The 80s Archives
2024 Stock. 300 copies limited edition. Japan release only. ** “It all started in 1979 when the punk scene was in full bloom and we, the youthful dilletants believed that changing the world included a hit on a cooking pot, some weird strumming of a distorted acoustic guitar or screaming from the top of the lungs. We were anti Art, but Dadaists, hated politics but were political, anti-pretty but extremely vain, anti-Rock and anti-conformist.” This is how Jürgen Schweighart describes the beginning…
Freuziel
2024 Stock. 300 copies limited edition. Japan release only. ** The Hamburg New Wave duo Ti-Tho, consisting of ChrisTIna Marisa Calcagno, who was still in her teens at the time, and Thomas Stelter, made a brilliant debut in 1982 with the single “Traumtäumer” on Alfred Hilsberg's legendary Zick Zack label. Further singles were released by the industry before they went their separate ways in the mid-eighties in the waning Neue Deutsche Welle without ever releasing the long-awaited debut album.
To m…
Good Night
Ian Elms’s cult isolationist synth masterpiece Good Night returns via Dark Entries. Originally released in 1982, Good Night blends Berlin school minimalism and BBC Radiophonic weirdness with the aesthetics of then-nascent DIY punk electronics throughout its fifteen short tracks.
According to Elms, these pieces were composed in two broad but interrelated modes: pieces with voice and synthesizer, which are obliquely narrative, and instrumental synthesizer pieces that aspire to capture fleeting emo…
Issue 82: The Genius of Tom Tom Club (Magazine + 7")
It’s been 40 years since the debut Tom Tom Club album brightened up the early 1980s, so we thought it would be a good time to chat with Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz about the making of this much-loved record and the circumstances that led to it.
They don't hold back – particularly when talking about their former Talking Heads bandmate David Byrne – and they've got some great tales to tell. Along the way, Chris reveals that the pair recently played a secret gig and are now getting ready to star…
Issue 102
With her debut solo album rocketing into the UK Top 10 on the week of its release, we are delighted to have Alison Goldfrapp on the cover of the new Electronic Sound. We have a fantastic red vinyl seven-inch by the always stylish and often elusive singer to accompany the issue too.
Issue 101
We have British Electric Foundation on the front of this month's Electronic Sound and an exclusive blue vinyl seven-inch boasting two previously unreleased Martyn Ware tracks to accompany the issue.
Panoramic Colorsound
The venerable Dark Entries celebrates it’s 300th release with Panoramic Coloursound, a triple LP from the Creative Technology Consortium. Traxx, Andrew Bisenius, and Jason Letkiewicz forged the CtC during the depths of pandemic isolation. Drawing from film and television music of the 80’s/90’s and armed with a mighty array of vintage analog and digital synthesizers, they set out to explore heists, vices, and catastrophe. Panoramic Coloursound collapses sound and image into a neon blur throughout…
Music For Stowaways
The first reissue of seminal early 1980's electronic recordings from the British Electric Foundation (B.E.F.), aka Heaven 17 / ex-The Human League's Martyn Ware and Ian Craig Marsh, with Adi Newton (CLOCK DVA / THE FUTURE), and John Wilson (HEAVEN 17), originally a cassette-only release (1981).
