pop

Where some artists saw electronics as a means to undermine or break entirely from existing pop and rock tropes, UK musician Frank Tovey assimilated them in his work as Fad Gadget. His output under that nom de guerre – four albums, beginning in 1980 with Fireside Favourites, before continuing using …

Liminal times be liminal. If there’s one thing that typifies the period i’m focusing on in this Lent Series, 1977–81, it’s the extent to which, with the proliferation of electronics, more than usually strange and wonderful things suddenly seemed to be possible. As i’ve explored previously, this led to some …

Many of the albums i’m featuring in this year’s Lent Series feel as if they came out of nowhere, less part of a process of evolution than a sudden, out-of-the-blue flash of something fully-formed and entirely new. That’s very much the case with The Bridge, a remarkable one-off creation resulting …

The encroachment and infiltration of electronics into pop and rock caused, among other things, a whole lot of disquiet, disagreement and division. One of the recurring themes of this most liminal period are band shake-ups and break-ups, in which opinions about the presence, role and importance of electronics were often …

Though synthesizer technology was new, throughout the 1970s various artists began to demonstrate its potential in serious, thoughtful ways. As early as 1971, Tonto’s Expanding Head Band created Zero Time, showcasing an astonishing array of dramatically intimate and immersive soundworlds, the kind of which would be explored further in years …

Today’s bit of freely-available music is by French musician Marylou Mayniel, aka Oklou, whose fantastic album Choke Enough was one of my best albums of 2025. Earlier in her career, around a decade ago, she put out a number of self-released EPs, one of which, For the Beasts, was a …

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To view this content, you must be a member of Simon’s Patreon at £5 or more

To view this content, you must be a member of Simon’s Patreon at £5 or more