almost exclusively within my own four walls. (The exception here was the meeting with the band Die Heiterkeit for kaput.) Forced into a reality that no longer played out between serotonin, dopamine, and endorphin peaks, I was at least spared the scene that I had played out myself as a thought experiment: The after-hour, the widespread cultural technique of making the often cold “return to home port” after a night of partying more bearable, becomes in this imagination the site of a deeply sobering moment.

While “I Trawl the Megahertz” opens a door to a world in which talking to each other and sharing personal stories becomes a valuable asset with therapeutic value, in the scene I have in mind, everyone is increasingly closing themselves off. The realization of MDMA inventor Alexander Shulgin that moments of “emotional breakthrough” could also occur outside of therapy falls on deaf ears here. Instead, I see what all too often happens at after-hours parties: brash dudes grab the laptop, play songs by Misfits member Danzig, pull some paste out of some pocket, scrape the remains together and demand – no, force – everyone to snort it. After-hours, in my experience from numerous visits, are simply not a place for precise detail observation and opulent chamber orchestrations. So “I Trawl the Megahertz” becomes the soundtrack to a completely different story, in which I come across the record because the YouTube algorithm is kind to me, I relearn how to escape from my inability to act, write for kaput, then for Stadtrevue and taz, then … the rest is history, or something for a loosely worded CV, but not for here. Amusing: total publicity and confession can also haunt you in a series on “25 records from a quarter of a century.” As if Paddy McAloon had predicted it all before—at the beginning of this time after the end of history.