Add N To (X) were a trio of British musicians (Barry Smith, Ann Shenton and Steve Clayton) who mainly played analog electronic keyboards, augmented by the occasional vocoder or drum machine. Vero Electronics (Mute, 1996) was their debut album.

Add N To (X) are in splendid form on On the Wires of Our Nerves (Mute, 1998). The music is made of artsy beats and noises and evokes a dark, claustrophobic, teutonic fantasy of mechanical monsters gone mad. The beeps, blips, squeals and squeaks are played with a raging fury and a cold determination. Such punk retro-futurism owes a debt to a variety of rock and pseudo-rock ensembles: Mother Mallards, Tangerine Dream, Suicide, Cabaret Voltaire, Kraftwerk, Devo and, more recently, Atari Teenage Riot.
The album opens with a videogame-inspired We Are Add N To X that sounds like a tribute to Devo. Murmur One is the quintessential industrial suite, all metallic bangs, pounding machines, robotic ballets and radio interferences, early Cabaret Voltaire and Human League. Grey Body takes off from there and lands in even more experimental territory, with rhythms that belong to the videogame generation rather than to Sheffield' working class milieu.
Orgy Of Bubastus references Brian Eno's dadaistic vignettes and Giorgio Moroder's "eurodisco" locomotives. Melody appears in Sound of Accelerating Concrete: a guitar and a synth weave their melodic themes onto each other before being swept away by tribal, polyrhythmic electronic percussions (another synth screaming like a distorted rock guitar). On the Wires Of Our Nerves brings back memories of the pioneering Tonto's Expanding Head Band. These are the "conceptual" tracks, that lay down the sources and the foundations for the band's art.
Some tracks are recognizable as more or less conventional "rock songs", albeit still diluted in a sea of sound effects. The guitar riff of hard-rock surfaces in Black Regent, that sounds like Jimi Hendrix fronting the Allman Brothers and broadcast over a dirty channel. King Wasp is even blues, a techno variation on Slim Harpo's I'm A Kingbee (complete with old vinyl statics). Hit Me could be the hit, catchy refrain (hummed by a synth) and chorus and call-and-response and bouncing rhythm and all. Sir Ape Their battery of analogue keyboards plays different roles at the same time: the guitar solo of heavy metal, the forceful drumming of punk-rock, the shouting of rhythm and blues. This album summarizes the a big chunk of the history of electronic instruments. The academic and the street cultures have never been so close.
This isn't electronica, just like Led Zeppelin's was not blues. They discovered a new, rougher and deeper, dimension of electronica, just like Led Zeppelin discovered a new, rougher and deeper, dimension of blues. They discovered "hard electronica" just like Led Zeppelin discovered "hard rock".

So it comes as no surprise that the follow-up album was titled Avant Hard (Mute, 1999). The title is a misnomer, though: somewhat smoother and easier, Avant Hard put aside the previous album's uncompromising sonic onslaught for a more mature symphony of tones and textures. Barry 7's Contraption and Steve's Going To Teach Himself Who's Boss could be some of Todd Rundgren's electronic vaudevilles. Revenge Of The Black Regent is an exalted symphonic poem, somewhere between classical music, military music, Morricone soundtracks and Procol Harum. Oh Yeah Oh No boasts a female whisper with the quiet bliss of Stereolab's lullabies, a jazzy trumpet and intense drumming. The latter two are experiments in the experiment as they further broaden the band's horizons and show new nuances of the method. The 10-minute suite Machine Is Bored With Loved picks up from here and is a manifesto of sort: an atmospheric whistle is swallowed in a sonic black hole.
Elsewhere, the band resurrects the rock format in grand style. Robot New York is both melodic and aggressive, boasting both a catchy refrain and a rock and roll frenzy. What makes it uniquely Add N To (X) is the maelstrom of synthesizers that rages, layer after layer, over the forceful drumming. FYUZ overlays a triple boogie rhythm with suave jazz intonation. Buckminster Fuller doubles the attack, adding distortion and pushing on the accelerator. A (visceral) synthesis of sort, Metal Fingers In My Body approaches the perverted intensity of Pierre Henry's Rock Electronique and establishes a new peak for the band's rock output.
Less erudite and programmatic than Wires, the album presents a more human version of Add N To (X).

With Add Insult To Injury (Mute, 2000), Add N To (X) gave their most schizophrenic album yet (and perhaps also the most calculated for media attention). The devoluted anthem Adding N To (X), the exotic dance Kingdom Of Shades, the tribal singalong Monster Bobby, the space-rock of MDMH (Miami Dust Mite Harvest) and the industrial dance Incinerator No. 1 are rather lame imitations of their classic novelties. Too many of the jokes are stale. On the other hand, the disco ballad Plug Me In sounds like the digital version of Giorgio Moroder's soaring disco trances. Brothel Charge displays more of a rock'n'roll edge, mixed with silly voices and videogame sounds, which is what they do best, like a horde of tiny aliens playing a Ministry song while playing pinball. The progressive-rock suite The Regent Is Dead is just about the contrary, ten minues of pathetic, melodramatic crescendo halfway between Ravel's bolero and Steve Reich's minimalist repetition.

The thesis of Loud Like Nature (Mute, 2002) is that confusion is a sign of wisdom. The praxis has not changed dramatically, but the spectrum of styles to which it is applied has much broadened. Luckily, the band's growth does not limit itself to the horizontal axis, but also occurs on the vertical axis: songs and instrumentals such as Large Number (Von Lmo's supersonic rock'n'roll coupled with Devo's mechanical lyrics), Electric Village (jazzy drumming, computer noises, guitar glissando, electronic distortion, blues-rock jamming), Quantum Leap (driving polyrhythms, digital cacophony, celestial choirs), Lick A Battery (frantic drumming, floating electronic), All Night Lazy (a heavy boogie and danse macabre), U Baby (a miniature rave-up for astral garages), are surgical (albeit delirious) strikes that exhibit manic cohesion and absolute determination. However, their post-industrial decadent futuristic punk cabaret is best represented by the alien-hippy weirdness of Invasion Of The Polaroid People, by the fractured carillon and grotesque ballet of Party Bag, by the comic chamber sonata (turning into witches' sabbath) of Up the Punks, and especially by the UFO pow-wow of Take Me To Your Leader. And it even finds room for a couple of poppy, silly, danceable novelties such as Sheez Mine (extraterrestrial surf-music) and Total All Out Water (an electronic version of Captain Beefheart's demented blues). Overflowing with powerful rhythms, catchy melodies and sound effects, this album redefined Add N To X as a cross between Heldon and Gong.

Spray on Sound (White Label, 2004) is Ann Shenton's debut solo album.

Large Number is Ann Shenton's solo project, that debuted with Spray On Sound (White Label, 2004).