Spotlight paid homage to old school electro with its vocoder robot amongst the woozy noir funk.
The funky trip hop hop sounds of pioneer Wagon Christ get a bit forgotten in the historic lineage of plunderphonics to sampledelia to instrumental hip hop to hauntology to whatever but he was a master of the nocturnal downtempo tune.
Back in the day when it all used to, literally, be all about the beats. Sometimes all I ever heard in a tune was the beats, the actual beats and we were beat connoisseurs.
Apocalyptic noisey ambient drone classic. It's got the feeling and texture of Daydream Nation and F#A#∞ without the Beatles rock band dynamics and instrument definition just a crushing, chaotic and catastrophic looming clusterfuck of a sound. Drowner Yellow Swans is ominous hovering amorphous sludge and yet it still feels a bit like a rock album because of the loud propulsive racket created containing an array of swirling and fluctuating distorted tones and hidden melodies. The band described it as their gonzo psych rock record... er just don't go looking for a beat or anything.
The dawning of a new age with dazzling displays of acoustic guitar prowess. Hedges conjures a trompe l'oeil affect creating picturesque splendour and an exquisite spacious atmosphere. On Aerial Boundaries he explores his instrument to its maximum potential pushing the American primitive folk-prog thing out into another dimension. However daggy it may be, it's an undeniable jam.
A barnstorming slice of neo-psych dream-gaze. Great drummage!
Difference Engine - Breadmaker [1994] [Full LP]
Totally missed these guys at the time as they were a bit late to the gazing of the shoe party but I gotta say Difference Engine's 1994 cd Breadmaker is top tier second wave shoegaze. They had a real tight nit band aura and thankfully weren't doing exact replicas of the genre's pioneers. Amongst the dreamy atmospheres and ethereal reverberations they would sometimes whip up an incredible disorientating maelstrom. Pretty psychedelic and hypnotic.
Get mesmerised.
*The final track at 35:08 is a bonus track added to the 2015 Breadmaker reissue cd. It was originally recorded a year later for the unreleased follow up album. To me it doesn't really fit and the album should always end with the spectacular epic Epiphany...
Difference Engine - Epiphany [1994]
The aforementioned spectacular epic that closes the original cd. Epiphany is an xpressway to your disintegration today and forever.
The opening 22 minute title track to Cat System Corp's Palm Mall. The vague distant muzak reverberations and the field recorded atmospheric buzz of shoppers and mall staff in Palm Mall, as opposed to the rest of the album's vaporwave tunes, has become a minor ambient landmark in certain quarters. A sound design triumph, this soundscape is a soft, wistful, immersive and hypnagogic journey that needs to be experienced at least once.
Strangely soothing and serene consumerism ambience - Have a nice day.
A vaporwave eccojam video masterpiece. They sample and loop Kate's Wuthering Heights with the looped slow mo vision of a Pepsi Cola ad featuring legendary 90s supermodels Bridget Hall, Tyra Banks and Cindy Crawford.
*Who the hell would deliberately choose to drink Pepsi when you could have the greatest soft drink/soda/pop of them all Coke?
A classic plunderphonic exotica jam with possibly a ye olde Esquivel record on the turntables add in loops and fx, all done in real time. Experimental avant-garde is better when it's fun.
When noise becomes ambient, ultra minimalistic and psychedelic. To me it sounds like relentless weather occurring on my roof for an hour. Someone described this as every sound all at once. You could just listen to the first few seconds to get what the entire hour sounds like but that would be missing the point. The hour needs to be experienced.
The first comment on yt says:
"No ideas, no change, no development, no entertainment, no remorse" - Vomir.
I'm not sure if the dude behind Vomir said that but it's pretty cool except of course there is an idea behind it and disappointingly there is a slight alteration to the sound in the final few minutes. You could just stop it at the 57 minute mark to keep the concept pure.
Actually it's worth trawling through the comments, these people are funny and insightful. Here are some other great quotes on the internet about this piece of sound.
"This is what I imagine the sun sounds like"
"Very quickly I started seeing stuff"
"Finally, something relaxing to listen to"
"Its like being dead"
"This cured my anxiety"
"It's psychedelic stuff"
"It just stays there and doesn't do anything at all for an hour when it ends just as abruptly as it had started"
"This shit is great for studying/concentration"
"Such a bop"
"It's like when I was 9 and used to stick my head out the car window"
"Great for noise cancellation, can't hear my mom"
"No art, no soul, no creativity"
"How to Vomir: Press REC on your phone, open your car's windows while driving on the highway, hold your phone out of the car's window for one hour (be careful not to drop it)"
DIY lo-fi outsider pop from the 80s Japanese cassette underground.
