Electronica in the 80's

[watmmisdead]

hey everyone

ive started recently to explore the history of electronica music as i never truly explored the beginnings of upbeat electronica music.

what electronica albums do you guys enjoy from the 80's?

 

thanks!

[watmmisdead]

ill start the fun

 

[Ski Nell]

like 808 st, so ahead of its time

[timmy otoole]

 

prolly too obvious  but always enjoyed these 2

[Rubin Farr]

 

[dcom]

Categorizing those as 80s "Electronica" is anachronistic AF, as a term it's from late-90s-early-00s. Genres hadn't hyperfragmented yet, and all of the above could be seen and heard on MTV, most of them on the radio, too, and not as special programming.

Don't mind me, I'm ontologically ossified. As you were.

[TubularCorporation]

 

 

Slightly OT because they didn't do much electronic stuff until the 90s but A.R. Kane is maybe the most underrated band of that era, and they were half of M|A|A|R|S so it's still relevant.

 

Edited October 29, 2022 by TubularCorporation

[J3FF3R00]

 

Edited October 29, 2022 by J3FF3R00

[TubularCorporation]

 

[TubularCorporation]

35 minutes ago, dcom said:

Categorizing those as 80s "Electronica" is anachronistic AF, as a term it's from late-90s-early-00s. Genres hadn't hyperfragmented yet, and all of the above could be seen and heard on MTV, most of them on the radio, too, and not as special programming.

Don't mind me, I'm ontologically ossified. As you were.

I was debating whether to make this post while you were making it. "electronica" was jsut a music critic blanket term to describe pretty much anything that had more synths than guitars/didn't appeal to rock fans, I definitely don't recall it being a term that anyone who actually made or was involved with music took seriously or self applied until maybe lthe late 2000s.  

 

So basically the late 90s counterpart to "new wave" (another meaningless umbrella category invented by critics to describe new music they didn't understand).

[AnwarAutokino]

heard this on one of the 2013 autechre mixes

[xy_politics]

 

 

 

 

 

[Enthusiast]

Arthur Baker 

[watmmisdead]

3 hours ago, Ski Nell said:

like 808 st, so ahead of its time

i have just began exploring really seriously the 80's.

what a crazy evolution from 1980 to 1988.

this 1988 record sounds more like 1990-91. very cool track!

 

Edited October 29, 2022 by watmmisdead

[zkom]

 

[perunamuusi]

[dcom]

5 hours ago, TubularCorporation said:

So basically the late 90s counterpart to "new wave" (another meaningless umbrella category invented by critics to describe new music they didn't understand).

Synth-pop.

2 hours ago, watmmisdead said:

what a crazy evolution from 1980 to 1988.

The turning point is around 1988, and it's commonly known as the Second Summer of Love, and it's an UK thing; raves started to pop up in greater numbers and their size grew; Ibiza became the ground zero for the spread of House music into Europe, facilitated by British DJs shuttling there and back and launching many of the most famous clubs on Ibiza. Acid House rose into prominence as the edgier sound, and Ecstasy's popularity skyrocketed; check the Wikipedia article for a concise summary, for an expanded view pick up Simon Reynolds' Energy Flash, and Generation Ecstasy: Into the World of Techno and Rave Culture. Bill Brewster's Last Night a DJ Saved My Life is extended curriculum material.

My initiation to this turn of events was a serendipitous week-long trip to Ibiza in the summer of 1989. I was 15, found a nondescript warehouse at the edge of San Antonio that had a rotating Smiley logo on top; the music was New Beat and Acid House, nothing but smoke and strobes until the place closed, and ever since I have been a part of that subculture. I was already a fan of Jarre, Vangelis, Kraftwerk, Tomita etc. and frequented the two dance clubs for underage teens in my home town, mostly playing chart pop music, but every now and then there would be something different, like Stakker Humanoid, which would clear the dancefloor of all other kids except me. As anyone who's lived during those years knows, MTV was actually a very diverse music platform, playing anything and everything that had a music video. I recognized the digressions from the safer pop material, tracks like Confetti's The Sound of C, Lil Louis' French Kiss, 101's Rock To The Beat, Phuture's Your Only Friend, Mr. Fingers' Can You Feel It, M/A/R/R/S's Pump Up The Volume, and believe or not, LFO's LFO. Paul Hardcastle's 19 was a staple, as was D-Mob's We Call It Acieeed; Tyree's Acid Over, Prodigy's Charly, and eventually 808 State's Cübik... I could keep listing tracks ad infinitum, because I paid intense attention to the contrast they brought to the dance floor - and I was always asking the DJs for track ids, which I wrote diligently down and searched for in the library's music section, record store shelves, and had my VCR paused on record to capture interesting tracks from MTV. Party Zone was manna from heaven, and I stayed up late on weekends because a lot of uncommon things were played in the wee hours of weekend nights - more experimental, dark, weird, non-mainstream music.

