Nexus 21 - from Stafford to Altern-8, via Detroit
Plus Ron Trent and more
On December 12 2024 Mind Machines, the second album by British techno duo Nexus 21 - aka Mark Archer and Chris Peat - was finally released, some 33 years after it was recorded. To celebrate this, I’ve edited a passage from my shelved rave book about the connections between Altern-8, the hugely popular chart rave duo that Archer and Peat would go on to form after Nexus 21, and Detroit techno. I interviewed Archer twice, once in 2019, once in 2022. I hope you enjoy it.
Detroit techno and Altern-8 have more in common than you might think. Before Altern-8 Mark Archer, a veteran of piano-heavy rave heroes Bizarre Inc, and Depeche Mode fan Chris Peat recorded serious, Detroit-influenced techno as Nexus 21 and they had been accepted by the Detroit community, with both Kevin Saunderson and Carl Craig remixing their tracks.
“I was very, very pure indeed,” Archer said of Nexus 21, when I interviewed him in 2019. “I was trying to be like Detroit; that was what I wanted to do. Theirs was the blueprint and I was trying my best to emulate that kind of sound. Not even knowing, you know, half the equipment that they had; the production techniques, nothing like that. We just went in and tried as best as we could to capture that Detroit techno sound.” The result of this devotion was The Rhythm of Life, Nexus 21’s debut album. On release in 1989 it became one of the first British electronic albums to seriously tussle with the legacy of Detroit techno.
Nexus 21’s love for Detroit was - eventually - reciprocated. “Apparently when Derrick [May] first heard one of the Nexus 21 tunes, because we'd sampled one of his bass lines, he said he was going to break our kneecaps,” Archer said. “We'd never met Derrick May before and I was shitting myself, to be honest. But when they found out, these guys are from England and they like what we're doing that much they're trying to do it.
“And then Network [which as well as handling both Nexus 21 and Altern-8’s music, also released records from numerous Detroit techno producers] hooked us up with them. We went out to Detroit worked with Marc Kinchen [aka MK], Kevin Saunderson, Anthony Shakir and Carl Craig - that was his first ever remix. So there was a kind of mutual appreciation. I was mad into what they were doing and they kind of liked the fact that we were that mad into it, we were doing it and a bit love came back.”
Archer says that he was even asked to remix Strings of Life, only to pass up the opportunity “because I didn't think I could do anything better than the original did”. Knowing this, it feels all the more bold that Altern-8 would sample Strings Of Life on their 1992 single Evapor 8, given that the song was already seen as a classic by this stage. But Archer says that this was kind of the point, after the duo had sampled 808 State’s Pacific 202 on Infiltrate 202 and the UK remix of Kid ’N Play’s 2 Hype on Activ 8.
“Because of the way the charts work, if you do a track and it's quite big and then your next track isn't as big, you're written off as one-hit wonders. So I thought, ‘What can I sample that's really noticeable on the rave scene - instantly recognisable, that would be bigger than the violins that are used on Activ 8?’ Strings of Life was the obvious choice.”
The crossover between Nexus 21’s hugely respected Detroit techno and Altern-8’s turbo rave madness is, I think, one of the most interesting musical points of the Altern-8 story. The two acts have their differences: Nexus 21 favoured deep Detroit techno drums, while Altern-8 used giant rave breakbeats; and Nexus 21’s elegantly spacey music felt a lot more strait-laced than Altern-8’s frantic patchworks.
But you can frequently hear the similarities between the two: both Altern-8 and Nexus 21 used vast sub bass lines, more a pulse than a melody, and Nexus 21 also shared Altern-8’s tendency to sample classic electronic music, employing clips from Kevin Saunderson’s Inner City, Derrick May’s Mayday project and Juan Atkins’ Cybotron duo over their career, neatly completing the Belleville techno circle.
Nexus 21 also shared Altern-8’s incredible ear for a melody - Nexus 21’s Self Hypnosis (Mr Whippy mix) has the gorgeous warbling melody of an ice cream van in space, which Altern-8 subsequently sampled on Hypnotic St-8 - and the crossover was made explicit in Nexus 21’s remix of Evapor 8.
As Archer tells it, the transition from Nexus 21 to Altern-8 was more instinctive than forethought. “We just went in [as Nexus 21] and tried as best as we could to capture that Detroit techno sound. And then, obviously, outside influences came in from all the raves I was going to and we recorded, I think, about nine tracks and gave them to the record label [Network Records],” he said.
