Tag: obituary

Geordie Walker, a founding member and guitarist of the post-punk band and goth rock pioneers Killing Joke, has died. Aside from Jaz Coleman, Walker was the only other sole constant member of Killing Joke until his death. His bandmates confirmed the news in a statement, revealing that he died following a stroke earlier today (November 26). Walker was 64.

Born in 1958, Walker’s family moved from Newcastle to Buckinghamshire. Walker and bassist Youth joined the band in 1979 after responding to an ad Jaz Coleman and Paul Ferguson put out in Melody Maker, which read: “Want to be part of the Killing Joke? We mean it man. Total exploitation, total publicity, total anonymity. Bass and lead wanted.”

“I liked the sound of it, it looked rather serious, fanatical, I don’t know what it was but it clicked with me,” Walker said in a 1984 interview. “So I went down to see this guy [Coleman] and immediately started arguing with him about his taste in music and whatever, and I kept in touch and kept hassling them for some reason. I think it was the intensity of the argument I liked.” He moved in with the band shortly after.

Coleman has said the band’s early manifesto was to “define the exquisite beauty of the atomic age in terms of style, sound and form.” The band played their first show in August 1979 and cited contemporaries such as Adam Ant, Lee “Scratch” Perry, and Public Image Ltd. as early influences. Following an EP in 1979, the band released their debut self-titled album in 1980.

A prolific series of releases would follow throughout the ’80s including 1981’s What’s THIS For…! and the Conny Plank-assisted 1982 album Revelations. During that period, Jaz Coleman fled to Reykjavik, Iceland over concerns about the apocalypse. Walker and the band performed “Empire Song” on Top of the Pops with a roadie wearing a beekeeper outfit standing in for Coleman. Walker and Ferguson then decamped to Iceland to join Coleman.

The band followed that album with 1983’s Fire Dances. Their 1985 album Night Time featured hit singles including “Love Like Blood” and “Eighties.” The band was dropped from Virgin Records following 1986’s Brighter Than a Thousand Suns and 1988’s Outside the Gate. In 1994, they released one of their best-selling albums with Pandemonium, which arrived in the middle of industrial rock’s boom. That same year they released Democracy. Their self-titled 2003 album was produced by Gang of Four’s Andy Gill and featured Dave Grohl on drums. The band followed it with multiple albums throughout the ’00s and ’10s.

Catherine Christer Hennix, a Swedish polymath and pioneer of drone music, has died. She was 75 years old. The experimental music non-profit Blank Forms, a frequent distributor of Hennix’ music, announced her death on Friday (November 17). The New York Times reports Hennix’ cause of death as complications of an undisclosed illness. The artist had received treatment for cancer in the past.

Born to a jazz composer mother in Stockholm in 1946, Hennix began playing drums as a child and started taking formal lessons at thirteen, around the same time that she would hear John Coltrane and Miles Davis perform live for the first time. She started crafting compositions on the computers at Stockholm’s Electric Music Studio (ESM) in 1969, a pastime that fostered a passion for logic and mathematics, which she pursued to the graduate level. During her career, she also taught mathematics at SUNY New Paltz and served as a visiting Professor of Logic at MIT’s Artifical Intellegence Laboratory.

Hennix’s work with drones traces back to her immersion in New York’s downtown music scene in the late 1960s, which she sought out as a Coltrane- and Stockhausen-influenced Stockholm University linguistics graduate. She connected with minimalist composer La Monte Young, and later recalled in a 2010 interview that upon hearing Young’s music it only took her “about 60 seconds to decide that this was the sound.” While continuing to experiment with synthesizers, drones, and just intonation, an alternative to standard Western tuning, Hennix also composed poetry, drama, and equations. Her varied pursuits eventually led her to organize a ten day festival called Brouwer’s Lattice at Stockholm’s Moderna Museet in 1976, which showcased Hennix’s work alongside other minimalist artists.

It was at that festival that she performed “The Electric Harpsichord,” one of her most well-known compositions. Over a constant underlying drone, Hennix improvised on a Yamaha keyboard scaled to just intonation and fed the results through a tape delay. The recording of the performance runs 25 minutes, but Hennix envisioned the piece to have no ending, an example of her self-described infinitary composition. The artist Henry Flynt, who Hennix worked with often over the years, called the piece as a “life-changing revelation.”

Mars Williams, the lifelong jazz saxophonist who played in the Psychedelic Furs and the Waitresses, has died, reports The Chicago Tribune. He died today from ampullary cancer after being diagnosed last year. “We’re heartbroken,” the Psychedelic Furs wrote on social media. “Goodbye to the great Mars Williams. Rest well.” He was 68.

“Until the end, Mars’ inexhaustible humor and energy, and his love for music, pushed him forward,” Williams’ family wrote in a statement. “As it became clear in late summer that his treatment options were coming to an end, he chose to spend six weeks of the time he had left living as he had since he was a teenager – out on the road performing night after night. Those last performances with the Psychedelic Furs will live on with all of the other incredible contributions that Mars has made as a person, and as a musician, and that boundless energy will continue to inspire.”

Born in Evanston, Illinois, Williams grew up in a jazz-loving household, as his father played trumpet for pick-up bands by Gene Kruppa and Tommy Dorsey whenever they stopped through Chicago. Williams quickly grew to adore swing music, Eric Dolphy, Ornette Coleman, and Charlie Parker. He trained as a classical clarinetist for 10 years before switching to saxophone during his final year in high school. He attended DePaul University before taking classes from Anthony Braxton and Roscoe Mitchell at the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians.

