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EBM rider
Chris Ewen keeps Man Ray and FBH moving
BY MICHAEL FREEDBERG

With his short blond hair, scholar’s eyeglasses, and dimpled smile, Cambridge’s Chris Ewen looks more like a kindly old prep-school teacher — or the return of Sid Caesar — than a dance-club DJ. Yet a DJ he is, at Man Ray, no less. Ewen may look pedagogic, but analysis and facts have little to do with the forebodings and sexual complexities that Man Ray caters to. Most of the men wear long black trenchcoats, or a priest’s collar, or else they sport body-hugging latex drag and fetish heels; the women look like Morticia, or they wear just as much latex or PVC as the guys, perhaps adding a witch’s cape over a strapless cocktail gown — or over a G-string and not much else. Modest Mussorgsky would be happy here; so might Mary Shelley, even Hester Prynne.

Onto a smallish dance floor surrounded by heavy, embroidered curtains, cobwebs, and cage-fence staging, Ewen pours the techno-blended gothic beats that fans call "electronic body music" ("EBM") or "dark wave." "I’m a child of the 1980s. I grew up in Detroit, hung out at a club called Todd’s. They played new romantic stuff, very 1981, Visage, Spandau Ballet, Depeche Mode." As he says this, he’s spinning that band’s "Reach Out and Touch Me." "I had tons of records, and being a musician, I knew my four beats. So they let me DJ." Now he quick-cuts the Depeche song directly to Covenant’s "Monochrome." They sound very similar to me. Ewen disagrees. "They’re from the same style, but Covenant does a whole different thing. Rhythm’s the same, but the song’s not. I am a song man. Not that I don’t know my rhythms and hooks. But unlike a house-music DJ, I don’t use a lot of turntable tricks, nor do I mix on the rhythms and the hooks. I concentrate on the song. I set up one solid structure that allows me to change moods in a completely different direction."

I see Ewen do exactly that and get away with it, again and again — perhaps because the Man Ray crowd knows him. "I’ve been here since the 1980s. By 1989 I was playing a lot of goth and industrial stuff, and it has taken on a life of its own now, though I’m still evolving. I’m an old-school DJ, where the records I select control the sequence rather than sequencing tricks controlling the records. Hell, I even announce song titles and group names." I watch him do that and not clear the floor. No wonder his fans know the EBM likes of Covenant, Apoptygma Berzerk, and Project Pitchfork. His DJ booth is three walls lined with CDs and vinyl, and a goth fan would definitely be jealous, since he has it all: CDs by VNV Nation, Front 242, Siouxsie, Sisters of Mercy, and, yes, Covenant, as well as plenty of what he calls, with a grin, "white-label stuff — the label is blank, so other DJs who might visit me can’t find out what I’m playing."

One reason Ewen insists on a song orientation might be that he himself writes songs for a trio in which he performs. And Future Bible Heroes — whose other two members are Stephin Merritt and Claudia Gonson, both of the Magnetic Fields — enjoy a substantial Boston-area following. Late on recent Sunday night, in bitter cold, a long line formed outside the Coolidge Corner Theatre waiting to get into their concert. These fans were attracted by music that could not possibly sound less like rock and roll, and they couldn’t have been less like the leathery types who cluster into big-time music venues. Future Bible Heroes performed most of the 16 tracks from last August’s Eternal Youth (Instinct), as well as an older song, the aptly titled "I’m Lonely and I Love It." (Instinct has tapped into Ewen’s DJ status by following up Eternal Youth with the new The Lonely Robot, a seven-song EP of Eternal Youth remixes by the likes of synth-pop pioneers Soft Cell, Mute label founder Daniel Miller, NYC-based house producer Rob Rives, and the London electro duo Client.)

Being lonely and loving it is the underlying theme, or feeling, of just about all of Future Bible Heroes’ music. Their songs are pensive, delicate, almost defenseless lullabies and musings in which Gonson’s whispery soprano or Merritt’s Brendan Perry–ish baritone — or both, in duet — sings of loves and lovers lost ("Find an Open Window," "The Slow Fade") or dreams about being gorgeous and sexy ("A Thousand Lovers in a Day"). Gonson imagines herself a disco queen ("The World Is a Disco Ball," "I’m a Vampire"), though she doesn’t look at all like one. As for Ewen, he plays piano and synthesizer, driving the moods and musings of his singers as he wills, even if it means sending their hopes and dreams in an entirely different direction from what they’d like. And he gets away with it.

Issue Date: Janaury 30 - February 6, 2003
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