“And they sounded a bit Nexus-y. But there were different elements, like Belgian techno, hip house breakbeats, the whole kind of thing and they were like, ‘We want to put this out, but the people who were into Nexus 21 will probably be like, ‘This isn't kind of right.’ So just think of a different name.’”
And so they did - although it turns out Altern-8 wasn’t even meant to be their name. Chris Peat had been in a band at school called Alien 8 and he and Archer decided to adopt the name; when the Overload EP came back from the pressing plant, however, it said “Altern-8” and Network claimed it was too late to change it.
The band’s decision to suit up was similarly haphazard. As Nexus 21, Peat and Archer played Coventry’s Eclipse club in late 1990 / early 1991 alongside LFO and Nightmares on Wax as part of a joint Warp / Network tour.
A few months later, Altern-8 were booked to perform a PA at the same club. Figuring that the Eclipse crowd might feel a little short changed by the same two people performing for them within such a short amount of time, Peat and Archer decided they needed a disguise. Archer asked his brother, who was in the RAF at the time, if he had anything that work as a costume for the band and he produced the two chemical warfare suits that would later go down in history.
The duo found the anonymity very refreshing. “When we were Nexus 21, we're actually playing live,” Archer explained. “When we did a gig it was coming out of the keyboards and the drum machines. But when we did Altern-8, we couldn't have that many samplers and all the rest on stage, there was no way you'd be able to load everything up. So it was a playback from a DAT. So that then gave us the freedom to prance about on stage and do the karate chop thing on the keyboards and make it all larger than life.
“If you're stood there and you're doing this, and you've got a massive rave going on, people think, ‘I don't know what the hell you're doing.’ But when we're banging on the keyboard - ‘Oh, man, he's playing that keyboard.’ And it creates that kind of vibe.”
For Altern-8, success came quickly. The Overload EP reach 99 in the UK charts in October 1990; Infiltrate 202, from the Vertigo EP, climbed to 28 nine months laters; and Activ 8 hit the vertiginous heights of number three, three months after that, bringing the duo their first Top of the Pops appearance.
Frequency made 41 in February 1992; Evapor 8 peaked at six and Hypnotic St8 made 16 in July 1992, the same month that the debut - and so far only - Altern-8 album, Full On… Mask Hysteria charted at 11. “Looking back on it, the amount of tracks that we put out in those 18 months, we didn't hang about,” says Archer.
This, clearly, was fantastic news for Altern-8. But Nexus 21 ended up as collateral damage, with Archer and Peat deciding they only had time for one electronic duo in their busy lives and it might as well be the one having chart hits. Mind Machines, the Nexus 21 album they had initially planned to release in late 1991, was shelved, with the DATs filed quietly away at Network’s Birmingham HQ, only to be rediscovered earlier this year.
Archer said the duo didn’t expect their Altern-8 stardom to last a year. It did - but not that much longer, at least in its initial phase. Infiltrate gave them their first UK top 30 hit in July 1991 and Hypnotic St-8 gave them their last in July 1992. Their album, Full On… Mask Hysteria, was released the same month.
Altern-8 weren’t exactly done as a band in July 1992. They still managed a number of other minor chart hits; but they never made another album and in 1994 Peat and Archer parted ways.
Archer says that by 1992 “there was a bit of an urgency to get an album together”. “I think, had we carried on past 93, if we'd have gone for a second album, that would have been a collection of completely new material,” he says. “But the way things were, there was a hell of a backlash against the rave scene, the Criminal Justice Bill coming in and all the rest. And the label said you know, ‘It'd be a good idea to leave it on a high and maybe revert back to Nexus 21.’ But that's when my working relationship with Chris totally deteriorated, so that never happened. I mean, we we spent a week in any studio and didn't come out with any tracks at all.”
The split with Chris was no dramatic thing, as Archer tells it: rather the duo simply grew apart. “It’s like normal relationships,” he explains. “You meet someone, you've got something instantly in common with them. But maybe when you move in together, you start finding out about the person and things rub you up the wrong way and you don't get on as well as you thought you would do.”
And this was the mundane truth that put paid to Altern-8. “It is the same when you're when you're in a group with someone,” says Archer. “When you first start working together, it’s only the odd occasional one or two days a week in the studio together. When you're in hotels for weeks with people you learn what they are like and maybe you don't get on as well as you previously did. And lots of things started failing in the working relationship.”
When Nexus 21 first got together, it was Chris who played the majority of keyboards and Archer says his partner was more into Depeche Mode than the techno music they were creating. “Chris wasn't into the music at all,” he says. “He never bought any tunes. You know, if Network ever gave him any records, he gave them away.”
