Third Door From The Left

A document from one of the most charged moments in British underground music. Face The Firing Squad, the sole album by Third Door From The Left, was recorded across a span of ten months - October 1980 to August 1981 - in a South London rehearsal space known as the Boiler-Room, and released that same year as a cassette on the self-run Chamber Music label. It has circulated in the shadows ever since, known primarily to collectors and historians of the early industrial and minimal electronics scene. This LP reissue on Vinyl-on-Demand is the first time it has appeared on vinyl.

The project was formed by Kevin Thorne and Raye Calouri, who met at the Throbbing Gristle / Cabaret Voltaire / Rema Rema show at the Central YMCA in London in 1979 - one of those few genuinely generative events in post-punk history. Thorne, who had already crossed paths with TG on Tottenham Court Road and whose name figures in the guest list for the recording of Heathen Earth, brought a Hofner knockoff violin bass, a Dr. 55 drum machine, and an echo unit purchased from Mark Perry; Calouri brought a synthesizer and a guitar. They recorded in the way the moment demanded - cassette to cassette, no editing, no remixing, each layer built live over the last.

The result sits in the precise space between the TG of The Second Annual Report and the Cabaret Voltaire of Voice of America - drum machine pulses riding beneath disembodied voices, guitar reduced to texture, synth lines that coil rather than resolve. The lo-fi tape medium is not incidental: it is load-bearing. Hiss and compression become part of the compositional language, giving the longer pieces - Ritual, Under Attack, Endorphin - a claustrophobic density that recalls bodies in a room rather than sounds in a studio. The track Erik Dorf's Diary takes its title from the Nazi bureaucrat character in Gerald Green's television miniseries Holocaust (1978) - a fragment of cultural detritus absorbed, destabilised, made uncomfortable in exactly the way the best industrial work managed.

Thorne went on to form We Be Echo; Calouri to Hydra. Face The Firing Squad was their only full statement together, and it holds.