Mick Karn: Titles (1982)

It’s hard for me to separate Mick’s past from the work you’ll hear in Titles. Still impossibly underrated and unaccounted for — compared to the actual influence he put in motion — there is just something truly unique found in the late Mick Karn’s bass technique, musicality, and ideas. Titles, his first solo work after leaving Japan, further cemented just how far forward whatever he was doing wasn’t meant to jive with whatever would go on then.

Sinewy, slippery, and quite seductive, it was his completely self-taught and exploratory bass tone that he would try to further along here, with some ideas we (the huge lot of us) had heard in Japan’s final album: Tin Drum. Imagine that album without Mick’s bass lines and you’d miss a whole lot of essential, special essence he brought to the mix. Now, where Japan took obvious influence from the glam of Roxy Music and the eastern exotica of the Orient, it always appeared Mick had his own muse to draw from. I’d be foolish not to call it Silk Road music, but it’s Titles truly left-field mix of Asian, Indian, Middle Eastern, and Mediterranean music with contemporary, electronic experimental sound that too this day makes it truly hard to classify.

A Cypriot by birth, from a young age, Mick always, simply, owned his difference, living as an immigrant in England. A young man he taught himself to play everything from mouth organ, violin, all the way to bassoon. When he found he couldn’t translate bassoon to more youthful pleasures, he picked up a bass and applied his violin technique to it — simply by chucking out all its frets. Not one to care how others performed, he purposefully avoided learning the “proper” way to play and which “proper” bassists to copy. By the time of Japan’s final album, together with David Sylvian, they had managed to steer a group of similar rudderless friends into territories that no one would have even thought to carve a path to. Whether it was personal feelings of betrayal from David’s affair with his long-time girlfriend or simply a need to finally get out all his ideas without a group filter, in 1982, everyone finally got an idea of what Mick had been working on.

First of all, the list of instruments played by Mick himself on Titles is as long as it is varied. Saxophone, keyboards, ocarina, violin, bassoon, clarinet, flute, and drum machines, joined the tangle of old and new, helping Mick create both the hypnotic and quite slinky first half of the album. Aided at times by others members of Japan (sans David Sylvian) there are moments like “Lost Affections In A Room” that feel like ghosts of their most productive period. It surprises me to no end that Steve Jansen and Richard Barbieri would three years later reconvene to touch on a more minimal, ethereal version of what they began here. Untethered from the dictates of David or Japan, they proved perfect foils to ring out their fastly approaching, more worldly, musical influences of the rest of their brethren. Backwards played bass that works as a moody partner due to some gorgeous European folk-leaning tone zone that Richard builds to, could only have worked outside of Japan.

“Tribal Dawn” sets it off, with fourth world music that sounds like the offspring of Soon Over Babaluma and My Life In the Bush of Ghosts. Up front and center, Mick Karn’s bass approximates the percussive sound of talking drums, while Steve helps weave something that sounds like a conga being swallowed by a tape machine, all the while distant ocarinas, tape loops, and sax fade in and out. “Passion In Moisture” goes even more tribal, with what sounds like hypnotic, vocal mantras assuming the roles of harmony to some truly displaced bass funk that sounds like its tripping through the Amazon, zig-zagging in fevered pace. Speed this track up and you’ve got some wicked minimal techno. Leave it as it is and you’ve got another unclassifiable bit of head-nodding, booty music that seemingly contracts and expands at will via Mick’s mercurial bass lines. For me, I search for memories/touchstones and fall on Eno’s “The Belldog” to relate some high praise, via the only way I know: a reminder of the powerful, musical technique of sonic contraction. The first side of the LP winds down on some plaintive musical sketches that recall Jon Hassell’s more peaceful ideas from Dream Theory In Malaya (Fourth World Volume Two), with floating synths orbiting Mick’s almost vocaloid bass work.

A mirror image “Heroes”, Titles collects all of Mick’s proper attempts at composing vocal tracks and actual Pop songs on the flip side. Suffering a bit, due to a weird mix that purposely lowers Mick’s vocals, this side only fails a bit because of his lack of conviction. However, the highlights, of which there are many, redeem this album to move it closer to being essential listening. “Trust Me” triggers all sorts of right emotions by sticking Mick in a context where his bass technique should have worked perfectly: R&B music. Sultry, slightly uneasy, and a whole lot of fun, “Trust Me” swaggers like a long, lost Prince track. Slightly misunderstood at the time, Mick’s cover of Roberto Carlos’ “La Distancia” took something that could have been overwrought and maudlin, and transformed into “Sensitive”, this wonderfully emotional paen, Balearic masterstroke letting his bass wander in some known territory where it gains this arresting saudade beat.

As the album winds down to even more tropical motifs (even on a bonus track tacked on to future issues) it still remains a treat to hear something so fantastically out of the norm. In the same year, Duran Duran would release Rio yet in the same year no one had a reason to imagine a tropic stuck in the past. Perhaps by 2249 more than someone will understand just how monumental this album was. Mick went deep, perhaps deeper than anyone was ready for then.

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