Soft Cell: *Happiness Not Included review – synth-pop elders with an eye on the future

(BMG)
Two decades after their last album, the band return with a wryly hopeful record – and some trademark electro bangers

Forty-one years since their debut album, Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret, and 20 since their last album, 2002’s underwhelming Cruelty Without Beauty, Soft Cell return with an album that makes the very best of their vantage point as synth-pop elders with an eye on the future. *Happiness Not Included cleverly compares the 80s promises of a future straight out of science-fiction (“rocket ships and monorails, electricity that never fails”) with how things have actually turned out. While these songs reference war, famine, loneliness, isolation and authoritarianism, Marc Almond’s witty lyrics and synth man David Ball’s bouncy tunes mean the mood is more wryly hopeful than bleak. Heart Like Chernobyl actually begins: “Oh dear / I feel like North Korea.”

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by Dave Simpson via Electronic music | The Guardian

‘It was the poor man’s studio’: how Amiga computers reprogrammed modern music

It was grey, ugly and had 0.0128% of an iPhone’s memory. But the Amiga 500 defied its limitations to power a series of astonishing dance tracks, from early jungle to Calvin Harris

“Phat as fuck.” This was how jungle legend Gavin King – AKA Aphrodite – described the powerful bass capabilities of his Amiga 1200 home computer in a 90s interview. Several decades later, it remains in his studio. With its drab grey buttons, it looks more suited to tax returns, but Amiga machines are instrumental in electronic music as we know it.

“The thing about the Amiga bassline is that it was constant volume, it didn’t waver,” King says now, “so when you pulled it up to the maximum volume that you could press on to vinyl, it made it, well, phat as fuck.”

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by Tamlin Magee via Electronic music | The Guardian

Klaus Schulze obituary

Musician and composer whose music covered many genres, including classical and jazz, mainly expressed through electronic means

Klaus Schulze, who has died aged 74 after suffering from renal disease, released more than 60 albums in his lifetime. He was often the recipient of such accolades as the godfather of techno music, was considered part of the Berlin School of electronic music and was credited with being an inspirational figure in ambient and IDM (intelligent dance music).

Perhaps it would be more accurate to describe him as a versatile and gifted composer whose music encompassed ideas from many genres, including classical and jazz, which he expressed through mainly electronic means. Though he started out as a rock drummer who was briefly a member of Tangerine Dream, he always knew that he “wanted to play with harmonies and sounds”. The revolutionary arrival of synthesisers in the early 1970s gave him the tools that could express his bubbling musical ideas. The film music composer Hans Zimmer used one of Schulze’s pieces as part of his score for the movie Dune (2021), and described his work as “the perfect balance between the soul and technology”.

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by Adam Sweeting via Electronic music | The Guardian

Jörg Thomasius: Acht gesänge der schwarzen Hunde review | John Lewis's contemporary album of the month

(Bureau B)
A compilation of DIY releases smuggled out of 1980s East Berlin on cassette includes glistening minimalism, pulsating grooves and wonky techno

Cassette culture may now seem like some quaint hipster affectation but, for a generation growing up in East Germany in the years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, it was the prime medium for underground music. Fans would smuggle in recordings of new music from West Germany on tape, while avant-garde musicians in the eastern bloc’s most repressive country could circumvent state controls over vinyl pressing plants – and avoid the watchful eyes of the Stasi – by copying their own music on to cassettes and distributing them (like samizdat newsletters) to likeminded freaks.

One of these freaks, Jörg Thomasius, ostensibly worked in East Berlin as a boiler mechanic and art gallery technician, but his real vocation was music. He was a member of the Zappa-ish collective Das Freie Orchester, ran a home studio called Tomato and hosted a show on pirate radio, drawing inspiration from experimental krautrock bands on the other side of the iron curtain. In the 1980s, he sneaked out three albums on cassette, and Acht Gesänge der schwarzen Hunde (Eight Songs of the Black Dog) – the latest in Bureau B’s Experimenteller Elektronik-Underground DDR series – compiles 10 tracks from these DIY releases.

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by John Lewis via Electronic music | The Guardian

Drumming, drones and drifting bliss: 10 of Klaus Schulze’s greatest recordings

The prolific German musician, who has died aged 74, released an astonishing range of music, spanning techno, prog rock, ambient and more. Here are 10 of his best

• Electronic music pioneer Klaus Schulze dies

Klaus Schulze’s first appearance on vinyl was as a drummer in the nascent Tangerine Dream, a band that bore no resemblance whatsoever to the Tangerine Dream who were famed in the mid-70s for their beatless, beatific electronic epics. The frazzled, occasionally terrifying contents of their debut album Electronic Meditation sounded like early Pink Floyd with all the songs removed and the freeform experimentation cranked up to 11. The second track, Journey Through a Burning Brain, features atonal guitar soloing, vast swells of menacing organ, someone doing something supremely nerve-jangling with a flute and Schulze’s battering drums fading in and out of the mix. If this was psychedelia, it was psychedelia from long after the flower-power dream had curdled, reflecting the turbulent state of West Germany in the late 60s.

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by Alexis Petridis via Electronic music | The Guardian