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John Bender

Pioneering minimal synth musician born in 1950 in Nurnberg, Germany. He played drums in a group called Barbi And Cen with his neighbor Jack Gorski. After Jack moved to Glasgow, Bender bought a keyboard and started working on solo recordings. He mentions Velvet Underground, Can, Tony William, Drumbo, Samuel Beckett, Alfred Jarry, Pere Ubu, Soft Machine, and Robert Ashley as influences.

Pioneering minimal synth musician born in 1950 in Nurnberg, Germany. He played drums in a group called Barbi And Cen with his neighbor Jack Gorski. After Jack moved to Glasgow, Bender bought a keyboard and started working on solo recordings. He mentions Velvet Underground, Can, Tony William, Drumbo, Samuel Beckett, Alfred Jarry, Pere Ubu, Soft Machine, and Robert Ashley as influences.

Pop Surgery
Following the release of lo-fi electronic masterpiece I Don't Remember Now / I Don't Want To Talk About It and his brilliant follow-up Plaster Falling, Cincinnati-based artist John Bender began assembling his third and last album, Pop Surgery, in late 1982. While all of Bender's work draws from intimate home recordings – featuring the artist alone with various keyboards, analogue sequencers and tape delays – Pop Surgery remains the one that perhaps best distills his arrant deconstruction of the …
Plaster Falling
"Plaster Falling was recorded at the same time as John Bender's first album, I Don't Remember Now / I Don't Want To Talk About It. Released in 1981 on the artist's own Record Sluts label, copies of Plaster Falling's initial pressing came hermetically sealed in plaster (and later latex). Thus, listeners had to literally break open the record to find what's hidden inside. Produced in relative isolation, Plaster Falling is a beacon of brilliance in the nascent minimal-wave sphere. Veering towa…
I Don't Remember Now / I Don't Want To Talk About It
Very necessary reissue of the minimal wave holy grail: John Bender’s self-released debut.
Memories Of Mindless Mechanical Monologues 1976-1985
This outstanding deluxe Box-Set delivers an excellent and extensive overview of John Benders music-output recorded between 1976-1985. John Bender is without any doubt, the protagonist, if not the inventor of a whole musical-genre known as Cold Minimal Wave/Synth. His synthesizer-sounds already carried elements of techno and acid-beats while techno was still to be invented a decade later.His voice and his partially sentimental and mourning lyrics made his music to something outstanding and extrao…
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