Large Number

Multi-instrumentalist and vocalist Ann Shenton ranks among electronica’s most flamboyant figures. She supplied vocals, synthesizers, and theremin to Add N to (X), yet her offstage exploits have matched that band’s intensity: she produces her own wine, assembles capes, once vanished to Idaho with one of the group’s roadies, held a job at a burger restaurant while befriending local motorcycle clubs, tracked songs inside a reputedly haunted Welsh castle, and—still recovering from a drunken skiing mishap that left her in a wheelchair—transported a guitar from Idaho to London for Jimmy Page. Following Add N to (X)’s dissolution, an episode that encompassed her absence from the band’s concluding American dates, Shenton eventually reassembled her energies around a fresh endeavor called Large Number, a title she had already used for a track on the group’s final album, Loud Like Nature. Teaming with ex–Add N to (X) drummer Rob Allum, guitarist David Guez, banjoist Robert Weston, percussionist Jackie Freeworld, and multi-instrumentalist/programmer Pierre Duplan, she pursued analog-synth textures deliberately remote from her prior work. She abandoned Add N to (X)’s purely electronic palette for an earthier approach incorporating prog and bluegrass influences absorbed during her Idaho sojourn, and she captured the new material on a farm occupying a disused military proving ground still seeded with live ordnance. The resulting album, Spray on Sound, surfaced in the United Kingdom during 2003 and reached the United States the next year; the single “The Now Defunct Delaware” appeared later in 2004. That same year Shenton launched the umbrella project The Electronic Bible, whose inaugural triple A-side single paired a fresh Large Number cut with contributions from Kings Have Long Arms and Pat Riot; the full-length Electronic Bible compilation followed in 2005.