Liquid Courage
In 1996, Alan Wilder Recoil-ed from the wildly successful Depeche Mode. Four years later, he's making the best music of his career

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Other performances required a different approach, one guided by the hand of the technology. Wilder actually located vocalist Rosa Torres, whose Catalonian whispers pepper the sinister "Vertigen," via the Internet, through a post on the Recoil Web site.

"I had this track that had a very exotic feel or flavor to it, and I just thought, 'Well, a foreign voice, a foreign language would sound great in here," Wilder explained. "So I advertised on our Web site for fans, really, just to send in any tapes they had of themselves speaking in their native tongue. Initially I was only thinking maybe [of using it] as a background sound, but after I received Rosa's tape -- and she's Catalonian, so she speaks Catalan [a Spanish dialect] -- it was so good, it had such a wonderful sensual quality, I felt it had to be at the forefront of the music for this particular song."

As this anecdote suggests, the Net plays a vital role for Recoil -- and not just for promotion. Wilder even serves as the de facto Webmaster of Recoil's official site (named "Shunt," after a song on Unsound Methods), a role he assumed two years ago as a matter of crisis resolution. "The funny thing was, initially, a fan was going to set it up and do it for us," he recounted. "And he dumped us right at the last moment, after I'd been advertising that this Web site was coming and coming and coming and saying, 'It'll be up next week,' and so on. He disappeared off the face of the planet, and I was left in a situation where I had to learn how to program HTML in about a week and get this Web site up online. I did a crash course, and it was the best thing that ever happened. I'm really glad that happened because now, being able to program your own Web site -- it's quite a lot of work, but I quite enjoy it. And the main point is that the fans really enjoy it because they know that it comes direct from the artist."

" It's difficult to create aware-ness when you're up against a brick wall from certain elements of the media. "

It's apparent to anyone who's logged on to Shunt that connecting with fans is important to Wilder. Recoil's music is challenging enough that no amount of corporate PR will foist it into the narrow, heavily formatted spectrum of mainstream radio or MTV. Promotionally, a heavy Web presence makes sense for Recoil. But Wilder's thinking runs fathoms deeper than that; he uses the site to ensure that Recoil remains accessible to anyone willing to give its music a chance. He goes the extra mile on Shunt, offering up a staggering volume of background and technical information, images, sound samples and, most interestingly, transcriptions of a monthly Q&A that Wilder conducts via e-mail with anyone who cares to write in.

"What's frustrating is when people say, 'Oh, I didn't know you had a record out,' or, 'I didn't even know you had a music project,'" he said of his main motivation to involve himself heavily with Shunt. "And that happens a lot because it's difficult to create awareness when you're up against a brick wall from certain elements of the media. Which is why the Internet is so important."

In the end, it's all about awareness and availability, the two benefits that the Internet offers to musicians who are willing to do their own dirty work. Thus, visitors to Shunt can contact Wilder, find out just about everything they could want to know about him (Shoe size? 8), download video and audio clips and, most importantly, order a copy of Liquid through the Mute Bank, Mute Records' online mail order service.

"My only hope is to make people aware of it, and let them make their own mind," Wilder said, optimistically. "If they choose to like it, great. If not, fine."

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