The Legendary Pink Dots were Edward Ka-Spel�s project, formed in London in collaboration with keyboardist Phil Knights. The Dots have produced an enormous amount of music. At their best, Ka-Spel demonstrates an eccentric talent for psychedelic songwriting. Unfortunately, quantity has often (almost always) come at the expense of quality: each album seems improvised on the spot, based on a barely sketched idea, and in the end only two or three tracks stand out.

Ka-Spel draws (very loosely) on �60s psychedelic ballads�especially Syd Barrett, whose vocal style he emulates�music hall, classical music, and synth-pop, but perhaps also horror films and dark punk.

The group�s career began with a few 1981 cassettes: Only Dreaming (Mirrodot, limited to ten copies), Chemical Playschool (24 copies), and Kleine Krieg (Little Lightning, 120 copies). The following year saw the release of four more cassettes. Some recordings from those years were eventually released twenty years later on Crushed Memories (Plinkity Plonk, 2004).

Brighter Now (In Phaze, 1982), their first vinyl album, contained one of Ka-Spel�s first masterpieces of melody and arrangement: Hanging Gardens, a pulsating, tender track in which the psychedelic vocal theme is counterpointed by a celestial synthetic orchestra line. The rest, from Red Castles to Premonition 4, is a somewhat random collection of cheerful melodies and soft electronic accompaniments, in a homegrown synth-pop style that borrows ideas from carnival sideshows, with occasional avant-garde ambitions.

Curse (In Phaze, 1983) continued the progression toward refined psychedelic songwriting (Love Puppets).

In 1984, the cassettes Chemical Playschool 3+4 and Basilisk were released.

Chemical Playschool 8+9 (World Serpent, 1995) is a two-CD anthology of both double-cassette Chemical Playschools (1+2 and 3+4, respectively), plus assorted rarities (intended as volumes 5, 6, and 7). Vol. 10 would be sold at concerts in 1997 before being packaged as an official CD years later.

Vinyl releases included Faces In The Fire (Play It Again Sam, 1984), featuring Blasto and the eccentric Eight Minutes To Live, and The Towers (In Phaze, 1984), one of their most conceptual works (not only the five parts of Tower, but also Black Zone, the surreal gag of the moment).

Ka-Spel also pursued a parallel solo career with the single Dance China Doll (In Phaze). Between 1984 and 1987, a bizarre "pentalogy" was released under his name, including Laugh China Doll (In Phaze), Eyes! China Doll (Play It Again Sam/Scarface), Chyekk, China Doll (Torso), Aazhyd China Doll (Torso), and Khataclimici China Doll (DOM, 1996). The last represents the peak of his tragic art, with dizzying layers of sound and dramatic, violent crescendos.

Down In The City of Heartbreak and Needles (Soleilmoon, 1995) is an anthology of Ka-Spel�s solo work from the mid-1980s (including the entire Eyes China Doll).

The new Legendary Pink Dots album, The Lovers (Ding Dong, 1985), showcases the meticulous pop of Mmmmmmmmmmm and the lush arrangement of the title track, worthy of a Morricone soundtrack.

The double album Asylum (Play It Again Sam, 1985) offers a striking snapshot of their musical repertoire, updated with a Central European sensibility (melancholic melodies, aching violins, decadent atmospheres) reminiscent of Roxy Music. The album�s strongest points are the solemn, classical-inspired ballads Golden Dawn and Echo Police, and the cabaret sketches The Hill and I'm The Way. Less convincing are the instrumental passages, both in the song endings and in the lengthy tracks So Gallantly Screaming and This Could Be The End, which are complex, confused, and possibly improvised in the studio. The use of electronics is amateurish and pretentious, suitable at most for Todd Rundgren-style mini-theaters.
If one invests in experimental tracks, the whimsical cross between waltz and bolero for violin and accordion in Fifteen Flies In The Marmalade or the avant-garde electro-vocal piece Femme Mirage, which Diamanda Galas would appreciate, are more compelling. The scale of the work is disproportionate to its (modest) merits, but the release is still significant, marking Ka-Spel�s artistic maturation, particularly as a producer.

The band�s first single, Curious Guy (1986), is exemplary in blending chamber music with synth-pop, and it may well remain their masterpiece: the violin drives the compelling cadence of a funeral march, the chorus lifts a cloud of samples and electronics, and the instrumental �bridge� brushes against the decadently refined orchestrations of Tuxedomoon. The B-side is the lengthy Premonition 16. Meanwhile, Ka-Spel had moved to Amsterdam, from where he frequently launched musical raids across the heart of Europe.

