Marc Ickx reconnected with an old schoolmate in Ghent in 1985: Peter Bonne, who was tinkering away at Micrart studio under the alias Chrismar Chayell. The two started recording together, unsure at first whether any of it was worth releasing. They mailed demo tapes around for opinions rather than pitching them to labels; it was a colleague, Henk Wallays, who passed a tape on to Antler Records, and the label signed them almost immediately.
The single that followed, "Flesh," released in September 1986 under the band name A Split-Second, is a fairly ordinary piece of EBM: metallic, mid-paced, built for a dancefloor that already knew how to move to Front 242. What happened to it afterwards is the part that matters.
At Antwerp's Ancienne Belgique nightclub, a DJ known as Dikke Ronny put "Flesh" on at 33rpm with the pitch control pushed up eight points instead of the 45 it was pressed for. The track slowed into something thicker and stranger than anyone had made on purpose, and the accident had a name within months: new beat.
A Split-Second did not chase the sound so much as get credited with starting it, which put Ickx in the strange position of being new beat's founding reference while the band itself kept moving in harder, more guitar-flecked directions. Ballistic Statues, the debut album, arrived in 1987;...From the Inside followed in 1988, picked up in the US by Chicago's Wax Trax! Records, the label that was doing for industrial dance music in America roughly what Antler was doing for new beat in Belgium.
...From the Inside leans towards that harder register more than the accident that made the band famous. "The Colosseum Crash" is the exception, a track built on the kind of discreet, understated tension DJs could actually mix with, closer in spirit to the slowed-down EBM that started everything than to the album surrounding it.
The band's lineup kept shifting through the late 1980s, with guitarists Peter Meyvaert and Swan cycling in as the sound thickened further, and by 1990's Kiss of Fury, A Split-Second sounded closer to industrial rock than to the genre it was credited with inventing.
Before any of that, though, there was Stained Impressions, the cassette Ickx had recorded and put out under his own name in 1985 — the kind of home tape most bands quietly disown once a label picks them up. A Split-Second never entirely disowned it. It is the version of the story without the accident: a Ghent musician recording alone, months before a schoolmate's studio and a DJ's mistake made him famous for something else entirely.
That's the joke buried inside this remaster: the record most responsible for new beat is barely a new beat record at all.
