On a summer afternoon in 1994, Alan Wilder, former programmer for synth-pop scenesters Depeche Mode, was driving his convertible through the bucolic Scotland countryside. When an ominous droning sound disrupted the pastoral splendor, one look was all Wilder needed.
     "This military plane crashed right in front of me," he recalls. "I was five seconds away from this thing. Everyone onboard was killed. It was a very surreal experience because it was a lovely sunny day and the birds were singing. The pilot must have known he was about to die. I wondered, did he have a life memory flashing before him?"
     Wilder's extreme experience fueled the dangerous tableaus of his current project, Recoil. With dialogue by kink queen Nicole Blackman and terror-faced diva Diamanda Galás, Recoil's Liquid envisions the last thoughts of a man about to meet his maker and the ground below. Liquid begins and ends with "Black Box," Wilder's textural and sonic memory of the crash experience. One line goes,"We saw what had happened in the crater, there was nothing but black eyes."
     "It was a good way to make sense of all the other stories," explains Wilder, appropriately dressed in black. "To make those stories become his memories, and a way to help me comile the record and make sense of it all. It is more personal than anything."
     Liquid is mostly foreboading, from the urban terror poems of Samantha Coerbell to the eerie Catalonian spiel of Rosa Torras, with the added sex and dementia sweets of Blackman and Galás. Underpinning the vocals are Wilder's neo-industrial shadings, full of buckling beats, twilight keyboard murmurs, and queasy sounds and samples. But one track stands out amid Liquid's deadly dregs. Featuring gospel legends The Golden Gate Jubilee Quartet, the Mobyish "Jezebel" is Liquid's feel good interlude.
     "It is quite fun like the Moby stuff," laughs Wilder, "except the backing music is quite dark, as is the story. They are great words; pretty heavy, actually. The darker treatment was appropriate and Diamanda Galás gave it a twist."
     Wilder enjoys the odd malevolent soundtrack or two (Apocalypse Now, The World At War), but his dark fascinations seem a personal fetish of sorts. Some like to peep; Wilder likes to take pictures.
     "I was one of the first ones on the scene of the crash," he recalls. "The debris was raining into the car. The plane was going 400 mph so there was nothing left of it. I hung around a while, took some photographs. There was nothing I could do. I dream about it a lot, but it is not a disturbing thing. It is something that stays with you. You know planes can crash once you have seen one crash."