Martyn Bates explored an extensive array of solo projects both alongside and apart from his early-'80s partnership with Peter Becker in the pop duo Eyeless in Gaza, moving across industrial noise, pop balladry, and traditional British folk before incorporating ambient and post-minimalist modern classical elements by the late '90s. An enduring experimental impulse guided these efforts without often diminishing the music's overall accessibility. Born in 1960 and raised in a strict Methodist household in the small Midlands town of Nuneaton, England, Bates first encountered folk music through his uncle, who escorted him to performances by figures from the British folk boom such as Martin Carthy and John Renbourn. In his late teens Bates shifted from that centuries-old repertoire toward the sharp edges of post-punk noise, issuing two self-released cassettes in 1979 and 1980 titled Dissonance and Antagonistic Music under the name the Migraine Inducers; selections from those aggressive recordings, styled after early Throbbing Gristle, later appeared on CD under Bates' own name.
Eyeless in Gaza maintained a noticeably milder tone than those early experiments, yet most of the duo's output retained a pronounced experimental character. Roughly a third of the way through their six-year run, which later included sporadic reunions from the mid-'90s onward, Bates issued his initial official solo release, the 10" EP Letters Written, in 1982. Following the duo's 1986 dissolution, he delivered his first full-length solo album, The Return of the Quiet, in 1987. That record extended the nearly commercial pop direction of Eyeless in Gaza's final album, Back From the Rains, into an atypical blend of soul-inflected dance pop that included a version of Burt Bacharach and Hal David's "The Look of Love." One year later Love Smashed on a Rock marked a return to the artfully elusive yet compelling approach that distinguished the duo's strongest work. The pair of 1990 releases, Letters to a Scattered Family and Stars Come Trembling, reflected a growing focus on hushed, near-ambient textures comparable to David Sylvian's post-Japan recordings.
After an almost four-year pause, Bates entered his most intensive phase of productivity. In addition to fresh Eyeless in Gaza material, he put out Mystery Seas (Letters Written #2), which he described as a fresh start for his solo work even as it essentially resumed the path set by the 1990 albums. He also launched two sharply contrasting ongoing series in 1994. Murder Ballads, undertaken with Mick Harris, reconnected with Bates' longstanding interest in traditional British folk; three themed EPs issued between 1994 and 1998 were later gathered into a single collection. The Chamber Music volumes paired James Joyce's poetry with settings that only occasionally evoked the series title, favoring instead the semi-ambient mode that became Bates' dominant style through the remainder of the decade.
Imagination Feels Like Poison, a largely instrumental and airy collection, appeared in two editions in 1997 and 1998, one accompanied by a lavishly illustrated lyric book. Just After Sunset, released in 1998, extended the Chamber Music approach by setting Rainer Maria Rilke's poetry, recited by poet Anne Clark, against increasingly delicate piano-based instrumentals. Another collaboration, this time with Alan Trench of Orchis under the name Twelve Thousand Days, yielded 2000's In the Garden of Wild Stars, Bates' most purely ambient statement to date, which wove together settings of poems by William Butler Yeats and Alfred Lord Tennyson with atmospheric originals and traditional British folk songs. A third entry in the Letters Written series, Dance of Hours, followed in April 2001.
