Cold Waves and Minimal Electronics: A compilation doorway to synth mystery
The synthesiser wasn’t always a cool instrument.
In fact, that box of knobs and oscillators went through two big identity crises. First was the prog era, when Keith Emerson’s gargantuan modular Moog showboating or the multi-racked Minimoog fortress that dwarfed Rick Wakeman’s cosmic noodles were deemed emblematic of 1970s rock excess by the, initially at least, synth-averse punks. Jump 30-odd years, and the synth stood as a plinky little electronic toy for the 2000s’ most execrable indie dregs like Does It Offend You, Yeah? or The Ting Tings.
“I play synth / We all play synth,” sang Reuben Dangoor on 2010’s hipster-bashing ‘Being a Dickhead’s Cool’. It was a painfully true lyrical observation. Synths seemed to be never more ubiquitous in the indie music world, yet the magic had gone, the allure and mystery of those weird machines, blinking lights, and tangle of wires feeling further and further away from their rightful stature as excavators of alien, sonic terrain.
It was 2010, and I was a dissatisfied, nay, angry young electronic music fan. Since the summer of 2005, between leaving school and beginning college, I’d fallen in love with the original wave of synth music burnished by Kraftwerk’s big bang. There’d been a precedent, working my way backwards from The Chemical Brothers’ big beat to Aphex Twin’s IDM intrigues and Nine Inch Nails’ Pretty Hate Machine aggro synthpop, but it was the Düsseldorf quartet and their shimmering legacy that got me hooked on the synth itself, whiling away far too much time on the RetroSound YouTube channel’s videos of analogue synths as I gobbled up CDs from early Human League, Tubeway Army, Depeche Mode, and John Foxx’s Ultravox.
But such pioneers felt like ancient history during the 2000s’ dark days of indie. Outside of admirable efforts from Ladytron and a handful of orbiting indie synth dabblers like LCD Soundsystem or MGMT, that flavoursome, switched-on resonance of arresting electronic fizz felt like a firm relic of the past, unlikely to ever enjoy a sorely-needed resurgence and thrust the synth back to the realms of polyphonic mystery it belonged to. Then I came across Cold Waves and Minimal Electronics Vol 1.
The cover alone piqued my interest. A desolate snap of mathematical wire grids floating in the infinity of black space, like the discarded schematics of intelligent beings. Stumbled upon on a late-night Spotify devour, the first curious spin zapped my brain like a lightning bolt. Opening with burbling arpeggio basslines and a mechanical drum machine, before a zesty, gleaming melody line soars in, Absolute Body Control’s ‘Figures’ delivered exactly the synth music I was after from its strange and frigid aural ether.
All the artists contained on the compilation would endure in my personal soundtrack with essentiality, Nine Circles, Linear Movement, Bal Paré, and Eleven Pond all urgent, dramatic conjurings of some variant of synthpop called minimal synth. I was hooked. What became more intriguing was its litany of relics, having thought for a moment that the discovered compendium was a cluster of icy electronic acts from the contemporary. In some strange way, they were long-lost gems of the early 1980s, but excavated in tandem with the synth’s long-awaited resurrection to its former mystery of the original post-Kraftwerk cohort.
“Wierd presents” sits at the top left corner of Cold Waves and Minimal Electronics Vol 1’s austere cover. It turned out that while I was seething in my lament for synth’s wayward blunder into indie novelty, a whole scene had been underway for a good few years of synth music that stood just as tall as the early pioneers from Brooklyn under the aegis of artist and label head Pieter Schoolwerth. Releasing several of their own compilations, a new generation of synthesists was eagerly bringing the magic back: Xeno & Oaklander, Martial Canterel, Staccato Du Mal, Epee Du Bois, and Led Er Est, forging the revival in minimal synth about to explode in earnest as the 2010s arrived.
Amid the electronic ecosystem came Veronica Vasicka’s Minimal Wave project, Berlin’s Daybed, Sixth June, and the city’s Detriti Records, and the frigid post-punk under Los Angeles’ Chondritic Sound. Indie was dead, and minimal synth seemed to bloom in earnest with a beguiling air of looking to the past while filled with the fresh dynamism of the present. It’s hard to think of any other musical moment where two different ears seemed to coexist as one whole, the above artists and labels inviting a weird wormhole to the synthpop that lay buried and awaiting to be uncovered years later, like a time capsule.
The synth was back, opening the floodgates of similarly taut and sinewy electronic artists to wield the synth with all its righteous majesty, and many are still going strong to this day. For many earnest synth fans like myself, Cold Waves and Minimal Electronics Vol 1 was charged with almost transportive energy, unveiling a new universe of twinkling electronic vistas and radiant synth beckon that we all became joyously lost to.
The synth didn’t just find its mojo again; it reignited its mystery.