Initially, Peat’s divergent musical taste was a positive thing for the group, Archer says. “He wasn't influenced by anyone, so we had our own kind of sound. But towards the end he was more interested in in computers and not the actual music making side. And you spending a week in a studio trying to do tracks and the other person's upstairs on the phone to Amiga Mag is… you know, you're not gonna you're not gonna get an album done.” In the 2020s, Archer sounds stoic about the split. But he admits he took it hard, with Peat later refusing to allow Archer to use the Altern-8 name and visual set up.
I tried to locate Chris Peat to talk about Altern-8 but he seems to have disappeared from music: Archer says his former partner went on to work in a computer shop in Stafford and an ambulance call centre.
In 2017 a Christopher Peat (@ChrisPeatA8) surfaced on Twitter using Altern-8 imagery and linking to a new track on YouTube and Bandcamp called Reboot: Take Me Back by ALTERN8iVE. “25 years after scaling the dizzy heights of the UK top 10 with tracks such as Activ8, Infiltrate 202 and Evapor8; Altern8 are rebooting,” the track’s description on YouTube reads.
The song’s video (which now appears to have vanished) features someone - most likely Peat but it is hard to say definitely - goofing around in an Altern-8 dust mask and clothes that suggest the duo’s classic chemical warfare get up, without quite being the full suit, while the music samples heavily from the Altern-8 catalogue.
Archer says he never heard the ALTERN8iVE song. “The way that the working relationship ended, just don’t, you know, nothing to do with it,” he says. “I thought it was weird that after years of him hassling me about Altern-8 then he went and started the ALTERN8iVEs and, you know, use the mask and everything.”
Archer, on the other hand, hasn’t stopped making music, releasing a steady stream of tunes under a variety of names (including Slo Moshun, DJ Nex, Xen Mantra, Trackman, Mr Nex, Kama Productions and his own name).
But you can’t keep a good rave moniker down: in 1999 Archer did his first PA as Altern-8 in six years, accompanied by some of the band’s original dancers. After that, he started DJing again under the Altern-8 name, largely at the kind of old-school night that take advantage of the UK rave scene’s counter-intuitive, in-baked nostalgia.
“It’s nice to be remembered,” Archer says, when I ask him about Altern-8’s longevity. “We were all part of a thing that we didn't know how long it was going to last, whether anyone was going to buy our music and, and to have songs like, like Infiltrate where people pick out their favourite ever rave tune and someone picks one of yours. Iit’s like, ’Of all the tunes that you could have picked….’ And to have an image that we threw together just to hide ourselves from being Nexus 21, to be now something that's instantly recognisable, you show someone that picture and they'll know straight away who it is. And it's amazing that so many years down the line, you know, I'm still able to do this.”
And the story goes on: 2025 will mark the 35th anniversary of Altern-8’s birth and Archer is planning a new single - and possible album - to mark the occasion. For Nexus 21, things are less certain. “Something might happen with Nexus 21 but next year is all about Altern-8,” Archer told Matt Anniss in Juno. “I’m 100% going to have a new Altern-8 single out next year with a view to recording a second album. So hopefully Nexus 21 doesn’t get pushed aside again by Altern-8, but you never know. We’ll see how Mind Machines is received and go from there.”
Some listening
ZOiD feat Bill Black - Ringding (Kirk Degiorgio remix)
ZOiD’s recent album, Vs. Musicians Vol 2, was a gem of jazzy electronic music, where the two genres met on an admirably level playing field. Now, for the remixes, he has invited Kirk Degiorgio into the gang, to create a sublime piece of jazz-infused, techno-leaning and distinctly astral music that is guaranteed to wam the heart as it wends its way through a gorgeous chord sequence and the drums shuffle like autumnal leaves.
Things I’ve done
This week’s guest is someone I had interviewed two times previously but always wanted to get on the Line Noise podcast: Chicago house master Ron Trent. Trent has done so much in electronic music, from composing the classic Altered States at the tender age of 14 to producing the dazzling album What Do The Stars Say To You? as Warm in 2022, that sometimes even he doesn’t remember what songs he’s featured on. We spoke about the follow up to What Do The Stars Say To You?, learning percussion from his father, recording Altered States, Erykah Badu, the state of house music and so much more.
The playlists
The end is nigh! The end of 2024, that is. And that means you need to get your best albums and songs lists in order. Should you want a helping hand, I have my Spotify list of the best music of 2024 - in its last few weeks of being updated, like a knackered old horse about to be shot - and that old faithful playlist of the best new music of the last four or so years. Follow them, who not? (And, just for the record, I love horses. Please don’t shoot horses.)