Italian ice-wave princess, Mushy gives up the delectable synth romance, ‘Breathless’, her second album on the Rome label Mannequin. Dark, post minimal wave electronix.
Mushy – Breathless [MNQ030LP]
synth wave
Ceramic Hello – The Absence Of A Canary [SUCTION024]
Reissue of Ceramic Hello’s seminal 1981 LP, ”The Absence of a Canary.” A long-time cult favourite among fans of obscure ’80s synthpop, this LP remains highly sought-after by ”minimal synth” vinyl collectors.
Nancy Fortune – Remain Human [NAT012]
Minimal wave album by Nancy Fortune on Chicago label Nation. Its about times of change and transformation, where we feel odd, lost or alienated. Life comes and goes, people in our life come and go, emotions come and go. we have a limited time on this planet and nothing stays the same and everything is in constant change.
Altres – Archives LP [DE033]
Altres are a band from Dundee, Scotland who originally formed in 1983. They were playing mostly instrumental, improvised electronic music at a time when very few bands, if any, were making this type of music in the UK. The Altres’ initial line-up was Jeremy Bryning (synths), Joseph Donnelly (synths), Kevin L. Guthrie (synths, sequencer, drum machine), Brian Hutton (synths, sequencer, vocoder), Mike Nelson (guitar) and Maurice Richardson (synths, sequencer, polysynth, drum machine). Most Altres compositions begin with a sequence and a drum pattern. These wrap around arpeggiated synth pulses, and are accompanied by shrill feedback. Instruments used on the recordings include Casio MT40 Moog Prodigy, EDP Wasp, Roland SH-101, Casio VL-Tone, Korg MS20, MS50, SQ10 Poly-61, Ibanez guitar and vocoder. All of the instruments are fed through various effects and echo units. Everything is played and recorded live – there are no overdubs.
Murphy Jax – Lost Soundtrack Main Themes [LXRC011]
Lux Rec brings on the 11th release. Four finely crafted musical pieces to dance to and for your own private cinematic experience. Join Murphy Jax on a trip of post apocalyptic nightmares with unknown enemies and dangers lurking behind the ruins of a doomed society.
Suzanne Ciani – Seven Waves [015EGGSLP]
Suzanne Ciani is a composer, recording artist, and pioneer in the field of electronic music. She is best loved for her fifteen albums of original music that feature her performances in a broad array of expressions: solo piano, piano with orchestra, piano with jazz ensemble and pure electronic. No matter the medium, Ciani’s music communicates the special intimacy, passion, and sensitivity that have become her trademark and prompted fans to buy over a million of her albums. The Seven Waves is Suzanne’s first album. She started recording it in 1979, finished it in 1981, and released it in Japan in 1982 on Atlantic Recordings.
Alan Hurst – Nzambi LP [ERS001]
The debut release on Emotional Response comes from Alan Hurst – aka Brooklyn based producer Jason Letkiewicz – with a deeper exploration in to the experimental, ambient electronics first seen on his debut work ‘Processed World’. The results are a darker mixture of hypnotic rhythms and uncertain soundscapes, hinting at soundtrack and library forms. Known for his productions under a series of alias’, including Steve Summers and Innergaze, this is Jason’s sophomore album under his Alan Hurst moniker and is the perfect way to launch the label.
Deux – Golden Dreams [MW040]
A new 12” EP by the lovely French synthwave duo known as Deux on Minimal Wave. Gérard Pelletier and Cati Tete formed Deux shortly after meeting in Lyon in 1981. Their music can be described as minimal synth with stripped down rhythm compositions and suitably cold duets. A perfect blend of archetypal Kraftwerkian pop and French synth, these set of songs comprise their later years (1985) and stylistically sound like classic house combined with the romance of New Wave. This EP features previously unreleased newly remastered studio and demo tracks.
Zsa Zsa Laboum / HNO3 – Something Scary / Doughnut Dollies [DONT021]
The new release from Don’t imprint features two sublime 1988 Belgian New Beat classics from Zsa Zsa Laboum and HN03. Laboum’s “Something Scary” is perhaps the archetypal New Beat track, commencing with a sample lifted from the dodgy 80s B Movie “The Entity” and displaying some excellent percussion and a powerful and obscure acid line – it still sounds excellent some twenty four years later. On the flip is the R&S classic “Doughnut Dollies” from New Beat icon Eric Beysens under his HN03 moniker features. It’s grubby industrial arpeggio sounding equally vibrant today – especially pitched way down to -8 like the New Beat guys used to do!
Felix Kubin – Teenage Tapes [MW037]
Minimal Wave is proud to present Teenage Tapes, an LP of selections from the early tape archives of Felix Kubin. Six of the twelve tracks on this album have never been released before. The recordings span his adolescent years, when he was between 11 and 15 years old. He actually began playing music at 8 years old, when he studied piano, organ, and glockenspiel. In 1980, he acquired a Korg MS-20 synthesizer and his recordings took off from there. He began experimenting and recording a variety of tracks, adding his own bizarre lyrics to them. Although Alfred Hilsberg of the notorious ZickZack label (Palais Schaumburg, Die Toedliche Doris, Einstuerzende Neubauten) had planned to release Felix Kubin’s early music in 1985, it took another 20 years until the French label SKIPP and the German label A-Musik put out a selection of tracks for the first time. These days, Felix Kubin is still very active, recording new music, writing and producing radio plays and running his label Gagarin Records.
Tanz Ohne Musik – Heartbeats EP
The three songs included were at the origins recorded to be part of the previous material, “The Whip”. As the mood of these songs was rougher and more abrasive, they found themselves gathered in this new EP by the means of letting them to breathe and to reveal their own expressive states.
