5XOD, what does it mean?

Somehow I rolled into the 'indie cassette scene' of the early 80's where you would record tapes with your own music (or 'sounds' in my case) and swap them with other people. The trick was to get a nice variety of 'correspondents' so you would get a nice variety of tapes back. Among my favorite correspondents were Rob Lawrence (aka Robot) and Mark Phillips (aka MAP) from Cardiff/Bristol, as their tapes had a constant quality (i.e. they often had good tunes unlike some of the 'industrial noise' tapes that I got from other people). After some time they joined forces as 5ive Times Of Dust (aka 5XOD) and made even better tapes.

Eventually, life happened and I lost touch.

And then some twenty (+ change) years later while perusing the interwebs I face that acronym again: 5XOD. It turns out the guys split up at the end of the eighties. But the good thing about split-ups is that you can come back together: they did a few years ago. In fact they picked up where they left off by taking old recordings and 'reworking' and remixing them. I got in touch with Rob who was so kind as to send me their 'come back' cd: Incense in the Middle Fridge of Birth.


The fact that I'm not so up to speed on electronic music is not really important as an obvious influence like YMO (like on the track 'You've got to Love the Nature') is not new either. It also helped that some of the tracks are reworkings of tracks that I already knew. Anyway, tracks like 'Fluffy Bomb' and 'Mass Collider' are instantly recognizable as 5XOD and great in their own right. One of the smart moves is sometimes using an electronic voice as the girl singer Miku which comes as a blessing after some of the more 'industrial' tracks.
On the whole I quite like it. It also made me (while typing up this blogitem) pay a bit more attention to their my|---| site: there is even newer 'Dust Music Product' available: mOVING tHROUGH tWISTED fORMS.

To explain the title of this posting: after all these years I was wondering if 5XOD meant more than just four words and googled out it probably does. Here is a link to an excerpt of 'The Soft Machine' by William S. Burroughs.