Floating in a netherworld of bedroom synths and home duped cassettes, the artists in this list exist in a nebulous sub genre of my own creation, one defined as much by quality of execution and mood as by style. Largely lo-fi, ephemeral, and hard to pin down in many ways, I recommend taking your own route through this music. It should be a solo mission; a choose-your-own-adventure through an infinity of bedroom synth music, via a universe of defunct blogs like Mutant Sounds; old WordPress catalogues of electronic music; magazines on tape like INKEY$, bootlegs CD-Rs on Creel Pone, important waypoints marked by jaunts into the catalogues of tape labels like Colin Potter’s ICR.
Much of this music was originally on tape, made in a period around the 1970s and 1980s when it became feasible to have a synth in the spare room and conjure galaxies on which to travel the spaceways after work. It’s a specific type of electronic music I can best describe in the negative – not ambient, but not getting anywhere near dance music either. Sometimes it feels like music for when Tangerine Dream seems too expensive and cerebral. It exists in a Venn Diagram with the Berlin school of electronics that flourished around Klaus Schulze and his ilk, as well as early DIY new age material like the music collected on Light In The Attic’s I Am The Center box set. Crucially, the zone I’m trying to articulate here doesn’t feel like it has a specific psychic function or spiritual dimension like Wilburn Burchette’s Music Of The Godhead or Important’s recent box set of Meredith Young-Sower’s Meditation music, although both of them fit with the theme texturally speaking.
One easy way to tell where you are is to check whether there is someone’s home address on the label, or a list of synths used are listed on the cassette labels – the closer to the middle of this universe you are, the more likely an equipment list is to appear. For the most part I don’t know much about who these people are; I have no idea about their place in the world or their politics. The only person about whom there is much information is Venezuelan musician Oksana Linde, who has been unearthed by Buh Records more recently. As with so much self-released music pre-internet, I am indebted to those who have spent their time seeking out the good stuff and uploading it to YouTube, without these patient souls, these gentle and sloshy oceans of sound would be forever lost.
One easy way to tell where you are is to check whether there is someone’s home address on the label, or a list of synths used are listed on the cassette labels – the closer to the middle of this universe you are, the more likely an equipment list is to appear. For the most part I don’t know much about who these people are; I have no idea about their place in the world or their politics. The only person about whom there is much information is Venezuelan musician Oksana Linde, who has been unearthed by Buh Records more recently. As with so much self-released music pre-internet, I am indebted to those who have spent their time seeking out the good stuff and uploading it to YouTube, without these patient souls, these gentle and sloshy oceans of sound would be forever lost.
Rick Crane – ‘If The Saucers Should Land In The Jungle’
(ICR)
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