Give me new noise, give me new affection
Strange new toys from another world
I need to see more than just three dimensions
Stranger than fiction, faster than light
These lyrics come from the final verse of Tuxedomoon’s ‘What Use’, included on their 1980 debut album Half Mute, and they nicely encapsulate the attitude driving the most experimental artists at that time, as they sought to explore and assimilate electronics into pop and rock. When i conceived this year’s Lent Series, my decision to limit its scope to the years 1977-81 was made quite quickly, primarily because it seemed so overwhelmingly obvious. But there are various reasons for this, and various implications too.
Beginning in 1977 makes sense simply because what came before is too sporadic and piecemeal to form part of a tangibly accumulating movement or aesthetic. Yet this decision obviously meant i had to omit some of the very earliest pioneers. Tonto’s Expanding Head Band‘s Zero Time (1971) is extraordinarily forward-looking, and the same goes for many other early- to mid-1970s albums featuring nascent electronics, particularly Wendy Carlos‘ score for A Clockwork Orange (1972), Georgio Moroder‘s one genuinely good album Einzelgänger (1975), Vangelis‘ Albedo 0.39 (1976) and the first part of Zanov‘s post-kosmiche triptych Green Ray (1976).
There’s also the fact that, by limiting my Lent Series to 12, all of them albums, i’ve been forced to exclude a number of highly significant releases that one could argue also deserve a place in a series such as this. It still feels like a wrench not to have written about Crash Course in Science, whose debut EP, Signals from Pier Thirteen (1981), and album Near Marineland – completed the same year but which, in a similar situation to Units’ Animals They Dream About, wasn’t released in a complete, remastered version until 2024 – are a spectacular demonstration of focused punk intensity, with supercharged drum machine momentum and a radical approach to electronics.
Similarly what-might-have-been are Futurisk, who were barely able to put out a couple of short releases in 1980 – What We Have To Have – and 1982 – Player Piano EP – both showing a wildly energised DIY approach to electronic pop, before disbanding (remastered reissues would come 30 and 40 years later). Less mysterious but more inscrutable is Sympathy Nervous (Japanese musician Yoshifumi Niinuma), whose work created at the turn of the 1980s – particularly Sympathy Nervous and No More Expo – are remarkably prescient examples of electronica, the regularity of their beat patterns often overloaded with a welter of extraneous synth embellishments, revelling in the experimental mayhem of it all.
There’s the formidable force that is Ike Yard, whose debut EP Night After Night (1981) pushed pop electronics into a noirish soundscape redolent of Lynch and Badalamenti. Lowkey beats and bass, often with a funk attitude, form the stable bedrock for amorphous elements that pulse and squirt, ripple and squall, in music (like Bill Nelson’s Red Noise) that, for all its relative restraint, sounds utterly electrified. Striking in a somewhat parallel way is the self-titled 1981 debut album from UK group Schleimer K, which is sonically distinct from everything i’ve explored in the Lent Series. Electronics speak from within a heightened, atmospheric soundworld, seemingly more interested in textures than beat-based structures. They bring to mind The Doors, a bit of Suicide and Ike Yard, with distinct hints of Hammer horror and Anton LaVey. H. P. Lovecraft would have loved that album. Kirlian Camera‘s debut EP Dawn… (1980) occupies adjacent territory, tapping into industrial elements in dark, surly pop that gives off a satisfyingly odd energy. One of my favourites omitted from the series is Dance of the Dolls by Danish group Moral, a cassette EP from 1981 that anticipates the early ethereality and dream states of Cocteau Twins, in a sequence of six beautiful, exploratory texture maps that shift in their proximity to recognisably song-shaped forms.
But it’s not just the wonderful obscurities i’ve had to pass over. Soft Cell‘s Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret (1981) was on my shortlist until very late in the day. Its recalibration of disco tropes into something charged with equal parts relentless momentum and huge emotion remains a benchmark for what would soon become synth-pop. Not including Deutsch Amerikanische Freundschaft‘s mesmerising Alles ist Gut (1981) was an easier call to make, having decided to start with Suicide and end with Liaisons Dangereuses. But their unique approach – even more starkly stripped-back, reduced to the three primaries of beats, bass, voice – is magnificently effective; though their two sprawling previous albums are impressive, this is unequivocally DAF’s magnus opus. And then there’s Yello, too often remembered for the fun and larks of ‘Oh Yeah’ and ‘The Race’, and not enough for the progressive way they harnessed early sampler technology on their wondrous debut Solid Pleasure (1980). It’s fascinating the way this album walks a line between serious and humorous, never (unlike the Art of Noise), tilting into novelty, never sounding like other artists from this period or sounding particularly “’80s” either. There’s something curiously timeless about it.
Ending the Lent Series in 1981 made obvious sense largely due both to the wealth of incredible music that came out from 1982, as well as, critically, its distinct shift in tone away from experimentation toward consolidation, codification and (in many cases) commercialisation. There’s a sheen and a polish to the music from now on, with electronics – no longer new or strange or quite so difficult to handle – less the focus of attention, more and more incorporated as just one element among many. Not quite innocuous, but certainly integrated. Nonetheless, there’s so much wonderful stuff from these still relatively early years of electronic expansion. 1982 – one my favourite years in the entire history of music – brought into the world such marvels as Biota‘s self-titled debut, Blancmange‘s Happy Families, Chris & Cosey‘s Trance, Depeche Mode‘s A Broken Frame, Experimental Products‘ Prototype, Heaven 17‘s The Luxury Gap, Ike Yard‘s eponymous LP, Portion Control‘s I Staggered Mentally, Rational Youth‘s Cold War Night Life, Talk Talk‘s The Party’s Over and Visage‘s The Anvil, many of these demonstrating the same urge not to take things for granted and keep experimenting. While the next couple of years included highlights such as John Foxx‘s The Golden Section, Moral‘s And Life Is…., Naked Eyes‘ Burning Bridges and Bronski Beat‘s The Age of Consent, the radical spirit had generally subsided, though Soft Cell‘s strangely neglected 1984 album This Last Night in Sodom remains one of the era’s last and most stunning off-kilter electronic pop statements.
And to think that so many retrospectives of the period give entirely undue emphasis to that ultimate triumvirate of inadequacy, Gary Numan, The Human League (v.2) and OMD, as if they were not merely relevant but somehow essential. Hardly. By contrast, the most glaring omission from these articles is Kraftwerk, yet their absence reflects not irrelevance but absolute ubiquity; Kraftwerk’s presence – whether as sound, style, image, aesthetic, attitude – is implied in almost everything i’ve explored in this year’s Lent Series.