On Island Of Jewels, Our Lady In Chambers appears, another synthesis as spectacular as it is understated (and dreamlike) of classical music, folk, jazz, and psychedelic music. The track is part of a trilogy completed by Our Lady In Kharki and Our Lady In Darkness.

Ka-Spel�s prodigious output showed no sign of slowing. In addition to collaborating with Skinny Puppy on the Tear Garden project, he released, under the Legendary Pink Dots name, the single Premonition II (Snowdonia, 1987), the EP Underclass (Play It Again Sam, 1987), and the album Any Day Now.

Any Day Now (1987) refines this learned-yet-na�ve fusion, simultaneously catchy and classical. Once again, the trick in tracks like Casting The Runes lies in the arrangement: the song opens with a staccato synth rhythm interwoven with the poignant motif of a violin, which then passes to the cello and intertwines with a sample; the vocals soar in the fatalistic tonalities of Joy Division, accompanied by a funereal organ; the instrumental interlude features a female choir, free dissonances from various instruments, and �found� percussion.
Ka-Spel excels as a musical shapeshifter: he is at once an effective conjurer of hallucinatory states, as in the dreamlike Laguna Beach; a bold composer of experimental fusion (A Strychnine Kiss); a nostalgic sketch artist (the street waltz of The Gallery); an exotic intellectual in the vein of David Sylvian (True Love); and a gaunt, futuristic dandy in the line of Bryan Ferry and Gary Numan (Neon Mariners). The suite Waiting For The Cloud (ten minutes) even plunges into �70s progressive rock territory, albeit updated with symphonic-cosmic electronic sounds and a shiver-inducing baroque passage (first trumpet, then organ).
Ka-Spel�s strength now lies in instrumental arrangements, almost entirely electronic, capable of rivaling the Penguin Caf� Orchestra and music hall ensembles alike, as well as Tuxedomoon and Robert Wyatt. The album closes with the poignant piano sonata Cloud Zero.

The band�s career remains dense with diversions and digressions, such as the single Blacklist, the second, third, fourth, and fifth parts of Traumstadt (a total of six interminable hours), and a triple album, Legendary Pink Box, of revisions and previously unreleased material.

Amidst so much discographic �fat,� the strong music of The Golden Age (Play It Again Sam, 1988) almost struggles to emerge�a dramatic concept album that accentuates the melancholic tones of its serene psychedelia with tracks like Maniac and Hotel Noir.

Ka-Spel�s new solo album, Perhaps We'll Only See A Thin Blue Line, and the single Princess Coldheart serve as preludes to The Crushed Velvet Apocalypse (1990) by the Dots. The work is increasingly immersed in pastoral atmospheres, with self-indulgent psychedelic effects (I Love You In Your Tragic Beauty), and now also marked by an inclination toward Eastern mysticism (The Green Gang). Their albums have, however, become increasingly cohesive: they flow from beginning to end without breaks, relying entirely on the suggestive power of timbres and the charm of subtle melodies hidden within elegant arrangements. Essentially, it follows the same principle as Morricone�s music and the concept albums of the early 1970s.

The arrangements of The Maria Dimension (Play It Again Sam, 1991) are worthy of the most baroque synth-pop, but Ka-Spel�s amorphous vocal lines rarely manage to lift themselves from a uniform mediocrity. Middle Eastern and medieval soundscapes are insufficient to restore identity to the project. An exception is A Space Between, where the voice is almost hidden among the keyboards. The real heart of the album lies in the two collage-suites The Grain Kings and Evolution, in which a sparkling accumulation of musical gestures distorts time and space to create the psychedelic equivalent of melodic imagination.

Ka-Spel gives free rein to his horror-medieval inclinations on the solo album Tanith And The Lion Tree (Third Mind, 1991 � Flesh Eating Ants, 2002). He also collaborates on Andreas Heeman�s (HNAS) Mimir project (Flabbergast). O�Rourke also appears on Mimyriad (Streamline, 1994).

Shadow Weaver (Play It Again Sam, 1992) continues the slow progression toward acoustic music, with surreal vignettes like Zero Zero and City Of Needles. By now, the Dots are increasingly less an electronic project of Ka-Spel and Knights and more a broader, eclectic musical endeavor.

