LEATHER STRIP
Leather Strip
An engine of hard electronica known by his one-man musical brand, Leather Strip, Claus Larsen showed a different side of himself in January when he posted an audio link to Dreaming — the “first song I ever wrote and recorded,” he explained on Facebook.
Dating to the mid-1980s, Dreaming is pure synth-pop — a chirping baby chick of a love song that could nestle on a club playlist next to Erasure and OMD.
A much harsher sound and sensibility would come to define Larsen, beginning with his very first releases as Leæther Strip in 1989 and 1990 on a German label, Zoth Ommog, named for the creature mythologies of horror writer H.P. Lovecraft.
But even as he vented with sadomasochistic fury about war, sex and death, tracks such as Japanese Bodies and Razor Blades (Go Berserk) bespoke the techno-pop buzz in his head. Larsen’s dream as a young Dane in the 1980s of making keyboard music in the style of his British idols — Soft Cell, and Depeche Mode and Yazoo — would live on in altered form.
Toiling for decades in the hybrid, electro-industrial realm of electronic body music, or EBM, Leæther Strip today is regarded as “[p]ractically the biggest influence for aggrotech, futurepop, and all other forms of post-millennial EBM,” reads the announcement of Larsen’s upcoming performance at Infest, a three-day electronic music massive this summer in Yorkshire, England.
As he lines up dates in 2016 for what he is calling The Zoth Ommog Tour, after his early years, Larsen is also on a retrospective kick with his recordings. In 2014 he released ∆precciation, a covers set ranging from The Cure to PJ Harvey. The aforementioned Dreaming first appeared on Teenage Demos, an almost confessional compilation from 2015 disclosing his primary influences.
Larsen himself refers to what he does as “symphonic electro” — letting traditional harmonic notions bleed into a genre that treasures white noise.
Leather Strip, with Ludovico Technique and Cyanide Regime, performs on Saturday, March 12 at Respectable Street, 518 Clematis St., West Palm Beach, 561-832-9999, sub-culture.org/respectable-street. Showtime is 9pm. Advance tickets are $20.
~ Sean Piccoli
