Cold Waves and Minimal Electronics 

Ten years have passed since the dawn of a new millennium.  Discontent grows among those who create and consume music: a new problem that hasn't been given a proper name yet.  Our new lifestyles and realities, bound up as they are in the virtual space of our laptops and mobile phones, our handles and avatars and social networking profiles, have separated us from reality to a degree unprecedented in human history. When we look at music and ask why so much of it feels so empty, it's abstraction we need to look at... 

Abstraction-- that mental space apart from concrete realities--has blanketed and softened the edges of music.  The instruments, the artwork, the record itself--all the concrete objects surrounding music have evaporated.  Success is now determined by popularity in a more unique and identity-altering way than simple album sales and chart positions.  Getting attention online--hits, views, downloads--is now the primary goal above being heard as an accomplished artist.  No real correlation between the musician and the music is required as long as the numbers are there. If the numbers are there, we are told, then the world is "listening."  Since attention has replaced accomplishment, and since technology can autotune and cut and paste the mistakes of the unaccomplished, quick learning has replaced the struggle to master one's instrument.  So what is it that brings in the hits, the views, and all the attention?  It is identification with the performer, and thus the standard for success is conformity.  Excessive talent in craft frustrates identification because the performer appears so far away from the screen-watching consumer...and thus undesirable.

It is in this context that the music in this collection has come to hold significance for the Wierd Records community, active in Brooklyn since 2003.  The cold wave and minimal electronic bands arose out of the ashes of punk in small towns and suburbs throughout Northern Europe during the years 1981-1985, largely in the shadows of the decadent commercial excesses of the American and British new wave.  Like the new wave bands the cold wave and minimal electronic bands played the most modern instruments, recording and performing with analogue synthesizers, sequencers and drum machines which allowed them to create the newest and most 'futuristic' sounds.  Unlike the new wave groups, however, who used these sounds to assume a certain vacuous, ironic posture forecasting a vision of an uncertain apocalyptic future, the minimal electronic bands created 'cold', vulnerable sounds that were simultaneously romantic, melancholic, and affirmatively aggressive.  Many of the bands recorded at home in relatively DIY studios live and direct to tape and distributed their music to friends via very limited cassettes and 7" singles.  Their non-metropolitan location, combined with the fact that many of the groups proudly sang in their native tongues of French, German, Italian, Dutch etc., meant that few of the bands had the opportunity to be seen or heard in the UK or US, and as a result they remain very rare and largely unheard of to this day. 

Abstraction has changed both electronic and guitar/rock based forms of pop music differently, yet what these changes have in common is a sense of distance between the performer and listener.  In electronic music, the change has come by the substitution of virtual synthesizers for hardware.  The performer no longer 'plays' or touches the actual instrument, removing all error, vulnerability, and fragility of the electricity-channeling instrument.   Instead, they interact with an image of the instrument in place of the instrument; a mouse in place of the fingers.  In traditional rock/indie music where the performer still touches the instrument, distance is created through an ironic intrusion into the performer's presence and lyrical content.  Where is the 'human' in the clever performer's pose?  Who are they really?

At the dawn of rock and roll, the response of youth culture to an ultraconformist, increasingly commercialized and soulless society didn't grow magically and directly out of the present moment--it was first an identification with the soul and outcast nature of the blues artists of the 20s and 30s.  Heard anew in 2010, the sounds of the cold wave and minimal electronic bands have come to embody a sincere, affirmative feeling of humanistic resistance for many of us active in the Wierd World in Brooklyn.  Far from being a nostalgia trip, the fundamental emotions, attitudes and methods of these bands have concrete relevance in responding to the abstraction of the contemporary world.  As people are becoming more and more isolated, sitting alone all day staring at the screens glowing from their cellular hands, it only makes sense that we feel loneliness and long for connection with others.  This is the essence of the new discontent and one of the predominant feelings of the Wierd World - a sense of humanistic longing for true connection conveyed through unironic, melancholic sounds and simultaneously a very aggressive celebratory spirit: true resistance to this isolation.  It's colder out there every year, and here is a soundtrack for being alive now...and for walking alone in the cold, Wierd World. 

Very Rare,

Wierd Records, Brooklyn, January 2010