White Souls in Black Suits

Available for first time in over 35 years, Clock DVA’s White Souls in Black Suits - originally released in 1980 as a limited-run cassette on Throbbing Gristle’s Industrial Records - now returns in a newly remastered edition on black vinyl and CD, reissued via The Grey Area of Mute and expanded with four bonus tracks from the same era.

Led by the visionary Adi Newton, Clock DVA remains one of the most enigmatic and shape-shifting acts to emerge from Sheffield. Their catalogue spans mutant funk, noir jazz, and coldwave electronics, with White Souls in Black Suits, paired with the additionals tracks, offering an insight into the early morphology of their sound. The album features a lineup including Newton (voice, synth, clarinet, bowed electric guitar, and tape treatment), founding member Steven James Turner (bass treatment), David J. Hammond (guitar treatment), Charlie Collins (saxophone, flute & percussion), Roger Quail (percussion), and Simon M. Elliott-Kemp (synth).

Recorded at Cabaret Voltaire’s Western Works studio, the album is loosely structured, largely improvised, and steeped in the influence of Sheffield’s early industrial and goth scene. It evokes a world of surveillance, obsession, and psychological decay a debut that set the tone for Clock DVA’s ever-evolving vision and an essential record of the original industrial era.