This officially has taken another route! I will be sharing a few films and videos I have done and also recommending some new music that will come my way. This can be old stuff (anywhere from the 50's and 60's) or new stuff coming out. I am officially starting this today with this recommendation!

http://www.amazon.com/Minimal-Wave-Tapes-Various-Artists/dp/B002ZMMNCY

The Minimal Wave Tapes Vol. 1 came to me while djing at KTRU Rice Radio. It is an amazing album that compiles the best Minimal Wave artist from around the world. Here is something I found online about it;

"Stone Throw Founder Peanut Butter Wolf has always had a love affair with that 80's new wave, Post punk and DYI Sound. Here he scours the Archives of New York's own Minimal Wave, a small indie label dedicated to reissuing lost and rare gems from around the World."

and...

If you wanna buy it directly from the people putting this album together the link is here (also available in Vinyl)

http://www.stonesthrow.com/store/album/various/minimal-wave

This album is both a genre of underground DIY electronic music from North America and Europe in the late 1970s and 80s. The Minimal Wave Tapes is the first official anthology (on CD, LP and digital) of Minimal Wave music from this label. This label is devoted to bring back these recordings and show them to the world. Most of the songs were originally released on limited edition cassettes or vinyl by the artists themselves, and only a handful of people knew about them. They’ve been remastered from their analog source tapes and compiled here by Minimal Wave's Veronica Vasicka and Stones Throw's Peanut Butter Wolf.

Here is something interesting about Veronica Vasicka (taken from Zach Kelly @ pitchfork);



New Yorker Veronica Vasicka has spent the past five years painstakingly and lovingly building Minimal Wave, a label that specializes in digging up and reissuing electronic DIY music from the late 1970s and 80s. From taking full control of the mastering process to creating packagings that border on the fetishistic, Vasicka has uncovered forgotten forays into independent new wave and synth-pop. Aptly dubbed "minimal wave", the genre's stock characteristics-- ticky-tacky drum machines, analog synthesizers, amateur vocal experimentation, lo-fi production-- seem more relevant than ever now, as a recent rash of DIYers have been toying with unpolished variations of everything from disco to IDM, using little more than a MIDI synth and a microphone. Thankfully, Stones Throw founder Peanut Butter Wolf-- who has devoted a great deal of time spotlighting leftfield niche records himself-- had the good sense to see the "obsessed freak" (his words) in Vasicka. "I always wanted to do an album of this kind of stuff, but I don't want to try and compete with someone like Veronica who does it better than I ever could."

For those seeking a substantial once-over, Minimal Wave Tapes, Vol. 1 serves as a great introduction. Most of the releases on the imprint are vinyl only, so PB Wolf combed through Vasicka's vast collection (the two co-produced the project) and hand-picked the group of tracks that show up here. Though Vasicka has released compilations in the past, Tapes is the kind of primer that makes the overwhelming (and for the listener, rather expensive) process of weeding through these acts (hailing from Belgium to Spain to the States and beyond) a little easier. And though there is a commonality at work with the music featured, the genre variations that arise throughout the compilation-- ranging from punk-funk to early techno rumblings to chilly goth textures-- help orient the listener with what they might like to delve deeper into. Almost every track shares an exploratory, homemade feel in either production or the varying degrees of musicianship at work, and though it makes things sound a little lop-sided at times, it's an exciting peek into the experimental, underfunded aspect of a burgeoning trend.

A lot of the music here is the underground response to the the well-selling synth-pop of the Second British Invasion. Oppenheimer Analysis' Andy Oppenheimer and Martin Lloyd bonded over the Human League and Soft Cell, and their "Radiance" echoes that chic, disaffected club feel. Certainly one of the poppier contributions here, it proceeds Crash Course in Science's "Flying Turns", a queasy, corroded chunk of Gang of Four-- acerbic, noisy but equally compelling. And while you can hear a little Kraftwerk just about everywhere, there's a wealth of varied personality that rescues these simple efforts from sounding too repetitive or indistinguishable. Most of the more memorable submissions fare better thanks to fuller construction and actual hooks, like the Joy Division-modeled "Just Because" by French trio Martin Dupont, or the English outfit Das Kabinette's "The Cabinet", which Ladytron can pretty much thank their entire career for.

But what might be one of the coolest things that Minimal Wave Tapes accomplishes is how nicely it frames the current synth-pop renaissance, reinforcing the idea that there's room in the garage for sequencers and Korgs as well as guitars and drums. Hopefully we have a little time until we start hearing traces of Bene Gesserit's brand of goofy spoken word or Duex's "Sprockets"-approved robo-schtick, but for now, there's plenty of really catchy touchstones being explored under early synth-pop's umbrella, many of which can be found in resurrected form over at Minimal Wave's site. And thanks to the parallel lines being drawn by Vasicka and the good folks over at Stones Throw, we might not have to bother with all that crate-digging to enjoy and experience it.

— Zach Kelly, February 17, 2010


So go buy it and enjoy!!


Daniel Salazarj