In 1980, Williams joined the Waitresses, contributing to the Ohio new wave band’s debut album Wasn’t Tomorrow Wonderful? and the follow-up Bruiseology. He earned his first Billboard hit in the shape of “I Know What Boys Like,” which peaked at No. 62 on the Hot 100 chart. Williams’ most recognizable saxophone part, and perhaps the most timeless one due to its regular rotation as a holiday song, is his jubilant hook on the Waitresses’ 1981 single “Christmas Wrapping.”

When the Waitresses broke up in 1983, Williams was swiftly hired by the Psychedelic Furs for a tour before more formally joining the band. He appears on the albums Mirror Moves in 1984 and Midnight to Midnight in 1987. Though he left the Psychedelic Furs in 1989, Williams rejoined in 2005, going on to record saxophone for their 2020 comeback album Made of Rain. Their final performance together was two days ago at the music festival Darker Waves.

George “Funky” Brown, the drummer, keyboardist, and co-founder of R&B greats Kool & the Gang, died yesterday (November 16), his family said in a statement. He died at Long Beach Memorial Hospital of an undisclosed illness, though TMZ reports that he had been living with cancer. George Brown was 74 years old.

Brown co-founded Kool & the Gang in 1964, when they started playing jazz clubs in New Jersey. They broke out in 1973, honing their ever-shifting fusion of jazz, soul, funk, rock, and pop on the album Wild and Peaceful. Brown went on to co-write hits including “Ladies Night,” “Celebration,” and “Cherish.” Brown and the band won a Grammy Award in 1979. They were inducted into the New Jersey Hall of Fame in 2015 and the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2018.

Brown’s family said in a statement: “We lost our beloved husband and father, Kool & The Gang founding member George Brown last night. He passed away peacefully at Long Beach Memorial Hospital surrounded by family. His incredible talent and presence will be greatly missed and never forgotten.”

A Nevada judge has set a trial date of June 3, 2024 in the 1996 murder of Tupac Shakur, the Associated Press reports. Duane “Keffe D” Davis, the man arrested by Las Vegas police in September and charged with Shakur’s murder and intent to promote, further, or assist a criminal gang. He has been appointed two attorneys by the court and pleaded not guilty.

Davis’ public defenders Charles Cano and Robert Arroyo have said they intend to seek his release on bail before the trial and noted that they have yet to examine the prosecutor’s “voluminous” evidence.

Prior to Davis’ arrest, he claimed in interviews and in his memoir that he was in the car from which Shakur was shot. He argues that another person fired the fatal shots. Davis is the last living person who was in the vehicle. He faces the possibility of life in prison.

Adam Johnstone, lead guitarist for Australian power pop group Romero, died on October 17. He was 32. Johnstone’s brother and bandmate Dave shared the news in an Instagram post, revealing that Adam had been living with cancer since 2019. Dave wrote that Adam “passed away peacefully at home surrounded by his family and friends.” Find his full statement below.

Adam Johnstone grew up in Melbourne, Australia, and began playing music with his brother Dave when they were kids. Encouraged by their parents, they jammed in their basement together from a young age, with Dave gravitating toward drums and Adam picking up the electric guitar. Their early repertoire mostly included covers of Blink-182 and Rancid, as they told Pitchfork’s Evan Minsker last year during a Rising interview.

“Our mum was actually an art and music teacher as well. She was always very supportive of us, but even before we sort of chose instruments that we ended up playing with, we’d be banging on crap and playing on keyboards and all that sort of stuff,” Adam told Pitchfork. “We had ended up being at the school that mom taught at for a few years as well. So the art and music room was our playhouse too. When we finished, we could just go and pick up anything we wanted to and play it.”

Adam and Dave formed Romero in 2018 along with singer Alanna Oliver, bassist Justin Tawil, and rhythm guitarist Fergus Sinclair. Adam and Dave had previously played in the band Summer Blood, and were considering sitting out additional musical projects after that band broke up. Then, Adam met Oliver, who played him one of her demos on her phone. Gobsmacked by her voice, Adam decided to start a new band.

“When Romero happened, all the sound that we had came really natural and it all felt a lot easier,” Adam told Pitchfork. “It just felt like it was meshing together a lot better. There wasn’t any pressure to write a certain way. We were just figuring everything out. That in itself was exciting to be around.”

Romero issued their debut studio album Turn It On! last spring; Adam Johnstone’s lead guitar riffs are a defining trait of the record. In announcing his brother’s death, Dave Johnstone summed up his unique sound thusly: “It goes without saying that he was an incredibly gifted musician. He knew how to write a fucking riff. I had a front row seat to all of his songwriting, and it always had such a haunting, nostalgic and tortured beauty to it, like he was relaying so much pain through the only way he could communicate it, channeling it through a tunnel of love and letting it bleed through his guitar.”

Angelo Bruschini, a longtime guitarist with Massive Attack, has died. “How lucky we all were to share such a life together,” the band wrote on social media. “Such a brilliant, eccentric talent. Impossible to quantify your contribution.”

This summer, Bruschini revealed that he was living with lung cancer. “Had a great life, seen the world many many times, met lots of wonderful people, but the door is closing, think I will write a book,” he wrote on his Facebook page in July.

Prior to joining Massive Attack, Bruschini was a member of the Bristol rock band the Blue Aeroplanes, recording and performing with the band for the better part of a decade after 1985’s Tolerance. He took up with his fellow Bristolians in Massive Attack in 1997.

Bruschini performed across Massive Attack’s landmark 1998 LP, Mezzanine, and he returned to the studio with the group to contribute to 2003’s 100th Window. He also frequently hit the road with the band as a supporting guitarist.