From the noise-y ambient drone end of hypnagogia was Bermuda Link and their underground limited run c-30 cassette Exit. This is the outer limits of music, if it's even music at all. More like the sound of trying to tune a radio dial on a spaceship in another galaxy but the signal is jammed and all you get is is an interrupted transmission with confusing hints of life and music amongst the static and blurred radio waves.
Bringing you all the misses of the 70s with divine funky grooves, splendid symphonic arrangements and luscious melodies. Na Boca do Sol is the ultimate in baroque samba soul.
Starts out with glistening Vini Reilly-esque guitars then goes into hypnotic daydream pop elation years before dream pop was used as a label to describe what AR Kane were uo to and way before shoegaze or original post-rock. This tune was on that top compilation Fingertracks: Vol 1 from 5 or 6 years ago which i just happened to listen to this golden autumnal afternoon in my backyard. I still know nothing about Rick Cuevas but I am curious as to whether his music goes down a more dreamy jangly route or further into trippy echo chamber laden pop opulance Arthur Russel style. Then again it might just be a one off anomaly.
I was going to say this is the best unknown song from 1984 but a quick look on spotify reveals it has now been played over two million times.
Like a BBC sports theme but with great drummage. It gets pretty off the wall for a minute in the middle thanks to the guitar shenanigans of the legendary Alan Holdsworth. Synth goodness supplied by Egg/Khan/Hatfield & The North keyboardist Dave Stewart.
One of the most bittersweet songs ever. Great strings and George Harrison-esque lead break, outdoing America at their own game! We've all been there and this just perfectly encapsulates the emotion of a relationship you know was fun but it was always gonna end so just be glad that it ever happened at all. A song you couldn't write if you weren't ever fully living life in the moment. Vivaciously upbeat yet actually kinda devastating.
These dudes were one hit wonders reaching the top 20 in both the US and Canadia but just missing the top 40 here down under.
Haunted and hypnotic. These are ancient deep psychedelic jams.
Described as doing for rebetika what The Caretaker did for ye olde ballroom music. Rebetika aka rembetika aka rebetiko was a pastiche of urban Greek folk and traditional European music that was popular from the late 19th century to the 1950s. Aeson Zervas re-animates this outmoded exotic music by putting it through a hypnogogic echo chamber. It's a mysterious tripped out ethereal nostalgia trip. Discombobulating.
Epic banging industrial electro. EBM synthwave. Dark funky horror synth. Wave wave and waves and waves of intense darkened retrowaves. What they now call darksynth.
When I started this blog I was following a few mysterious acts with zero music press attention and minimal internet footprints Miami Nights 1984, Lazerhawk and ActRazer. They were all on the Rosso Corso Records doing retro-licious 80s synth action soundtrack gear with elements of disco, jock rock, synth-funk and whatever else for your cruisin' pleasure. The title given to this micro micro-genre was outrun which I guess was eventually subsumed into the synthwave subgenre. The acts on Rosso Corso all fitted in with parallel stuff going on at the time like Zombi and at the synthy horror end of hypnagogia/vapour-wave acts on Not Not Fun like Sand Circles, Umberto and Xander Harris.
Anyway on their third album Skull & Shark (2013)Lazerhawk eventually melded the 80s neon kitsch vibe with the throwback horror synth vibe and, unknown to me at the time, ended up in a place later named darksynth which was a scene in its infancy (beginning the previous year) made up of acts like Perturbator, Carpenter Brut and Mega Drive. Seven years later we end up with Vandalism by Masked doing music that resembles hard late 80s/early 90s ebm/electro industrial rather than, say, the soundtrack to Knight Rider.
Power - Lazerpunk [2018]
Academic Agent recently made a video resource on the youtubes which was a pretty successful attempt at a comprehensive guide to the darksynth micro genre from what I can gather. His guide alerted me to all things darkened synthwave after Lazerhawk's Skull & Shark. He included this harsh dark bangin' EBM-esque cyberpunk number which couldn't be more far removed from the chilled cruising and neon tropical vibes of synthwave.
Recently somebody smart rebranded 00s to early 10s hipsters as "Indie Sleaze" thus stripping it of its beyond the paleness, irrelevance and obsolescence in cultural cache terms as in "that shit is never coming back" so voilà it's now re-cycled and maybe even cool again... whatever all that means... wouldn't it be great if it meant the retarded ideological conformity of the last 15 years in the music industry was finished and now artists can go back to thinking and doing whatever the fuck they want without the fear of pitchfork mobs forming to destroy their livelihoods or blackmail them for not toeing the line.
Anyway... Snow Strippers' Know My Name sounds like prime 2009 witch house.
Snow Strippers - Again [2023]
Trash is the name of the game and it's certainly achieved here in a fake moronic kinda way.
Snow Strippers - Achin Like It's [2024]
Snow Strippers have got like 30 videos on their barely three year old youtube channel. Reckless youthful abandon in scuzzy dilapidated middle America is the vibe in most of them.
All the electro/disco/trance/house put through an electro-clash bubblegum-techno-pop ringer and tranced even further for the retro hipster rave in your bedroom.
Snow Stripper - Only Way Out [2022]
When you think maybe they pressed the crappy low-key trance preset button too many times then all of a sudden you realise this is one of the most tripped out ethereal jams ever,
Snow Strippers - Tragic Surprise [2022]
Electro-synthwave-chillwave with lil' mesmerising hooks.
Also the video is pretty iconic: T-shirt for a flag. Bare breasts for America. Patriotic!
