8 Tracks: Of Synthetically Enhanced Punk With Circuit Breaker

Pere Ubu are a huge influence on us both formatively and currently. Our Dad was a massive fan and I remember distinctly throughout the ’90s, him coming home with their latest albums as soon as they came out. The run of records beginning with ‘Tenement Year’ and ending in ‘St. Arkansas’, where Jim Jones’ muscular guitar work laid the groundwork for Allen Ravenstine and then Robert Wheeler’s aggressive bursts of synth-noise, is untouchable. We listened to all those albums obsessively as children and still today as adults. The searing electronic tones are burned into our subconsciousness. Has there ever been a band so simultaneously ‘Pop’ and ‘Avant’? “Elitism for the people” indeed.

There is a seemingly hidden pre-history to British synth pop. The bands who eventually entered the popular consciousness with highly polished hits all seemed to have started out in a far more rough-hewn form. The idea seems to have been to follow the punk “learn three chords and form a band” mantra to its next logical step, which would have been something like… “press one or two buttons…. there’s ya band!” Can you believe the group in this video became ABC? See also the first two Human League records and the Blancmange demos reissued on Minimal Wave.

Years ago, we sent one of our first CD-R demos to Julian Cope and he wrote really enthusiastically about it, comparing us to Factrix and Minimal Man. We were not particularly familiar with much underground American stuff of that ilk, but quickly brushed up. The Factrix record, ‘Scheintot’, is about as barely there as you can get whilst still retaining some semblance of ‘song-structures’. Possibly some of the bleakest music ever made, so hugely complimentary to have had the comparison! This track ‘A Night To Forget’ is actually one of their more substantial numbers, but no less interesting for it.

Colin Potter is known as a sound recordist who works closely with Andrew Chalk to achieve his detailed, delicate ambient works. He is also a member of uncompromising industrialists Nurse With Wound, so his early tapes may come as a surprise to some. A mix of tonally coherent and beautifully propulsive synth compositions are offset by the occasional spikier song with singing and ambitious guitar interjections. All the recordings have a wobbly beauty, which at times gives the impression the sound could slip off of the tape reels at any moment, completely under the weight of their own enthusiasm. They were all re-issued as a batch of six in 2014 and made a huge impression on us.

It would be difficult to write a list of ‘synthetically enhanced punk’ without mentioning Wire. The lineage plotted from their punk-rock debut ‘Pink Flag’ to a kind of proto-shoegaze on ‘154′ is clear for all to see. Beyond those beginnings, they then began to cannibalise emergent dance music forms and are still mixing things up to this very day. The best stuff in our opinion is reserved for the ‘satellite’ projects. Dome have many albums of probing experimentalism and Colin Newman’s solo efforts are a majestically dark synth-wave. In a crowded field of high quality, the AC Marias record stands tall. With Dome, in effect, a backing band, there isn’t a poor track in the sadly scant discography (one album and a handful of singles). Haunting and ethereal.

We came of age playing in bands on our local DIY scene, where labels like Touch & Go, Load and Dischord served as the primary inspiration. Eventually our group of friends realised that there was precedent to this kind of stuff and it triggered a Milton Keynes-wide obsession with No Wave. Our interest in industrial and noise music came later, but a group like Dark Day (featuring Nina Canal from UT on guitar & DNA’s Robin Crutchfield on synths) bridged a perceived gap, from the kind of outsider rock we had previously sought inspiration from, to our new-found interest in synthesizers.

Into the present day now, here is a group described tantalisingly by their label (the excellent Downwards) as “… their own grubby mound in the no-mans-land between post punk pop and industrial techno”. Because synthesizers are a relatively young instrument (compared to something like a guitar), plugging one in is instantly plugging into multiple really recent histories, (whether it’s post-punk, techno, ambient, blah, blah, blah). A group like DVA Damas not only threads together different trends, they re-imagine them in new contexts. Here is a whole live set from a Blackest Ever Black clubnight a few years back.

It would be disingenuous not to point this out, but the conceptual framework of punk + the material reality of synths = industrial music. Industrial warrants its own investigation and playlist, so I’ve tried to avoid mentioning groups who exist too comfortably within that canon (if anything about that canon could be considered comfortable). However, I also want to mention that we still find inspiration in lots of new music, probably more so than old. Wetware are a very recent discovery for us. Echoing the murk of TG or Monte Cazzaza, they hit that sonic sweet-spot where the textures are horrible and satisfying at the same time. Perhaps there is a bit of nominative determinism going on but the use of modular synths has a fluid quality with all the tones glooping around, being man-handled into the loosest possible song-structures.