March brought archival treats from Das Ding, Heinrich Dressel, DDS, Dark Entries and The (Hypothetical) Prophets – read on for Flora Pitrolo’s thoughts.
With the arrival of a new Das Ding collection on Minimal Wave, Danny Bosten discusses his 30-plus years of making music with Flora Pitrolo.
I can’t remember where I read that the 1980s was the decade Japan had been ready for, aesthetically at least, for centuries; a country regarded as so postmodern we might as well call it non-modern. Whether we think it’s true or not, it’s interesting an interesting angle from which to hear the country’s minimal synth; as a genre so grounded in coupling melancholia and ideas of the future, it works particularly well where that future appears clearer somehow, whatever that future might be. While certainly not a societal record – it’s really very intimate and existential – Tomo Akikawabaya’s The Invitation of the Dead provides a profusion of future melancholia, completely unphased and unseduced by the technology at its disposal. Synthesisers sound almost natural to him, the obvious expression of a private despair which could be in the 1980s and could be anytime that ever was. Minimal Wave’s choice of title, as ever, proves apt.
A collection of largely unreleased tracks from the Belgian act called The Linear Way will arrive in October. Read more
The elusive Japanese artist will be profiled on the upcoming The Invitation of The Dead album.
This month’s best picks head through downtown New York circa ’83 to admire the earliest Editions Mego offerings, highlights the latest Dark Entries discovery, peeks into the shadows of the American underground and celebrates troubadours for the age of surveillance.
Minimal Wave will grant the UK duo’s album a double LP edition as part of the label’s 10 year celebrations.
As Tony Poland pointed out in his feature on In Aeternam Vale in Juno Plus earlier this year, Laurent Prot was making proto-techno tracks like “La Piscine” back in the ’80s in complete isolation, which “makes them sound more impressive”. Can the French artist win the hearts and minds of modern audiences who have been weaned on a steady diet of technologically advanced electronic music? Certainly, Prot’s recent release for Jealous God showed that he was well capable of making hypnotic dance floor rhythms and Gnd Lift goes some way to continuing his resurgence.
There’s something to be said for a certain purity, isn’t there? So often it’s the records that weren’t even expecting to be bought, the bands that never thought anyone would show up to see them live, the songs made as if nobody was ever going to listen that end up have lasting effects. And it isn’t only archival festishism – some albums, like this one, attest to the fact that solitary experiments sometimes become pivotal in the story of a music. Tibor Csebits and Philippe Alioth self-released Portrait in their hometown of Basel – even singing in the Basel dialect at times – when they were about fifteen years old. They liked synthesizers so they experimented, they wrote some songs, they had a lot of fun, and ended up defining a certain kind of minimal synth while they were at it.
Originally released in 2004 as part of a double CD Richard H Kirk retrospective called Earlier Later (Unreleased Projects Anthology 74-89) on the Mute archival label The Grey Area, “Never Lose Your Shadow” gets its first ever vinyl release courtesy of Minimal Wave. Label founder Veronica Vasicka has been playing the track in her sets and it does sound very familiar, but maybe it’s also because Kirk’s influence has loomed large over electronic music.
Records from Peaking Lights, Bruce, Lukid and more made for a varied week of vinyl highlights.
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As well as a long-awaited album from a certain Cornish producer, records from Latency, The Trilogy Tapes and Minimal Wave stood out this week.
Tony Poland speaks with Laurent Prot, the down to earth artist behind a vast archive of powerful electronic music produced as In Aeternam Vale dating back to the early ’80s.
Veronica Vasicka’s label will bring four solo tracks from the Cabaret Voltaire member to vinyl for the first time.
The Swiss duo’s debut album Portrait is next up for reissue by Minimal Wave.
Originally released as a 10” back in 2010 on Downwards, Karl O’Connor’s project with Juan ‘Silent Servant’ Mendez gets repackaged and re-released on Minimal Wave. In part, this is to counteract the online sellers looking to make a quick buck from the limited edition original release – prices go over €70 in some cases – but it also satisfies Minimal Wave’s aim of cataloguing, archiving and curating music in great detail. To put it another way, the New York label is the Guggenheim of the underground reissue scene.