In 1990 I found out that the local record shop had a wall of 12"s at the back, and I was almost beside myself because I recognized artists, event some labels on the wall - and after that the wall was my horn of plenty, I was there almost daily just listening to any and all of it (I had an allowance that would've bought me one 12" per month). The record shop people were extremely tolerant of me, and I was allowed to scour the wall and hog one listening station for hours every day. Subsequently I had personal income, and I spent everything on vinyl, listened to them constantly at home. It would take a couple of years more until I got into DJing - there was a pair of decks and a mixer at my local youth centre, so I got access to the equipment and stood there trying to figure out and learn how they were used to do DJ things, based on what I had observed at the clubs. When I understood how the mixer channels worked and how to adjust the turntable's pitch, slow down or speed up the record manually to sync the beat, and return the stylus to the beginning of the track to start over, everything just clicked into place. Things were easy after that - I had a decade of music theory studies and played a couple of instruments at a semi-proficient level, so counting bars, beats, and measures, knew where the first beat is and counted to 1-2-4-8-16-32, knew how the music was structured etc. so it was just applying existing knowledge. It took a while to grok gain adjustment and EQing for controlled transitions when mixing, but after some methodical pot tweaking I heard what they did - then I just needed to practice until I had the required hand movements in muscle memory.

After 30+ years of DJing I'm still practicing regularly and making occasional trainwrecks, but so does every DJ who plays vinyl - I've heard Jeff Mills mess up a transition and the rhythm gallops catastrophically, but then he recovers. It happens. Surgeon got his moniker from his flawless mixing technique, but I wager he's not perfect, either. I takes just one drunken bump of a punter's arse or a resonant frequency to make a needle jump; digital DJing is ridiculously easy compared to working with vinyl on turntables, even without autosync. Playing vinyl is a fine motor skill, a craft one has to learn by rote repetition, and there's still always plenty of room for error. Playing files from USB sticks by pressing buttons is almost menial in comparison.

(I'm obviously leaving out the minor, but non-trivial inconvenienience of collecting, curating, knowing and perusing a record collection, construction of a set's dramatic arc via progressive selection of tracks from an available subset of the collection, cultivating personality, style and taste and identity as a performer - an amorphous blob of idiosyncratic practices and processes, subjectivity, a metric fuckton of dedication, perseverance, grit, and well nigh complete disregard of what anyone else has to say about it.)

There, that's a thing you know now. It's one of the most formative and direction-setting thing in my life; it became an integral part of who I am, and that's why I generated a wall of biographical irrelevance the internet will not forget.

Witness me.

Edited October 30, 2022 by dcom

[dcom]

I still have a handful of the MTV VHS tapes in storage, and most probably one of them contains Stakker's Westworld when it was shown in full on MTV's The Party Zone. There is a full version on YT and on Archive.org, but I have a personal copy. It seemed important back then.

[TubularCorporation]

49 minutes ago, dcom said:

Synth-pop.

Yeah, that too.

EDIT: I meant it was the linguistic counterpart, not the stylistic counterpart, but I guess synth-pop was a pretty widely used term and fits better either way. I guess the "new wave" of the 90s was probably "alternative."

Anyway, if it has a direct lineage going back to underground gay dance clubs in the early 70s and isn't played by a live band, it's probably electronica, and that's a good enough definition for me.

Edited October 30, 2022 by TubularCorporation

[TubularCorporation]

Anyhow, just watch all 700 videos on this channel and you're good to go (even though a lot of it is actually early 90s):

 

https://www.youtube.com/c/Caprice87

 

 

 

Edited October 30, 2022 by TubularCorporation

[beerwolf]

7 hours ago, perunamuusi said:

Classic

[beerwolf]

Number 5 was the first tape of the Electro compilations I heard. Knights of the Turntables (Sean mentions them in his interviews) and Arthur Bakers Breakers Revenge! Pretty much a life changing moment. Unfortunately I could never breakdance, oh how I wished I could do a windmill.
 

 

Edited October 30, 2022 by beerwolf

[hello spiral]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7zx8663_6lU

[Rubin Farr]

 

[zkom]