Norimono Zukan
50 years ago, Hokkaido-born singer-songwriter Morio Agata released his debut single, Sekishoku Ereji (Red Elegy), an emotive, shuffling piano ballad that (shockingly) sold half a million copies in Japan. While he would never have another Top-40 hit, Agata would spend the next half century issuing a series of idiosyncratic, experimental pop albums. Today, he’s a beloved cult figure, still actively touring and recording in his seventies. In his first decade as a recording artist, Agata released a …
Batang Frisco
Founded by Eric Jensen & the late Bill DiMichele (RIP), the lifespan of San Francisco based project Batang Frisco (‘San Francisco Kids’ in the Filipino dialect Tagalog) is inimitably distilled on this solitary self-titled record, an outlandish private press pearl of homespun minimal synth music.Recorded over the course of 1985/6 and self-released in 1986, the one and only Batang Frisco LP was the product of an inconspicuous DIY existence spent in the margins of the Bay Area scene in the 1980s. C…
Unfinished Business
300 copies Available now is the much belated debut album of SnoOks, a selection of No Wave Synth Beat with spoken word and vocals, by Eric Svensson and the late Jim Shepard. In the early 80's, when Jim was composing for his bands Vertical Slit and Skullbank, he got in touch with Eric (aka Doktor Liborius) who inspired him with his fresh experimental music and Jim suggested it could be a vehicle for his lyrics. They started exchanging recordings via mail, between Sweden and the US. Jim was ambit…
Last Chance
** Edition of 500. The record has been remastered and is pressed on 180-gram black vinyl. Lyric insert sheet. ** Minimal Wave is are excited to announce the reissue of a rare self-released record by Plugpoint Music called 'Last Chance'. Plugpoint Music was the minimal synth project of Reiner Ossmann, who recorded the 12 songs on this album in his home studio in Germany in 1987 and released them as an edition of 200 copies. This gem of a record was never properly distributed and so essentially di…
Khamu (She Sleep Walks)
Second installment in a reissue programme for this excellent UK band. C Cat Trance were formed by multi instrumentalist John Rees Lewis after his departure from Medium Medium, taking the band's drummer Nigel Kingston Stone with him. The band are seen as members of the post-punk movement, but that's not all that is to say about their sound.
C Cat Trance incorporated ethnic music into their compositions before world music became a popular genre. Their influences come mainly from Northern Africa an…
From Backside Japan: Underground Music Scene In Niigata 1980s-90s
**Limited Edition. Including 36 page booklet** The first compilation album from Niigata, the prefecture on the Sea of Japan side. The Niigata underground music scene in 1980 to 90s was quite unique compared to other prefecture, but had never been compiled. Featuring 20 artists from all over the Niigata prefecture like as Ai To Makoto, Hirohito Taneguchi (aka. Seed Mouth).
Including 36 page booklet: Geographical overview, consideration of the music scene and explanation of each artist (Japanese/E…
Freedom of Choice
Finally, after all that waiting, The Future arrived in 1980. Ohio art-rockers Devo had plainly prepared with their 1979 second LP Duty Now for the Future, and now it was go time. Propelled by the new decade's high-tech, free-market, pre-AIDS promise, 1980's Freedom of Choice would rocket what Devo co-founder Gerald Casale calls his "alternate universe, hermetically sealed, alien band" both into the arms of the Earthlings and back to their home planet in one scenic trip.Before an artistic and com…
Effenaar
* A masterpiece of DIY and the countercultural Dutch scene. Includes tracks by Rabbit Fun, Vovo Kai, Tubifex and Viva La Muerte, all remastered from the original tapes.* Discos Transgénero present the first ever vinyl reissue of the essential DIY Dutch compilation from Effenaar, a music venue located in Eindhoven, The Netherlands. It was founded in 1971 and has hosted many national and international concerts throughout its existence. Bands like Joy Division, Sex Pistols or Cabaret Voltaire have …
Next One's Called
Next One's Called could be seen as the missing link between Slaughter in a Tiny Place (SR 298CD/LP, 2010) and 1982's Europa (SR 372LP) -- the third and final LP report from Pseudocode. All songs here are previously unreleased; Recorded and mixed between 1980 and 1981. Pseudocode were a Belgian electronic improvised music band, active from 1980 to 1982. Featuring Xavier Ess (Thrills), Guy-Marc Hinant, and Alain Neffe (Insane Music, Bene Geserit), the material on Next One's Called sees Pseudocode …
Festival Genialer Dilletanten - Berlin 1981
This boxset is a complete documentation of the legendary festival of the "Geniale Dilletanten" movement, which took place on September 4th, 1981 in the Tempodrom in Berlin. This edition consists of a CD + DVD and a T-Shirt, and the reverse of the box shows it to be an edition of 999. The CD and the DVD are fixed in a 32-page 12" sized booklet which includes information about the festival. Some copies also include an empty LP sleeve.The DVD contains an unreleased video with recordings from the fe…