There's a slight overlap with the topic that went up to 1983 here, but also allowing the whole of the 1980s can help fill out the sounds of the era as new and older technology mixed. And if anything, the overall aim is to gather a sense of those key moments, those songs that captured an era, that made advances, those classic synth sounds and beats, and to gather a sense of the shape and arc of this slice of music's history, of how it moved over a period of two decades. So, example, it could begin with those Sheffield experimentalists turned pop artists The Human League, or Depeche Mode, or The Art of Noise and the ZTT Records label, all the way up to the late 1990s, a decade where, after a very rich patch of pop, US grunge and Britpop took more of a stranglehold on commercial success, but in all the time electronic dance and synth pop were thriving in their own corners, from club sounds to crossover bands such as Stereolab, Massive Attack, Faithless and Tricky, or the purely electronic and commercially successful Air or Daft Punk.īut of course these are just examples of the better known, and there are many more artists to be shared and discovered across this period. So it is more particularly towards synth pop and electronic songs, in other words, those genres where some sort of rhythm and beats are involved, where often bodies are inspired to move, but also words sung, even minimally. With such huge sonic palette, this could potentially be a vast and unwieldy prospect, but just to focus those sounds a little, the emphasis is less on the ambient branch of electronica, which could easily be a whole other topic for the future, nor is it on the totally lyric-less dance genre (we already explored dance instrumentals last Christmas). And from many hundreds of nominations and oddball sounds, fabulous playlists emerged.Īll of this is worth a revisit, as it garners so much joy and discovery, but this time, we're taking up that baton, and buttons, and moving to the next phase, or indeed phaser, where, from the early 1980s, after the bigger analogue machines, digital synthesizers and MIDI began to make their mark on popular music and more, expanding on the work of the giants who came before them, using the fast-developing technology at their fingertips, with new synth sounds, samplers, sequencers, and drum machines to embellish and develop the whole genre. It began with a look at the early 20th-century mechanical L'Arte dei Rumori (The Art of Noises), inventions of Italian futurist Luigi Russolo that inspired vast array of emerging electronic experimentalists across Europe, Japan and America, moving towards 1950s and 60s pioneers, including Robert Moog, Wendy Carlos, Delia Derbyshire, then, in the 1970s, Kraftwerk and The Yellow Magic Orchestra. Three-and-a-half years ago here at Song Bar we delved deeply into the bleeps, buzzes and soundwaves of electronic music and songs up to 1983. It was not much fun for the other guys." – Bernard Sumner "In New Order, I played about 95% of the synth parts. ![]() "The synth helped us in that it meant you didn't have to be a traditional four-piece band." – Curt Smith I keep it because I have not heard a voice I like better and because I have identified with it.” – Stephen Hawking “The voice I use is a very old hardware speech synthesizer made in 1986. ![]() It was limited to 16 tracks, and you used the keyboard, not a mouse, to input, but I was using it so long, I got quite fast at it." – Vince Clarke ![]() "I used to do all my programming on a BBC computer. We just don't usually hear them as music." – Ryuichi Sakamoto "My concept is that is no border between music and noise. The world is full of sounds.
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