Malachai (1993) is perhaps their most meticulously crafted work in terms of instrumental parts. Ka-Spel cannot do without his pale and inconclusive little songs, but the arrangements of Joey The Canary (African tribalism and a shrill flute solo), Encore Une Fois (chaotic electronic noises at a pseudo-reggae rhythm), and Window On The World (a twelve-minute suite in the dadaist style of early Soft Machine) create surreal atmospheres, ultimately amplifying an idea that Kevin Ayers had twenty years earlier, and make one forget the musician�s inherent weaknesses.
Ka-Spel earns the respect due to an avant-garde musician, pushing the limits of concrete music with On The Boards, integrating bebop and symphonic elements into the impressionistic vignette of Paris 4Am, weaving a Pavane immersed in a pond of amorphous sounds, slow jazz waves, and subtle ambient stasis. We Bring The Day, a surreal collage of gratuitous cacophonies and nostalgic tunes, would have pleased Nino Rota more than Frank Zappa. With this album, Ka-Spel realizes, all things considered, a dream that David Sylvian only managed to touch upon.

Lyvv China Doll (Staalplaat, 1993), Ka-Spel�s solo album, is another hermetic collection of fragments (mostly gratuitous) recorded over four years. The single Inferno (Robot) is, however, one of his most captivating compositions. It was followed by The Scriptures Of Illumina (1995 � Caciocavallo, 2000), which was later accompanied by the EP The Textures of Illumina (Bog, 1995).

Meanwhile, bassist Ryan Moore launched the project Twilight Circus Dub Sound System.

Ka-Spel's wife Elke has a solo project called Vegetarian Bavarian In Exile.

Continuing the pattern of alternating important and less essential releases, Ka-Spel issued the new Dots album, 9 Lives To Wonder (Play It Again Sam, 1994), featuring the ballad Madame Guillotine and the madrigal Siren, followed by From Here You'll Watch The World Go By (Staalplaat, 1995), with the dadaist dance piece 1001 Commandments. Increasingly channeling Syd Barrett, Ka-Spel pursues his dream of a chamber acid rock in which the psychedelic transforms into the fairy-tale, and the cosmic into the bucolic (Citadel).

A wasteful and approximate group like few others, the Legendary Pink Dots perhaps never managed to condense their suggestive style into a truly classic song. Still, the fact remains: the Beatles recorded just one White Album, while the Legendary Pink Dots have recorded a dozen.

Stained Glass Soma Fountains (Soleilmoon, 1997) is a double album of rarities. Das Digitale Vertrauen (Soleilmoon, 1997) compiles two rare EPs. Hallway Of The Gods (Soleilmoon, 1997) is the new LPD album and continues the melodic metamorphosis. On High is influnced by Tear Garden's experiments, while the psychedelic operetta Lucifer Landed is one of Ka-Spel's masterpieces.

DNA Le Draw D Kee (Soleilmoon, 1999) reissues two ambient suites that Ka-Spel recorded for a commission.

Edward Ka-Spel, accompanied by flute and female voice, recorded the madrigals of Red Letters (Caciocavallo, 2000), whose best examples (Radio 6) rank among his most transcendental works.

Searching for a new way to world-music, Legendary Pink Dots's A Perfect Mystery (Caciocavallo, 2000) displays Ka-Spel's indulgence more than it displays his genius. Only Lent is worth of his canon.

Chemical Playschool Volumes 11, 12 and 13 (Soleilmoon, 2001) is the ultimate cauldron of Ka-Spel's art, a sort of remix of unreleased material structured as three hour-long tracks.

LPD's Synesthesia (2002) mostly offers instrumental electronic music for synths, samples and drum machines (Shining Path and The More It Stays the Same being the only songs).

The well-crafted songs on the twin albums All The King's Horses (SPV, 2003) and All The King's Men (ROIR, 2003) are not particularly hummable and are not particularly intelligent. Each album is mostly an atmosphere, not a collection of songs. So Ka-spel's music has basically become background muzak, the kind of pleasant, soothing sound that envelops the passengers at an airport, although one can't deny that Ka-spel's music has the intensity and the fatalism of Greek tragedy.

The Legendary Pink Dots were resurrected for The Whispering Wall (Roir, 2004), but it sounded like a collection of left-overs. In ten years, Ka-Spel had not made another recording worth of Malachai.

Your Children Placate You From Premature Graves (2006) celebrated the 25th anniversary of the project in the worst possible manner.

Ulkomaalaiset 1 (Beta-lactam Ring, 2007) and Ulkomaalaiset 2 (Beta-lactam Ring, 2008) document improvisations between Edward Ka-Spel, electronic musician Alena Boikova and pianist Martin Heuser in Finland.