Happy new year, everyone.
Black Dog Productions was an umbrella name under which Ed Handley, Andy Turner and Ken Downie brought together eight of their various aliases to record an album called (Bytes).
Xeper was a Downie alias, and reading through some of his obituaries - he died on 20 December, 2025 - one thing that is mentioned about the ethos of Black Dog is how many of its recordings were inspired by two of Downie’s great interests: technology and history. David Abravanel described this fusion as Cyber-Egyptology and a couple of the tracks on (Bytes), I’m thinking especially of Focus Mel by Atypic (Andy Turner) sound like excavation and archaeology set to a break beat. Even the collective’s name, Black Dog, has its roots set less in connotations of depression and more to do with links to Anubis/Anpu, the ancient Egyptian god of funerary rites and guide to the underworld, who is represented in hieroglyphics as either a black dog or a man with the head of a black dog.
Carceres Ex Novum translates as Prisons from the New. This could reflect a desire on Downie’s part to immerse himself in the past as a way of blocking out the pressures and ghastliness of the modern world. Alternatively, if we read the title as New Prisons, it could also signal an awareness of how the creep of technology could make us prisoners and slaves to it. It’s this interpretation which I lean more towards when considering the track, which is a gorgeous piece of downtempo IDM.
Thinking back on it, I’m wrong to describe a creep of technology; in 1993 it was more like an approaching gallop, given that within 2 or 3 years of this track going out on Kat’s Karavan, I was buying albums which had website and email addresses for bands and record labels on their inlay cards. With the benefit of hindsight, Carceres Ex Novum does a brilliant job in its near 7 minute running time of previewing the progress that developing technology would bring to us and how it would become a part of our routine. It breaks down as follows:
- Opening 95 seconds - the synth drone which runs throughout the track reflects our consciousness as we work through the daily grind. But in that stretch, we hear certain beeps, like satellite signals reflecting the work going on in the background and the building of new technological structures that will eventually cocoon us all.
- From 1:35, the burbling piano line suggests the slavish search for information and gratification on the internet. A new world, albeit made up of garish colour schemes and awkward code, but which allows us to find out about things which are both vital and trivial to us. And once you’ve made one search another will follow, and then another, as we start to see just how far we can push the boundaries of this new technology. It will soon become clear, that nothing is off limits and anyone can create in this new space, with these developing tools.
- 2:40 onwards, are those squawking voices I can hear? Well, yes, quite possibly given that the new technologies allow us access to publish our thoughts via blogs/video channels. We’re all authorities now on our chosen areas of interest, aren’t we?
- 3:10 onwards - it ever there was such a thing as a quizzical piano line, then we get it here. It heralds a cautious welcome to these new opportunities we have to share information and communicate with one another, wherever we may be. This is something that Downie had direct experience of at the time given that he had been running a bulletin board system called Black Dog Towers.
- 4:40 onwards, more and more of us start to plug into the new systems of communications and online noise becomes our perpetual environment. As a result, we walk into our new technological prisons, but attempt to make them feel like our homes. When I consider my life in terms of pre and post Internet time frames, there’s one way of consuming the world up to about mid-2000, and then there’s the way I’ve consumed it, and it has been made easier to do so, over the last 26 years. Others will have different timescales, but it will have claimed all but the most dedicated off-gridders.
- 5:44 onwards, it does feature earlier in the piece but the stabbing piano refrain, which sounds like a car horn suggests that this mode of communication and info sharing may occasionally invite confrontation, discord and an online version of road rage. But this was 1993 and optimism remained high about what this technology might bring to our lives. I mean, just how toxic could differences of opinion expressed from a computer terminal ever become, eh?
If the notion of Downie as a technological soothsayer seems a little far-fetched and we want to consider Carceres Ex Novum as being a track which was a little more in-the-moment, it could serve as a musical commentary on virtual reality, which was still being trumpeted at the time as means by which humans could escape their everyday environment and put themselves in universes of their own creation. Certainly, for anyone looking to create an environment from the past in which they could subsume themselves, it appeared a perfect solution, albeit one that would function as just another new prison.
Ultimately, VR hasn’t yet managed to capture as much of the world’s everyday attention as the internet has. But we can be sure that like all bad ideas, it will never truly go away.
Warp Records issued (Bytes) but they have made the whole album available for listening on their YouTube page.
Video courtesy of Marius Georgescu.
