Essential Logic

After a brief stint as a founding member and saxophonist for English punks X-Ray Spex, Lora Logic split off and founded a group of her own in 1978 with Essential Logic. During their initial run, Essential Logic were influential in creating the sound of post-punk, with eccentric song structures, crude but fun sax playing, and melodies that swung quickly between whimsical and anxious. Essential Logic released just one album, 1979's Beat Rhythm News, before splitting in 1981, but Logic continued working on music sporadically as the band's legacy and influence grew. She reactivated the group in 2001, just a few years before Kill Rock Stars issued the anthology Fanfare in the Garden, and though performances and output were slight for the next 20 years, Essential Logic returned in 2022 with new album Land of Kali.

Lora Logic was born Susan Whitby in 1960. She was 15 years old and had been playing saxophone for a little more than six months when she joined her friend Marion Elliot (aka Poly Styrene) and formed X-Ray Spex. Logic stayed in the band long enough to record the seminal feminist punk single "Oh Bondage, Up Yours!" and arrange sax parts for an album's worth of songs, but left X-Ray Spex abruptly, forming Essential Logic instead with guitarist/vocalist Phil Legg, bassist Mark Turner, drummer Rich Tea, and future Whitehouse affiliate William Bennett on second guitar. Eschewing fast and loud playing for off-kilter rhythms, abstract sax figures, and forays into dissonance and atonality, Essential Logic created some of the most liberating, exciting music of the early post-punk era. Along with her primitive, exhilarating sax playing, Logic displayed an imaginative vocal style that conflated the subtle eroticism of Patti Smith with the boundlessness of Yoko Ono. Essential Logic released several singles and 1979's Beat Rhythm News (Waddle Ya Play?) before breaking up during the recording of their second album. Logic completed that album, Pedigree Charm, and released it under her own name in 1982.

She also contributed to work from the Raincoats, Swell Maps, the Red Krayola, and more before leaving music behind for a time to join a London-based Hare Krishna sect with old friend Poly Styrene for some of the '80s. By the mid-'90s, Logic had returned to writing and recording music on her own, and played again briefly with a re-formed X-Ray Spex, just long enough to record their second and final studio album Conscious Consumer in 1995.

By the early 2000s, post-punk groups like Essential Logic had inspired new generations of restless music makers, and the band re-formed for the 2001 release of a self-titled, four-song EP. A second EP of new music followed the next year, and Kill Rock Stars celebrated Logic's work in 2003 with the release of Fanfare in the Garden, a two-disc anthology that included all of the Essential Logic and solo output, as well as many previously unreleased recordings from throughout the '90s. It would be almost 20 years before the next Essential Logic album, 2022's Land of Kali. The first new studio album from the group in the 43 years following Beat Rhythm News (Waddle Ya Play?) was co-produced by Logic & Youth Martin (Killing Joke), which also released as part of the five-album vinyl boxset Logically Yours. A remix album of Land of Kali, featuring collaborations with Dave Audé, Adamski, bis and others is, scheduled for release on November 29 2024.