Tanz Ohne Musik – The Whip
Tanz Ohne Muzik aka Dan Serbanescu is back with “The Whip”, four psychedelic shoegaze tracks.
Kontravoid – Native State [CITI006]
The name Kontravoid belongs on a limited run cassette circa 1980-something, the type of tape buried in lost upstate dustbins of pre-MIDI analog electronics, wedged between Cabaret Voltaire and Das Ding. The dark industrial and new wave influences are strong on ex-Crystal Castles drummer Cam Findlay’s new project—his voice is scary, like an echoing underwater growl—but the underlying pop melodies always afford a degree of breathing room.On his debut self-titled album, Kontravoid turns to analogue synths to create a dark, brooding pop masterpiece. His brilliant vocals emit a dystopic low-grown, often running through warped effects accompanied by exceptionally stirring arpeggiated synths and washes of sound. Modern touchstones could parallel the likes of John Maus or Trust, but Kontravoid’s vision is a much more twisted one, embracing goth influences and yielding a monstrous result that is harder to define. Despite its sonic vampiricism, Kontravoid’s music leaves plenty to dance and lose your mind to, but the imagination here goes way beyond these activities exclusively.The tracks Native State and Cut To Cleanse are exclusive 7” only versions.
VA – So Click Heels [DOWNWARDSCLICK001]
Downwards’ collect the best of their DO series, together with a handful of exclusive aces on ‘So Click Heels’. Since 2009 the label’s affections for the miasmatic drizzle, sonic innovation and repressed violence of post-punk and shoegaze has manifested itself in some twelve releases veering between the scuzzy basement noise of Collin Gorman Weiland, the blissful feedback blooms of The KVB, and swaggering rock’n’roll from DVA Damas. A good proportion of them feature here – including Richard H Kirk’s droning remix of Tropic Of Cancer’s ‘Be Brave’, the desiccated drum machines of Sandra Electronics (Regis), and Pink Playground’s powdered-glass shoegaze bloomer ‘Ten”. Unreleased bits: the phet-clenched twitch of Deathday’s ‘Dropped Into Obscurity’ or V West’s ‘Catching Me Cold’; the excoriating sludge of The KVB’s ‘Dayzed’; a mighty slab of monochrome, motorik punk from Silent Servants (Juan Mendez); the psychoactivated rock ‘n roll of Green Screen Door; and not least an insidious Electro cut from Antonym, or the graphite surfaces and choking dust of Six Six Seconds’ ‘Tearing Down Heaven’.
Ssleeping desiresS – A Voice [FLEXI004]
Degada Saf – No Inzro [MNQ009CD]
Degada Saf was a transgressive-dada-ist musical combo coming from Veneto, Italy. Degada Saf played a synth-electronic music, a kind of involved no-disco with no-sense lyrics in esperanto. Their music suggests a peculiar mixture of post-modernism synthesized electro assaults, new wave’s imaginative minimalism and pop art aesthetic vision. “No Inzro” makes constant interferences between rigorous avant-gardism, alternative music styles and colorfully plastic electro pop. The spectrum of musical imagination reveals a lot of good surprises, notably with the opening theme “La Rhumba de Shang Hai” which directly gives the tonality of the entire album: kitschy retro-popish ambiences based on dancing minimal hypno pulses and efficiently cold melodies. A groovy and captivating electro experience and a pretty decent introduction to the band’s very own musical universe.
Betty Botox – The Final EP [BBFINAL001]
Sadly Betty Botox is no longer with us. She departed planet earth in 2010 and leaves a gaping hole amongst all those who knew her. She left behind a DAT tape in her studio with ‘”The Final EP” written on the cover in lipstick, which her closest confidants feel she wanted to be her last statement to the world. So, after a slight delay, two years later, 4 tracks that were regular features in her musically wayward dj sets are now available for her to fans to hear and play. Combining her love for Psyche Funk, Cosmic Synth, Space Rock and late 70s Stadium Rock these reworkings, remixes, refixes and reproductions of known and unknown tracks are sure to be hits on non-conservative dance floors everywhere.
Vocoder – Cuadro Sinóptico [DE026]
Dark Entries presents a 4-song compilation from one of the finest groups of the Spanish New Wave/Techno-Pop scene of the 1980s. Vocoder were a quartet from Zaragoza, Spain formed in 1981 by Keyboardists Antonio Laval, Alfonso Olarte, Antonio Tenas and vocalist Pilar Pellicer. “Cuadro Sinóptico” compiles both 2-song 12″ maxi singles as one 4-song EP. All four songs were recorded during 1984-85. A futuristic sound for the modern age topped with Pilar’s charismatic vocals. Lyrically they address robotic love, disco dancing, and the tropical island of Mindanao.
Innergaze – Mutual Dreaming LP [CITI005]
Minimal Wave sublabel Cititrax, presents new music from Brooklyn based synth duo Innergaze, the musical project of Aurora Halal and Jason Letkiewicz. Their music, crushed and static, obscured by sound. EBM, coldwave, early techno fight it out for dominance of the drum machine. Casually brutal vocals force their way through from the Death Factory. Celestial synths coexisting with the industrial landscape bellow.
Neud Photo – Simulations [PYLON025]
NYC’s Neud Photo returns to Pylon for a new EP ranging from synth wave / italo / and electro. Neud Photo uses his signature style utilizing 808 electro/disco beats and an array of analog synths. Classic sounding tracks that with a timeless feel.
The Hipodrome Of Music 