Cosmic Colors is like a naive art version of city pop. Pure beauty and innocence sans the too slick soulless sheen.
This guy released over 35 cassettes in the space of five years from 1981 to 1985. None of these albums were issued outside Japan. Cult status in the western world awaits for K. Yoshimatu.
[1982]
K. Yoshimatu - Spherical Voyage
Low key evocative minimal instrumental spacey ambience juxtaposed with strange almost cartoon-like clangorous percussion.
This cassette seems like a precursor to hypnagogia with its vaguely psych prog aura mixed with echo-y new age touches.
[1985]
Juma - Lunar Lavender
Juma is a K Yoshimatu alias. This guy's just got a knack for gorgeous guitar and synth melodies, like he just can't help it.
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!
Stop the press! This is a brand new record released just yesterday!
All your eerie gothic ambient sound design flavours combined for a dark woozy 2025 anthem. Glitchy ethereal wave to witchy nightmare gaze, VIZ might just become your new favourite gloomy sonic sorcerer.
Angel's Throat - VÍZ
More woozy shenanigans as dream pop shifts into a gloomy electroacoustic nightmare. The Black Lodge relocated to rural Lost Highways of Transylvania.
The most orthodox and least talked about of all the Flying Nun janglers. Sneaky Feelings' 1984 LP Send You is still a pretty underrated low key triumph despite gaining some belated acclaim ten years ago when Captured Tracks did a reissue. These guys eschew the tense jangles and the post-punk bass lines of their contemporaries in the international jangle underground for a more traditional sound that could have been created in the 60s à la Bob Dylan and The Byrds. Throwing Stones istimeless goldwith itssparkling web of swirling jangles, splendid harmonies and sour lyrics.
Sneaky Feelings - Not To Take Sides [1984]
We even get some ace atmospheric reverbed twang here amongst the bursting melodies, lush harmonies and kaleidoscopic jangles. Pure pop goodness for people not made for these times or those times.
We interrupt the 80s jangling for a moment to present this folky/soft-rock classic from one hit wonder Brian Protheroe. I'd never heard this tune until it turned up on one of those Junk Shop compilations in the 00s so I'm guessing this wasn't a hit in Australia. The stream of consciousness lyrics which include a list of things that keep going wrong are pretty funny and a bit naff. He feels like he's in jail because he's run out of pale ale and the cat's just finished off the bread. Nick Drake-esque folk transforms into Shuggie Otis style smooth mellow funk jam which also contains excellent saxophone solo. The kids would probably call this yacht rock now but I don't know if they've realised that this one should definitely be in the cannon.
More jangling from down south in the 80s, this time from Birmingham Alabama's Primitons. Seeing Is Believing from Primitons self-titled mini LP is somewhere between the menacing jangles of The Feelies and supreme pop melodicism of Shoes. Produced by Mitch Easter who even kindly provided the lead break.
Primitons - All My Friends [1985]
All My Friends is the crowning glory in Primitons small discography (of just 18 songs). Starts out the gate with that Feelies-esque nervy urgency then proceeds into almost shoegaze territory with a melodic almost psych-noise-pop chorus reminiscent of peak Pale Saints. The jittery to mellifluous song structure is a neat sonic trick analogous to the loud/quiet/loud method perfected by The Pixies a few years later.
One of the great non-hits of the 80s. I mean sure it was a hit in the indie ghetto but how did this not crossover to become a chartbuster? Anywho The Living Kind has aged like fine wine. At the time Ups & Downs couldn't avoid being compared to The Church with this jangling Rickenbacker monster featuring Ploog-y drummage. Vocally though they were different and this melodically rich power pop with blood harmonies from the Atkinson brothers is incredibly crafty and catchy. These guys could have had a career as songwriting hitmakers for commercial Aussie pop stars I reckon...
Dark swirly bass, swirly psych jangles and downbeat lost lyrics. The lines between post-punk, neo-psych and the jangly pop of the day get blurred once more. We get the usual Television and Byrds inspiration and I guess for all these jangly bands there's always a lurking Feelies influence too.
Has anyone ever written a book about this great 80s phenomena of jangling pop-rock? I mean it was so ubiquitous but all we ever hear about now is post punk, hardcore, blockbuster commercial pop, heavy metal and noise rock. Yet some of the biggest bands of the era employed a jangle strategy more often than not: The Smiths in the UK, REM in America, The Church in Australia, The Clean in in NZ etc. Plus all the fantastic second tier bands in each territory then the gazillion unknown groups in the jangly underground like Crippled Pilgrims. It makes zero sense that all those other aforementioned genres as well as goth, industrial, synth-pop are seen as more worthy than all our favourite jangly bands.
